Living in a Sin-Filled World

CCI Fellowship's podcast discusses the topics of living in a sin-filled world and the importance of God's grace and Jesus as Lord. The speaker shares their personal journey of sin and conversion to Christianity. They emphasize the need to seek the light of Jesus in a sinful world. Sin separates us from God, and it is important to acknowledge our sins and seek forgiveness. The speaker encourages fellowship and support from fellow believers to overcome sin. They also highlight the importance of praising God and focusing on His victories rather than dwelling on our sins. Welcome to CCI Fellowship's podcast. Thank you for joining us. At CCI Fellowship, we are reaching God, reaching each other, and reaching our community. We pray that this week's message challenges you in your walk with the Lord, causes you to grow in your faith, and encourages you in your love for the Word of God. Living in a sin-filled world. Notice it's not, in English, sinful. It's sin-filled. The world is full of sin and we have to live in it. Us believers, non-believers, have to live in a world full of sin. You'll probably see two arcs in this. Okay, so this is my organized mind. I have two columns going. And there's one thing you need to remember when I talk about a dark subject such as sin is grace, God's grace. God's grace cleanses us. He cleanses us in the past, currently, and in the future. God's grace. Second arc is Jesus is Lord. There's none other. Jesus is Lord. When you give your life to Christ, you are giving your life to the Lord. So those are the two arcs. On this side, on this side is the sinful part, sin-filled part that we have to live through. So it is a dark subject, and I'll admit it, I don't know why the Lord gave me this to preach on, but He did. I've lived a life as a sinner. When I accepted Christ at forty-five, twenty-some years ago, I was full of sin. I was living that sinful life. I was living in the world, and I was enjoying it. But at what point did I realize that this life was wrong? How's that conversion going? How did that happen? So let me go to our first verse tonight. The Gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 14-17. Open your Bibles to that, as I will be opening my Bible as well. And the Word of the Lord, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen His glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. While we always like to say Jesus is full of grace, Jesus is associated with grace, but there's also a second word in there, and truth. Jesus is truth. Jesus is grace. Jesus is perfect. Verse 15, John bore witness about Him and cried out, This was He of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because He was before me. For from His fullness we have all received grace upon grace, renewed every day, renewed every time we stumble, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Praise God for that. So grace. What is grace? It is inherited favor, which brings blessing and joy. But what is truth? Jesus fulfilled all of the Old Testament prophecy, and He reveals the true God. Jesus is God. Jesus is part of the Trinity, and that whole miracle, He is truth. He is true. He is honorable. He is just. He is pure. He is lovely. He is commendable. He is excellent. He is worthy of praise. Jesus is Lord. When I was growing up, though, it was based on works. You worked hard to get to heaven. You worked hard to please the Lord. So this is foreign to me. I can work. I can do this. My father, coming from the World War II generation, said work hard and you'll get stuff. Work hard. He didn't talk to me about religion. He didn't talk to me about raising a family, but he did say work hard. So I was works-based. And then Jesus came to me, like He came to all, if not most of us. Most if not all. And somehow He came to us, and He said, your sins are forgiven, because we gave our life to the Lord, the Lord of everything, the creator of everything. We gave our life to the Lord. It's somehow foreign to us now, living in this age, because we don't have kings. We don't have lords. We don't have queens, all that thing. But He still is Lord. He still controls us. He still offers grace. And then we make that decision. Will we follow Him? Will we follow in His footsteps? Jesus is light. John 1, verse 10. Jesus is the light. We have to keep on seeking the light when we lived in this sin-filled world. So keep that verse up about grace, as we move now into the separation from God, sin. Sin is easily defined, because as we read the Bible, the first two chapters of Genesis doesn't talk about sin, the last chapter, several chapters of Revelation doesn't talk about sin, but the whole Bible talks about sin and how to live in a sinful world and who your Savior is. So we call it, I call it, we're living in the pit. The pit of sin. And whether we sink down deeper and deeper into that pit is up to us, is up to the Lord. We walk in the shadow of death. So Psalm 23, verse 4. