Hey everyone, this is Troy. So today I want to talk to you about the secret to
keeping the commandments. And you might have this question in your mind:
Is there really a secret? I mean, come on. There can't be like an actual secret to it can there?
Like, it's just us trying really hard to do what's right,
us trying to obey God, us learning and growing spiritually or maturing or—
You know, it's a combination of all these things, but what I want to talk to
you today is about an actual truth from God's Word that makes it so much easier to do.
So I want to start with an illustration. And if you if you didn't notice,
I'm actually in a new location right now, and this is my family's
new house that we just bought. So it's our first house that we've ever owned.
It's a nice small house that we like that so far we enjoy.
But we've had a few issues with moving in cause, you know, it's not a new house or anything like that.
To move into this house we had to do a lot of things.
We had to work really hard. Some of the things we had to do was like pack our
boxes, you know, at our apartment, we had to move everything over here, we had to
clean this house, we had to sort everything financially together, you know,
and do all the documents and the papers and everything. We worked really hard to
make this a place that we could live in and that our family could enjoy.
But what we did not take into account was the fact that there were other things
happening behind the scenes that we couldn't necessarily control.
And one those things was—it was probably like less than two days after we had moved in—
suddenly—if you follow me on Facebook you might have seen a post
about this—but suddenly our drains in our bathrooms begin to back up, and our
bathrooms begin to flood. And it wasn't, unfortunately, it wasn't just with water.
It was with sewage water, which is a whole lot worse. So suddenly, all this
hard work that we had put into moving into this new house got that much harder
because of something we couldn't control. There's an aspect of obeying God and
keeping the commandments that we can't control on our own.
And I'm gonna show you in Scripture what I'm talking about.
So I'm gonna read 1st John 5:2-4, but before I read that, I want to ask you a question.
Have you ever tried really hard to do what God wants you to do and yet felt like it
was this impossible burden that you couldn't overcome or this impossible
task you couldn't achieve? I want you to keep that question in your mind.
1st John 5:2-4 says, "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we
love God and observe His commandments." So that's the goal, right?
I mean, that's what I'm talking about today. If we're trying to follow God, we're
trying to obey Him, that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to love the children of God and we're trying to keep His commandments
Get this: verse 3, "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and
His commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world;
and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith."
So the main point I want to pull out of these verses is that obedience is connected to love.
Love and obedience go hand-in-hand, and if you try to have one without the other,
it's not gonna work. But what's so amazing about this is that
if we understand this concept, and if we get the spiritual truth behind it,
then obeying God is no longer gonna be a burden to us. That's what this verse just said,
that His commandments are not burdensome. So I want to take a look at
another verse—Romans 13:8-10—and it shows us how love and obedience,
how these two things, in a deeper way it shows us how they're connected. It says,
"Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor
has fulfilled the law. For this, 'You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder.
You shall not steal. You shall not covet—" These are the commandments, some of
the commandments he's listing off. He's trying to let us know he's referring
back to the law right now. He's saying, "and if there is any other commandment,
it is summed up in this saying, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
Love does no wrong to a neighbor;
therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." So this is Paul writing, and he's saying
if you want to learn how to obey God's commitments, if you want to learn
how to keep all these commandments—and he lists some of them off—he's saying
if you want to get this right, you've got to get the love of God inside of you.
Because what happens is when we get the love of God inside of us
then we're naturally going to be reacting and acting the way that God
would in that circumstance—the way that Jesus would. It would have been so
difficult for someone to go around and do what Jesus was doing all the time, and yet
if you read the Gospels you see that He was always filled with compassion for
these people, even though, you know, they stretched him to his limits. There were
crowds of people pushing around. Sometimes Him and His disciples they
couldn't eat. Sometimes they didn't have a place to sleep. And yet, you never see
Jesus freak out. And the reason is because Jesus was directly connected to
the love of God. So I want to ask you a question: how do we get that love?
I mean, you know, we can know that God loves us and we can try to love people,
but how do we really get that love inside of us. And here's the answer; it's
real simple. The Holy Spirit fills our hearts with the love of God.
So I want to read you a verse that shows us right here, real quick, and it says,
"The love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us."
So that was Romans 5:5. And another verse, if you want to go
read about the fruit of the Spirit, you know, it's love, joy, peace, patience, etc.
It starts with love. So the first fruit of the Spirit, the first aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, is love. So if you've
got the Holy Spirit living inside of you, it's gonna be that much easier to love
one another and to love God, because He's going to be filling your heart with the
very love that God showed us when He sent Jesus to die on the cross.
And there's two things that the Holy Spirit does when He places that love inside of us.
