Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Last week we talked.
I introduced the first part of the series called killing my old man. And last week we really talked about just what is the old man? Okay. We gave that a thorough examination. And so after service, at some point in the afternoon, I got a text message. And I had several people contact me, various situations. But this one I want to bring to your attention. This just to point out something here.
This is an edited version of the text. Text to just keep everything confidential.
But he said your message was amazing today. Now, I actually forgot that part was in there. Okay. I just actually forgot that part was in there, he said, but they said, I'm struggling with an x, Y and z. Fill in the blank. And it's affecting my family. I don't know what to do. The image that I have of myself is not good. You remember us talking about image, self image, identity.
I'm always seeing the negative and experiencing such fear of moving forward. I'm the stagnant character you described. Remember the analogy we used of the fictional character in the books and how you have a dynamic character arc and that's the one you really gravitate to, but the ones that are stagnant, you sort of push to the side.
I'm the stagnant character you described, afraid to move forward, to go outside my comfort zone. I hate this about me, but I'm unsure of how to change. I watch as you have grown in your faith while I've fallen backwards. Please pray for me.
So I want to do more than pray, although I am doing that, I want to help. And this series, hopefully will give some direction in that.
And so this series has three parts. Number one, we did last week, that's recognizing the problem. And this was called the old me. Today we're going to talk about the death of me. And this is the second phase of that is what I call a create. To create a disruptive event. Okay. When to affect change, we have to have something that disrupts our normal flow of things. The way we always are, the way that we do things. We have to have some kind of disruptive event. And then next week, we are going to recreate our identity through Messiah Yeshua. Okay, so, and I have to say, I need you guys to pay attention. I need you to hone in today because today's message is very critical.
We're all on different spectrum. I don't want you to know that. I know that. And so we all have different places that we are in our journey. And some people are further along than others. Some people are just on a different wavelength or whatever. Some people are really on a whatever wavelength. Anyway, that's another. I'm just joking.
So some of you guys got my humor, some of you don't. That's okay.
But, you know, some of this is going to speak as if. What are you saying, Darren? I don't know God at all.
Some of you, you know, there are some people that need to hear this, but some of you, most of you, most of us, it's more nuanced than that. It's. I need a kickstart, a restart. I need some juice, I need some fuel going into this, okay? So that's the main thing. And I want you to realize that we have different spectrum that we're going to be dealing with. And so let's review what we talked about last week in a nutshell, and review the problem.
So the problem is, many of us have come to faith in God through Yeshua, but we still have our old identity and mindset.
We may have added Yeshua to our identity, but we may have never really surrendered our identity to him. Thus our old man is still in control and our new man lies dormant.
Big, big buzzword and pun intended around here, in the south especially, is cicadas.
Right?
But they've been lying dormant for years. Right. There's a, I think, 817, 18 year cycle one and then there's a 13 year cycle one. And they've. They've converged. And I think it's 2089 that we're going to have a five different groups that are going to converge. And so we have like an estimated 1 trillion cicadas that are emerging right now. And then in 2089, it's going to be over 50 million cicadas. I mean, 50 trillion cicadas.
Okay. And so get your bug out bags ready. No, I'm shaking.
Yeah. Dad jokes. Sorry. Sorry, dad jokes.
But my point in saying that is that these, these guys lay dormant and you never really think of them, you never see them until they start emerging from the ground. They're underground most of their life, and then they all of a sudden you see them come to life. Well, that's a lot of times what's happening within us. We have this underlying dormant self that we need to kickstart and make come to life. And that's. That's our goal here.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:05:50] Speaker A: And so we actually have an old man and a new man. We have this in. We have these two almost people within us that are battling, that are wrestling within us. And we would call these the flesh and we call the spirit, but we're going to call them the old man and the new man. Blake, can you hit that first slide? This is going to gonna have you guys. Blake, can you hit that first slide?
So. Nope, sorry, the picture.
So many of you guys may recognize.
Nope, the picture.
The photo. The image. There you go.
You may recognize these guys. And I'm gonna say, guys, because we have really. It's one person, right? If you've read the Lord of the Rings, if you watch the Lord of the Rings, who is this?
