Study Notes

I.      Love won’t allow you to go on in dishonor and not correct you, but rather Love himself will correct you because He loves you and because He doesn’t want you to miss out on the Love plan for your life

A.    1 Samuel 2:27,29-A leader cannot allow those under him to treat God and His things with disrespect

1.      When the correction came from the man of God it came to Eli, not his sons; The Lord asked why do YOU kick ye at my sacrifice

2.      Why did Eli allow this to go on? He honored his sons above the Lord so rather than having His sons displeased with him, he chose to have the Lord displeased with Him (I just love them to much)

3.      If you let them treat it disrespectfully then you are being disrespectful to the Lord and you can try to call it love for the people all you want, but it is not

a.    When everything is loose and it doesn’t matter if you show up or not and it doesn’t matter how you act or how you dress or you handle certain things and you justify with “love” – Oh we love people and we just don’t want to put that kind of demand on them; to do so is to perpetuate dishonor and if you’re a leader it’s on you as much as them because you’re allowing it; This is what happen to Eli with his sons  – The standard is there because as leaders we got to be sure that honor is upheld and that the things of God are treated the way they should be treated and if somebody is not going to treat them the right way, then they have deemed themselves unworthy to have it; if you can’t show up on time and do it with excellence, then you have deemed yourself unworthy to have it

B.     God’s not going to ignore how you treat him and his things and give you precious and holy things anyway just because he loves you

1.      God’s not going to let His love for you blind Him of the truth that you are not fit to handle these precious things and just give them to you anyway; such things are too valuable to give to someone who doesn’t value them and so you’ve judged yourself unworthy to have them and yet God still loves you

a.    They are not worthy to handle them because the worth of the thing they are handling is very little in their eyes

2.      The care and the honor with which you treat God and His things is going to determine the level of depth and richness that you experience in his things

3.      If God doesn’t give precious things to people who don’t value them, then we need to be sure that we don’t give precious things to people who don’t value them and if we have given something to somebody who doesn’t value it, then we should take it away

C.    Grace is not a way for you to lightly esteem and slight and disrespect and dishonor God and his things and still get God to honor you and get His best

1.      The grace of God and the blood of Jesus is not for you to just treat God and his things with disesteem and disrespect and still get to have God honor you – It matters what you do and grace is there and the blood is there in case you make a mistake but it is not there to ensure that you still get God’s best (and have him honor you) while you treat him and his things with contempt and light esteem

D.    If Jesus sees dishonor in your life he’s not just going to sit back and not say anything to you because He “loves” you so much, but rather he’s going to correct you so that you can get it corrected so that He can honor you

1.      Because He is correcting you is a true sign that He does love you and a teaching with a lot of correction is a teaching with a lot of love-Hebrews 12:6

2.      It’s not love to let you go on in dishonor and miss the plan of God for your life

II.     Matthew 10:34-40-You’re going to have to make a choice about who and what is first and the most important in your life

A.    32,33-Confessing vs. Denying; This sounds like those who honor me I will honor and those who despise me I will lightly esteem

1.      32-Confess Definition – This is honor

a.    Praise-Declaring of esteem bestowed on a person for his personal virtues or worthy actions; To extol (opposite despise) in words or song; To do honor to; To glorify which means to honor

b.    Celebrate-Praise, Extol; To honor or distinguish by ceremonies and marks of joy and respect

c.     Profess-To make open declaration of; To profess oneself as a worshipper of one

d.    Confess-To own or acknowledge; publicly to declare a believe in and adherence to; To declare to be true or to admit or assent to in words as opposed to deny

e.    Concede-To yield; to admit as true; to grant; to allow

1)       To say the same thing as another (The opposite of that is to contradict what someone says); To agree with

f.      Delcare-To make known to others by words; To publish, to proclaim

g.    Not deny, not refuse

2.      Deny Definition – This is dishonor

a.    To reject-To throw away as anything useless or vile; to slight, to despise, to refuse to receive

b.    To not receive or embrace-To seize eagerly, to lay hold on, to take with willingness what is offered, press to bosom in token of affection

c.     To refuse to grant, to not afford, to withhold

d.    To refuse or neglect to acknowledge (receive with respect)

e.    Contradict, Oppose one’s words (Confess means say the same thing as another and to agree with)

f.      Refuse-To decline to accept what is offered; To deny a request, demand, invitation, or command

3.      There are different degrees of this “denying and confession” the same way there are different degrees of “honor and dishonor.”

a.    If Jesus wants you to be somewhere and you aren’t you denied him versus if you’re there you’ve agreed with him

4.      He is not going to confess (honor you before the Father) while you refuse and dishonor him

a.    33-Jesus didn’t say if you deny me I won’t love you; He loves the person who denies him, but loving you and honoring you with precious things are two entirely different things; If you dishonor him he still loves you, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to honor you with precious things

b.    2 Timothy 2:11-12-I will honor those who honor me is NT principle too

B.     31-36-Jesus came to separate so that you have to make a choice about who’s going to be Lord and who’s going to be first

1.      34-Jesus is telling us don’t think this way so we need to not think this way

a.    You can assume something to be scripture and it not be and you can imagine something to be true and it not be true

