LEGALISM VS. REST FEBRUARY 4, 2019

Transcription

1 LEGALISM VS. REST FEBRUARY 4, 2019 Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Bible study Evangelista show. I m Sonja Corbitt your Bible study Evangelista. Boy do I have a show for you today. I love what we re going to talk about today. Actually, my whole office is just covered in resources and stuff I want to share, and I know I ll never get to it all, but this particular lesson in the Dew of Heaven really brings out my Thomistic personality and temperament which is all about the who, what, where, when, why and how. And so, we re going to get into the weeds. For some of you this is going to be boring, but I promise if you ll follow me all the way I will make it applicable and you will see why God wants you to have this message. He wants us all to have this message. Actually, as I said, all throughout the series so far, I have dealt with this particular issue when we talk about rest and unrest, I have dealt with this issue my entire life. It s because of my father wound, it s because my father wound caused me to try very hard not to be criticized because my dad was very critical. And so, I tried just really hard to just do everything perfectly so that I couldn t be criticized, and yet what ended up happening is I turned out to be OCD. So, I am obsessive compulsive and I have a perfectionist problem and so in this time where God removed me from serving him and told me you have to learn to rest this is part of what he taught me. You re not resting because you are trying so hard to be perfect and you re trying so hard to be exact, and you re really trying to earn my love but not just the love, my promise. I had a promise from God, I had it from my early twenties, and I worked, and worked, and worked toward it and then he like plopped down this possibility of Catholicism in my life, like right in the center. It seemed to have no connection whatsoever to my promise. In fact, I assumed that following God, if that were necessary in the end, following God into my Promised Land into Catholicism meant I had to leave behind the Promised Land. I didn t realize that my Promised Land lay in Catholicism. I just didn t even after I came into the church, I didn t really realize that. I just assumed that there was no place for me and my gifts, and my call and so that was probably the biggest, well not the biggest, but one of the biggest conflicts that I had in wrestling with what I was learning as I was coming into the Catholic Church. I mean part of it was my relationship with my husband, my relationship with my denomination, my relationship with my family, all of that figured into it, but honestly personally because I had had such a really strong call, in the beginning it felt disobedient, it felt wrong to then explore Catholicism because I had no idea how in the world that call could figure in. Now obviously it s really obvious, but at the time it was a huge concern. So, what we re going to talk about today is partly the book of Hebrews. Many of the books in the New Testament, most of them are Epistles, which is the word for a letter. They are pastoral letters to particular churches, and they were written to address particular problems that rose in those churches. So, if you think about the book of Hebrews, which is our overarching text for the entire series of Dew of Heaven, we ve been in chapters 3 and 4 of Hebrews all this time and we will continue that, but why is the book of Hebrews included in the Bible? And if you find a commentary on Hebrews and read that introduction you can find the reason, you can maybe borrow one, if you don t have one, if you don t have a Bible that has that introduction you can get one from your library, your pastor or a friend, but study Bibles often have that information in the beginning of each book. But if you can t do any of that then just read through the first 13 chapters, I mean not every single word, but just look at the chapter headings, and paragraph headings of those 13 chapters and what you come away with is that the letter was written to the Hebrews. They were Hebrew Christians. They were Jewish Christians. And so, the whole book of Hebrews seems to be addressing this problem of not progressing. We see in Hebrews chapter 6 that the book is actually written because they seem to not be progressing. They seem to be regressing back into Judaism, okay? And specifically, the ceremonies and the practices of Judaism that was the big thing. So, they were going back to Judaism and the law rather than pushing forward into Christianity, all right? Okay so that seems to be the whole issue of the book of Hebrews. 1 P a g e

2 In the early days many people thought that the book of Hebrews was written by Paul because Paul has this issue in spades. He writes many of his letters, his Epistles, and most of the New Testament actually is written by Paul. They were Paul s letters to particular churches. Most of his writings address that very point, that somehow, he himself is trying to earn salvation or we might say the Promised Land and also that he observes that the people in the churches, who were Jewish, and accepted Christ as the Messiah are also trying to revert to the ceremonies and the prescriptions of Judaism. And so lots and lots of Paul s writings sort of addresses this. We see it in Galatians 3 especially where he talks about justification by faith and not works, and he talks about how the law brings a curse, and that there is instead a remaining promise and a purpose for the Old Testament law. And that s actually what we re going to really look at today, we re going to look at law and legalism that is sometimes what traps us when we, you may not have a father wound the way I have