Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Acts 19:10-41, emphasizing the question, "What are we exalting in our lives?" He highlights how the church in Ephesus shifted from idol worship to glorifying Jesus, illustrating that true growth comes from prioritizing God's Word over worldly distractions. The sermon challenges listeners to evaluate what they lift up in their hearts and encourages them to make sacrifices for the sake of the gospel, ultimately calling for a commitment to exalt Christ above all else.
Housekeeping and Introduction
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. I appreciate all of the work that Ms.
Green puts in and little kids as they've been practicing on Wednesday night. Always appreciate them leading the service as well.
I appreciate it because I don't have to lead, and I don't have to sing and wear my voice out. And so it's always better to hear them than it is to hear me. We are continuing our study in the book of Acts.
And so if you have your Bibles, we'll be in Acts chapter number 19. We'll look at the end of chapter 19, verses 10 through 41.
And so if you turn there. Today I've got one question to start out with. As you're turning and you're making your way there, the question is sort of the title of the message.
What are we exalting? What are we lifting up? What are we glorifying in our life?
And it can be evident in a lot of ways, in a lot of areas of our life, of what we're lifting up and what we're exalting. We're going to look at that today at the Church of Ephesus. Church of Ephesus is mentioned multiple times.
There's a book wrote to them, the book of Ephesians. They're also one of the seven churches in Revelation as well. And so this church is monumental in Scripture.
This is sort of the beginning of the book of Ephesus, the book of Ephesians, sort of the foundation of that. And so we'll look through this today. If you have your Bibles and you're ready, we'll stand out and read the Word of God. We'll read 31 verses this morning.
Acts chapter 19, verses 10 through 41. We ended last week with verse 10.
I do want to pick it back up. It says, The seven sons of Sceva. What a wonderful name here, the seven sons of Sceva.
Jewish high priests were doing this and the evil spirits answered them, I know Jesus and I recognize Paul, but who are you?
And then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on all of them, overpowered all of them, and prevailed against them so they ran out of the house naked and wounded. When this became known to everyone who lived in Ephesus,
both Jews and Greeks, they became afraid that the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high esteem.
Verse 18, And many who had become believers came confessing and disclosing their practices, while many of those who had practiced magic collecting their books and burned them in front of everyone. So they calculated their value and found it to be 50,000 pieces of silver.
In the way of the word of the Lord spread and prevailed.
After these events, Paul resolved by the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia, and then go to Jerusalem. After I'd been there, he said, It is necessary for me to see Rome as well. And after seeing the Macedonian, two of them assisted him, Timothy and Erasus.
He himself stayed in Asia for a while, and about the time there was a major disturbance about the way. For a person named Demetrius, a silversmith who had made silver shrines of Artemis,
provided a great deal of business for the craftsmen. When he had assembled them, as well as all the workers engaged in this type of business, he said, Men, you know that out of our prosperity is diverted from this business. You see it here not only in Ephesus, but also among all of Asia.
This man, Paul, has persuaded and misled a considerable number of people by saying that gods made by hand are not gods.
Not only do we risk that our business may be discredited, but also the temple of the great goddess Demetrius may be despised and her magnificent come to the verge of ruin, the very one of all Asia and the world worship.
When they had heard this, they were filled with rage and began to cry out, Great is Artemis of Ephesians. So the city was filled with confusion, and they rushed all together into the amphitheater, dragging along Gaius and Artaxas, Macedonians who were Paul's traveling companions.
Although Paul wanted to go before the people, the disciples did not let him. Even some of the provincial officials in Asia who were his friends sent word to him, pleading him not to venture into the amphitheater.
Some were shouting one thing and some another because the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know what they had come together.
So Jews in the crowd gave instructions to Alexander after he had pushed him in front, motioning with his hand. Alexander wanted to make his defense to the people, but when they recognized that he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about two hours, Great is Artemis of Ephesians.
