Admonition Podcast

Dear Lord, our Father in Heaven, hallowed is thy name, hallowed is everything that you do.

Lord God, we pray that at this time we open up our minds and our Bibles to study your word
and take to heart everything that is taught.

May we think with diligence on all the lessons so that how we can apply them to our daily
lives and to move forward and teach others as well to bring them to the knowledge of your

grace, your wisdom, and how to be saved.

Lord God, please continue to be with us, guide us, and direct us each and every day.

And so we pray to thee in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right.

So last time I was here, we have been studying through Matthew chapter five.

So if you would go ahead and be turning your Bibles there.

We're gonna pick up where we left off, what, two months ago?

Three months ago?

It's been a little while.

For those of you taking notes, that's great.

And we are going to continue by starting in verse 31.

So the lesson aim for this evening is to show that righteousness of Jesus requires reach
beyond outward procedure, which we talked about a little bit last time, that it matters

what's going on inside our hearts as much as it is the outward showing of our faith.

But tonight we are going to start with a very hot button topic, divorce and marriage,
which Matthew speaks about.

So there's a lot of notes.

I'm going to stick with this.

That way we can continue on and I want to make sure that I

phrase everything very specifically for this study as it is a very hot button issue.

So starting Matthew chapter five, we'll have someone read verses thirty one and thirty
two, please.

Alright, so we have a shift in language here from the last couple of verses and a shift

in topic.

He now moves over to the topic of divorce and marriage.

He moves from lust to marriage, and the transition there is not accidental.

What Christ is saying is that lust cheapens what God has made sacred.

And the marriage is one of the cleanest examples of something sacred that mankind often
treats far too casually in today's society.

uh Even back then, Jesus has just shown us that adultery begins in the heart.

Now he shows us the seriousness of breaking the marriage bond itself.

So verse 31 reaches all the way back to Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1.

And for the sake of time this evening, ah this is where Moses spoke of giving a wife a
writing of divorcement.

That right written certificate served as an important legal purpose.

It documented what had taken place and protected women from being treated simply as
property.

ah I don't know of anybody that likes to be treated by property, even back in those days.

This is what they had to deal with.

So, but by the days of Jesus, many had focused so heavily on the document that they had
lost sight of the covenant that was being given.

They begin to reason that if the correct paperwork was supplied, then it was okay.

The divorce itself must be, quote unquote, acceptable, and we don't see that to be the
case.

ah So J Deuteronomy 24 and verse 1 begins by saying, When a man hath taken a wife and
married her, and it came to pass that she find no

Favor in his eyes.

Continuing on a little bit, it says, Let him write her a bill of divorcement.

Now, this is a familiar pattern that we see in the Sermon on the Mount.

uh We see Christ saying and continuing the pattern that we spoke of last time.

You have heard it been said, but I say unto you.

And he continues this pattern.

Jesus is not exposing an error in the Word of God.

Deuteronomy was not wrong.

With what it was teaching.

He is expo exposing the shallow way that the men back in Deuteronomy in earlier time had
misused the scripture and what was taught.

They emphasize the certificate while Jesus emphasizes the covenant.

They reduce marriage to a procedure while Jesus is trying to restore it to back to its God
given right.

And so Jesus says, but I say unto you, he's not giving another rabbi type opinion.

He speaks with divine authority.

And we see that all the way back in Matthew chapter 7, verses 28 through 29, which is a
little forward of here.

But here the king tells us what his law truly requires.

Next, I want you to notice the wording in that specific verse.

It says, Whosoever.

Now, whosoever means whosoever, right?

It doesn't get too much easier than that.

Notice the breadth of the wording.

Jesus does not say.

Whichever disciple.

He does not limit it to by saying whichever Jew.

He doesn't say whichever member of the church.

Marriage was established by God far before the law of Moses and before the church.

It belongs to God and it's God's order to mankind.

So that's why in Matthew 19, 4 through 6, Jesus reaches all the way back to creation, and
we see where he which made him at the beginning made them male and female.

God's teaching about marriage is not an internal rule, it's something for everyone to
follow.

So God joins the marriage.

This means that the marriage is far more than simply our human arrangement.

The paperwork that we're going to talk about in a second has a very specific purpose to
play.