One, He gives us a motivation of love. But He does even more than that. I think
some people stop there, some believers think, "If I'm just motivated enough by
God's love, then I'll be a better person, then I'll be better at obeying God,
will be better at loving people." But He doesn't stop there.
He motivates us with God's love, but He also transforms us with God's love and with His grace.
And this is what I truly believe has been a blockage point,
a stopping point for a lot of believers, because we've got the motivation down,
but we've got to get the transformation as well. We've got to let Him change who
we are on the inside and continue to change our nature into the nature of Christ.
So one way to look at this is a four-step process that I want to share
with you real quick. And the process is simply this. One: Grace. We've got to
receive the grace of God by faith, believing that Jesus died on the cross
to pay the penalty for all of our sins— that we are forgiven, that we are seen as
righteous before God when we believe in Jesus. So it starts with grace and then
it goes to fellowship. So when we receive the grace of God,
and God sees us as His righteous children, then we're in the position to ask God to
fill us with the Holy Spirit, and we get to have fellowship with the Spirit.
And then three is love. So the Spirit fills our hearts with the love of God. And then
four is serve. And so, when that love is in our hearts, we're naturally going to be
obeying God. We're actually going to be wanting to serve other people,
other believers, and even people who are not believers.
You know, people that we naturally would be upset at or naturally not want
to forgive, suddenly we're going to be finding ourselves forgiving them, we're
going to be finding ourselves loving them with the love of Christ.
But here's the point I want to make. There's something blocking—the same way that in our house,
in our new house, there's something blocking the pipes. It was blocking what
was supposed to be flowing through the pipes. It was blocking it from flowing,
and it was causing this junk to come back up and to flood the house.
And I believe the same thing happens with us spiritually. There's something blocking
what's supposed to be flowing through our lives. It's the reason it's not
flowing out. This love and obedience is not flowing out is because there's
junk that just keeps coming back up and making it harder for us. So what we had
to do for our house is we had to call someone, a professional, a plumber. We had
to call someone to come in who had the ability to unblock the pipes, to change
this thing that we had no control over. And we have to do the same
thing in our lives spiritually. We have to allow the Holy Spirit to come in
and begin to unstop those pipes that are, you know, that are causing the blockage.
And here's the thing that is causing the blockage in our lives. If you're
wondering, "Well, what is it? What's this thing that's stopping us, that's making
it harder, that's making the commandments of God a burden to us?"
And the answer is it's the flesh. And Paul talks about the idea of us, almost a
battle happening between the spirit and the flesh all throughout the New Testament.
But I want to show you a picture of what it looks like when we
are walking in the spirit and not in the flesh. So this is John 7:38-39a. It says,
"He who believes in Me—" and this is Jesus talking here. So listen
to these words. "He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost
being will flow rivers of living water." That's amazing. Verse 39: "But this He
spoke of the Spirit—" So He's telling us, what is that living water
that's gonna be flowing out of us— that's gonna be flowing inside of us and
out of us to to others? What is that? And He answers the question immediately.
It says that He spoke of the Spirit. He's talking about the Holy Spirit.
It says, "But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive."
So the Holy Spirit is like the plumber that comes in and removes the
blockage in our lives, and He allows the good, clean water to flow through.
Our bathrooms—they were only made to flow one direction. They weren't
made to flow back up the other direction. And when that happens, something bad—
It's a bad situation that you don't want to be in. Trust me. Yeah, it's something that—yeah.
Anyways, it's a bad situation. That's all I'll say about that.
But here's the thing. When that bad situation occurs, suddenly we find
ourselves working so much harder, not only to try to fix the problem but
also to try to clean up the mess that the problem is causing. And we do that so
many times, I feel like, in our lives. We're trying to fix this issue from a
fleshly perspective instead of a spiritual perspective. And it just keeps
getting harder and harder and harder. But this concept of
walking in the Spirit is so amazing because when we get it, suddenly God
transforms us on the inside and naturally we're gonna be walking out
obedience and love without even having to put forth the
same amount of effort, because it's not relying on our effort anymore.
Yeah, we are gonna have to choose to obey still. It's not just this thing that happens,
you know, no matter what we choose to do. And that's not
what I'm trying to say, and I'm definitely not trying to make this
excuse for us to sin willingly—that's not what I'm trying to say at all.
But what I am trying to say is that it's no longer gonna be on our shoulders.
You know, that's something that God never intended for us to bear.
So I want to share another verse with you that talks about this issue, and its
2nd Corinthians 3:4-6. And it says, "Such confidence we have through
Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider
anything as coming from ourselves—" He's saying, we aren't doing this in our own strength.