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Walking through the shadow of death is walking in the sinful world. But sometimes we are not perfect and we start to go down that rabbit hole of sin into the pit. While our life is spent in the valley, we can sink down into that pit. Sin surrounds us. We start to lose the light. We start to lose the knowledge in our heads that says Jesus is the light. And if we can't focus, if we can't praise God because we're so far down in that pit, sometimes the pit feels comfortable. It feels nice because you have a lot of people around you that are doing the same thing in that same pit. And I was one of them. I still sometimes sink into that abyss that says, oh, I better not go down here. Because we've matured and we've grown. Others have matured and we've grown to know when we're starting to sink or we're starting to come out. But sometimes you get to the point where as a believer or even a new believer, you say, I am too dirty to acknowledge Jesus Christ as my Lord. I have too much sin. I have too much worldly desire. So even though I have this pull in me that says seek God, I don't always do that. I lose track of that. But sin separates us from God. Maybe we should have a scorecard of our sins. So I was thinking today. I was praying. I said, so, you've got about a third of this screen up here and we start listing our sins that we're telling God. I go, God, okay, I did this, I did that. But then the other two-thirds of the paper, these are the sins that you reveal to your brothers and sisters. These are the sins that I don't want to reveal to anybody. And those are the sins that are tough to work out of. It's hard to get out of that pit when you have all of this inside you that is burning to say, I like it too much. God doesn't know my sins. Well, He does. He knows your heart. He created you. And if I was to hold up all the sins and say, let's just reveal our sins. Who's got the most grievous sins? Okay, I've got this, I've got that. Is any sin greater than the littlest sin? How can we call it a little sin? All sin grieves God. All sin. There is nothing greater sin. There is nothing minus sin. There is no little white lie sins. Because all sin grieves God, it's a separation from God. First John, chapter 3, verse 4. Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness, ignoring God's law by action or neglect or by tolerating wrongdoing, being unrestrained by His commands and His will. The God of self controls us. I am my own man. I am my own this. I have to be self-taught. I have to be self-praised. But we are not God. And your friends will tell you that. You are not God. Your family tells you that. My kids tell me that. I'm not God. So just know that. But God knows. He describes it in Genesis, chapter 3, verse 5. For God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened. That is, you will have greater awareness, and you will be like God, knowing the difference between good and evil. This is when sin entered the world. The most important sin, as Jesus said, teacher, tell us which is the most important sin when you don't honor God. You have to know what is sin and what is not sin. Sin, you're following another God. But as brothers and sisters, we walk together in this valley of death that sometimes leads to the pits. We have fellowship. That's why we have fellowship. To share with each other our trials, our troubles, everything that we're unsure of, any anxiety that is caused, any physical problems that we go through. That's why we have fellowship. We do service to church, whether it's singing, greeting, whatever we do, we're doing it for our fellow believers. But sometimes at certain times of day, think of this. What are your triggers? What triggers you into that pit of sin for your specific sin or sins that cause you to do that? Do you have trouble staying home on a Friday night because, well, that's my club night, and I used to go to clubs a lot and not know what happens until Saturday morning? Or is Saturday night that night that you've fallen into sin? Or maybe when you go on business trips, that's your trigger. I have several triggers that could do that. Maybe we watch something that we're not supposed to. This is where your brothers and sisters come in to help you out of that pit. Remember, Jesus is Lord, and there is grace and truth in Jesus. So why grace? You're living in the pit, how can you see? Because our hope in grace is the shining light that we need to see out of the darkness that we live in to know that Jesus is Lord. So self-worship, worshiping yourself, you are your own God. And one thing that we must do is praise God for all the victories, all of the victories that we see in our lives. It could be that the house Angie and I will be renting in the next couple weeks. We praise God about that because he established, he set all the funds that we needed at the right exact time. And remember, I mean, in the United States, it's tax time and quarterly payments time. So, if he could do that, that's a miracle. But you must praise God because the more you praise God, the less you'll focus on your