A government may license and record a marriage, a preacher or another lawful official may
conduct the ceremony, but who marries the people?

God marries the people.

Friends and friends, friends and family may even witness the vows.

However, Jesus is the one who actually joins the husband and wife together.

So somebody get Matthew 19 and verse 6.

All right, so we are married by God, not merely by man.

And because God establishes the bonds, man does not have the authority to tear it apart.

Doesn't matter what paper you come up with.

Marriage is not simply a private contract that two people can cancel whenever they no
longer prefer its conditions.

it's a covenant relationship between the one who joins the two together.

So we need an illustration.

A lot of the world has a hard time coping with this.

Think of a birth certificate.

Does a birth certificate create that life?

No.

It authorizes it in the view of the government.

It gives you civil records that recognize it.

The same goes for a marriage, but the authority and the terms of that were governed
originally and come from God.

God also shows that marriage is intended to be continued for life.

Someone get Romans 7 and verse 2.

Go ahead and continue in verse three.

But if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

So then if while her husband liveth she be married to another man, she shall be called an
adulteress.

But if you're a Yep.

Alright, so now let's go over because Paul states the same principle in First Corinthians
seven and verse thirty-nine.

Let's have someone get that, because we want to see it from different views.

Yeah, seven and verse thirty nine of First Corinthians.

She is at liberty to be

Alright, only in the Lord.

There's a key phrase there.

Death ends the bond, and his surviving spouse is free to marry, provided that the marriage
is still only in the Lord.

That's a defining piece of framework.

This gives us the framework that God revealed.

In the teachings of Jesus, fornication is the one stated cause that permits the faithful
spouse to put away the unfaithful mate and marry another.

Fornication, however, does not force the innocent spouse to divorce.

It does not make every relationship righteous automatically.

It is the exception Christ gave to the rule that the marriage bond is for life.

So, but God's rule goes before our hypotheticals many, many times.

Whenever marriage, divorce, and remarriage is discussed, people can quickly produce
hundreds, if not thousands, of hypothetical situations.

Unfortunately, some real lives are painfully connected to these hypotheticals, and
sometimes they hit home when we ask about them.

Tonight, we are not going to attempt every case of unresolved imagine case in this class.

Doing so is going to allow for very unusual circumstances and pull our attention away from
the plain rule that Jesus is teaching us.

We have to have the foundation.

So our purpose, again, for reiterating all of this, is to reinforce that foundation.

God created marriage.

God joins the two in marriage, and God gives the rules that govern marriage, divorce, and
remarriage.

We do not begin with what seems easiest.

We should never begin with what society accepts.

Our foundation for all things go back to the argument of authority.

And where do we get authority from?

From God, from the Bible.

So I want someone to get Philippians 2 and verse 12.

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much
more in my absence.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

That verse does not mean that every person may invent their own truth.

It means that each of us is responsible personally before God.

We must not treat eternal matters casually.

We always need to look back at what we have authority for and what

What we don't.

We cannot make excuses for ourselves.

We cannot hand our accountability to someone else eventually.

Difficult circumstances call for very careful study.

It calls for humility and a sincere determination to obey what God has commanded.

So this is why I say that I'm not going to go over and talk about a lot of hypotheticals.

ah

And when you get in muddy water with your relationships like this, I implore you to turn
back to Philippians and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

So Jesus states one exception in this passage, saving for the cause of fornication.

He repeats it clearly in Matthew 19 and verse 9.

Whoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another,
committeth adultery.

Now this fornication here, the Greek is referring to sexual immorality.

He's not saying ha unhappiness.

He's not saying because you changed your mind.

He's not saying because of disappointment.

He's not saying because of incompatibility.

He's not saying that your feelings changed.

He didn't

Say that, well, we're just simply growing apart.

We've all heard these over and over again from many people, at least I have.

And those difficulties may be painful and they require patience.

They require a lot of times counseling, but it requires faithfulness to the one who gives
us his law.

The exception is stated because sexual unfaithfulness violates the exclusiv.

These words are long.

Exclusivity of the marriage covenant.

So, one simple decision can spread.

Jesus says that the next man, going back to Matthew chapter five, who unlawfully puts away
his wife, causes her to commit adultery.

The word causeth is what I want us to focus on.

This does not remove her moral responsibility as though she has no choice.

