Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

My Tuesday morning of this week started out to be the most incredible day.  I wasn’t anticipating it.  In fact, when I looked at the first appointment on my day I thought it was gonna be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  But it turned out to be a day…when I walked away from that first appointment I was singing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay”.  If you were to look on my calendar that day, you would understand why I was not anticipating a good start to my day because the first appointment of my day was to go to the DMV.  All right?  I had been putting this off for a long, long time.  I moved to Virginia Beach, and, you know, you’ve got to change your address and all of that.  I’m not a procrastinator, but when it comes to going to the DMV I procrastinate all I can.  But, you know, we’ve got an election approaching and the whole voter registration thing was upon me.  I didn’t have a choice, so I put it on my calendar first thing Tuesday morning.  And I’m thinking, you know, it’s gonna be one of those days.  In fact, my wife and kids did this a month ago, two months ago maybe during the summertime.  They spent two hours at the DMV just to snap another picture, change an address, and, you know, do all of that stuff.  So I came prepared.  I had my briefcase.  I had my laptop.  I had my cell phone.  I was wired.  I had study materials.  I mean, I brought a cooler.  I brought lunch.  I brought everything.  I was ready to just settle in and make it happen.  I got there shortly after it opened up.  And I was little bit nervous because the parking lot was full.  And I’m watching people get out of the cars, and they’re at a brisk step.  And I’m thinking, well, I’m gonna beat you to the line.  And I walk inside the DMV, and I’m like, well, there are only five people in the line.  I took my step up there.  I’m not kidding you.  I got through the DMV—are you ready for this—in 13 minutes flat.  You better believe it.  I was so happy.  You ought to see the picture on my new license.  I’m smiling.  I look like a dork, but I’m smiling.  And they let you do that now.  Or maybe they’ve let you smile all along and we just didn't know because most of us are hanging out for two or three hours at the DMV.  And nobody is smiling by that time.  I thought it was gonna be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  And I’m walking out.  I’m singing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”  I got through the DMV in 13 minutes.  I walked into the church office, and everybody’s like, “Pastor, what have you been drinking this morning?  You’ve all happy and giddy.”  I said, “I had the best, best start to my day.”

0:03:03.2

Well, I want you to think about that as we go back to the Old Testament Tabernacle.  And I want you to picture yourself as an Old Testament worshipper.  You’re one of the Israelites encamped around this portable worship facility that God instructed Moses to build as they left Egypt and they began their…well, what turned about to be a 40-year trek on their way to the Promised Land.  And you make your way to the tent of meeting, this Tabernacle.  You step inside.  And the first thing you find yourself staring at says to you, “This is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”  Because the first thing that a worshipper comes in contact with is an altar.  An altar where something or somebody is sacrificed.  And there ain’t nothing good about that.  The bronze altar was, according to scripture, about 5 cubits long, 5 cubits broad.  It was square, about 3 cubits high.  A cubit is about a food and a half, about 17 inches, some scholars say.  So picture that in your mind.  There was a fire continually burning at this altar.  And you can feel the heat of the fire.  Just imagine yourself standing before a bonfire, and you feel the heat of that fire.  You can also smell the singe of burnt flesh, animal flesh.  And you’re thinking to yourself, this ain’t gonna be a good day.  This doesn't look good.  But you can’t get anywhere past further into the courtyard, let along into the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place if you were a priest.  You can’t get there by bypassing the altar.  There’s no way around this thing.  And there you stand as a worshipper.  You’ve brought your animal sacrifice, and it’s a sobering, sobering moment.