one, but because my father was so critical and because he was military in several branches and because he was Highway Patrol we lived in a very legalistic environment which just means the rules ruled. You don t transgress the rule. If you transgress the rule you re punished. If you transgress the rule your bad. If you transgress the rule, you ll go to hell. Like in my mind as a child that s kind of where that went in the end; If you transgress through, you re going to go to hell'. So, St. Paul actually addresses this in Galatians 3 but also in the book of Romans. Romans was written by Paul to the church in Rome which consisted of both Jews and Gentiles. Gentiles just means they re not Jews. People who, whatever people, who are not Jews and, in that letter, the book of Romans, Paul explains that life with God is not a matter of the rules and the ceremonies and the traditions or the works of the Old Testament Jewish law. Works then, we might say, by extrapolation is anything we do that we are attempting to obligate God to us. So, think about this when have you done something for God and expected a particular result and then got hurt or angry that he did not do the thing you thought he would, that you expected he would. And because of the promise he gave you that you saw, possibly in the scriptures, he didn t do it that way, and so you got angry, or you were hurt. If that s happened to you then my suggestion is that your faith then was in your own works in earning God s blessing and not in faith itself, and those are two very different things. When we talk about legalism, when we talk about works as the enemy of rest, that s what we re really doing today. Trying to obligate God through our works is the enemy of rest. We re going to see that in a few minutes, I haven t made that point yet but that s the whole point really, part of the point of Hebrews, but then also some of well, many of Paul s writings. So, when you re trying to obligate God based on your behavior that is unrestful. Why? He won t let it happen. He will not let you think that the blessings he wants to give you are going to be based on your behavior. He will do everything in the world actually to thwart that assumption. We ll talk about that next when we get back. This is Sonja Corbitt your Bible study Evangelista. Welcome back. So, I mentioned earlier that it was thought early that the book of Hebrews was written by Paul because it s specifically talks about how the works of the law are not going to save you. That was his theme throughout many, many most all of his writings. And so, Galatians, and Romans and lots of other places, Paul talks about that. He actually applied it to himself at the end of that chapter when he says ' I know that in me, that is in the flesh, nothing good dwells, for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the evil I will not to do, that is what I practice. And he s not talking about Passions there, and like physical sin, he s talking, if you look at the whole chapter, he s talking about the law. He talks about the law a lot. And what is then the law, the Works of the law? 8 times in his letters he talks about that, in Romans and Galatians and each time he says that the law does not have the power to save us. And that s what we re looking at really because the book of Hebrews says the very same thing and it s written to Jewish people who are in danger of falling back into what Paul calls the law and that s why we re looking at it. Lots and lots of times all throughout the scriptures especially in Paul, what we see is this comparison, this purposeful comparison and placement of opposites between faith and law. So, what is law exactly, right? And so, that s what we want to look at today. So, in the Hebrew the equivalent of works of the law which Paul talks about turns up in a context in the laws of this, well the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament. So, sacrifice, festivals, foods, that 2 P a g e

3 kind of thing. In fact, we saw later in history that it came up in the Dead Sea Scrolls and that was very interesting I thought myself. But it s a historical interpretation that we really need to look at because Paul put forth one thing and then the church fathers expanded on that. Origen talked about that interpretation as the ceremonial laws, the ceremonial rituals, and that has actually been the interpretation of the church from really the very beginning. There has been dissents from that in small ways. Augustine is one of those. But for the most part what we see is that church history tells us that when Paul is talking about this opposite of faith and works, what he s talking about is the works of the Old Testament law. He s not talking about what I grew up hearing was legalism in ritual meaning well specifically it meant Catholicism then, but it meant any sort of rule that got in the way of faith. But what we see in the Old Testament and that s actually why I wrote my whole study fulfilled is that God likes ritual. He likes it, it expresses something about him. It expresses his otherness and properly we might say you know people wonder when they come to a Catholic mass it seems so solemn, it seems so dead. You know the people are just going through the motions. Well maybe they are, but for the most part those who aren t just going through the motions which is what legalism means; we do it simply because of the rules. Those of us who are not simply going through the motions understand what the Mass is. The Mass is not a celebration. The mass is an awareness that we are at the foot of the cross and if we are at the foot of the cross imagine yourself at the foot of the cross during the crucifixion. Are you going to be celebrating and waving your