It describes the position into which sh he has placed her in that society, back in the

Biblical time society when the Romans and all of that, a divorced woman often faced a lot
more than just being divorced.

She's faced severe social and even economical standing and pressure to enter another
marriage.

By casting her away without cause, Jesus the ca the cause Jesus permits, the husband
inadvertently and sometimes vertently

Helps create the circumstances in which she may enter an adulterous relationship.

Because society would push them towards that back in that time period.

So it was very important for Christ to teach this that the responsibility was still with
the wife, even if the husband pushed her off.

Because are they st even if they got the papers, are they still married by God or no?

They would still be married by God, yes.

Unless one of the two were given.

by death or

Correct.

So few people who pursue an unscriptural divorce stop to consider how far the damage may
travel.

They may call it a private decision between two adults.

I've heard that one before.

But Jesus traces its moral consequences outward.

The spouse is affected.

It affects more than that.

Children and families are affected.

And then Jesus continues: Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.

So now we have a third person being affected.

It's not just between two consenting adults anymore.

Sin spreads.

Someone who is not part of the original marriage can now be brought into sin as well.

And sometimes that can even happen unknowingly.

In the context, Jesus is speaking of the woman who's been put away without scriptural
cause.

Civil decree may say that the marriage is over, but the civil paperwork can never overturn
what God's rules are.

And if another person enters that unscriptural union, he does not make the relationship
righteous simply because he was not responsible for the original separation.

He becomes guilty of adultery too, him or her.

Please let me extrapolate that fact.

Just because he

saying him in these verses doesn't mean that it does not also apply to the female.

Sin rarely confines its consequences to a person who begins it.

What happens when you take a rock and you drop it in a pool?

What does it cause?

A ripple?

It strikes one place, but the ripples travel.

And they actually travel really far.

They may lose potency the further they go out, but this is what Christ is saying.

That one division, that one rule break is going to affect everyone involved.

And sometimes even those that are not involved or may not even have knowledge of it.

This is why Paul tells Christians to put these desires to death rather than feed them.

Jesus is restoring God's standard in Matthew chapter five.

And now that brings us and moves us on to a section I call oaths and honesty.

This will be verses thirty-three through thirty-seven.

And for the sake of time, I'll go ahead and get this one.

Matthew chapter five, starting in verse thirty-three.

Again ye have heard it, that it has been said by them of old time, thou shalt not forswear
thyself, but shall perform unto the Lord thine oaths.

But I say unto you, swear not at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by
earth, for it is his footstool, neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great

king.

Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black,
but let your communication be yea, yea, nay, nay.

For whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

So now Jesus moved from faithfulness in the marriage and moves to faithfulness of speech.

Honesty.

The law condemned at the time false swearing and required a person to perform vows he made
unto the Lord.

The problem was not that God's law encouraged dishonesty, but

The problem was that religious leaders had built complicated systems around their oaths
back in the day.

They would debate which oath was binding, which was sacred, what sacred object it was
based on, and which wording left a person room to escape his promise.

They got very legalistic about it.

Sometimes today we see that in the courtroom.

In that kind of culture, a man could try to sound trafe truthful without actually becoming
truthful.

He might swear by heaven, he might swear by earth, he might swear by Jerusalem, by the
parts of things that were in the temple, by his own head, but

And when people swear like that, they're using what they think to be impressive language
to try to convince you that they're being truthful this time.

They think that adding the words and tacking them onto the beginning has an effect.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't.

We know that words have value, but what to the person that always says, I swear I'm I'm
going to your baseball game this time and then still doesn't show up?

Are they being truthful?

Are they being honest?

No.

So what does swear not at all begin?

We need to read that command together with the rest of Scripture.

Jesus is forgetting is forbidding the casual, manipulative, and evasive use of oaths.

The use of sacred things to prop up unreliable speech.

He's not contradicting examples in which a solemn charge or appeal is made in a very
serious setting.

So this is much different from when you place your hand on the Bible in a courtroom and
say that you're going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

When Jesus stood before Sephas, the high priest,

We read this back in Matthew chapter twenty six and verse sixty three.

He says, I adjure thee by the living God that thou tellest whether thou be Christ, the Son
of God.

Now, this is in a courtroom setting.

Would this have been a fairly serious setting?