And the city clerk had claimed, calm the cloud down, and he said, People of Ephesus, what person is there who doesn't know the city of Ephesians as the temple guardian against the great Artemis? And of the image that fell from heaven,
therefore, since these things are undeniable, you must keep calm and do not do anything rash.
For you have brought these men who were not of the temple robbers or blasphemers or goddesses. So if Demetrius and the craftsmen who were here gave a cease against anyone, let the courts that are in session and the procouncils, let them bring charges against one another.
But if you seek anything further, it must be decided in a legal assembly. In fact, we run the risk of being charged with rioting for what has happened today, since there is no justification in what we can give as reason for this disturbance. After saying this, he dismissed the assembly.
Lord, we love you. Thank you for this reading today. Give me wisdom and guidance as we preach your word this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
I know that was a lot of reading, and we've got about 25 minutes or so that we'll preach through today.
I do want to open up with an illustration as I was thinking through this thought of what are we exalting, what are we lifting up high, and my mind continued to go back to an experience that we had about a year ago.
Me and Carrie and Logan and Kim went to Nicaragua, and there was a cross up on the top of a mountain,
and it was a rather large cross, even from the ground, but it was not necessarily a huge cross.
And some of the people that were on the trip decided that, hey, let's go and let's torture ourselves by climbing this mountain and go and see this cross.
And they had convinced me to be one of the people that were going to self-crucify themselves and go up on this mountain. And so I think Carrie was the only one in our group. Carrie, did you go?
Did she go to Children's Church? I think Carrie didn't go. It was me, Kim, and Logan from our church and a couple of us from the other church. We went up this mountain,
and about seven times as I was going up this mountain, I continued to think, why am I putting myself through this torture? Why is this happening? Why did Kim talk me into doing this?
Logan is like running up this mountain like a gazelle, and I'm the fat guy in the back that's having to stop every three steps just to get my breath. We finally made it to the top, and I'm trying to get my breath.
By the time I get to the top, they're like, we've already seen it all. It's time to go back down. And I'm like,
just give me a couple of seconds to breathe before we go down. But I noticed something while we were up there. This cross that seemed insignificant when we got there was massive.
We took pictures around it, and because I was on vacation, I didn't have time to pull pictures up. But we took pictures around it, and we got to stand up there with it. And I noticed something as we looked back down off this mountain. What seemed big down below now seemed really small.
The town and the villages and all the people, you couldn't really even see the people, were super small. But now this cross that was small when we were on the ground is now enlarged and massive.
And I began to remind myself as we begin to go through life, whatever is in front of us and immediately in front of us is what we exalt up and is what is big. And the closer we get to the cross, the closer we get to Jesus,
the more grand and big he is, and the less grand and big we are in our problems and things that we have going on. And this happens in our hearts every day.
We lift up things in our life that are small in comparison to what God tells us to lift up. Some lift up success as being high. Some lift up their priorities or pursuits that they go through.
Idols and Their Impact
Other people lift up comforts or reputation or possessions. And they put that on the highest stand.
And they say, these are the things that are going to mean well in my life. And God commands us and he challenges us that the only thing that is worthy of being exalted to the highest level is Jesus.
And when we get to the point where we lift Jesus high and we give him the full pleasure of glory and we give him the king of our throne of our heart, that is when our life begins to be put into perspective.
Acts chapter 19, the Ephesian church here was full of idols and ambitions.
As you look through and you study, this is a place that they were, they had goldsmiths and metal workers that were putting idols together to the goddess Diana and Archimedes. And they began to go through this life and Paul came in and he preached the gospel and everything changed.
Everything in this world and where they were at was beginning to change and the idols began to crash down. People got mad, things happened. The question for us today is really simple. What are we exalting?
Because whatever is the highest in your heart will ultimately shape your life. Whatever you put as king of your throne will shape and determine everything else that goes on in your life. When you begin to make a decision,
you're not gonna, unless Jesus is the king of your heart, you're not gonna go through and make that decision by asking Jesus, what should I do here?
You're gonna do whatever you decide to do that's gonna make you happy, that's gonna please self or whatever it is that's the highest on your throne.