1)       HCSB-Don’t assume that I came to bring peace on the earth; Philips-Never think; Voice-Do not imagine

b.    Don’t think that when Jesus shows up that everybody is going to get along because in fact the opposite will happen

1)       Peace-Peace between individual’s, harmony, concord-agreement, union in opinions, views, sentiments

2)       Sword-Persons at variance, disputants, strife, contention, cutting, battle, fight or combat; Variance-Disagreement, lack of agreement, state of dissension or controversy

3)       When Jesus was done preaching there was never harmony and agreement, there was dissension and discord-John 6:56-68

4)       Everybody on the earth is not supposed to get along and agree; You shouldn’t be getting a long with darkness

5)       If you don’t want disruption don’t get good teaching because really good teaching will disrupt your environment it will pull you out of your comfort zone it will demand more of you

c.     What he says is the truth and a sword; When the truth is preached it doesn’t unite, it cuts and divides into 2 sides-Jn17:17, Heb4:12

1)       What he says is not going to bring harmony and agreement among all people; What he says is going to cut and divide and then you’re going to have to pick Jesus and follow him or follow something else

d.    Jesus came to cut you away from everything else that you’re clinging to and separate you unto him-John 17:17

2.      35-He came to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother

a.    You can’t be clinging to them and they can’t be first

1)       Variance-To cut into two parts, sever, cleave asunder; Twice, two, DI

2)       For I am come TO – This reveals his purpose in coming

a)     DLNT-For I came to cause a separation

b)     MSG- “Don’t think I’ve come to make life cozy. I’ve come to cut—make a sharp knife-cut between son and father, daughter and mother, bride and mother-in-law—cut through these cozy domestic arrangements and free you for God. Well-meaning family members can be your worst enemies. If you prefer father or mother over me, you don’t deserve me. If you prefer son or daughter over me, you don’t deserve me. “If you don’t go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don’t deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.

b.    Eli did this with his boys, he preferred them over the Lord, he honored them over the Lord, they were more important to him than the Lord was and it cost him and them and because his boys were ahead of the Lord it hurt his boys; 1 Samuel 2:29-You honor your sons above me

1)       You hurt your family when you put them ahead of the Lord (and it’s teaching them the wrong thing)

2)       If God would have been first he would have put his boys out and maybe they would have woke up to how serious it was and repented and got restored; but he was clinging to them

c.     You can’t be clinging to them and preferring them more than you do Him and He came to sever you from that clinging to them, from that preferring them to clinging and preferring Him

1)       He’s not going to show up and tell you he’ll share first place with your family and it’s all good; he’s going to show up and say you’re going to have to pick it’s either them or it’s me because you can’t have two firsts

C.    What makes them unworthy?

1.      36-The biggest enemy you have to choosing him and following him and making him first is your own family

a.    Jesus should be more important to you than them and if he’s not then you are not worthy of him

2.      What makes them unworthy is that something is more important than He is and that means you don’t honor him the way you should and therefore you are not fit to have him, to handle him, to experience him in fullness  

a.    He didn’t say, “He that’s conduct is not up to snub or he that is bad or he that’s not good enough is not worthy of me,” He said he that love someone MORE THAN they love me is not worthy of me

b.    It’s not your bad conduct that makes you unworthy, it’s that something is more important to you than the Lord and His things     

3.      The problem is not loving your family, the problem is loving them MORE THAN Him

a.    There are some people who would do absolutely anything for their family and won’t get to church once a week for the Lord

1)       It’s not that what you’re doing for your family is bad, what’s bad is that you’ll do it for them and not for Him

b.    The problem is not in just loving your family more than him, the problem is when you love anything more than him

1)       You shouldn’t love/honor anybody or anything more than love/honor the Lord

c.     It’s amazing the things we take more pleasure in than we do the Lord (AMP-And takes more pleasure in)

4.      If He and His things aren’t important enough to you to be the biggest thing in your life than you have judged yourself unworthy to partake of Him and His things

a.    38-Follows-Side with his party; Amp-Cleave steadfastly to Me; Siding with him, cleaving steadfastly to Him makes you worthy of him

b.    If you don’t recognize how much more valuable and precious he is than your family you’re not fit to have him; You’re not to fit to have me because you don’t know the value of me

D.    39-This is how you find your life and the life that God wants you to have and the life that He wants to honor you with: You allow Jesus to become your life and when he becomes your life and he is the biggest thing in your life you’ll find your life

1.      Ephesians 2:10 (AMP)-God has prearranged and made ready for you’re a good life this is how you find that life

a.    EXB-Those who try to hold onto cling to seek to preserve their lives will give up true life. Those who give up their lives for me will hold onto true life

b.    TLB-If you cling to your life you will lose it; but if you give it up for me you will save it

c.     VOICE-To find your life you must lose your life

2.      Mark 10:29-Jesus is trying to get you a life that is a 100 times better than the one you’re living now

3.      Trying to teach how people how to live a victorious life while God is not first place in their life is like trying to build a house with no foundation – IT WON’T WORK