Or Golem? Golem. Right. Good. Both answers here. So you have this character wrestling with his identity. You have the Smeagol, the guy on the left, he's the. I want to be amiable. I want to do what's right. I want to do the right thing. And then you have the golem that's really trying to take control on the right, and he wants to just destroy and do evil, and he's very narcissistic and all that kind of stuff. And so, like Smeagol and Gollum, we have within us these two personalities at war with one another. And ultimately, one of these personalities has to win.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:27] Speaker A: They can't all continue to fight together and work, you know, be a dual system, like, actually what happens throughout Lord of the Rings with. With Gollum.
But what does it mean to be a disciple? Because this is how everything factors in. What does it mean to be a disciple? If we have been an old man and we are supposed to be a new man, but yet we're a disciple of Yeshua, how do we transition. How do we make that transition from one person or one identity to the other? Many of you guys know that I wrote a book several years ago called the four responsibilities of a disciple. And the first responsibility in those four responsibilities is. Anybody know? I don't know if anybody. Dedication. Dedication or devotion. Very good. Thank you. Got a student right there.
Of course. Of course. The timbers are always going to be a first on everything. They're going to like, I know they're being steadying, so that's great. So devotion and forsaking all other people, all other things for your rabbi.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: And so this is really where it begins. We have to decide if we're willing to forsake everything for Yeshua.
Abraham Cohen. Some of you guys have read the book, every man's Talmud. It's a synopsis, sort of summary of the major themes of the Talmud. He says this. He says the greatest dignity was attached to the profession, profession of a teacher. And he was held in the highest esteem in certain matters of jewish law. It gives him precedence even over a parent, because the parent only brings the child into the life of this world, whereas his teacher brings him into the life of the world to come.
Okay? When we're talking about spirituality versus just our flesh, so many people who go to church, maybe even attend a messianic synagogue or even call themselves Christian or whatever term they want to call themselves by name, they maybe even have said a sinner's prayer.
They never actually become a disciple of Yeshua.
You think? What? Isn't that what it means? No, it's not what it means. But why do they not become disciple if they've done all these other things? Because they haven't really counted the high cost associated with that decision. How much does it cost?
Our entire life. So, in Luke five, we have an example where Yeshua is teaching, and he's near the sea of Galilee, of course, he's near the. The galley quite a bit. And this is his stomping ground, and he's teaching the crowds. He decides he's going to go out and get on the boat and get away from the crowd a little bit and get it. Use the natural acoustics of the lake there to teach from.
And so the guys had just finished. They're fishing. They're putting everything up. They're cleaning their nets and everything. And Yeshua gets out in the boat. He teaches for a good while, and then he tells Peter, said, hey, cast your net. He's like, what do you mean? We've been fishing all day, and we didn't catch a thing.
But you're Yeshua. I get it. I get it. Okay. I'll do it just to say I did. Okay. So he throws a net, and what happens?
Huge catch.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: They're struggling to get it in. This is the way Yeshua works. He tells you, you obey, and you reap the benefits from it.
But right after that, this is what happens.
It says, and they. And when they had brought their boats to land, this is talking about the disciples here. They left everything and followed him. This is in Luke, chapter five, if you want to refresh your memory on that. So my question to us is, have we left everything?
Boaz is about to embark on a journey and leave everything that he knows. I mean, this is akin to when we moved to Georgia. We left everything that we knew, every. Every person, every thing. We barely knew.
Rabbi Damian and Kelly, and we knew that the Turners, who were hours away, that's it. Okay. And that was difficult. Boaz is going to be on a further away journey. He's got a few contacts of people he's going to get to know.
But in our journey, in our faith journey, we have to be willing to forsake everything. And my question to you is, has following Yeshua cost you anything?
Has it? Because if it hasn't, you might want to reconsider how committed you are and what kind of transformation has taken place in your life.
There was a time when John's. I'm talking about John, the immersion, when his disciples, they saw Yeshua's disciples immersing a bunch of people, and they're like, you know, we. We've been immersing for a long time, and these other guys are coming along, and they're. They're immersing people now. What's the deal? Copycat?