0:05:19.4

Before we get into the details of what this altar teaches us, even all these thousands of years later, let’s retrace some of our steps.  Remember, last week we learned that God always wants to dwell with His people.  He always has.  He’s a relational being.  We learn this from the early pages of Genesis when the Bible says God said, “Let us create man in our image,” the holy trinity speaking—the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.  One God who expresses Himself in three distinct persons and personalities.  And they have and share perfect fellowship and perfect intimacy and perfect relationship.  And when God created us in His own image, well, He wanted to hang out with man as well.  And He did so in that garden paradise.  The Bible says that God walked with Adam in the cool of the day.  Could you imagine just taking a daily stroll with God in the Garden of Eden and just how wonderful and friendly and intimate and relational that was?  But Adam sinned against God.  And when God established that relationship, He said to Adam, “You can enjoy everything I’ve created.  But you see those two trees over there: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  You can eat from the tree of life, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, don’t eat from that.  Don’t eat from that, because if you do you will surely die.”  And God established moral accountability and moral responsibility for Adam and his wife Eve.  Well, they disobeyed God.  They fractured the relationship.  They broke the relationship.  Nothing has ever been the same since, and we inherited the consequences of that.  We live in fallen world.  We also inherited the sin nature that was passed down from our spiritual ancestors.  But ever since then, ever since God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden, He still wants to dwell with His people.  One of the most perplexing and, you know, ponderous questions of the ages is why and how does a holy God want to hang out with unholy people like us?  How does that happen, let alone how do we enter into the holy presence of God?  Well, the Tabernacle is an Old Testament answer to that.  This was how God chose to dwell with His people.  And inside the most intimate place in the Tabernacle was a little place called the Holy of Holies where the presence of God dwelt.  And only the high priest could go into that place, and he only went there once a year.  But all the worshipers in the Hebrew camp were invited to come to the tent of meeting and at least come to the outer courtyard area.  And as they walked through the entrance, they come to the bronze altar.  That’s the first thing.

0:08:12.9

Now, we said last week that there was one entrance to the Tabernacle.  Only one.  And, by the way, God was very specific, very detailed in the way He established how this Tabernacle was to be built.  I read from Exodus 27 a moment ago.  The detailed description of how they were to build the bronze altar.  It’s an indication, first of all, that, you know, Moses didn’t just come up with this plan himself.  No, this was a divine plan that Moses was to implement.  God was the architect, and then He asked Moses to be the builder.  But it’s also an indication that God is into the details, is He not?  Don’t ever let somebody tell you that God is watching us from a distance.  He’s a distant and remote God.  Oh no, God is in the details of your life and of my life as much as He was in the details of how the Tabernacle is built.  And part of that instruction created one entrance into the Tabernacle across from the tribe of Judah.  That’s how the Israelites were to encamp.  And Judah, the tribe of Judah…it was across from the entrance because Messiah came from the tribe of Judah.  All right.  God knew that, and that was part of the picture He wanted to create.  And that one entrance…which is a picture of Jesus, who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.”  It’s a picture of what the early apostle says, that “there is one mediator between God and man, and it’s the man Christ Jesus.”  Oh, I know that’s not politically correct.  I don’t care.  It’s the Bible saying it.  It’s Jesus saying it.  It’s God telling us this.  “Here’s the entrance.  And you want to dwell with Me or have a relationship with Me, you come on My terms.  I’m the architect.  I lay out the details.  Here is the entrance.”  And that entrance was made of a curtain.  One entrance into the Tabernacle through curtains made of colored threads.  I mean, God was even as detailed down to the color of the yarns and the threads that were used in the curtain.  Listen to this from Exodus 26:1.  “Moreover, you shall make the tabernacle with curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns; you shall them with cherubim skillfully worked into them.”  God even chose the color of the yarns: blue, scarlet, purple.  By the way, those of you are into colors, you know how we make purple, right?  Take a little bit of blue and a little bit of red, mix them together, you’ve got purple.  Well, in the Bible blue is the picture of deity, scarlet is the picture of, we’ll say, humanity.  You mix them the gospel and you have a perfect picture of Jesus.  Deity plus humanity equals Jesus.  And He is the King of Kings that reflected in the purple.  The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.  He is royal in every sense of the word there.  “And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”  And so the details of the Tabernacle are really quite amazing.  And, yes, God is into the details of your life and of my life.  Let’s not ever forget that.

