In Dependence

Ow! That was loud. Okay. Okay. I'll start here in a sec.

Good morning, Salt Church. So glad you joined us this morning right here in my kitchen. Happy Fourth of July. I hope you have a great day planned with your family and friends. I'm so glad we're able to be here online so that you can take the day off.

You have a guilt-free Sunday. I hope you're taking advantage of it, being with your family. And I know some of you are barbecuing and doing some fun things today. But what a day to celebrate independence. We love independence, right?

And I hope you're thinking about the goodness that we have on this Independence Day, being able to be free, just free to worship, free to gather together. Even there's countries that can't even gather online. And I'm so thankful that we can gather online today. So if you have an opportunity, go ahead and share this with somebody. If you're not able to tune in right now, this will be posted later on.

So you can watch it on YouTube. Join our YouTube channel and you can pick it up or right on our website at www.saltchurch.org and you can connect there. So not only are we doing online today for the reason of giving you the day off, but as you know, and if you haven't already heard, we did lose our location last week.

And we're in the process of finding a new location. It came suddenly. We didn't know it was going to happen. It was just one of those things, guys. And this is a part of being a mobile church right now, that sometimes you have a location and the next day you don't.

And they didn't renew our contract going forward for July, but they caught us off guard. So we are in the process of finding another location. We're looking really all over the place and in this general area, at least. And we hope to have something very soon. So stay tuned to social media.

Connect with us through our website. Connect through us through email. Stay in touch. We're hoping to have something this coming week. We might do something a little different this coming Sunday if we don't have a location at this point.

So just stay tuned and we'll give you more information as that comes. But as Americans, we love Independence Day. We love Independence Day. We love the idea of being independent. It's a great day to think about all those wonderful things that we have freedoms with being independent.

But today, I want to talk about something in regard to independence. Now, let me think about this or you need to think about this. As a child, you think you want independence, right? When you're with your parents, you want independence. You want, I don't want to eat that broccoli.

Don't make me eat that broccoli. I don't want to clean my room. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do that. While you're young, we're striving for independence.

We want to be independent. But once we get out of the house, once we get older, we realize that maybe it wasn't so bad to be dependent on something. Now, I have to buy my own food. Now, I have to work and get up and have responsibilities. I have to pay the bills.

I have to do all those things because there's a certain dependence that we have to have in order to function, right? Depend on a job. Depend on where you live and the choices you make are dependent on how well you do in life. So, today I want to talk about that a little bit because independence is great for our country. We love it.

It's great for a group of people, but it's not great for us individually. We need people. Go to Colossians 1, 13 through 14 and let's go into this together. For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his dear son, who purchased our freedom and forgave us our sins. See, Jesus didn't die for our independence.

Jesus didn't die for our independence. Jesus died for our freedom. Independence and freedom are different. And I want to talk about that today because in Galatians 5, 1, it says it is for freedom that Jesus set you free. That's why he died.

But culture and society likes to promote independence, right? Live life your own way. Do the things you want to do on your own. Create your own venture. Create your own destiny.

Do your own thing. That's what society promotes. In fact, they write songs about me, myself, and I, and I want, I need. And that's the American way. But when problems arise, we need dependence.

But in some stretches of it, we definitely want to do it ourselves, right? I mean, because we're independent people. We want to fix things. We want to take care of things. We want to handle it on our own.

But here's the deal. It's not God's way. God has designed human beings. Now, for a group of people, independence is good. For a country, we celebrate independence.

But for a group of people, we need to be in dependence on each other. We need to be in dependence on the things that matter. So I want to give you three myths real quick about what independence does for us. When we think of independence, the first thing that comes to mind, we need independence because we can't help ourselves or I can't help myself because of who I am. I do the things and I say the things because that's just who I am.

That's how I was born. That's what chemistry goes on in my body. Chemicals are running, whatever it might be. That's just who I am. I can't change.