"But our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant."
The new covenant is our ability to be righteous before God
because of faith in Jesus Christ. Not of the letter but of the Spirit;
for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." What's amazing about this is if you've
ever had the thought, "The reason I'm failing God right now is because I'm
just not trying hard enough. If I just tried hard enough.
Or you know, maybe I'm not trying as hard as this person over here. They're obviously
so much better at this than me." If you've ever had thoughts like this, you need to
know that those thoughts are not spiritual thoughts. Those are thoughts
that are coming from our fleshly man, from our fleshly nature. But God wants to
put new thoughts inside of us. He wants to put the thoughts that say, "God,
I'm gonna put all my trust in you today. I'm gonna put all my reliance upon you today,
because I know I'm not adequate." You know, it's us being honest before God
and saying, "God, I need your Holy Spirit inside of me working through me cause
apart from you I can't do anything".
The Holy Spirit frees us of the burden that we have to make it work on our own, and that's the secret.
The secret to keeping the commandments is that the New Covenant,
it's not about the letter of the law anymore. It's about the Spirit of the law, because
when you get the Spirit of the law down, when the Holy Spirit is working through you,
then any part of the letter that we are supposed to be keeping we're
gonna be keeping naturally because God's doing the work through us. And here's
what's so good about that is that it's such a freeing covenant. You know,
the Old Covenant was this, almost a covenant of bondage, but the New Covenant is a
covenant of freedom through the Holy Spirit. And one more verse that talks
about this is 2nd Corinthians 3:17. It says, "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and
where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And some translations say there is freedom.
I love this verse because Jesus came to set us free. He who the Son
sets free is free indeed. That means the things that used to bind you—
And this is this is how I saw God, how I envisioned God before I got saved.
I thought, "Oh, I just got to do everything right—enough good, you know,
so that God's happy with me." But I knew I was never doing enough, you know. It was
always a burden to me, and I was always covered in shame and
guilt and fear and failure. And then when I received Jesus as my Lord and Savior,
suddenly those chains were broken off of me. This burden fell off of my
shoulders, and I realized that Jesus carried the burden for me when He hung on the cross.
And now I get to walk in freedom. I get to walk in liberty through the Holy
Spirit and through Him working inside of me. And here's the good news today:
you can walk in freedom today. You can walk in freedom from shame, freedom from
failure, freedom from past sins, freedom from anything that is keeping
you from walking close, in a close loving relationship with God. Anything that is a
burden on your shoulders right now, you can walk in freedom.
So if you want that freedom today, I just encourage you to pray along with me.
I'm just gonna pray a simple prayer asking God to help us to walk in the Spirit and
not in the flesh. Lord Jesus, I ask for your freedom right now, and I ask that
you would fill me with your Holy Spirit and you would help me not to try to do
this in my own efforts but instead to trust completely on the grace of God and
on the work of Jesus on the cross—to trust that He paid the penalty for my sins.
And then now I get to walk in freedom through your Holy Spirit living
inside of me and transforming me and making me a new person in Christ.
I love you, Lord. Amen.
Hey everyone, I really hope you enjoyed this video. I want to quickly tell you about a few updates I've made
to my website. It's TroyBlackVideos.com. I've made some style adjustments and
some formatting adjustments just to make it a little easier for people to be able
to browse the site and be able to watch videos. But also, I just added a couple
blog posts to the site, and I'm gonna be updating these written posts every once
a while with some new new content. But I just want to tell you about one that I
think is really cool I just released. It's called Five Misconceptions You May Have
About Sharing the Gospel. And the reason that I wanted to say this at the end of
this video is that I think this is one of those areas, sharing the gospel and
being a witness for Christ, that sometimes we allow all these burdens to
be placed on our shoulders. And here's what's so amazing about
God's Word is that when we really get into the Word, and we really allow it to
sink in, it begins to strip those burdens off of us and it begins to show us God's
perspective. And so if you want to be able to share the gospel out of a heart
of joy and out of a heart of love and in freedom and in the way that God designed you,
then I want you to go read this blog post. I think it's awesome. I think it's
worth reading, and I think it's really gonna bless you, so I hope you get a
chance to read it. It's kind of long just to warn you,
so maybe set some time aside, but I think it's gonna be a real blessing for you.
So I love you and I'll see you next time.
Hi. What's your name, Mirabelle? I just told everyone. Mirabelle. Okay. What's your
name? Iona. That's a good name, I like that name. I wonder who picked out that name.
These lights are bright aren't they?
Bye see you later. Bye, bye.