sin. The more you praise God, the more you go to church, the more you're in time with prayer and the Bible and God's Word, the less time your mind has to wander into the pit. So sin surrounds us. What are some examples? So besides Genesis to Revelation, where 99% of the Bible talks about sin, let's go to the Old Testament. Let's go to 2 Kings, chapter 16, verses 2-4. Let's get some examples of what the Lord was dealing with in these people. So this is when Judah and Israel were separate, living kingdom here, kingdom there. Judah and Israel. King Ahaz was 20 years old when he became king, and he reigned 16 years in Jerusalem. He did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord his God, as his father, his ancestor David had done. So how's that for, like, a LinkedIn page? How's that for my resume? Well, I didn't do what was right in the sight of the Lord my God. Instead, he walked in the way of the, what, number one, idolatrous kings of Israel. Number two, he even made his son pass through the fire as a human sacrifice in accordance with the repulsive and idolatrous practices of the pagan nations whom the Lord drove out before the Israelites. Number three, he also sacrificed. Number four, he burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree. And all of that is one thing. He served other gods. He did not serve the Lord. He served other gods. And in the verse 7, right after 2-4, So Ahaz sent messengers to Tilgath-pelezar, king of Assyria, saying, I am your servant and your son. So this was in Judah. Now let's go to Israel, another pit dweller. In Kings 17, 1-3, in the twelfth year of Ahaz, king of Judah, Hosea, the son of Elah, began to reign in Samaria over Israel, and he reigned nine years. And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, of course, yet not as the kings of Israel who were born before him. Against him came up Shalmanzer, king of Assyria, and Hosea became his vassal and paid tribute. In the next verses, 7-18, this talks about Israel, why the Lord was angry with Israel. Now this came about because the Israelites had sinned against their Lord, their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. As we praise God, we also remember where God brought us out and placed us. So what did they do? Number one, they had feared and worshipped other gods. Number two, walked in the customs of the pagan nations, whom the Lord had driven out before the sons of Israel, and in the pagan customs of the kings of Israel, which they introduced. Number three, Israelites ascribed things to the Lord, their God, which were not true. Do you hear any false teachers on the internet, in other churches, talk, these could be false teachers, ascribing things to the Lord, their God, which were not true. They built for themselves on the high places of worship in all their towns, from the lonely lookout tower to the populous fortified city. Number five, they set up for themselves sacred pillars, memorial stones, an ashram on every high hill and under every green tree. There they burned incense on all the high places, just as the pagan nations whom the Lord had deported before them. And they did evil and contemptible things, provoking the Lord. That's only five, there are sixteen specific things, and all of those specific things are worshipping other gods, or self-worship, not worshipping the Lord. You want a relationship with the Lord. The Lord is the same today as he was yesterday, and what he will be in the future. The Lord doesn't change. But then we say, come on, Pete, that's the Old Testament, but yeah, there's more, though. Is there any good examples of the kings? Yes, there is. So in the third year of Hosea, this is 2 Kings 18, 1 through 7, the son of Elah, king of Israel, has a child, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign. He was 25 years old when he began to reign. See, life isn't over at 25. You still get to be king. And he reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Abi, the daughter of Zechariah, and he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. And what did he do? He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah, and he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it. He trusted the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord, he did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments of the Lord, the command of Moses. And the Lord was with him wherever he went, he prospered. If you want a relationship with the Lord, that's what you do, and that's how you seek. You seek the true, the honorable, the just, the pure, the lovely, the commendable, the excellence, the worthy of praise. Jesus is working in your life to do all that. He's working in you to turn you into the Beatitudes. What about Jesus? Let's go to the New Testament. And I know it's the New Testament compared to the Old Testament, but God is the same before. What angers him before angers him in the New Testament, because Jesus' life is the New Testament. We don't have to offer sacrifices to be cleansed. Jesus' grace cleanses