hands and singing? No, you re not you re going to be crying. Your face is going to be planted in the dirt. You are going to be, you are going to be humbled in the most profound way. Which is why a Mass is so solemn and quiet and so reverent. We are at the foot of the cross. Is there a place for celebration? Of course because Jesus has risen and we will rise with him provided we have faith and continue with him according to the scriptures so there is a place for that and that s part of what I shared about how when I came back from Poland what I appreciated so much about that, because we had, you know every day was a Mass day so we had Mass everyday and then on Thursdays there was adoration for 15 minutes after the mass and then there was this huge celebratory praise music time that we all enjoyed and it was beautiful and I loved that and that is sort of what Paul is trying to get across here, right? So, if we go to mass, if we observe the Commandments simply because we are trying to keep the rules then we re not at rest because we re never sure we ve done it well enough. And that s what he talks about throughout all of his writings. All of his writings Galatians, Romans all of them they all talked about this idea of being freed from the law. And what is the law? The law is the ceremonial law of the Old Testament meaning the feast days the worship ceremonies that kind of thing and so we have to as Catholics and as Christians we have to know the difference between the Old Law in the Old Testament and the new law. So, in Matthew Chapter 13:52 Jesus says that every scribe who s been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. And so, we have to have both we have to know both and so that s why part of why the Catholic Church brings forth the Ten Commandments as part of the law that we must observe, why? Because it s a moral and natural law and those moral and natural laws are binding on all of us. That s what the Ten Commandments are. And I said in my study fulfilled that the Ten Commandments were given in sort of a like an opposite to the 10 plagues and I guess I didn t explain it very well because a lot of groups have said what did you mean by that? But what I mean is God s people understood that those Ten Commandments were a gift. The law was a gift from God to them and to their people and to their history and they felt that way all the way up until, and to when Jesus came. The 10 plagues however we re in contrast to those Commandments. Remember that the plagues came first because the Egyptians had wanted nothing to do with God for God s people listen to him. And they allowed him to rescue them from Egypt put them in the desert, let them wander around for a while and then he gave them his law, his Commandments his Ten Commandments. He gave them to Moses and they, always from that point forward, considered the law of God the natural and the moral law from God as a great gift. Now the moral law and the natural law in those Ten Commandments is totally different from the ceremonial law that regulates liturgy and ritual worship, not morality The Ten Commandments are talking about morality, morality that every single person on the face of the Earth must observe simply because he or she is human and humans are made in the image of God and God is a moral God. And so, 3 P a g e

4 in order well it s not even in order to, it is Roman says in chapters one and two that we all have that law in US. It s called the conscience. We understand that those moral and natural laws are binding to every single human being, butt then the ceremonial law that regulates liturgy and the ritual worship of a people and so God gave his people after they came out of Egypt, he gave them a ceremonial law. Why? Ceremonial law commemorates the decisive event of salvation and in the Old Testament that decisive event was the rescue through the Exodus from Egypt. So, everything that they did that was ceremonial throughout their entire year of observation of Feasts and ceremonies and that kind of thing, all of that centered around the Passover because that was when they were rescued from Egypt. So, the ceremonial law is largely contained in the first five books, well especially the book of Leviticus so you get that like the rubrics of the people. So, if you re reading the Bible and you bump up against the Leviticus and then suddenly you get this idea of oh my gosh, I m going to go to hell because I m not doing this stuff you have to remember that that was their ceremonial law, they were commemorating the Exodus, we are not we commemorate the cross. Jesus as our final sacrifice. We ll unpack that when we get back. This is Sonja Corbitt your Bible study Evangelista. All right we re talking about the difference between law and Grace. We re talking about the fact that legalism or the law the Old Testament law makes us unrestful. Why? Because it has nothing to do with the New Covenant. So, as I was growing up one of, actually this was really a good thing that came out of my denominationalism, the denomination that I grew up in talked about legalism as being rule keeping or ritual keeping. and one of the difficulties as I was coming into the Catholic Church is realizing that God loves ritual, he loves not just the rule keeping part but the ritualism of it because ritualism helps communicate the fact that we are worshipping something other than ourselves. It s supposed to be very different than anything you encounter in the world. So, it s not going to be a big show or an entertainment. It s not going to be like a concert. You re not going to have a group of people singing at the front of the, or you shouldn t necessarily, have a group of people singing at the front of the church, you shouldn t have a