And we must get to the point where we ask ourselves, what is shaping our life and begin to expose truly in our life who is the king of our life?
Is it Jesus or is it something else? A couple of things we notice as we walk through this passage very quickly, there's two verses, verse 10 and verse 20, that begin to see what is really important here. Verse 10 and verse 20, we see the word increasing.
We see the word increased in the life of the church of Ephesians. At this town of Ephesus where the word was growing bigger and bigger in their life. It just so happened that the Gideons were coming.
I did not plan for the Gideons to be here on this specific Sunday, but the Gideons are all about exposing the word to other people and getting the gospel and the Bible out to other people. As we were on vacation this week at Fort Caswell,
we've been starting to read through the book of Proverbs together as a family every night.
Then I said, hey, we need to get our Bible out and read it. Bertie goes, oh, dad, I forgot my Bible at the house. I was like, well, I got one on my phone because you should have a Bible on your phone in case you need it. The Bible app's great.
We got to look around. He opened up the drawer there at Camp Caswell and he said, dad, there's a blue book in here. It says the Gideons on it. What is this? I said, well, it's funny you ask. They're actually going to be here Sunday.
They put Bibles in hotel rooms and all throughout conference centers so people can have them and they're on the desks and they're in the room so that people can have an access to the word of God. We use that Bible every single night to read from.
The Bible says here that the mightily grew the word of God and the word of God prevailed in this location.
Foundation of Revival
The foundation of the revival at Ephesus, it wasn't emotions, it wasn't entertainment, it wasn't manipulation.
The essence of what was going on here was Paul preaching and teaching the gospel for two years.
He got up and he preached the word of God. He went to the house of Tyrannus, the school of Tyrannus and he preached the gospel.
He was in the city and he was preaching the word of God to people and the lives of the people, the city that was there were not being entertained but they were just simply being told what the word of God says.
And when the word of God grows, the idols in our life begin to fall away. And we have to ask ourselves, what does this growth look like in my life?
Oftentimes we look at growth and we say, well, growth has to be numerical, right? When we have a life that is living and we have a family, the only way that family grows is by having kids or we're gonna grow by getting more money in our family or we're gonna grow our house
by building more onto our house. And oftentimes we only look at growth as this outward physical growth.
But I wanna challenge us this morning that growth in this situation, yes, there was numerical growth but there was growth in obedience, there was growth in their convictions and ultimately there was growth in their love for Christ. The people here at the church of Ephesus, as they were growing,
their love for Jesus grew greater and greater. And we see that as we begin to look through this. It didn't necessarily spread geographically but it grew in their deeping of personal relationship with Jesus.
The word of God was making an increase in their heart and they had to continue to tell others about Jesus. They had to go and disciple their family as the Gideon talked about this morning about this Otis little boy who had to just tell people about Jesus.
This is what it looks like when revival begins to come in because we begin to break through the darkness and begin to tell other people around us about what Jesus is doing for us, about what the word is doing in our life that's impacting our life, that's increasing in our life.
So is the word of God increasing in your life? In your family's life, is the word of God important and is the noise of the world been canceled out by the noise of scripture? What is the thing that's growing fastest in our homes?
As we begin to evaluate our houses and we begin to evaluate our families, is the influence of scripture elevated in our homes or is it the influence of screens and televisions and devices that are good in themselves but oftentimes they can become a distraction of what's going on in life.
And we must ask ourselves, what is increasing in our life? Not only do we see the increase of the word but we see God's power shown. We see that God wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul, the Bible says.
Now these were special miracles as the Bible says these were unique demonstrations of God's authority.
These were not patterns for imitation. A lot of people will see this and they'll say, well, in order for me to have the spirit, I've got to do what Paul did. I've got to be able to cast out demons and do these things. There's a study scripture that we have.
It's called, is this descriptive of what's going on or is it prescriptive? And I believe this is a description of what Luke is writing down. He's writing down what is going on. He's not saying this is what happens when we begin to see the revival that happens.