So they. They get. They get up in arms and they tell John, they say, hey, this guy is over here doing what we're doing, you know? And. And so, you know, his disciples have one response. Their response is, I'm jealous. You know, we can't do that. But John's response is something totally different. And this is the pattern for what we need to have in our life. He said the famous line, he said, he talking about Yeshua must increase, but I must decrease.
But what does this mean? You know, we all inside, for some reason, we have this flesh, and it's going and going and going. We have this internal desire. A lot of us. I want, I need. I I.
You know, have you ever listened to yourself talk? And how many times your sentences start with the word I? I mean, they do that in projects and stuff like that in class and speech classes and everything, but it's. It's remarkable how many times we begin a sentence with I, and it's all about us. I mean, I know. I know people. I've had people in my life, especially some people growing up, that when they started talking, it was all about, I did this, I am this, I did this, I did that and all that kind of stuff. And you could never get a word in edgewise, and it was all about them. Is that somebody that you normally gravitate to and want to hang out with? No. It's the people that are asking about you, how you are, what you've been doing, how was your day? How was your life and everything? Those are the people you gravitate towards. And so when we had this I I I mentality, it drives us in the opposite direction of where we're supposed to be headed. We are supposed to be imitating Messiah. He didn't come to teach us hedonism of just eat, drink and be merry, enjoy every pleasure of life that you can. Although we are supposed to enjoy the pleasures of this life, he enjoyed the pleasures of this life. And as a matter of fact, he was accused of being hedonistic because people didn't understand.
But his mission and his example was to lay down his life so that he could receive it anew. John 1017 says, for this reason, the father loves me because I lay down my life, that I may take it up anew. And so if Yeshua had to do this, how much more so do we need to be able to do that? Right? So, as I mentioned last week, people may have simply added Yeshua onto their lives. Like they put on a new sweater, put on a new pair of shoes or whatever. They've never really counted the cost of what it means to be a disciple.
You know, we arrange our lives according to what's important. We prioritize.
And you can look at a person's calendar generally, if they keep one, and see what's important to them. And unfortunately, most of that usually involves or revolves around activities such as sports, entertainment, food, whatever, okay? And very few of those activities on a given calendar involve spirituality.
But we, as disciples of Yeshua, if we call ourselves by his name, we need to change that. Our lives should revolve around the things of God. And if we're truly a disciple of Yeshua, then we've made teshuva. What is teshuva is repentance of our sins and renouncing our previous way of life, we've submitted ourselves to Yeshua's kingship. We haven't simply said, I believe in God. I want to be a believer. I want to follow this guy or whatever. But we have changed something. We have made a drastic commitment and devotion, and our lives are radically different. This is a point I want to emphasize here.
Becoming a disciple of Yeshua involves something in the Hebrew that's called Betul hayash. Everybody say, Betul Hayesh means nullification of the self. That's really what it means, nullification of the self. We have to figure out how to die to ourselves.
There's a mystical concept in Judaism, and don't you turn this off or whatever if you're watching online, said mystical. But it's a concept within Judaism of the merkava, the chariot of God. Now, I'm not going to go into all that stuff, but really, the goal of the Hasid, the goal of the person who is seeking God wholeheartedly. Our goal is to be God's Merkava, to be God's chariot. What in the world is that? Like, get on my back. I don't know. Okay. No. What is a chariot? Let me think of it. Similar to our car or automobiles today, a car doesn't. I can't say that anymore. Can I start saying a car doesn't drive itself? But things have changed a lot lately. Right.
But a chariot doesn't drive itself for sure.
And most cars don't. And technically they don't. They've got to have some assistance. Right.
And so the chariot, the car, the automobile, whatever, what's the purpose? The purpose is to serve the driver. It's to take the driver where the driver needs to go. It's to do the will of the driver. And so the goal of one who is following the Lord is really to be that is to be a chariot, is to be someone whose will is nullified before the Lord so that his will can be imposed on ours and he can do in us and through us anything that he needs to without our will bumping into his. Okay, but that's the hard part. That's the challenge.