band, you shouldn t have all the lights and entertainment that we experience at a regular concert. It should be very, very different. It should include things like incense and candles or lamps, really that's a better way to look at it if you look at the Old Testament lamps because they were oil lamps which meant the oil in the lamps actually communicated the oil of the Holy Spirit and all of that is communicated, I go through each part of that in my study Fulfilled, but the point of all of that Old Testament stuff was to communicate that God is holy other. Worship is not about us, it s not about what we like, it s not about what we prefer, it s not about our taste in music, it s not about her taste in lighting or in our taste in sermons or homilies or whatever, it s not about you. It is about God. It is about God and what draws us most fully into his presence and that is why he loves ritual because ritual when it's done according to the prescription of the Old Testament it gives you that sense of wholly other. When you walk into a dim-lit place that is full of incense and the light of lamps and chant and those kinds of things, when you go to the Holy Land and you enter those churches and you cover yourself if you re a woman and men too, but you are observing the fact that you are entering a space that is not about you and that s what all of the ritual was meant to communicate in the Old Testament. The Old Testament then is a blueprint for the New Testament which is the living Tabernacle. So, we don t do things that the Old Testament people did meaning we do keep the Ten Commandments because that is the moral and natural law and that is the part that governs all peoples in all times. But then there are different distinctions in that the ceremonial law of the Old Testament it governed and was centered around the saving event of the Old Testament people and that was the Passover so their whole year centered around that Passover. So, the ceremonial law then should change when God intervenes definitively in history and he did when Christ came and when he died. So, the next coming of Christ then will inaugurate the celestial Liturgy which we see in the Book of Revelation. So, the church's liturgy continues through history. It was founded and based on the skeleton of the Old Testament which included ritual and specific things, the altar, the priesthood, the year of Feasts, the liturgical year. The baptismal font or the laver, the lamp stand, the table of presence bread, the altar of incense, the veil which we saw in the readings this week is Jesus s own flesh, which was rent, to let us move into the holy of holies and then the holy of holies which included the Ark of the Covenant. 4 P a g e

5 And so, all of those things because God prescribed them in the Old Testament and commanded that they be eternal they must last forever and said the church brings them forward into history. The Old Testament ceremonial law centered on Aaron, but the new Testament ceremonial law centers on Jesus. The new priesthood, the new ceremonial law all of this has been in the readings for the last couple of weeks. We are in the book of Hebrews are we not? And so, what we see is that Paul sees a conflict between the Jewish law and the gospel. Why? Because the two commemorate two different interventions by God as salvation events in Salvation history. It used to be the Passover because that was the decisive event but now it is the cross and that is our decisive event. So what Paul is saying in Romans and Galatians is not that ritual is bad. That s what I grew up hearing but it s not true. If it were true, then God would never have prescribed it to begin with in the Old Testament because the Bible says that God does not change. God loves ceremony he loves ritual. He loves gold and incense and all the things that he established in Old Testament worship. But when Jesus came, he fulfilled that in his own person. He is the new sacrifice he is the Lamb. He is the presence bread. He is Christian prayer. He is the ark he is all of those things. Here is the New Covenant he is the New Covenant in his person. So the things that we do that are rituals are not, they can be legalistic if we just do them because of the rules, and that s what I m going to get to in the moment, but if we do them out of love because we are observing the New Covenant and we are doing what God said and keeping the Sabbath holy which now the Sabbath is in Christ he is our Sabbath he is our rest Hebrew says it goes on to say that which I haven t gotten to that yet but we re getting there. Jesus is our rest. He is our Sabbath. He is the one who has given us rest in heaven pits the law and Grace. So, he talks about it a whole lot. He uses that expression The Works of the law a whole lot twice in Romans and as I mentioned six times in Galatians and both oh, well in every single instance he denies that the works, those works of the law have the power to save us. And of course they don t because the whole point in the Old Testament law was that those ceremonial laws expressed this Theology of Separation that was proper to the old Covenant because the whole point of the old Covenant according to God was the works of circumcision, dietary restrictions, the Sabbath, all that stuff functioned as a badge of separation between Israel and the people of the Gentiles. It s separated them and made them distinct and the point of that was to hopefully draw other nations in, but now it s different. Jesus came to gather all of the nations Jewish and Gentile into the New Covenant. And so, the ceremonial restrictions that separated the Jewish people from the rest of the world had to be set aside because the whole point was that the rituals that were exclusive