London Baptist Confession 21

Law. We were morally inept, you know, but it still sounds awful positive to me to be set free from those things. Right? So even though that's the negative part now, the positive. I haven't even really given us all the benefits yet.

And the confession does. We get benefits. And it goes on to say first that we have access. Your sons of God, you call the Father in heaven, Abba, as also in their free access to God. So instead of punishment and fear, we have access to God directly.

And then we. You can. Now, I want to say this as pointedly as I can. You know, we know the boldness in the throne room of God and all that we have access. I want to make sure that we're clear that when I'll just ask you, I'll ask it and then tell you what you probably should think and then you can just mull that over this week in your mind.

Is obedience to God and his law and commandments, something you have to do or something you get to do? That's an easy switch to flip in your brain. It's an easy switch to flip that I get to obey God. I get to be holy, I get to be sanctified. I get to overcome rather than have to everybody act like it's a big teeth gritting white knuckle.

You know, it is hard. I know it's hard to be obedient, but I want to make sure we're clear that we have the right attitude because the confession is telling us we've been set free so that we get to do all that. You get to do it. And that's the next part, that we get to be obedient. And they're yielding obedience unto him not out of slavish fear, but a childlike love and a willing mind.

So the obedience that God expects is not. He's sitting there with the stick ready to hit you. That is not the way God loves his people. He's there ready to embrace you. He's there ready to accept you.

And I know that might sound modern evangelical, but no, it's biblical. The idea that we are not in slavish fear of God anymore. We are slaves of righteousness, but we're not slaves of a vindictive God. He's beneficent. We don't say that word enough.

Beneficent. He's a good owner. We have a good master. There's all kinds of passages. One I have here is First Corinthians 6, that we are not our own.

You know, we've been bought with a Price. So God owns us now. And he doesn't own us to smack us and to beat us. He doesn't own us to abuse us. He owns us to.

To take care of us and to love us and accept us. So no more slavish fear now. Now, this is that part where I said, I'm probably going to be confusing because I don't know if I'm going to be able to say it all that accurately. But the idea here now is there are some added benefits, added liberties for New Testament believers that were not there in the Old Testament. And this is one of those places where I might, you know, just plug in here a little bit.

It's one of the reasons why I'm not covenantal in my theology. You know, I'm thankful that the Baptists, early Baptists that adopted this and penned this said it the way they do. So the next part of the paragraph says all which were common also to believers under the law for the substance of them. But under the New Testament, the liberty of Christians is further enlarged. I like that language.

That Christians get more benefits than the Jews did. And a couple of them first are, they're free from the ceremonies. And that's what the confession says in their freedom from the yoke of a ceremonial law to which the Jewish church was subjected. Did you hear that? They said Jewish church sounds like covenantal people, the Jewish congregation assembly.

Don't be throwing the word church around like, anyway, English word church just means the gathering. But I do want you to catch that. It says that we're free from ceremonial law. And you might say, well, I'm a Gentile, I was already free from the ceremonial law. Right?

You might say that. But no, what we're saying is New Testament believers are no longer bound by all those Old Testament ceremonies, the feasts, the sacrifices and those things. And then it also says, and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace. Did you know that as a Christian, in the name of Christ, you have more access to the throne directly than Old Testament believers did because they couldn't come without sacrifice? That's why the whole purpose of the book of Hebrews is to say that they didn't have what we have and we don't want to keep going back to what they had.

That's the Jews of the author of Hebrews and the Jews. There he's saying, like, we don't. We don't want to go back. We want what we have now. We have free access now we can go directly into his throne room and Talk to him.

And then the third one I have here is that you get that special supply of the Spirit and you think of post Pentecost that if you go all the way dispensational. So I tell you all the time, I'm not covenantal and I am only dispensational leaning. That's your view of the end times, right? If you go all the way Pentecostal, a lot of strong Darby Scofield, like real hardline Pentecostals, they actually don't think that people were, in the sense that we understand, regenerate until after Pentecost because that's when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. I don't hold to that.

I actually believe the Old Testament saints are saved and saved the same way you and I are, by the Spirit of God. That points them to their need of salvation, you know. But I do want to say somewhere in the middle, I'm going to sit firmly on the fence and say there is something unique about Pentecost, that coming of the Spirit in that way that the Spirit of God moved at that time to spread the word of the resurrected Christ. There's something special about it. Now, I'm not exactly sure I fully understand that.