This was a specific working here in this location that was authenticating Paul as the messenger of Jesus to say that the gospel was greater than what was going on. They were already practicing demonic values. They were already doing these things.
And so Paul was coming in and saying, hey, my God is greater than what you guys can do. And so he is demonstrating in this area as a way for us to say, hey, this is some things that can happen.
Oftentimes we don't need to look and see, how can I replicate what Paul was doing? What I challenge us to do this morning is, let us get a revelation of God's word.
And let us get a revelation of how the word of God can transform our hearts, can transform our lives, and can transform our children's lives for the sake of the gospel.
As we were on vacation this past week, we were at Fort Caswell, and it was my second time being there, but our kids' first time.
And I had seen all the forts and all the bunkers that the war bunkers had been built there, leading after the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812.
And most of them were built during the Civil War era, and the ones there at Fort Caswell were really never used. But you could see where all the cannons had set up and all the different ammunition bunkers were at. And there was one specific area, and we're walking through inside these bunkers.
It's somewhat dark in some of the rooms, but Jade and Bertie had found a tunnel in actual the Fort Caswell.
And this tunnel led, it was the largest bunker, and it led from one bunker all the way to the other, all the way underground. And so Jade walks through there, and Allie comes around the corner, and she goes, Jade, what are you doing?
You're like halfway through this tunnel, and you have no light.
And she's like, I need a flashlight, Dad. Break out your phone.
And so I break out my phone, and we're walking through, dusting out the cobwebs, and spiders are crawling. Here comes another little animal, and I'm joking, there wasn't any spiders or animals. And so I've got my light out, and as we came around the corner,
we got to the point, as we're walking down through this hallway, where there were some openings, almost like where a soldier could sit in there, and have a gun coming out through the opening. And as I came through that opening, the sun would come in, and my flashlight was useless.
At one point, it was effective, but once I got to the place where other light from outside came in, my light was useless as the sun came in.
And oftentimes, as we go through this, miracles are like the flashlight, until the Word of God comes in, and the Word of God reveals what's going on, and the Word of God says,
Transforming Power of the Gospel
hey, this is the transforming power of the gospel. This is what the Word of God does. It begins to show the power of what God is doing in our lives. I wanted to illustrate that by saying,
oftentimes, I know I'm guilty of this as well, we can chase after signs, and we can chase after the flashiness of what's going on in the world, and God just says, are you staying faithful to Scripture? Scripture. This past year has been a tough year. Three men, of course,
we've talked about Charlie Kirk passing away, and the assassination there, but John MacArthur, who I look to, and I study after often,
was the pastor at one church for 50 plus years. And he faithfully preached the Word of God for 50 something years. He preached through the entire New Testament, and it took him 48 years to preach through Matthew to Revelation.
48 years that he just studied the Word of God, and he preached it faithfully, and he loved people, and he began to just dive into Scripture, and he just spent almost his entire ministry in just the New Testament. When he finished his last sermon in Matthew,
he ended in Matthew, and he said, I finished the entire book of the Bible.
Come back next week, and we're going to start back in the book of Luke, and we're going to start over in the New Testament. We're just going to preheep preaching the Word of God because the power that the church has is not in the ability of what I have.
It's not in the ability of what the Gideons have, but it's in the ability of what the Word of God has to change our lives, to change the lives of the people that are around us.
And are we staying faithful to Scripture? Not only do we see the Word increasing, God's power shown, but we see people worshiping Jesus. In verses 13 through 17, people begin to worship Jesus. The Bible says that the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. These seven sons of Sceva,
what an amazing name. Like, if you go through Scripture, you find some fun names, but like, this is like, almost like a rock band name. The seven sons, like I could see them opening up for like, Led Zeppelin, or some other Guns N' Roses or something.
Like, the seven sons of Sceva step up, and they're about to do some great things, and they begin to magnify sort of their borrowed or fake power. They say, hey, we're here for a purpose, but we want to sort of piggyback off of what Paul has done.
And what happens is, this key to note is, we don't replicate the miracles that are going here.