So I'm independent. I'm I'm Scottish Irish or I'm Italian or I'm Latino or I'm whatever. And I've got this this attitude and I can't do anything about it. And that's why I'm independent. So I do things on my own.

And culture says, you know what? If that's you, that's you. You know, if it feels good, do it. Whatever glitters, just go for it. But we fail to see what's underneath because we go for what feels good.

We go for what glitters and that's what and what is beautiful. And we don't look at what matters most. What matters most is is character and values. And we often act impulsively. We think impulsively is the right way to go because it's about going for it and doing so.

So that's the first lie or the first myth about being independent. That is because I am who I am and I can't change. The second lie is I must protect myself. I must protect myself because I've been hurt so many times. I've been damaged.

I've been disappointed. People have done me wrong. And we put up walls of isolation. We tend to put up these walls and we get alone and we think isolation is best for us. And you know, Satan loves to get us alone.

He loves us to be by ourselves because we're not built to be that way. We can never pursue our purpose or our plan if we're alone, if we do things on our own. We need others to help us. And without relationship and without direction, we can go anywhere. And so we believe that lie.

I must protect myself. I need to be independent to protect myself. And the third thing is I can take care of myself. I could take care of myself. I could do this on my own.

I don't need you. I don't need anybody. You don't help me anyway. I can figure this out on my own and I'm going to go do it. I mean, most of us that started small businesses have had that kind of attitude.

And I'm not saying it's a bad thing to be an entrepreneur and start small businesses. Do it. That's what's great about a country of independence. We can do, we can try things and we can start businesses and we can have visions for things that and purpose for things in our lives. Go for it.

But what we tend to do is we do it because we're rebellious, right? We can do it on our own. I can do it on my own. And the funny thing about small business, sooner or later you're going to learn that you aren't actually your boss. Especially when tax time comes, you've got to pay to a boss.

So nobody really is on their own, are they? So that lie is I can take care of myself. So let's talk about shifting from independence to being in dependence or living in dependence, living in dependence. Paul talks about this. He even describes himself.

He says in Philippians 3, I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, a real Hebrew if there was one. So he's describing himself here. He's saying who he's always been. I was a member of the Pharisees who demanded the strictest obedience to the Jewish law.

I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church. And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault. So he had all these things that he was a dependent on, actually, which he thought for sure he was independent. But here's what happened with Paul at his conversion. I once thought these things were valuable.

He says, I thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared to the infinite value of knowing Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, my Lord. And for his sake, I have discarded everything else, counting it all garbage. He says, all that stuff that I thought about before, it was all garbage. It's all garbage compared to what I've experienced, the value.

And he says this, yes, everything is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Jesus Christ, my Lord. For his sake, I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage. So I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law. Rather, I became or become righteous through faith in Christ. Rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ.

For God's way of making us right with himself depends on faith. It depends. He talks about being independent, independence on faith, independence on Christ. Before he was independent by the law, you know, by rules, by whatever it was that he followed before. He says, that's who I was.

I was an independent man. I made choices that made me right. But when I found Christ, I realized that true dependence comes when I'm dependent on Christ. Because he died not to bring us independence. He died to bring us freedom.

Freedom. Independence and freedom are two different things. Independence is a group that decides to be separated from something for the cause of being free. But true freedom comes with Jesus. True freedom comes when something sets us free from something.

And freedom from doubt, freedom from shame, freedom from depression, freedom from hurt, freedom from sin in general. And we must know that true freedom comes from living in dependence on the right things. That's where freedom comes from. You can still be a slavery if you are living independent on the wrong things. But we're going to be independent or live independence on the right things.

And that's what I want to talk about today. And we need to be careful not just to be dependent on the things that are tough. Okay. Or be dependent on the times on things when the times are tough. Let me say it like that.

We don't need to just be independent on things or on Christ when the times are tough. We need to be independence all the time. When you're on the mountain, everything's going great for you. Because what happens is when things are good, we tend to think that, oh, I'm doing this, right? I don't need to be dependent on anything.