And depending on your view of end times, you're going to say one thing about that or the other. But I am going to say that our confession, the Baptist held to some sense that we post Pentecost have something special because of the Holy Spirit. And it says, and in the fuller communications of the free Spirit of God than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of. So we have it good is what the Baptists were saying. We have it good.

We have the luxury of a fuller, closer, deeper relationship with the Spirit of God. Because when we now post Pentecost, see it, if we're right about that, he indwells us directly. You know, and you might read those passages of the Old Testament where like David says, take not your spirit from me. Don't. I was going to say, don't get it twisted.

I'm not cool enough to say that, but maybe I am now because that's old school. So maybe it's okay for me to say, don't get it twisted because that's from the 90s or whatever, but. But I do want to make sure that we don't make a mistake. When David says that he's not talking about the salvation Spirit, he's not saying the Holy Spirit indwelled me like he does in salvation. And now he can be taken away.

That's not what he's saying. In the Old Testament concept, the spirit would do special endowments for gifts for. For tasks for, you know, think God was accomplishing something. So he'd put his spirit on someone in a. Like a legitimate anointing and say, I put my spirit on you and I want you to go do that thing.

Well, that, that. And now in the New Testament terms, you might be able to say something like, we all kind of have that. That's the idea that we all have the spirit of God dwelling in us and we all have all the tools necessary to do what God calls. But I just want to point out that we have something a little more, to whatever degree that is, than the Old Testament saints. Now let's talk about that.

This liberty that we've been given. Now we're going to talk about our conscience specifically, and whether our conscience condemns or excuses us. Right? So in this case, the conscience, what we're going to say is given by God. The liberty of conscience is given by God.

And we're going to talk about that from the confession here, first paragraph two. God alone is Lord of the conscience. That's important. Your conscience, you Christian, your conscience is only obligated to God. And you say, well, wait a second.

The Bible also tells me to yield to my church or my pastor or my boss tells me to obey my masters. Yeah, when you obey your master at work, you are yielding to God. You're appealing to him for your clear conscience, not the master at work. So it is important to see that ultimately God is the only one that is the Lord of the conscience. And that's what the confession says.

God alone is lord of the conscience. That's how it starts. That's important. There's only one lawgiver, James says, right, who is able to save. So you only have one judge.

That's why Paul will say in Romans there, where he says, who can condemn you? Right. Who can bring a condemnation against one of God's people? It's God who justifies. So the idea there is like, God is your only judge.

And that doesn't mean, again, that you don't struggle and want to obey. And how hard is it sometimes to obey our civil leaders when they're, you know, in the wrong areas? And so, you know, like I'm reading Romans 13 and it tells me, I got to do this, but they're also telling me something that's violating my Christian conscience. And you struggle with those things. But ultimately, the point here is that you're accountable to God only for your conscience.

No one else has the right to bind your conscience. So I think it's really important. We had a thing happen, financial thing here like we're going to do, try to do some elect be able to donate electronically, right. So we're working through that. And the question in that is, is it okay for us to have the ability, now we're not asking people to do it, but even the ability to have people donate to the church with a credit card, how would you answer that?

How would you, how would you think through that? Because debt is not okay, right? But also there are loans in the Bible, right? Even like you might even think of for convenience. There's talk about lending sandals and things like that in the Bible, right?

So I say that to you. I don't, I'm not giving any answers here to that question. We're just working through it and talking about such things. But what I'm trying to tell you is who binds the conscience there? Like, do I want to tell you you absolutely couldn't use your credit card and I forbid it and well, no, then I as a man am binding your conscience because there's enough leeway in the scripture to where I don't feel like I have a command for that.

So I have to be careful with that. That's the idea here, is to watch out for those things in life that are, you don't know. You don't have a command, you don't have a final say. So you all know, I think you do that. I have the view, I do of marriage, the permanence view of marriage and no divorce and remarriage.

And I don't expect everybody to hold that. And I respect people who don't hold it. I really do. I don't dismiss them. And someone asked me this week if I knew of a church that held, held it the way I do down south.

