| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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A New Era in Church Teachings
00:03:49
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| You have literally given a chapter about Rahab from James's point of view. | |
| Tell me about that. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, like I said a moment ago, honor was a huge importance to the New Testament culture. | |
| James was only, what, a couple of years removed. | |
| His epistle, the writing of his epistle was a couple years removed from the day that we all know very well about when a prostitute, or excuse me, a woman caught in the act of adultery was pulled and set in front of Jesus Christ in the middle of the town square. | |
| And we all know how that story goes down. | |
| And Jesus Christ, of course, says that he among you without sin can cast the first stone. | |
| But that tells you what the New Testament culture considered a prostitute or an adulteress or somebody else who is doing some kind of a home wrecking or defiling of the body. | |
| What she is to us today is, yay, God will redeem anyone. | |
| That's what she means to us today. | |
| And that's wonderful, and that is true. | |
| What she meant to the New Testament culture was a business deal. | |
| Spies came to Jericho and they said, hey, let's barter with you. | |
| You don't tell her she actually started the bartering. | |
| I'll hide you under flax seed if you'll spare my life. | |
| And they didn't, they just kind of passed over the fact that she was eventually redeemed because she converted and became an Pharisees didn't care about that. | |
| They belonged to a society that said if a woman is using her body in this way, she has committed the ultimate act of shame, which is the ultimate opposite of honor. | |
| And what that does to our society is take her to the middle of the courtyard and stone her. | |
| So James said, first Abraham, was Abraham not justified by faith in works? | |
| He used Abraham. | |
| The New Testament readers, if you go into a time machine in your head, you can see the Pharisees and the Sadducees. | |
| Oh, that's just true. | |
| We love Abraham. | |
| You can see that because Abraham was the venerated man of faith, the ultimate. | |
| The very next thing he says was not also Rahab justified. | |
| Other translations say righteous by her faith through works. | |
| What he did was he said, we have reached a new era, church. | |
| Listen to me, church. | |
| Was Abraham not in the same plate as Rahab because they showed their devotion to God and their ability to be redeemed from something, from some past that they had? | |
| Rahab is no longer defined by something she did before. | |
| She is now something that you should accept into your church with the same love and the same honor as Abraham. | |
| By doing so, now we can look at what he actually accomplished by that and say, who is today's Rahab? | |
| And I'm not, by the way, I'm not talking about a woman and I'm not talking about a prostitute. | |
| I'm talking about who is today's cultural shutter factor. | |
| Who is the person that when they come into a church today, we all go, we don't like that one. | |
| We'll take the drunk. | |
| Come on, town drunk. | |
| We'll take you. | |
| We believe in you. | |
| Yay. | |
| Oh, you had a drug problem in the past. | |
| You're redeemable too. | |
| Oh, a homosexual just walked in. | |
| What do I do? | |
| Or, oh, you're a Muslim. | |
| What do I do? | |
| There are people today that are a shock to our current church that we are not reaching out to because our culture sees it as a dishonorable kind of sin. | |
|
Letting Walls Fall Down
00:00:43
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| It's that one sin. | |
| John 3.16 wipes all of that away and says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever will, we have to love the whosoever will. | |
| Yes. | |
| James, James's ability to point at Rahab. | |
| Reach it. | |
| James's ability to point at Rahab was the ability, what he was essentially doing was he was saying, let the walls fall down, folks. | |
| Rahab might have been the worst of all sinners. | |
| We just saw her almost get stoned the other day when my half-brother was here. | |
| So what he's doing is he's letting the walls come down, and we need to do that as well. | |
| There is no such thing as a lost cause sinner. | |