There's a article I want to read a little excerpt from on this concept from Ur semeyach. It's a great teaching resource website that I get a lot of teaching resources from. But anyway, this is a rabbi, Moshe Newman.
He says, rabbi Shimon bin Lachish said, the teachings of the Torah are not established within a person unless he kills himself for the Torah. What I mean by that. So this, I searched for this article. I didn't know that they had an article like this. I'd known this teaching for a long time, trying to find out where I could find some succinct summation of it. But basically there's a passage in the book of numbers that says, these are the laws of a man who dies in his tent.
This is the law of the man who dies in his tent. And we just take it at face value. We say, go on.
But the jewish way is, let's dig a little deeper. So this is what this is all about.
Rabbi Shimon bin Lakesh bases this teaching on a verse that seems to call out, explain me. The Torah states, this is the law, or this is the Torah. It uses the word Torah if a man dies in a tent. And phrasing is just a little bit different, too. The same hebrew words, but we can phrase it in our translation a little bit different. This is the Torah.
If a man dies in a tent, anyone entering the tent, and anything in the tent shall be ritually impure for seven days. Why in the world is the Torah mentioned in this verse? As Rashi explains in the Talmud commentary on the Talmud, he says, where do we find that a person should die in the tents of Torah?
And why should it be that a person needs to kill himself over Torah. In order for the Torah's teachings to be established within him? What's up with that?
Ras Lakesh's teaching is cited as halacha, basically like jewish law, by the Rambam Maimonides. You've heard that name as well in his Mishnah Torah, his famous, famous work on the Torah.
The Rambam writes, the words of Torah will not be permanently acquired by a person who applies himself feebly to attain them. Not by those who study amid pleasure and in abundance of food and drink. Rather, one must give up his life for them, constantly straining his body to the point of discomfort. Without granting sleep to his eyes or slumber to his eyelids. Rambam continues writing, our sages alluded to this concept. This is the Torah should a man die in a tent. Meaning that the Torah cannot be permanently acquired. Except by a person who gives up his life in the tense of wisdom.
In this room, there's a lot of people that have specialties of different things. Okay. I can look, go around the room and pick out people that know a lot of stuff. And you have specialized in such. I mean, I just happen to look at Karen and others that, you know, you have this physical therapy and different things, right? You had to go to school for that for years and years and years. You had to internalize. There's doctors, there's lawyers. There are different things.
You invest your life into this knowledge, into this life becomes a new life for you. You invest in learning.
Look at Roger over there. Mechanic. And I'm mechanically declined. I tell people, hey, I got some good news for you. I changed the regulator on my window the other day by myself.
And the best two parts about it, three parts about it is, one, I didn't kill myself. Two, I had no leftover parts.
And three, it actually works.
So we're doing good.
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.
But you have people that have invested. They have invested in becoming something and being a person who now they can do x.
They can be in a situation, and they are comfortable in that situation. Like, you know, some whole deal with Roger.
I'm not comfortable getting into the nitty gritty of the things that he gets into, it's way above my pay grade.
But the people that have invested in those things, it's just swimming in their natural habitat.
Doctor Brionis getting inside people's heads, that's deep.
So, yeah, but the point is, the things that are important to us, the things that we want to use for a lifetime, we have to invest in. We have to make the time, create the priority, make the investment to become that person. How much more so should we die to ourselves and our own lives to become a disciple of Yeshua and make that investment?
Because becoming a disciple means killing my old man.
Last week we talked about how before we came to Yeshua, we were dead. We were walking corpses.
Well, this week we're discussing what it means to kill that corpse so that it can be resurrected with new life. But how do you kill a corpse? I mean, this thing is getting more like the zombie apocalypse as we go because the corpse of our old man continues to kick and scream and fight its way out of the grave.
So we have to do something about it.
Here are some passages that we need to look at. Colossians 211 through 14. And I meant to apologize ahead of time if this goes a little over, because I have a lot to say today that it's important. Colossians 211 through 14. In him also, you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism. I had Blake put up these slides here so you could see the passages I was reading. The emphasis we have underlined, having been buried with him in baptism, or we would say immersion, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead, and you who were dead in your trespasses and uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us.