And I essentially told them I'm not sure I would feel good searching out, you know, a church. I didn't say it in those words, but I told them these are the things you would look for to get answers on that, on what they think go listen to sermons on these passages. So I'm not sure I would feel firm in my, in my conviction enough to tell somebody they shouldn't go to a church if somebody doesn't hold to what I hold to in that because there's freedom in that. There's enough freedom to where you have to be careful. There's enough freedom to where I don't get to say it's my way or the highway.

And I don't want to be the man that binds the conscience. So there are. Think of music, think of food, think of alcohol. That's a good one, right? That's a good subject.

Should Christians ever drink alcohol? Well, you don't want me to be the say so in that because my say so is no ever. I'm a total abstentionist. So that means no wine with dinner or anything in my mind. But now what if I told you that's what God wants?

You have to listen to me because I am the spokesman of God and I'm the authority of this church. That would be me, a man binding your conscience. And I don't want to do that. I want to allow you to work through those things yourself from the passages that deal with those things and you get to your clear conscience there. Tattoos.

We could go on and on, right? These are all those things that come up in these subjects. But I just want, I love that our confession says God is the only lord of the conscience. No popes, no Baptists, no people, God alone, right? He's the only one that we're accountable to ultimately.

And he's account, he goes on further to talk about the accountability because he's the only Lord of our conscience. It is his word that is our only authority, what he says. And that's what the confession says and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his word or not contained in it. Did you hear that? That The Baptists in 1689 said Scripture alone.

Did you see that? Watch out for commandments that are not found in Scripture. And can I tell you, that doesn't only come from popes and it doesn't only come from Pharisees. It comes from you. We write our own commandments all the time.

We do it all the time. I would tell you that if you're, if you're not quoting chapters and verses, you're writing your own Bible. And it's really important to have chapters and verses functionally in your head so that you're thinking scripture. And that really comes into play in these areas. So if you get bound up in the, in the doctrines of men, I can never ever play a card game.

I can never watch a movie. Those used to be big time things in the Baptist churches, which is ironic because it's Baptist confession. Like you can't do this, you can't see that, you can't watch that. You ask kids who grew up in that? And you ask them, tell me what the commandments of God are.

Oh, you got to wear a tie, you know, like, where's that at in the Bible? I don't know. My pastor told me that, you know, and so over time, these things develop and turn into their own commandments. They become the commandments of men. And that's what our confession is saying.

That's not the way to go. You need to only yield to the word. We talked about that in Sunday school. I think Jay asked that question about the regulative principle, that we're looking for what God actually says so that we can obey it. Not maybe looking for holes or weak areas of weakness either.

In fact, I have a note about that, that we can do both wrongly. We can bind the conscience when God doesn't bind the conscience. And then on the other side, we can loose the conscience when God hasn't allowed something. Right. So we have to find that balance.

And you find it with what our confession says, the word of God. We know that lots. Jesus and Bible writers all talk about commandments of men. The idea that people follow them, follow men instead of God, and the danger of that. The Old Testament is quoted by Jesus when he says, these people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

This is just a thing where, you know, for us. How many commandments are there in the bible? Something like 600. And something like that's not enough. We need to add another hundred.

You know, let's just keep adding commandments. But isn't it true? How do people obey their New Year's resolution commandments? Yeah, we write commandments and don't obey those either. Never saying that again.

I'm never going there again. I'm never eating that again. So lists asceticism, commandments of men. Our confession says those do not bind our conscience. God alone does.

His word is the way that we know what he wants. For us to have a clear conscience, then the confession goes on to almost threaten anybody that would go against that. And it says so that to believe such doctrines or obey such commands, those are the commands of men out of conscience is to betray true liberty of conscience. So the idea there is God gave you the ability through the Gospel to have freedom in your conscience, right to have a clear conscience. God gave us a clear.

The author of Hebrews says that the blood of Christ gives us the clear conscience. He gave you a clear conscience. And then you come along and say, no, I need to Add commandments. I need to add works. I need to add other things.

What the confession is saying, when you do that, you betray the real thing. God gave you this beautiful gift and you're betraying it with your. With your. Adding those doctrines of men goes on also to say. And the requiring of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind conscience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.

So you're not. Here it is. I found it, Sam. It's in my notes. We're not supposed to say do as I say, not as I do.