What do we see Jesus do?

Did he did he did he answer the solemn charge?

He didn't refuse to speak just because the high priest had placed him under oath.

Paul likewise used solemn language.

In 1 Thessalonians 5 27, he wrote, I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read unto
all the holy brethren.

And in 1 Corinthians 15, 31, he affirmed, I protest by your rejoicing, which I have in
Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

These passages do not picture these men using careless oaths to excuse careless speech.

They are very serious appeals in very serious settings, made in a very serious surface to
the spread of truth.

So the lesson is not that a Christian may never answer in court or make any solemn
affirmation of the truth.

The lesson is that truthfulness must not depend upon, as us magicians say, a verbal trick.

See, I can ask you as a magician to pick one of three things.

If I have this side of the podium, the microphone, and this side of the podium, you might
point your finger to here.

And I could use a verbal trick and go, okay, well, that's the one we'll get rid of,
because my goal is to get you to pick over here, right?

Okay, that's the one we'll get rid of, and uh we have just these two left.

Which one would you like?

Now if you pick the one I want, cool, we'll just go with it.

If you pick the other one, I say, well, we'll follow the same suit, we'll get rid of this
one, and that leaves us with this.

It's called the magician's choice.

It is a verbal trick to make you feel like you have a choice in the matter.

When in all intents and purposes you don't.

He's saying don't do that.

Don't swear by oaths of God and things that are namely belong to God.

We have to do things honestly in all of our speech.

Jesus names the very things people used in their oath.

The heaven is God's throne, the earth is his footstool, Jerusalem is the city of the great
king.

Now that last expression comes from Psalm 48:2, which describes Mount Zion as the joy of
the whole earth, the city of the great king.

Psalm forty-six four calls it the city of God.

Psalms eighty-seven three says, Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.

Was Jerusalem great because of its buildings?

No.

What about its history?

Maybe it's because Jerusalem had the biggest population on earth?

It was great because of its relationship to God.

It's just like we think of Esther.

Who was Esther?

Esther was a no-one until she obeyed God and she stood up for her people.

The people were bar borrowing the holiness of God's city to make their own words sound
more impressive.

Jesus reminds them that they do not own Jerusalem.

They do not own heaven.

They do not own earth.

They do not even own possession over their own heads.

Because he says in the passage in Matthew chapter five, you can't make a single hair white
or black.

Everything they were swearing by already belonged to God.

Therefore, the answer is not to find a stronger object by which to swear by, to to make an
oath by.

The answer is to become a more truthful person.

So Jesus concludes.

He says, Let your communication be yay, yay, nay, nay.

If we say yes as a Christian, our answer should mean yes.

Our words need to reflect their value.

If we say no,

And little children really need to learn this one from their parents, right?

The first time you say no, what is this supposed to mean?

No.

This de this reaches far deeper than vocabulary.

It's a lesson Christ is teaching us about integrity.

The righteous person is not one man in public and another man in private.

He does not become honest only when being dishonest is going to cost him something.

And this matter this matters because truth supports almost every relationship we possess.

Tell me, does does the does the home need truth?

Do marriages need truth?

Do churches need truth?

Absolutely.

Do friendships need truth?

I don't know what kind of friendship you can have without truth.

The kingdom isn't of God is not built by exaggeration.

It is not built by deception.

It comes from Christians living a dependable and honest life in service to God.

So now we get to section three.

There's another section between verses thirty-eight and forty-two.

And if you're taking down notes, I labeled this revenge and restraint in my Bible.

So we'll go ahead and have someone else read Matthew five, thirty-eight through forty two.

Ye have heard that it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law and take thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

And whatsoever shall com and whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn thou not away.

Now would you believe me if I told you that this is probably the most frequently quoted,
and yet also the most

Misunderstood section in this entire chapter.

We hear this day in and day out.

Well, maybe not every day, but sections in this chapter.

An eye for an eye comes directly from the law of Moses.

The wording appears specifically in Exodus 21, 24 through 25, Leviticus 24:20, and
Deuteronomy 19:21.

Jesus is not suggesting that the law of Moses was cruel.

And then now he's decided to be kind.

How many times have we heard people say an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth?

Does that mean that I just get to exact my revenge on whoever did it?

And I get to whatever they did to me, I get to and human psychology wants you to take it
further than that, right?