to Judaism are no longer appropriate for marking out the people of God because they exclude the Gentiles. In the new people of God, the Gentiles are included. So, those rituals had to be set aside and that s part of why then Jesus fulfills but does not abolish the Old Testament. There s a verse in Hebrews that talks about how the Old Testament was abolished, and some people have said they ve never seen that word in there but if you go back and look at the older, well the translations that I grew up under, the Protestant translations, it almost always says abolishes or sets aside but the Gospel, Jesus himself says 'fulfills' that Old Testament, he doesn t do away with it. In fact, he said himself whoever sets aside even the smallest minutiae of the Old Testament cannot be saved. And so, what he means is that he, in the New Covenant, he will embrace the old and fulfill it and bring it forward in the new. Which means and actually I was asking him about that specific term, you know? What does that mean to abolish, and he said, No, it is abolish in the same way that my flesh was abolished. There was nothing wrong with my flesh just as there was nothing wrong with the Old Testament law. It did exactly what it meant to do. It was meant to teach the people to look for me. It was meant to teach the people once I came to recognize me and it s meant to teach you after I came and died and rose again and went to heaven in ascension, it s meant to teach you to recognize how you re rooted and the Old Testament Judaism. It s all one continuation. So, his body then was not bad, although it was set aside and it was fulfilled. It did exactly what he brought it to do. It came to die. It came then to be transformed and Resurrection and that is what the New Testament of Grace does. And now we re ready then to look at what Paul means when he talked about rest and grace. We ll be back in a moment this is Sonja Corbitt your Bible study Evangelista. 5 P a g e

6 So, the point of our study then today and this week has been to investigate the context of the book of Hebrews which chapters 3 and 4 specifically have been our text for the whole study, and they will be continuing on. And so, it was important then, I thought, to go back and look at the context and the point of the book of Hebrews. And as we said in the first segment it was written to the Hebrews who were in danger of going back to Judaism. And we have looked at really generally because I haven t really had time to look at the specifics, but Paul over and over, although we don t know that he wrote the book of Hebrews and most people think he didn t. At least it was very influenced, the book of Hebrews, it was very influenced by Paul and Paul is very adamant that the law cannot save us. He says it over and over and over in most of his letters. And so, what he is saying is the law, the rituals of the Old Testament la cannot save us. Why? Because the law was not meant to save us. It was not sacramental. It was meant to show us what is good and because we could never keep it all, no one person could ever keep the law and its entirety perfectly. And that means that if you transgress the law, he says in one piece then you have transgressed the whole law. And so, because of that it could never save the people. Instead we needed grace and that is what he s trying to point out in the book of Hebrews; hat we had to have grace, we must fulfill the law because the law is part of God s own being. We must fulfill it, but we couldn t, we could not fulfill the Old Testament law because it was not sacramental. It didn t have grace in it, but now through Christ we do have grace. We have the grace to actually do the things that the law commands us. I thought this was so striking in today s reading in The Magnificat actually, I think it was yesterday where Augustine said if God commands then we must ask him, how will you do it Lord? So, we expect and understand that we have no power in ourselves to keep the commands of God. Grace must do all the work. And so and today s reading which is not the one I was thinking of but this one struck me too; one of my favorite authors on spiritual direction, those of you who have been asking about spiritual direction and where to find it, the best teachers I ve ever seen are St John of the Cross and Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and the meditation of the day in The Magnificat included a writing by Father Lagrange and he says that charity is the principle of all merit. Charity is Grace. Charity, in fact the word charity comes from which is often caris, which is often translated as the word grace. We see that in John 3:16, 'For God so loved the world' that loved word is grace, it s an Agape word, and that s why Father Lagrange says that charity is the principle of all merit. Grace and sacrificial love go together and that is what Jesus brought us. He is the one who fulfills the law. And he gives us the power through his mystical body, through grace and the sacraments, to fulfill the law. He said that we must fulfill the law, we must be holy because he is holy. He said that we must observe it in our own life in the Sermon on the mount. He said that we must love God and neighbor. And so, he gives us through the sacraments the grace to be able to do that. That s why he talks about the adulterous woman and he talks about grace there and the sacrificial love that draws her into the fulfillment of the law instead of the rule keeping. They wanted to banish her and kill her for the Old Testament law and Jesus instead said that if you have kept the whole law then okay, you re free to stone her, but no one could and that s the point. In 2 nd Corinthians 3:6 Paul says the law actually kills because the law