He just said that earlier. Do as I say, not as I do is not something any Christian should care to say. We should always want to be only expecting those around us to do it. Do as I do. Because we're obedient, right?

Because we're obedient. But I say that, that dads aren't allowed to say that too. Dads aren't allowed to only say because I said so, and be faithful. God doesn't just say because I said so. He always gives us a reason for what he expects of us.

Right now he can. He's allowed to. And dad, you're allowed to say right now. I'm not going to answer that. Do it because I said so.

You're allowed to do that. But I just mean in your life, that as a leader in your home, it's better to give good reasons and to explain and not just say because I said so. Because eventually your kids, church, if it's a pastor, business, if it's a business owner, community member, if it's the politics out there, the civil leaders that over time, because I said so, becomes an 11th commandment. That's what you say. You can't kill, you can't covet, you can't steal.

And you got to do everything because I say so. And that's essentially again us adding commandments. So we want to be able to. To not destroy someone's liberty. When someone has freedom, we don't want to take it away with commandments that we add to their life or our own life.

Let's see, Jesus was innocent, right? Why didn't he condemn or destroy Pilate? Why did he submit even though he was innocent? I think that matters because. And you want to be careful that he had a clear conscience, but that didn't mean he didn't want to do what God said to do.

The idea is, I don't say, here's an example. In fact, I'll give you true story. This one really happened. I just told you what I Said, think about alcohol. And by the way, a lot of old school Baptists think what I think about alcohol.

It's not that unique of a position. But I will tell you that one of my professors, who I love dearly, I really do, he literally wrote a book about how reformed people are allowed to drink. That's the point of his book, was drinking with the reformers, you know, and in our class one night, everybody was talking about that. I stayed quiet, just so you know. I wasn't combative.

I didn't ever want to undermine my teacher in class. So I just, I stayed quiet on the subject. And it was going around and somebody asked him, what would you do if you were out to dinner and drinking wine and somebody who holds to the abstentionist view were to see you, what would you do then? And he said, I wouldn't do anything. I'm not going to let them bind my conscience.

So in my mind, when he said that he wasn't concerned for their stumbling like I thought he should have been, right? That's what I thought. I thought he should be concerned that he might cause somebody stumbling. That doesn't mean he has to stop drinking his wine if he has a clear conscience. It just means have enough sensitivity to that person to not just trample on their, their obedience, right, or their, their mindset.

And so to me, the thing would have been a solution might have been, well, I might take the wine glass and put it over toward the edge of the table or something so it wouldn't be so obvious or out, you know, something just something considerate. Not, not that you have to do that to be right with God. But I bring that up because that the, the freedoms that we have, we might have the freedom. Jesus had the freedom to wipe Pilate out. He had the ability and could have done it.

He would have been justified in doing it, except for the purposes, obviously, the plan of God. But I bring that up because the Galatian churches were suffering. They. Because people came in and bound their conscience and over and over again. So when you do that, you have to be careful to not trample on liberty.

Like you're free to have a clear conscience before God. And if I come in and say, this is a commandment you have to obey, now I've trampled on your liberty. So maybe the most important thing I'll say of the night is that the essence of liberty is the freedom to serve Christ. The reason you were set free was not so that you could be autonomous. That's a major mistake that people make because they have American freedom in their head, not biblical freedom.

American freedom is nobody can tell me what to do. I'm absolutely free from an authoritarian regime. I'm absolutely free from a king. I'm absolutely free and I have rights to do whatever I want. That's Americans concept of freedom.

When we say freedom isn't free, almost always when people are thinking of the freedom that isn't free, that the good soldiers and the constitutionalists and everybody in our founding fathers, that freedom is so that I can have a Harley Davidson and drink beer. That's why I have that freedom, right? So that I can do whatever I want. That's the way people see freedom. But that is not biblical freedom.

Biblical freedom is you are set free from sin, you're in bondage to sin, and you're set free from sin. But now you are a slave of God. There is no autonomy, you're not autonomous. There isn't total freedom to do whatever you want. So we want to be really careful that the liberty you've been given is freedom from sin, but it's also freedom to righteousness, right?

You're free from something to something. Now let's talk about some abuses I already kind of have. But there are more here in the confession, in paragraph three. They who, upon pretense of Christian liberty, do practice any sin or cherish any sinful lust. And it'll.