The human mind wants to, for whatever reason, always settle the score.

But the original command actually limited retaliation by fixing an exact and measured
compensation for an injury.

Tell me, does human anger tend to escalate?

Especially when you have two opposing parties?

Someone injures us a little, we want to injure them greatly.

Someone embarrasses us and we want to ruin his name.

Someone costs us something and we want to take everything from him.

Under the law, judges were seen seeing that the penalty fit the offense.

Now back then they had to have this on the books but

Because they wanted it to be equal.

They wanted it to be no more and no less.

An eye for an eye restrained excessive punishment in that day.

It was never given as a personal slogan for revenge, and yet we hear it in today's
society.

Someone get Deuteronomy nineteen and verse twenty-one.

Deuteronomy nineteen and twenty one.

Alright, so by the days of Jesus, some had taken the principle intended for measured
public justice and turned it into personal permission to, as we say, get even.

The spirit had become, you know what, you hurt me, I got the right to hurt you now.

And and the government, they're gonna back me up.

But Jesus corrects this retaliating heart type of thinking.

So we move to verse 39.

It sounds paradoxical.

Resist not evil.

But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn unto him also the other.

What is a paradox?

A paradox arrests our attention because it sounds surprising at first.

It presses us, however, towards learning something deeper.

Jesus is not commanding us to approve of evil, he's not commanding us to call it good, but
he is forbidding the heart that must answer every insult, return every injury, and

And specifically, like we said earlier, settle every score.

The principle was not absent from the Old Testament.

Leviticus nineteen and verse eighteen says, Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge
against the children of thy people.

Hmm, that's a little different from eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

Proverbs twenty and verse twenty-two warns and says, Say that say not thou, I will
recompense evil, but wait on the Lord, and we shall save thee.

And then if you turn over to Proverbs 24 and 29, he adds, Say not, I will do so to him as
he hath done to me.

The law of limited compensation never ever canceled out the command against personal
vengeance.

They work in tandem with one another.

So we see Paul carry the same principle to the Romans.

In Romans 12 and verse 19, he says, Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give
place unto wrath, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, set the Lord.

The Christian does not have to deny a wrong that's been done to them.

But he refuses to seize God's place and make personal vengeance his mission.

That's not our fault.

We also read about treating our enemy well, and you'll be shoveling lumps of coal upon
their head.

God will take care of it.

David gives us a more memorable example in 1 Samuel 24, 8 through 15.

Saul had pursued him unjustly, repeatedly sought his life during this period.

But when David had an opportunity to kill Saul in the cave, what did he do?

He refused.

He refused to kill him, and he later confronted Saul and plainly described Saul's
injustice towards him.

He said, The Lord therefore be judge.

And judge between me and thee.

Did David pretend that Saul was innocent?

Not for a moment.

The man tried to kill him in a cave.

Did he place judgment into God's hand and refuse to become a man ruled by vengeance?

He did.

The Hebrew Christians showed similar restraint.

In Hebrews 10, 32 through 34, it reminds them that they had endured affliction, reproach,
and even the spoiling of their goods because they possessed in heaven a better and

enduring substance.

You can suffer earthly loss without surrendering faith or having hatred towards your
enemy.

Jesus didn't retaliate.

He told truth, didn't he?

Turning the other cheek does not mean that a Christian can never identify wrongdoing.

When an officer struck Jesus, back in John 18, 22 through 23, did Christ strike him back?

Could he have?

he could have done way worse.

But Jesus never called the blow righteous either throughout the book.

He calmly answers.

He says, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil.

But if well, why smitest thou me?

If I've done nothing wrong, why do you hit me?

He says.

He responds with truth.

And he asks a very simple question.

The greatest teacher of all kind was so good at asking questions.

He taught people by the questions he asked.

In fact, we see Christ throughout the whole Bible.

He asks more questions than he gives answers.

Because typically that's the best way people learn.

It's called critical thinking.

I wish we would bring that back in math class and school.

They took it away years ago.

During his trial, men spit upon him.

They covered his face, they mocked him, they struck him.

Mark 14 and verse 65 records their abuse reflected the suffering described in Isaiah 50
and verse 6.

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair.

Christ possessed all power, yet he submitted to the will of the Father.

He did not retaliate.