0:11:33.5

But what do we learn as a worshiper standing before the bronze altar.  Again, if you stood there you would feel the heat.  You would feel the heat of that bonfire.  You would smell the singe of burnt flesh.  You would understand that if you were going to have a relationship with God, something or someone had to be sacrificed.  And if you know anything about the Old Testament, you know the sacrificial system and the blood of bulls and goats.  It was a very bloody, sacrificial kind of, some would say, primitive, cruel, inhumane.  I mean, can you imagine, you know, PETA getting a word of this in the Old Testament and, you know, having all kinds of protests about the cruelty to animals.  But what we need to understand is what Isaiah tells us in chapter 55.  The Lord says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.  My ways are not your ways.  They're higher than the heavens.”  This is not about man trying to come up with a way to have a relationship with God.  This is the holy God of heaven and earth saying, “This is what I worked out as a way for Me to dwell with you and you to dwell with Me.  Something or someone needs to be sacrificed because there was a brokenness, a breach in the relationship all the way back to Genesis.  And I’ve got to fix that somehow.”  And this Old Testament Tabernacle becomes a picture for us of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  But it was a bloody, bloody mess and a sobering, sobering scene before that bronze altar.

0:13:14.6

There are three things that this altar says to us, even today.  I just want you to think about this for a moment.  The first thing it would say to an Old Testament worshiper is you are a sinner.  You are a sinner.  Now, nobody likes to be called a sinner, especially from another sinner, right?  Nobody likes to be called a racist.  We’re hearing a lot of that in this election cycle.  Nobody likes to be called a racist, especially if that other person might have racist tendencies themselves.  But what I want you to understand from the diagnosis of scripture is that when the Bible diagnoses us as sinners, it’s not another self-righteous sinner making that diagnosis.  It’s the perfect, righteous, holy God of the universe who looks at us and says in Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Sin is transgressing God’s commandments.  Sin is being disobedient to God.  It’s missing the mark.  And God establishes the target.  God establishes the mark.  And He alone has the right to diagnose our spiritual condition.  And I use that phrase “diagnose” intentionally, because if you’re a little repulsed by some preacher saying to you, “You are a sinner,”—and I include myself in that category—or the Bible saying, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” think of it as sort of like an oncologist who has done a blood workup on you.  And he sits down with you and says, “I have some bad news for you.  You have cancer.”  Now, you can either, you know, get repulsed by that and say, “Oh, you don’t know what you're talking about,” or, “Who are you to tell me this?”  Or you can accept the diagnosis.  If you’re unhealthy, you know, you want somebody who understands health to make a proper diagnosis.  And so when the Bible says to us, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” God is saying to us, “Listen, there’s something wrong in the relationship here.  There’s a breach in the relationship.”  He is the repairer of the breach, the Bible tells us.  We are the ones who cause the breach through our sin, through our disobedience.  We’re not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we’re sinners, because we inherited this from our spiritual and biological parents, Adam and Eve.  And if you have an questions about that, just look around.  Look at the brokenness of our world today.  The Bible’s diagnosis of this is that we live in a fallen world.  We live in a sin-stained, broken world.  And we are broken people.  And God—whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our ways—has figured out a way to repair the breach.  And it starts with a sacrifice.  You can’t get past it.  You can’t move around this.  You can’t navigate in a different direction.  You're staring at this bronze altar as an Old Testament worshiper.

0:16:34.4

Second thing it tells us, not only you are a sinner, but sin is punishable by death.  Now we’ve gone from diagnosis to prognosis.  And the prognosis isn’t good.  It’s like the oncologist sitting down with you and saying, “You not only have cancer, but you're in stage four.  And it’s not looking good.  This is what the Lord said to Adam when He pointed to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  He says, “Don’t eat from that one, for if you do you will surely die.”  Romans 6:23 says it this way.  “For the wages of sin is death.”  Not just physical death entering into the world when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, but also spiritual death.  Separation from God forever in a terrible place called hell.  That’s the prognosis.  And it’s meant to make us think soberly.  It’s not good.  What are we gonna do?