I'll pause there. Here the idea is that licentiousness I was saying earlier, where you say I am free from sin, so nothing I do right now will count against me, right? The idea is, since I'm free and my sins are paid for, then I can just do whatever I want and not have to worry about condemnation. The confession is saying, no, no, no, no, you're not free to sin. You're not free to do things that don't please God.

You're not free from your sin so that you can go to sin. I used to say it. I was one of the people saying it. Just so you know, I did actually try, I genuinely tried to share the gospel and be faithful as a new Christian when I was playing music in bars. I know that sounds hypocritical.

I know it sounds like. And by the way, I wouldn't commend anybody doing that now. I would argue not to do it. And did I have argued to people not to do such things. So at the time, when I was young and I hadn't been discipled yet, hadn't spent enough time around Heinrich to know better, I didn't understand the application of those things.

I was doing what a lot of people did and saying, how did Jesus find sinners and tax collectors? He would go eat with them, right? And I made the same mistake everybody else did, was thinking that that's what I was doing when I was playing music in bars. I was there with the sinners and tax collectors. I had spray painted Jesus on my amp and everything else, you know, And I really thought I was a good witness.

So I was trying. I wasn't drinking, I wasn't a hypocrite. And personally, in my personal life. But I will tell you that in hindsight, obviously I don't believe that now, but I am bringing it up. The idea to say, let's go take our freedom and do whatever we want with it because we're okay, we're okay.

I'm going to go there where all those people are getting drunk and cheating on their spouses and I'm okay, Right? That idea of me not realizing there are bigger implications of my obedience and faithfulness and not to use. Well, to use the text that here in a second that says not to use your liberty as a cloak for vice. You're not given your freedom so that you can do the wrong thing with it. And so first here you're not supposed to be sinful.

You reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ. Paul says, therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey its lusts. Dear friends of mine years ago quietly bragged to me, you would hate what we did Friday night. These were church people, by the way. You know them?

They're no longer here. You would hate what we were doing Friday night. Why are you telling me that? Because they went to a party, a dance party thing, and they were drinking and partying. You know, their family fell apart, incidentally.

But there they are using their freedom, using their freedom to do things that they knew were bad for them and that they were enslaved to and gave themselves over to watch out. Other things that come out of abuse of liberty, I'll give you a couple of them, is they do thereby pervert the main design of the grace of the gospel to their own destruction. This idea is that grace was designed so that you could obey God by his grace. And people who use their liberty, their freedom that they think they have because they're bought and paid for when they abuse it, they are saying they're using God's grace for something it wasn't designed for. God's grace was designed for God's people to be obedient and faithful to him.

And when you choose to use your freedom that way, you're essentially taking God's grace and using it for something he didn't intend. And then it goes on to say, so they wholly destroy the end of Christian liberty, which is that being delivered out of the hands of all the enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear. Again, that might be the big point of the night, which is that you were given freedom by God. You should have a clear conscience. Your conscience should not be bound by men, but bound by the word of God only, right?

And now someone might come along and say, I'm going to add some commandments. I'm going to have my own system. I'm going to have my own rules and regulations, my own worship, my own, you know, whatever, church, whatever. I'm going to come along and I'm going to say, yes, I know you heard that the Gospel alone was sufficient for you to be right with God and free. But I got to tell you, he wouldn't have had all those thousands of years of ceremonies and laws and sacrifices if they weren't really important to him.

Or the Catholics come along and say it's the oldest religion in history after Jesus, right? It's consistent from the time of Peter to now. So people say these things, they. They walk these things as though they're doing something good by helping God out with new commandments. That's what the Judaizers did, right?

And now we're. I'm trying to emphatically say, when they do that, they take away what the freedom was designed to give us, first in grace, but then also that we were set free to obey Christ, not set free to obey our lusts, our freedom. We didn't. We weren't set free to be autonomous. We weren't set free.

And in this case, the confession is condemning anybody that would do that to someone else. So not only should you not be bound and have somebody bind your conscience, but don't bind anybody else's conscience. Make sure you truly know what the laws and the expectations of the Lord are so that you're not like the Pharisees, right? So that you're not the Judaizers, that you're not the religious leaders of Jesus Day who are hypocritical, right? The false shepherds.