The authority that can't, the authority of the Word of God can't be manipulated. We can only submit ourselves to Jesus.
Trying to use Jesus' name without knowing Him is like taking the key to my house and taking it to your house and trying to get into your house. It's not going to work. You're replicating something that is only specific for one area at one time.
And we must take the Word of God and we must apply it in our life and we must say, Christ is the one that's going to be exalted.
We must say that Christ is the one that is going to work in our lives and we're going to worship Him and we're going to love Him and we're going to apply that in our life as we begin to go through life.
Because we see the people here in verses 13 through 17, they fall down and they begin to worship Jesus and they see that this life that they're trying to go through is useless without Jesus.
And in the 21st century, this is the crux of what we get to. Oftentimes, we see Jesus as an easier way of life.
And we say, if I can follow Jesus, my life is going to be a little easier. And so I'm going to follow Jesus for the ease of life because I've read the history books.
I've read that back in the 1900s when people would move into a new town, they would immediately join a church because when they would go to that job interview, they would ask them one of the first questions, what church do you go to?
And people realized that early on in life that if I don't attend a church somewhere, I'm probably not going to get a job somewhere. This is how America was founded and the Christian life began to become an ease of life and not truly worshiping Him.
And Jesus was never magnified in our life. And we've got to get to the point where as we see here, these seven sons of Sceva give us an illustration of how they completely abandoned what they were doing because they were trying to manipulate or use the Word of God or use God's power in errancy.
But then we get to verses 18 and 19 and we see the church. We see saints here begin to get right. Verses 18 and 19, many believers came, they confessed, and they showed their deeds. This was a visible public repentance.
This is something that we don't see a lot in today's church. Today's church, we want to come in and we want to see faith as silence. But this is a people who began to see God's work in a miraculous way and they sacrificed tremendously.
The Bible says that they saw that they were doing wrong, they saw that they had collected these demonic books and these witchcraft books and instead of selling them and making some profit and saying, hey, I'm doing a good
thing, I'm going to sell them and I'm going to give the money back to the church, they said, we've got to burn and abolish these things. Now, the Bible says that it was 50,000 pieces of silver. In today's society, it would have been several million dollars
that they decided they were going to abandon and they were going to sacrifice. They were going to destroy them. Later on, in Ephesians chapter 4 verses 20 through 24, if you want to write that down, Ephesians 4, 20 through 24,
Paul is writing to the church of Ephesus and he's saying, if you want to be closer to Jesus, there's going to be times where you put off some dirty things in your life and you put on Christ. And this is what they were doing.
They were an example of putting off the things of where they were at in one area of life and they were putting on Christ.
They were putting on the gospel of the believer here and they were living this out in a practical example. Back in, when a guy named Herman Cortez arrived in Mexico, he began to, as his crew landed in Mexico, he began to one by one burn the ships that were there.
And all the people that were there with him came up to him and said, Mr. Cortez, what are you doing? Why are you burning our ships? Why are you burning the way that we got here?
And he said, if I don't burn the ships that got us here, we'll be tempted to go back where we came from. And he said, I'm giving us a visual illustration that we are here and we're never going back where we came from.
Too many Christians in our life, we've got the ships of sin sitting in our houses and we're willing to say, I'm going to put on Jesus on Sunday, but I'm going to live in the ship of sin and
we've got to get to the point where we burn that ship and we say, I'm going to live for Jesus in a way that's going to be radically different to the people that are around me and I'm never going to go back to the old ways.
I'm never going to go back to what my life was like before Jesus and I'm going to radically change my life. And these people here, they said, this is what repentance is.
It is burning the ships and burning the bridges that we once lived in so that we can never go back to that way of living. Real repentance costs us something.
Real repentance is not just simply saying, I'm going to be convenient today but inconvenient tomorrow. Real repentance should cost us something massively in our life. And if it doesn't cost you something in your life, it's probably not repentance.
When we get wrong or when we get caught when we do something wrong, there's repentance that happens because we get caught. But oftentimes, the repentance didn't come beforehand.