But when you're up on the mountain is when you should be more dependent because you know it's God and you trust God and you know he's blessing you. And we tend to fall off and fall away from the things that we depend on when we're up at the top. But when we're down at the bottom, for sure, we're heading towards God. We're asking God for clarity. We want direction from God.

But what I'm saying is we need to be dependent all the time. I'm going to take you to the book of Acts and I'm going to give you three things out of chapter 4 beginning with verse 31. We're going to walk through this. I'm going to give you three quick things that will help us learn to be independent. What things do we need to be independence to?

Okay, so let's go to verse 31 of chapter 4. And it says after they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. So the first point I get from that is we live independence on prayer. We live independence on prayer. Maybe you don't know how to pray.

Maybe prayer is uncomfortable for you. I get that. But here's what I want to say. God just wants you to talk to him. It's really a conversation with God.

And yeah, you can put a quiet time together. And that's great. I have a quiet time. I'm kind of disciplined. I know that if I don't discipline myself, sometimes things can slip in the day.

But let me just say this. You can talk to God at any time. You can talk to God anytime you want to. Anytime you're driving down the road, you're at work or whatever, he just wants to have a conversation with you. It's just a conversation with God.

And he wants to hear from you. And that's really what prayer is. And Jesus is with us all the time. So why wouldn't we want to pray to him all the time? We should be praying to him consistently and all the time asking for him.

Here's what prayer does. Prayer is basically praise. Praise is prayer. When you praise, when you cut on music and put on music and you start listening to music, you're praising God. You're praising God.

And guess what that's doing? That's prayer. God, I love you. God, thank you. God, I worship you.

God, all those things, that's prayer. So you're praying to God. And here's what prayer does. It gives you two benefits. First of all, his presence.

It gives you his presence. When we pray to God, when we're together praying, when you're praying alone, it invites his presence in and his presence changes things. And it also brings about his power. Where two or three are gathered in his name, I am there also. So his presence and power show up in our midst.

And when we gather together and the presence of God enters, because he promises us that when we gather together in prayer and praise, he shows up. And things start to happen. So we need to be dependent on prayer. Prayer works. We throw out prayer all the time.

We go to prayer as a last resort when we need to go to prayer as a first resort. It should always be the first of everything we do, because we know we need to be dependent on prayer. The second thing is found in chapter 4, verse 32. So if you roll down to verse 32 of Acts 4, it says this, Now, the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul. And no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own.

But they had everything in common. They had everything in common. So they were gathering together. Nobody said, this is mine, this is mine. They gathered together and they had all things in common.

They shared things. And so my next point is we live in dependence on God's people. We live in dependence on God's people. Don't mistake this as living dependence for the opinion of people. Okay?

That's not what I'm talking about here. That you need to live to be approved of by people. You only need to be approved of by God. But God's people are a part of the process or part of God's plan. And if prayer is the process in order for God to empower you and give you and bring about some change, then people provide the plan.

People are part of the process of bringing you to where you need to be. They are a part of your purpose and your potential. They help identify your purpose and potential. This is a part of God's plan and we need the people of God to help direct us. And that's why we don't buy the myth that we do things in isolation.

Like the Lone Ranger Christian says, oh yeah, I spend time with God on my own. I don't need people. I don't need church. I don't need anything like that. But that's not true.

We need each other. We need people around us to help guide us, to help correct us. And even though your greatest pain may have come from other people, and that may be some reason that you pull back from people and you go in isolation, even if your greatest pain came from that, I can't promise you that you won't experience pain with people. I understand the hurt that comes from people. I understand that there's a lot of things that are said, things that are did.

There's relationship issues. People do things hurtful all the time. I realize that. But I can say this, that his plan is perfect and his promises are perfect. And he promises us that we will have people in our lives.

If we gather together, we'll be able to accomplish a lot more in our purpose, in our mission, in our life. Because he has a plan. His plan is people. His plan is the church. His plan is to do things through us to help bring people to the gospel and be discipled into their eternal purposes and their direction, the direction that God has for their lives, the plan that he has for their lives.