0:17:40.0

Well, it brings us to the third thing that we learn from this bronze altar.  Not only we are sinner and not only that sin is punishable by death, but here is a turn a little bit toward some good news.  An innocent substitute may die in your place.  And this was the picture of the Old Testament sacrificial system:  the blood of bulls and goats.  An innocent, unblemished animal could be offered as a substitute for your death and for my death.  And, again, you know what this is a picture of.  This is a picture of Jesus, who is the once-for-all sacrifice, who is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  And when John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and said that, every Hebrew worshiper says, “I get it now.  All of that in the Old Testament—the blood of bulls and goats and innocent little baby lambs unblemished—it was meant as a picture of somebody who would come along, the son of God and the savior of the world, to fulfill the spiritual realities behind the  pictures in the Old Testament.  This is why Jesus said in His Sermon on the (0:19:00.1) Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7…in Matthew 5 there was some question about Jesus’s relationship to the Law in the Old Testament.  And Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.  I’ve not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.”  How did He fulfill the Old Testament law?  Well, first of all, He’s the only one who ever kept the Ten Commandments perfectly.  Remember, He’s an unblemished lamb.  He never sinned.  He didn’t inherit a sin nature.  But also, He fulfilled all the pictures of the sacrificial system.  He is the spiritual realities behind the pictures.  And His once-for-all sacrifice on the cross…remember, an innocent substitute may die in your place is the idea.  And that’s what Jesus did when He died on the cross for your sins and for my sins.

0:20:00.1

Now, if you go all the way back to the book of Genesis 4, Cain and Abel didn’t even understand this principle.  Remember Cain and Abel, the two children of Adam and Eve?  And the Bible tells us that Cain was a keeper of the ground, a tiller of the ground.  He was a farmer.  And Abel kept flocks.  He was a herder.  And they both brought an offering before the Lord- Cain from the ground, you know, some fruits and some of the spoil of the ground; and Abel brought a firstborn from the fatlings of his flock.  And the Bible says God received Abel’s offering but rejected Cain’s.  Why?  Didn’t Cain bring the best that he could from what he had?  Well, what Cain missed was that it was all about a blood sacrifice.  That was the acceptable sacrifice.  Abel understood that.  Cain didn’t.  God accepted Abel’s sacrifice, didn’t accept Cain.  Cain ended up killing his brother Abel out of jealousy.  But Cain should have learned from Adam and Eve that it was a blood sacrifice that God required.  Because you remember when God came back to the garden that day looking for Adam?  “Where are you, Adam?  Where are you?”  And they played this little hide-and-seek thing, not that God didn’t know where he was.  Of course, He knew where he was.  But He was getting Adam out of the bushes.  And the Lord says, “Adam, why didn’t you come when I called you?”  He says, “Well, you know, I was naked and I was ashamed.”  “Who told you you were naked?”  And they had that conversation.  And do you remember what Genesis 3 tells us the Lord did?  He made animal skins to cover their nakedness.  So what had to happen was two innocent animals were sacrificed, and the skins from those animals covered the nakedness of Adam and Eve.  Theologians refer to that as the first gospel.  The term they use is the protoevangelium, the first gospel, the first picture that what a holy God required of sinful human beings to bridge the relationship was a blood sacrifice.  Cain didn’t understand that or accept it.  He came his own way and got rejected.

0:22:19.2

And so you can look at the cross of Jesus Christ as many people do, and you can say, “Oh, that’s just a bunch of foolishness.  That’s foolishness.”  Jesus had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, didn’t He?  To some who see the cross, the Bible says it’s foolishness to them.  “But to those who believe it is the power of God unto salvation.”  They're singing, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my, oh my, what a wonderful day,” because of what Jesus did for us as that innocent substitute who died in our place.  Hey, not my plan.  I don’t completely understand it, but God’s thoughts are not my thoughts.  And His ways are not my ways.  But this is the plan He came up with.

0:23:07.5

I told you last time we’d spend as much time in the book of Hebrews as we do the Old Testament book of Exodus.  Look at Hebrews 9:13-14.  “For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh…”  In other words, if all that stuff in the Old Testament was a acceptable to God…and, by the way, they had to do it over and over and over and over and over again.  Jesus came along as the once-for-all sacrifice, putting an end to the repetitiveness of the sacrificial system.  But the repetitiveness was there to drive home the point and the picture that Jesus ultimately fulfilled.  The writer of Hebrews goes on in verse 14, “How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, [how much more will that] purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”  Hebrews 9:26 says, “For then he,” that is, Christ, “would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world.  But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”  Somebody sing “zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” because this is good news, friends.  Christ did for us what we could not do for ourselves.  The diagnosis was not God.  The prognosis was even worse.  But God said, “I have a plan.  An innocent substitute can die in your place.”  The Bible also says in the book of Hebrews, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no atonement or remission for sins.”  Again, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.  This was His plan.  This was His way.  We had nothing to do with this.  Moses didn’t draw up the architectural plans.  God did.  And God and God alone is the One who makes the way into His holy presence through right Lord Jesus Christ.