us. Jesus is poor in spirit. He's mournful. He's meek. He hungers and thirsts for righteousness. He is merciful, pure in heart, peacemaker, persecuted for righteousness' sake and reviled. That's what Jesus is working in our lives, what he's doing. But the other thing is, Jesus is not soft, he is not tolerant, he is not that anything goes person. He is God. And when he saw unrighteousness, sin, he spoke up. But he did not condemn. He did not say to the sinners, you are condemned to hell in the Bible. Can we do that? Can we not judge? Can we not condemn? Now, honestly, there is going to be a final judgment described in Revelation, but what do we do? What is our role in Christ? Just as sin separates us from God, as believers in Christ, we have to separate the person from the sin. Jesus loves the person, he does not love the sin. He is tolerant of the person, he is not tolerant of the sin. For example, in Mark chapter 3, verses 3-5, and he said to the man with the withered hand, come here, he said to him, is it lawful, he's talking to the Pharisees and the scribes, is it lawful on Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of the heart, and said to this man, stretch out your hand. He stretched out and his hand was restored. Let's go to verse, in John chapter 2, verses 14-15. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple. With the sheep and the oxen, he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. They were in the court of the Gentiles, and Jesus had a zeal for his Father's house. Do not disrespect the Father, do not follow other gods, Jesus is Lord. So, let's come out of that pit. We are no longer sinners. We have been saved by grace, we're new creations in Christ. And why do we seek? Why did we seek Jesus in the first place? All the sin in the world, why did we seek them when we were so far down the pit? Because God placed something inside us to seek Jesus, to seek forgiveness, to seek God. So we could follow the lineage of a lot of people from the Old Testament into the New Testament. Jesus is described, they say, in every book of the Old Testament, that he is coming. And Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies, Jesus is the truth. From Genesis to Revelation, God created us, molded us, he placed inside us every tendency that we had. He created our DNA, he knew what we were going to be from the beginning of time when he established everything. I'm not saying we were there from Genesis to Revelation, I'm saying there is a God-sized hole in our hearts that seek him. He knew us prior to conception, in the womb, and now in our life. Much like is described by Jeremiah, Isaiah, David, Zechariah, and Paul. The potter has molded us, he created us. But every time we seek other gods, we are not seeking the real God. Every time we judge instead of love, remember several weeks ago, God was love, God is love, and it might be difficult for some of us to say, but in this world where we see sin all over the place, what do we do as believers? We love that person, no matter what they look like, what they do. When we go to work in the areas of Tegucigalpa that nobody likes to see, do we love those people? Do we love the father who has five children with five different women? It's easy to love the orphan, it's not easy to love that father. Do we love the alternative lifestyle that some likes to live? No, we don't love that. We don't condone that like Jesus, not condone, but not judge that. But we still need to reach out and seek and share the love of Jesus with everybody. Because is my sin less than their sin? No. Is your sin less? No. Sin separates us from God, God brings us together. And imagine, when we start to share that, when we start to share the love of Jesus, it multiplies itself. What started out in Israel multiplied and went out to the world, and now it's going in that reverse multiplication in many parts of the world. But seek Jesus, and Jesus is King. Grace upon grace, seek Jesus. John 1, verses 16-17, Frouda's fullness, the superabundance of his grace and truth. We have all received grace upon grace, spiritual blessing upon spiritual blessing, favor upon favor, and gift upon gift. For the law was given through Moses, but grace, the undeserved, unearned favor of God and truth came through Jesus Christ. That's what we must share every day to everybody, every person that you know. Next chapter, we'll be in Titus, you won't see it up here, Titus 2, 11-12. For the remarkable, undeserved grace of God that brings salvation is appeared to all men. It teaches us to reject ungodliness and worldly immoral desires. It teaches us to reject ungodliness and worldly immoral desires and to live sensible, upright, and godly lives, lives with a purpose that reflect spiritual maturity in this present age. Are you representing spiritual maturity in all of our interactions with others? That's something you have to think about. That's that God-sized hole that created in us is moving us closer and closer to the Lord. Ephesians 2, 1-5, and I'll just hit verse 4. So