We are a part of the plan. In fact, a good example of this, just a few weeks ago, I had a young man from our salt group come up to us. And what we have is salt groups here, and they're salt groups that gather during the week. They're small groups where we fellowship and enjoy each other, study the word, eat together like a family. And that's really, really important because you can't really get all that on Sunday morning.

Sunday morning is great. The gathering is great. Even right now, we're focused on small groups until we get back to gathering again when we find a location. So we're encouraging everybody to get to a salt group. But this young man told me, he said, thank you for not giving up on me.

Thank you and Miranda for not giving up on me because I felt like in the past a lot of people have given up on me, but you guys didn't. And I know that maybe that was something that maybe you thought about, and I was like, no, no, I've never thought about giving up on you. We would never give up on anybody. You're a child of God, and we love you, and we're so glad that you're part of our family. And we've gotten to know him very well through being in a group, and he was just really encouraged by that.

And we're really encouraged by that because we love each other, and we're moving together. So that's just an example of that. And you need people in your life that have things in common. And that's why they said they had all things. Everything was in common, okay?

Now, this isn't interests. This isn't likes, okay? We can have a lot of people with the same interests. We can have the same hobbies. We can enjoy the same things.

And we can have the same likes and the same tastes and all that in life. But when he says they had everything in common, it was their values, not necessarily likes or interests or tastes. It was values they held. And people can have the same likes and tastes and interests and be completely different, that you can have nothing in common. You can go out and hang out and do all the wonderful things.

But when you're just kind of one-on-one or you're across from each other, you really can't connect on values. So the most important things for the people of God to get together on are around values. We have values that we hold on to, values that shape us, and the values that know that that person has your back and you have their back. And you walk in those values. And the most important value that you can have is a relationship with Jesus Christ.

We have that value, that common value, that common interest that wraps around Jesus Christ. That's the best value we can hold on to. So we need people. We need to be dependent on the people. If we want to grow, if we want to heal, if we want to be strengthened, if we want to be delivered, all those things that we need to grow in, we need the people of God to get us to where God wants us to be.

And then the third thing comes from verse 33. And it says, And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was upon them all. Great grace was upon them all. So we need, the last point I want to make is we need to be living in dependence on God's promise.

On God's promise. And the greatest promise that we have is based on the testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No greater testimony, no greater thing, no greater event has ever happened in history. This is the ultimate thing that we can rest our hope on is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the Bible gives us hundreds of promises.

We have a promise for everything. If you're depressed, there's a promise. If you're without finances, there's a promise. If you're in a dark place, there's a promise. If you're lonely, there's a promise.

If you need, but the most promise, the greatest promise that we have is freedom. The greatest promise we have is that God gives us freedom and it's only found through Jesus Christ. None of these promises mean anything unless we can be placed on knowing that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world and that He was resurrected. And when we look at this Acts testimony here, they saw great power through the apostles and they were giving testimonies to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because the testimony of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the hope that we have, is the hope that we have today.

A relationship with Jesus Christ only comes through that. So my question for you today, do you want to be free? Not just independent. Do you want to be free? Then you need to place your dependence on Jesus today.

So my question for you today, wherever you are in your spiritual walk, is your dependence on Jesus? Maybe for some of you, you need to lay aside some things and stop trying to be so independent because you've trusted in yourself. You've trusted in your own will, in your own way, and it hasn't worked for you, right? Because your dependence is on the wrong thing, you need to be in dependence on the right things in order to experience freedom. For others of you, you've never had a relationship with Jesus before.

You've never experienced this resurrection, this renewing life that God can give you in Him. And He wants to give you freedom. Maybe you've been locked down for a long time. Maybe you've been without purpose. Everybody wants purpose.