You want to make sure. And if I. What if I said it this way, I'll say it simply. We are supposed to be helping people be free in their conscience. We're supposed to be helping with the liberty of conscience, not binding the conscience, not looking for ways that we can make people feel guilty.

Now it might be that they're doing something wrong and they need to be told that it's wrong. And in that case, you're not binding their conscience. You're pointing them to the word of God that might condemn their conscience, right? So you point them to the word of God and say, this is what the word of God says about what you're doing. And now you've essentially walked them to the Lord and said, lord, you deal with them.

But that's not the same as me saying, you know, I don't know. I think a church should only face north or south. And any church that doesn't, you know, question that church or whatever it is, whatever thing that we add, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be the color of the chairs, it doesn't matter. People will make laws out of everything.

People will find things to be legalistic about, right? They invent things to gripe about how come nobody does this thing at our church? Well, where did God tell us to do it? I don't know. I just think we should be doing it.

Well, so now all of a sudden, everybody's supposed to conform to your commandment that you just wrote. We're supposed to be really careful and only apply the word of God to people. And now I'm telling you, motivation wise, we're supposed to be thinking, how can I help them if they are wrong, if they are violating an actual principle of scripture? How can I help them get free from that? How can I point them to the right kind of repentance, the right kind of confession?

Or let's say there's a questionable thing? And you say, well, I know this person and they're doing a questionable thing. And I know them well enough that I'm concerned for them to keep doing what they're doing. Like, let's say somebody has a history of some sort of sin in their life. Alcohol.

Let's use alcohol as a real example because it happens, right? Or you could talk about lust or any other thing. Somebody, let's say somebody has a history of alcohol issues, but their friend keeps inviting them over for the football game every week. And there's always alcohol there, right? And you say, wow, I want to be there with my friends.

Yeah, you might be free to go be there with your friends. That might be true. But is there anything there that you might want to consider? It could be bad for you. Is there any potential for stumbling?

Is your Conscience going to be bound when you're there and you're. You're struggling like, oh, no, I got it. I can't do this thing. So we're supposed to be seeking freedom, and freedom is serving Christ. So I don't.

Again, I don't have answers for any of those things. I told my family years ago that if there's alcohol served at a thing, don't tell me. Don't tell me to come. That's pretty simple. They've always respected me.

My family's always respected me. I always say that to them privately. I always tell them Christians fight with each other. But I always tell everybody my family treats me really great. They've always respected me.

My stepmother's always been very respectful. Well, most of my family have people who don't. But my brother never condemned me. Never, you know, because I would say things like that. But I am saying that just to.

So that I don't get myself in trouble. We just have ground rules. And yes, I. Those might be things I'm free to do, but I want to be careful not to use my freedom to get myself in trouble. That's the idea.

I don't want to abuse my freedom. Aren't you tired of people burning the flag in your country? Using their freedom in our country to burn the flag that gives them the freedom in our country? Well, that's kind of what this is like, when we take the grace that God gives us to be free from our sin, and then we tiptoe over to as close to the edge to sin as possible and just go over here and play. I know I'm not right in it, but I'm in the neighborhood.

Like, run away, man. Go the other direction. So. And by the way, I can be completely honest with you. You all know that I follow mixed martial arts and I play crazy rock music and all those things.

Don't think this stuff doesn't. Isn't lingering in my head. I am trying to practice what I preach. I am trying to be consistent. And I am not wanting to love the world and not wanting to let any accolades of people or anything draw me in.

So just. I just want you to know, you might be thinking, how can he watch people punch each other until they're bleeding? I get that. If you have trouble with that, I get it. By the way, there was a fight last night that was very bloody.

It was rough. Don't have your conscience. Bound by men just by the word of God. And don't bind anyone else's conscience by anything other than the word of God, we are set free and we should go live in our freedoms. Listen to what Jesus says.

Most assuredly I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a Son abides forever. Therefore, if the Son makes you free, how does that conclude? Yeah, so go be free. Let's pray.

Father, thank you for the freedoms that we have that are purchased, that were given to us by Christ. These are things that have been talked about and dealt with and discussed and just lectured on for centuries. Just help us do it right, that we are obedient where we need to be, that we recognize our freedoms, and that we're supposed to have a clear conscience. Help us with that, and then help us help others too. In Jesus name, amen.