Does anybody think that that was weakness?

Shake your head like this.

No, it's not weakness, it's power, it's strength under perfect control.

Anybody can lash out.

Most people do.

Anybody can answer evil with evil.

That's the easy thing to do.

It takes far greater strength and restrain of the flesh to submit the matter to God.

And sometimes we need to remind ourselves of this.

Sometimes it can be a big issue, someone hitting you in the face like Christ.

Sometimes it can be a small issue.

A guy that hit his gas pedal a little too hard and whizzed by you in the passing lane.

Why do we get upset about that?

I still find myself getting upset about that.

Especially when they cut me off.

And so I've star I've started trying my hardest not to honk the horn.

I've got one of those little beep beep horns, you can't hardly hear it over forty miles an
hour anyway, so that helps.

The question becomes what kind of person we become after the wrong is done to us.

I want I wrote down an illustration and I think it fits.

The word retaliation.

It means essentially giving an eye for an eye.

It's you're going to do back what someone has done to you.

It's kind of like feeding a fire from both sides of the fence.

We have the Loreau up here.

I was thinking about this when I was getting this class ready.

You have one gentleman on the other side, me on here, and I throw in a I throw in a stick.

on the fire to that sets the the wall ablaze.

If he's gonna retaliate and do an eye for an eye, is he gonna throw a stick on his side?

Now the fence is between our dividing properties.

Do you see any good coming out of this?

We're both feeding the fire.

What does fire do typically?

Does it cause damage?

If it's built under a wooden fence, is it gonna burn the fence up?

Retaliation does no good because every new piece of fuel increase increases the
destruction.

Restraint, however, refuses to add more fuel to the fire.

And sometimes that's many times that's the way that Christians need to be.

We don't need to fuel the fire.

If someone gets on Facebook or Reddit or whatever the websites are today and blasts you
about something, leave it alone.

Who cares?

All you're doing is feeding into that fire, giving them more ammunition, and you're just
causing more destruction on your end as well.

But I digress.

Jesus gives three more pictures of this type of spirit.

First, if a man is determined to sue for the coat, the disciple is prepared to surrender
the co the cloak also rather than become consumed by the disciple.

Dispute.

I almost said disciple.

Totally different lesson there.

Jesus is not teaching carelessness with every responsibility we possess.

He is teaching freedom from the spirit that values winning, property, and pride above all
peace and righteousness.

Second, if someone compels you to go one mile, go twain with them.

Roman authorities back then had the legal right to compel a civilian to go one mile and
carry their stuff.

This was legal tender for the for the Romans.

The first mile could be demanded.

However, the second mile was freely given.

Instead of doing the minimum with a bitter heart, what Christ is telling them, he tells
his disciples to turn what is a burden into an opportunity for service, demonstrating

willing service.

Thirdly, Jesus teaches generosity.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn thou not away.

It's a command against the hard, selfish heart that automatically closes itself to genuine
need.

He's not saying if someone comes to you and begs for alcohol money, you need to give them
alcohol money.

He's not saying to finance sin.

He's saying keep your heart guarded.

Don't close yourself up just because someone asks you to borrow some money.

How many times do we pass the plate and suddenly many people in the congregation clutch
their wallet?

This is a hard lesson to learn, and I've used this, I believe, once before in in this
class period.

I I think they know what's coming.

But if I hold up my wallet, this is not my wallet.

Whose wallet is this?

Is it God's wallet?

Does God give us everything that we have?

Now, does God command us to be good stewards of those funds?

We have to always be thinking ahead.

What is the best way to use this?

Not only just to take care of my family, but also to pursue the furtherance of God's
kingdom.

Use it.

At the end of the day, we can route God, can we?

No.

Taken together, these examples can teach us mastery over a retaliating spirit.

The child of God does not have to respond to every insult.

We do not have to win every argument.

We do not have to protect every ounce of pride that we have in us.

We don't have to repay every offense.

However, we can calmly speak truth, seek lawful help where necessary, and protect those
entrusted to us.

But we must be governed by the hunger.

We must not be governed by the hunger not to get even.

Make sure I'm saying that right.

Class is over, and next time we pick up, we will pick up at the section I've labeled Love
for Your Enemies in verses forty-three through forty-seven.

Thank you for your time.