The question we have to ask ourselves is, what are we willing to burn in our life? What are we willing to say that this is not glorifying God? It's not putting God on the pedestal and it's putting self on the pedestal. And so I'm willing to burn it. I'm willing to abandon it.
Therefore, I can follow Jesus to draw my life back to God, to draw my life back to someone and something that is greater than anything I could ever imagine or think. What is it, church, in our life that we need to replace the old with the new?
And we need to say, I'm going to give up those things in order to follow Jesus today.
Radical Changes from the Gospel
Because as we look at the last several verses, the last 20 verses here, and I'll be quick here, we see that the gospel radically changes everything. The gospel changes everything.
When we begin to follow Jesus, when we begin to follow what is going on, the Bible says that there is no small stir about what is going on here. The gospel began to upset the Ephesians here economically, socially, spiritually, and Jesus was exalted and the idols began to fall.
We began to see that those who once profited from what was going on began to get angry.
They began to say, I was okay with it at first when it was a small gathering, when it was over here, secluded in the temple. Yeah, they began to rent out this big hall of Tyrannus and yeah, they were having some people come, but it wasn't affecting my pocket.
It wasn't affecting my well-being. It wasn't affecting what I was doing and so I was okay with it to begin with.
But now, this is something that is bigger than what we can get to and Demetrius is mentioned here and he cared more about his income based off of his idols than he cared about anything else that was going on.
And I began to see three main things as we look through this very quickly. The first thing we see is that when the gospel changes everything, it changes the social norms. It changes the social norms. The people's loyalty began to shift from Arminius to this almighty God.
The one that created heavens and earth that breathed the world into existence. They went from worshiping an idol to worshiping the one who created everything. The gospel began to redefine this community where once they were celebrating things, now they are condemning the things that they once celebrated.
They're going to their brothers and their sisters and they're saying, how can you worship that false God made with hands?
God is the God of the creator of the universe and he created all this and how do you think that we can create God?
And they began to ridicule and rebuke and preach the gospel to their neighbors and their family members and the social norms were changed and riots began to happen and things began to get mad and upset because their social norms were upset.
Not only did the social norms get changed, but their spiritual attitudes were now changed. These riots exposed their emptiness. The Bible says that they were preaching and yelling, great is Diana.
This was shouted and they were preaching and teaching this that Diana was great, but yet there was no peace that followed.
As they were going through their life, there were more riots and there were more things that were going on and this noise that was going on was going on without truth and with chaos was ensuing after this.
So they got up and they were yelling this for two hours in the hall of Tyrannus where the church was meeting, where the church was trying to disciple one another and believe and grow closer in their faith.
They began to come into that location and they began to yell for two hours straight so the church couldn't even function because the spiritual attitudes of what was going on here was being challenged.
But then we begin to see that when the gospel comes in, it changes our sacrificial giving. It changes our way of living.
Believers, they gave up valuable possessions. They gave up income for the sake of the gospel. As I mentioned earlier, true faith always loosens our grip of greed.
When we begin to follow Jesus, when we begin to say, God, I'm going to give you my heart, I'm going to give you my soul, I'm going to give you my bank account, I'm going to give you everything
and when you tell me to do something, I'm going to do it. I know it's going to probably hurt me in the moment but I know that you are the God of everything. You're the God of the hills, of the thousands, of the cattle on a thousand hills and you own the hills.
You are the God of everything and I'm just going to trust in you. You see, when the gospel reaches Wall Street, when the gospel reaches Hollywood, when the gospel reaches Washington, it will cause the same kind of stir.
People's lives will get right, the light will begin to shine in and the darkness will get defensive but always understand that the light will overcome the darkness
and we have to be the people who are saying I'm going to sacrificially give so that the light can go into the dark places, so the light of the word can go in and we can be people who are going to go out and to tell others about Jesus because I
can get up and I can preach John Blue in the face but until we understand that it's not what I say or do but it's about what the gospel does, the gospel changes everything in our life and we have to get to the point where we understand that.