defines your sin. If you look at the Old Testament say just the Ten Commandments but not just that, but all of the whole law, the first five books, the Torah. If you look at that law what you see is especially in Leviticus you really get a sense of, oh my gosh. In fact, this was part of what really struck me as I was reading the book of Leviticus which is why it s important that you know the genre of Leviticus. The fact that it is the worship manual of the people because when I read it for the first time, I just put the Bible down and I said you know what I don t think I can handle this because first of all it was very brutal. It was punitive, it was legalistic in the sense that it was all about the rules. I didn t understand the genre, but specifically it talked about how women are unclean in their time of the month. And I was rather offended from that because you know it s not my fault you know if you made me this way Lord you can t then turn around and say it s my fault. But the whole point of that sense of oppression is that that s what the law does. The Old Testament law gives you that sense of I m never going to be able to do this. And that s really the point. Because no dear one we cannot do it. If we think that we are going to fulfill the law to God even in a grace way especially in a grace way because 6 P a g e

7 the whole point Jesus said in The Sermon on the Mount is not that we keep the letter of the law but that we also keep the spirit. So, it s not enough that we just don t commit adultery we have to also not even fantasize in our minds and our hearts about it. And so, if we ve done that then we have actually broken the law without actually having broken the law. So, the New Testament then it wraps up the old it gathers it up and it makes it deeper. God goes even deeper it s not enough that you just keep the outward. You have to also keep the inward and so what we see then is obviously we can t do that, and so Paul says in Romans 7:18-19 he says I don t do what I should do, and I do what I shouldn t. He is speaking about the law. He is also trying in his flesh to go back to the Old Testament ceremonies because they re comfortable. But what God is calling us to is the new law, the law of love, the law of charity, the law of sacrifice. So, works then, law, rule keeping equals unrest. It equals evil unbelief. If you finish through the rest of chapter or the book of Hebrews, you see that there is a wrong way to obey. The wrong way to obey God is to obey with no love, to obey to be seen, to obey for appearances, to obey to simply tick off on your list that I have kept the rules that is the wrong way to obey. That is obedience that is not pleasing to God. The obedience that is pleasing to God is restful and it is of love and it includes works of faith and love. Obedience that is not restful, that is not pleasing makes you unrestful, it is rule keeping and it is faith in your works. You put your faith in the fact that you have done things for God and in so doing what you re doing without really realizing it most of the time is that you re trying to obligate God to do something for you by doing things for him. And that is unrestful. It s unrestful because you can never do enough. You have the sense that you can never do enough to please him, you have the sense that you can never do enough to be good enough and it s true. It is absolutely true and so Satan then keeps you mired in that sense of unworthiness when what you should do is lean into the fact that I can t do this I have to have grace. God must do this in me which does not mean we have no responsibility to do things like doing but it does mean that our salvation is not dependent on our works. hollit is only dependent on the grace of God only ever. You can never do enough to deserve God s love. You can never do enough to deserve his help. You can never do enough to deserve him at all or any gift, or any promise or any promised land that you have heard or believe that he wants to give you. So, consider all of the things we ve looked at to this point, rest is uninterrupted spiritual peace and when we re angry we have no peace. In the Old Testament the people s unwillingness to rest in God s provision and in his timing made them miss the Promised Land and so he defined unrest as evil unbelief because they did not receive the promise that he wanted to give them. And now today we see that in the New Testament that we find that trusting in our works in the rule keeping but specifically in the Jewish Old Testament law which none of us try to do anymore but we do try to earn our salvation in the rule keeping that we do, that is evil unbelief and it is the enemy of rest. When we are trying to deserve God s love, we are not at rest. Over and over and over again God made me try to reach that promised land and over and over again he snatched it back and it felt to me because of my background with my father and I talk about this a lot in Unleashed that he was putting that carrot in front of me and soon as I would reach for it he would snatch it back and he was and he really was and what I finally came to was this point of total brokenness and I said you know what Lord if I m going to get it it s going to be only because you have given it to me as a gift and he said to me as plain as day 'it s about time you get that, you will not learn what is a gift. Never, salvation is a gift to you dear one, love versus law, rest versus works. The wrong way to obey is to continue to try to deserve it. Instead by grace through faith it is not through works lest any of us should boast but our salvation comes through faith, Paul says in Ephesians 2:8, Until next week. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 7 P a g e