how do you answer questions, all the questions of the world? You got to read the Bible, you got to have it in your hand, you got to meditate upon it. These give all the answers. If we have to depend on government to fix all the problems, we are looking at the wrong God. If we have to depend on NGOs to fix all the problems in the world, we are looking at the wrong God. Look toward God. In the fourth verse of chapter 2 in Ephesians, but God, being so very rich in mercy because of his great and wonderful love with which he loved us, even when we were spiritually dead and separated from him because of our sins, he made us spiritually alive together with Christ, for by his grace, the undeserved favor and mercy, you have been saved from God's judgment. And our job is to share that. Get out of your pit. Is the Lord pulling you out of your pit? I imagine it as someone taking the back of the collar and pulling them up out of sin, or maybe they were out late, like some children, and you have to pull them out. Or maybe you're crossing the street, and you take them from the back of the collar. Just wait, don't run into the street. Not that I'm talking about Nick. So we go. But are you pulling back on the Lord when he's trying to pull you out of that pit? When he's trying to walk with you in the valley of the shadow of death, are you pulling back? Because whatever it takes, you're not ready. Jesus is with us, and we are just so grateful. Jesus comforts us, he understands us, and he fills us. First John, chapter 1, verses 8 through 10. If we say we have no sin, refusing to admit that we are sinners, we delude ourselves and the truth is not in us. His word does not live in our hearts. If we freely admit that we have sinned and confess our sins, he is faithful and just, true to his own nature, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us continually from all the unrighteousness, our wrongdoing, everything not in conformity with his will and purpose. What is sin? Everything not in conformity with his will and purpose. If we say we have not sinned, refusing to admit the acts of sin, we may come out to be a liar by contradicting him, and his word is not in us. The worship team can join us up here. So I think the question, there's a lot of questions here that maybe in fellowship groups we can discuss on Thursday. How do you treat someone you believe is just mixed in sin? How do we answer that? How do we answer, how do we bring the gospel to people who are different than us and who we seem to be able to judge rather quickly? That's a question. Are we good enough for God's grace? There is no one not good enough for God's grace, so just know that. His grace is sufficient. Second Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 9 through 10, Paul is boasting in the Lord. He is praising God in this, but he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness, therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me, for the sake of Christ then I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, for when I am weak, then I am strong. Praise the Lord. So let's end this. If you have any questions, come see the leaders of the church, Pastor Sergio, Pastor John. So let me pray. Father in heaven, the enemy has been defeated. Jesus Christ is Lord. I ask that you bless and watch over them. I want to talk in prayer over Psalm 40, verses 1 through 6. Father, we waited patiently for the Lord. You inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog. Father, bless our brothers and sisters who hear this message, that you're drawing up from the pit every day, every hour that they're stuck in that miry bog. Set their feet upon a rock to make their steps secure, upon that rock that never changes. Set today's culture always changing, but you are firm. You are our rock. Put a new song in our mouths, a song of praise to our God, so that many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie. Lord, you have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us. None can compare with you. Lord, let us proclaim every day and tell people. And there are so many more things that you do that cannot even be told, that could not even be written in this Bible. Lord, in sacrifice and offering, you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offerings and sin offerings you have not required, but you sent your Son to cleanse us, to walk with us, to be with us. Jesus Christ is Lord. Brothers and sisters, have a great week. I pray these things in your Son's name. Amen. Thank you for listening to this week's podcast. If you are ever in the Tegucigalpa area and looking for an English-speaking congregation, please join us on Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. in the main auditorium of Iglesia CCI in Colonial Trevichi, just off Boulevard Cuyapa, near UNA. If you would like prayer or more information about our church, contact us at fellowship.cci at gmail.com. That's fellowship.cci at gmail.com. Or follow us on social media. We hope to see you or hear from you soon. Blessings. Amen.