Keith Battle - Stay Connected - Part 2

Genesis chapter 25. This is chapter 25. Let me celebrate Pastor James Marshall for the great message he delivered last week. If you were here, I celebrate all our pastors in the ministry that God has entrusted to our church. What a blessing we have in our pastors on our team! Last time I was with you all, I started talking about something, and you know, I’m usually pretty active on social media, but I don’t remember ever being asked this much to continue discussing something as I was a few weeks ago when I began talking about staying connected. So, I’m going to continue that today, beginning at verse 27 of Genesis chapter 25. I’ll start reading there. It says, «As the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter; he was an outdoorsman. But Jacob had a quiet temperament, preferring to stay at home.» Verse 28: «Isaac loved Esau because he enjoyed eating the wild game Esau brought home, but Rebecca loved Jacob.» One day when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau arrived home from the wilderness, exhausted and hungry. What was he, exhausted and hungry? I’m just checking to see if you’re with me. Esau said to Jacob, «I’m starved; give me some of that red stew.» This is how Esau got his other name, Edom, which means red. «All right, ” Jacob replied, „betray me your rights as the firstborn son for some stew.“ Verse 32: „Look, I’m dying of starvation, ” said Esau. „What good is my birthright to me now?“ But Jacob said, „First you must swear that your birthright is mine for some stew.“ So, Esau swore an oath, thereby selling all his rights as the firstborn to his brother Jacob for what? For some stew! Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and lentil stew. Esau ate the meal, then he got up and left, and he showed contempt for his rights as the firstborn. My subtitle today is „It Ain’t Worth It.“ The concept I shared with you last time may be novel to some of you from a nomenclature standpoint, but experientially, I don’t know of any human being who hasn’t talked to themselves. Everybody talks to themselves. How many of you talk to yourself sometimes? You’ve got to talk yourself into something sometimes; you’ve got to talk yourself out of something. You may not know what the psychological terminology is for those conversations, and we may not have had a heightened awareness that this dialogue was happening, but we all talk to ourselves. We have what I call internal meetings, and I believe these meetings are important because of the human constitution—the way we are assembled anatomically, emotionally, psychologically, and all the complexities that make us who we are as human beings require us to have an awareness that there’s more to me than what you see. In fact, tell someone next to you, „There’s more to me than what you see.“ See, yeah, I have a body—that’s what I live inside of. A body is where my sensory capacities come from—my ability to sense, to smell, see, taste, hear; that’s the sensory part of me. Then we have a soul, which, I mean, there have been volumes of books written on the human soul, where there exist in it the mind, the will, and the emotions. I also believe we all have a spirit, which connects—the highest part of us that connects to God—that is quickened or made alive when we establish our relationship with God. And then there’s a part of us that the Bible speaks of that I didn’t really talk about last time, but many people try to connect it to the body, yet it is distinguished from the body, and it’s called the flesh. The reason I distinguish it from the body is that the flesh is not just physical. The flesh is a drive; it is a nature, a proclivity, and a propensity. It is what makes us capable of behaving contrary to our beliefs. The flesh is more than skin; it is the capacity to mess up. You can love God; you can shout, „I love God, ” all you want, but you still have flesh. It is the capacity to err, and the ideologies of the flesh—the suggestions that come to us from the flesh—are usually in direct conflict with the spirit. In fact, the Bible says the spirit and the flesh are at war with each other. This is going on all the time. In fact, I can pretty much evaluate the direction of my life based on which part of me is leading. If my spirit is leading me, I’m going to be straight; if my flesh is leading me, I can live just as recklessly as anyone. I wish I could tell you that since the day I got saved, my spirit has been in control; I’d be lying, and you would be too unless you got saved at 14. Your spirit hasn’t been in control since you’ve been saved either. Because I’m a believer, I believe that although God is one, He has revealed Himself in three different ways: through God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Father and though all three are equal in deity, they have voluntary roles—two of them have taken on voluntary roles of submission as it relates to the function of God’s redemptive plan on Earth. So, the Father sets the…