0:25:06.9

Back to our medical analogy here, suppose you’re sitting in that doctor’s office.  The oncologist delivers the news.  “You have cancer.  You’re in stage four.”  And then somebody walks in who is perfectly healthy.  And they say, “Why, I’m as healthy as an ox.  My cells are not contaminated with cancer.  And we now have the technology to put my cells into your body.  But that means I have to take your cells and put them in my body.  And I’ll gladly do that for you.”  That’s kind of what Jesus did at the cross.  Here’s what the Bible says.  “He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.”  That’s the innocent substitute dying in our place.  And He didn’t just die.  He rose triumphantly from the grave—don’t forget that part of the story—to validate every Old Testament picture and prophecy that pointed to the once-for-all sacrifice that is Jesus Christ our living God and our living Lord.  

0:26:23.3

So if you're here today, my question for you is, are you willing to accept the diagnosis?  Do you understand the prognosis?  And are you willing to accept by faith God’s plan to send an innocent substitute, His son Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, to die on the cross for your sins?  If you’ve never by faith received that free gift of eternal life, today is the day to do that.  You may not understand every theological nuance.  You may not have ever understood these Old Testament pictures.  But the gospel is simple enough for a child to understand, and we come to the Lord in childlike faith, just saying yes to Jesus.  The cross makes absolutely no sense without the diagnosis and the prognosis.  It’s makes perfect sense and it makes blessed sense when you understand God’s diagnosis of our human condition.  And the only remedy He has provided.  That’s why there was one entrance, because there’s been only one sacrifice at the end of the age of a perfect, unblemished Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.  And that’s Jesus Christ.

0:27:58.7

Now, let me turn the message around just a little bit.  The title of the message was “The Sacrifice God Made for You”.  And, yes, He did something for you you couldn’t do for yourself or did something for me I couldn’t do for myself.  But now let’s talk about how we live this thing called the Christian life.  Let’s turn it around and talk about the sacrifice you and I make for God.  And I want to go to Romans 12:1 for this.  So turn there in your Bibles or watch it on the screen here.  We’re not talking about a sacrifice we make in order to earn a saving relationship with God.  No, that’s all God, and He’s already taken care of that on the cross.  You’re response and my response is faith.  But then what does faith look like as it moves forward, as we live this thing called the Christian life.  Well, notice how the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans reaches into the Old Testament imagery here.  And he says, “I appeal to you, therefore.  [I urge you.  I beg you], brothers and sister, by the mercies of God to,” here it is, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.”  That’s a powerful, powerful verse of scripture and so important for…now I’m talking to believers in Jesus Christ.  You’ve come to faith in Christ.  You’ve come to the altar.  You’ve come to the cross of Christ.  Your sins are forgiven.  You’re cleansed by faith and by grace.  Now faith moves forward.  It lives this thing called the Christian life.  And Paul gives us a command here.  It’s an imperative in the original language.  He says, “Present your bodies as living sacrifices.”  You can’t live the Christian life apart from the daily sacrifice of yourself.  Jesus said it this way.  He said, “If you want to be My disciples, deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow Me.”  That’s about as sobering as standing before the bronze altar.  But it requires daily sacrifice.