I want to ask you a couple questions before we close and Terry can come and start playing but as you begin to think what Ephesus is in your world that need to be stirred by your witness?
What people that are like Ephesus who are worshipping false gods who are doing things that are immoral and wicked and you need to be that example to go to them and say I want to tell you about Jesus
I want to be that little Otis that's just finding someone in the marketplace that's finding someone in the grocery store and says hey do you know about this man named Jesus?
Cost of Following the Gospel
Do you know about this man who can change your life forever? Are we willing to let the gospel cost us our comfort?
Are we willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of the gospel? Are we willing to let our reputation be the one that loves Jesus? Maybe our income gets hurt a little bit because we love Jesus more. Are we willing to let the gospel cost us some things? And are we truly exalting Christ?
Are we truly giving Christ the supremacy of our heart and we're saying I want to exalt Christ in everything I do and no matter what happens Christ is going to be lifted high.
The Ephesians here this church at Ephesus was this town of Ephesus was filled with idols they were filled with magic they were filled with money but in the middle of all of it there was this one little group
of people the Bible says as we looked at last week twelve disciples of Paul this small group insignificant group that I'm sure thought we can't impact this town we can't impact what is going on how are we going
to do this and through Paul's teaching through Paul's ministry through Paul's discipleship the word began to prevail lives began to change and Christ was exalted greater than what they ever could have imagined.
What are we exalting church? Is it Christ or is it culture? Is it family or is it familiarity? Is it eternal or is it earthly?
What is it that we are lifting high? And when people come to us they will know what we're lifting high they will know where your priorities are. I was counseling a young lady this week and she asked me she said how do I know an idol is in my life?
And I said it's really simple I said if you take your time you take your talents and you take your ability the things that you're doing you begin to look through and you begin to say what am I spending the most of my money on?
Where am I spending most of my time at? And who am I hanging out the most with? Those are your idols.
Those are the things in your life that you're giving the most things to. I said is it Amazon? Is it that you're giving the most and I'm guilty of giving Amazon a lot of money. Is it Walmart?
What is it that you're giving all of your money to and all of your time and all of your efforts to? Who are the people that you're hanging out with the most? Who are the things that you're going to and the places that you're going?
I said when you begin to ask yourself this these are the things that are going to lift us up. That we're going to lift up and we're going to say this is the highest priority.
Or is it the things of God and the things that God wants us to do and or you're spending your most time with your family investing in your family and loving on your family and trying to tell them about Jesus. Whatever captures our imagination will control our devotion.
We've got to ask ourselves what are we exalting in this world? I pray that we're exalting the word. I pray that we're lifting up our hearts in worship. I came in this morning and I said Terry I've been listening to this new song. The name of the song is All Sufficient Merit.
I said I'm just in love with this song. It talks about how we have nothing and that we are borrowing the merit of God.
I said I just can't get this song out of my mind. Every time I get in the car I've got to play it.
Every time I've got to go to the store I've got to play it. When I'm riding to make a visit I play it because it's reminding me that it's not my own merit it's the merit of Jesus that's been applied to my life.
How is our worship and how is your walk this morning?
When our community sees that we love the word and we're worshiping Jesus and our walk is all about Jesus they will begin to say there is something different that is going on that can't be explained by the world and I've got to go and find out what's going on.
I've got to go and find out what is making this happen and we get to this awesome ability to say it's all about the gospel.
Conclusion and Call to Action
It's all about what Jesus has done. It's nothing that I have done and I'm just here to be a messenger to tell you about what Jesus has done. This morning church what are we exalting?
What are we lifting up? What are we putting first and foremost in our life? Lord we love you we thank you for what you've done. Help us time of invitation as we respond help us to ask ourselves who is the king of our throne?
We may profess Christ and that's a great thing maybe there's someone here that doesn't know you
but maybe there's someone here that has accepted you but never has really truly put you king of their heart and help that to be a decision that we make today. We love you in your name we pray. Amen.
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