And Jesus Christ come to give us life and life abundantly. And in that life abundantly is purpose. It is design. It is the way He created you. A perfect design, a perfect purpose, but your purpose comes only by giving your heart and life to Christ, surrendering your life to Christ today.

So I'm going to challenge you today, wherever you are, wherever you're sitting, whether you're out in your backyard, whether you're in your living room, maybe you're sipping a coffee at a coffee shop today listening to this message. Do you know Jesus as your personal Savior? It will be the greatest decision that you ever made. I can give you that promise because of what happened to me. My life was changed.

My life was transformed when I gave my life to Jesus. And the closer I get to Him, the more hungry I am for Him, the more I want Him, the more I want to live for Him. He leaves me wanting more. And it's so great to be where I am. I would never want it the other way on the other side.

I want it on this side. So I'm just asking you today, will you consider Jesus? If you tried everything else, won't you consider Jesus today for your freedom? Put your dependence on Him, not on yourself, not on independence, but independence on God. So if you would just say this with me, wherever you are, if you're ready to give your life to Christ, if you're ready to surrender, I want you to just pray this with me today.

Say this with me today. Father, I believe that you are the Son of God, that you died on the cross for my sin. I want freedom today, Lord. I've tried to do it independently for so long. I tried to live in independence, but I don't experience freedom.

And I want to experience freedom today. And I believe that you have the freedom that only you can offer. So God, come into my life, come into my heart, transform me from the inside out. I love you so much, Jesus. And I want to, I want to give, I just want to give my heart to you today.

And I believe in you. Can you come in and change me and make me new, Lord? And I thank you, Jesus, for doing that for me today. In your name. Amen.

Man, if you gave your life to Christ today, here's what I want you to do. I'm excited because God's getting ready to do some things. You're going to be changed. You're going to be transformed. Things are going to start happening in your life.

So if you will fill out a form on our online, our online digital form, I meant to say this at the beginning for anybody who's even visiting today, there's a saltchurch.org card. If you'll put that down, if you'll, if you'll go to that and you'll, you'll type in and put, put down that you gave your life to Jesus today. Or if you're just a guest, just, just put your information in there. And we would love for you to, to connect.

We would love to connect with you and you with us. And we want to help you on your journey, uh, with, with God. I celebrate you. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be awesome.

Also, I want to mention, uh, giving today again, back to where we are. We don't have a building right now. And let me just celebrate this just for a minute. Uh, uh, you guys gave $30,000 just in one weekend last weekend to our building fund. And, and, and I am just overwhelmed with joy that, that God would provide that through you.

Um, so if you want to continue to give to our building fund above and beyond your tithes and offering, but you can also continue to give tithes and offering. If you go to, uh, you can either go to saltchurch.org slash give, uh, and enter in your information. You can also text us at 84321 and, uh, you can text, text give there. Or, uh, if you want to send it to our P.

O. Box 680, uh, P.O. Box 680, Virginia Beach, Virginia 23451. You can give that way.

We are doing this together, guys. We're building buildings. We're, I mean, we're going to be building buildings. Uh, we're, that, that's our future plan. We're going to be doing that, a place that we can salt the city.

Not only that, we're going to continue to give. We're never going to stop giving. We're going to give to the elder. We're going to give to ministries. We give, we gave to missions last week, some world missions things last week.

We're, we're giving, uh, to church planting. We're giving to so much. We're going to continue to give. We're not going to stop giving. Uh, and, and, uh, the building is just a place where we can work out of, but in our hearts, we really just want to surrender it all to Jesus today.

So, so, uh, thank you so much for being with us today. I don't want to hold you up any longer because I know 4th of July is waiting for you, but I love you guys. I can't wait to be back with you in person. That will be really, really soon. Keep up with the updates online, uh, on, on, uh, on, with your email, social media, or whatever source, uh, YouTube as well.

Uh, and we'll, we'll, we'll fill you in on what's happening. So have a great day. Love you. Salt church. Salt always makes a difference and a little bit of salt goes a long way.

So go be salt today.