0:30:16.8

Now, He says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”  Some old preacher once said, “You know, the problem with living sacrifices is they keep crawling off the altar.”  That’s right.  I understand that.  The old hymn writer said, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.  Prone to leave the God I love.”  You ever feel that way?  You’re that sacrifice that just keeps wanting to crawl off the altar and do your own thing.  And maybe that’s why you’re in a frustrated place in your Christian life.  You’re saying, “This just doesn’t work.  I can’t figure this out.  This is hard to do.”  Well, you can’t do it in your own strength.  That’s why He gave you the Holy Spirit to live out this thing called the Christian life.  But you have a responsibility in this to deny yourself, yes, in the midst of a culture that says indulge yourself.  “You deserve a break today,” the culture says.  No, we deserve hell today.  Remember, you’re a sinner.  Sin is punishable by death.  But God did something to give us a break.  He sent His son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins.  And so daily I come with that sense of sacrifice.  And with the altar in mind, I present my body as a living sacrifice.  And why do I do this?  Not to earn a saving relationship with God.  But Paul says because of God’s mercies, in response to His mercy to us, the response should be, Lord, how can I not sacrifice myself and give myself to You today at this moment?

0:31:51.6

The other reason he says is because it’s your spiritual act of worship.  It’s an act of worship, to present your body daily as a living sacrifice.  That word translated “spiritual” is translated in other Bible translations like the King James as your “reasonable” service of worship.  This is a reasonable thing to do.  Some people think that faith defies reason and logic.  No, the word here is you present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice and this is the most reasonable, logical thing you can do.  We’re not talking about an emotional response.  You know what…you know, an emotional responses live about as long as the emotion.  It’s kind of like a little fire or ember that burns up and then it’s gone.  No, make a reasonable, logical, smart response, is the idea here.  When you present yourself to God as a living sacrifice all day and every day.  That’s the smartest thing you could possibly do, Paul is saying.  You say, “Okay, Pastor.  But how do I do this?”  Well, Paul answers the question.  He says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God.”  Holy.  You can’t present yourself holy to God without presenting yourself wholly to God.  What do I mean by that?  You can’t present yourself H-O-L-Y to Him without present yourself to Him W-H-O-L-L-Y.  In other words, a sacrifice that is made to God, a living sacrifice that is holy to Him is complete.  It’s entire.  What you’re saying to God is, “I’m all in today and at this moment.”  There were no half-sacrifices in the Old Testament.  The fire consumed the sacrifice of the animal.  And you can’t have one foot here and one foot here and say, “I’m all in, God,” when you’re really half in.  And this is why some of you are frustrated living this thing called the Christian life.  Oh, your sins are forgiven.  You know you’re going to heaven.  But this thing ain’t working real well.  Three steps forward, two steps back.  How do I do this thing?  Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.  It’s the smart thing to do in response to God’s mercy in your life. It’s the only reasonable thing to do today, tomorrow, the next day.  But you’ve got to be all in.  It’s a holy thing.  It’s a sacred thing.  And you’ve got to say to God, “I’m all in.”

0:35:07.3

There may be some area of your life this morning…and I could go down the list of areas of our life.  Our finances, our family, our career, our business, whatever it might be.  Your thought life.  And you’re saying in so many words, “God, I’m all in to get what I want, Your mercy and grace.  But this little area over here or this little area over here or this little thing over here, it’s mine.  I’m all in on Sunday, God, but Monday morning I’ve got to do my business thing.  You know, I’ve got to do it my way.”  It’s about being all in.  A complete, total sacrifice.  And the idea is, you know, as Jesus said.  Deny yourself daily.  “Take up your cross and follow Me.”  What He did for us once for all makes us justified in God’s eyes.  But this process we call sanctification, where we’re made more and more into His image, I wish it happened once for all.  We have been saved.  The theologians say that’s justification.  We will be saved.  The theologians say that’s glorification.  But we’re living in the “we are being saved” time, right?  That’s called sanctification.  And, yeah, sometimes it’s three steps forward and two steps back.  But practicing the discipline of sacrifice, of saying, “God, here I am again.  It’s a new day, brand new morning.  I thought it was gonna be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, but I present myself to You as a living sacrifice.  Put “zip-a-dee-doo-dah” in my heart.  Help me to just be all in with You today, to hold nothing back.  By faith to trust You with everything that comes my way today- my family, my finances, my business, my future, my relationships, whatever it might be.  God, I’m all in.”  And He responds to that in the most wonderful way when His people walk with Him in the most God-honoring way, the most complete way, the most all-in kind of way.

0:38:00.4