So, romans six, three, four, we are buried with him in baptism. This is a concept that repeats over and over through Paul's writings. It says, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Messiah Yeshua, were baptized into his death? We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Messiah was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, we too might walk in newness of life. And so in these two passages, we had this connection between immersion, baptism and the resurrection to new life.
A mikvah that's the hebrew phrase for the implement that's used for baptism, whether that's a spring, a river, an actual physical built mikveh, whatever.
This is a huge thing within Judaism, and it should be a huge thing for us as well, because we, our followers, are Master Yeshua, who is the jewish messiah.
I think, unfortunately, I mean, this is no criticism to us, but I think, unfortunately, we've not placed a good enough emphasis on people taking a mikveh when they come to faith in Yeshua. I mean, we don't deal a whole lot with that here. Generally, people come in and they're already a disciple, and we're bringing them to a deeper walk or whatever. But there are some times that we need to do that, and some of us in this room, we may need to evaluate and say, hey, guess what?
I need to do that. I've never done that. I've never really made that public confession. I've never.
And my life is different. I've now completely devoted my life to Yeshua, and I want to make that public, and I want to make that change in my life. I want to make a radical declaration and change. And so Didache, some of you guys are familiar with Didache, an early work purported to be by the apostles to the gentile disciples coming into the faith.
It takes it seriously. It says, before the immersion, before the baptism, let the one being baptized fast and the one.
No, no, I'm sorry, I read that wrong. Let the one who is overseeing the baptism fast, and then let the one being baptized or immersed fast and whoever else can. It's a community effort. It's not just a person doing something.
This is a huge different mindset.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: But you shall order the one who is immersed to fast one or two days before. And so this is a preparation. It's a spiritual preparation. It's not something that, you know, I've. I've raised my hand in a class and I, you know, come down or whatever and then get baptized and then 20 years of my life go by, and I was like, I think, hey, yeah, I did that. Yeah, I'm good.
And my life isn't. Isn't any different.
When we are immersed into Messiah, things have radically change.
I love this song. This is a song that I think of quite a bit when this topic comes up, but it's a. It's a. It's a heavier christian rock group called we as human. And this song is called lay me down. I love this. This chorus and part of this verse. But this song is all about their baptism and how they. They're transformed in this. And this is what it says. The chorus says, lay me down in the waves.
And that graphic I have up here is sort of a representation of that. Let the water wash away and if I leave with the tide in the morning I will rise so lay me down don't lift me out let me drown take a breath hold it in and sink beneath feel the eyes of the living watching me this is the witnesses. Lay me down in the water leave the past behind there's a time to be born and a time to die and somewhere they collide love that line.
Immersion is a starting point. We have a fresh start. Our old man is washed away so that the new man can emerge.
So if you've never been immersed in a mikveh, never been baptized as a public confession, that you've died yourself and resurrected as a disciple of Yeshua, I want you to seriously consider it if you're willing to make that commitment.
There's a devotion we did a few days ago, if you are counting the Omer, and some of you guys are using the Chabad Omer counter app. I love this devotion from a few days ago that really corresponds along with this. It says, nothing can hold you back, not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment, you can abandon your past.
And once abandoned, you can redefine it. If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power.
The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and it's honey salvaged.
As we read last week, Paul wrote about the struggle of his old man. Romans seven, verses 18 through 20 says, for now, excuse me, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now, if I do what I do not want is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So we. We went over that last week, and that is really very difficult to even read because all the dos and do nots and wants and all that kind of stuff in there. But you get the idea there's a struggle there's. A power struggle within him. And so what's the solution? Well, if we read to the next chapter, chapter eight, he alludes back to something he's already said. But if we haven't read the full passage, we miss it. In chapter eight, he says, but if Messiah is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness. If the spirit of him who raised Yeshua from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Messiah Yeshua from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. So Paul's difficult to understand, as we found out from Peter in second, I believe. Is it first or second Peter? Anyway, chapter three, he's difficult to understand for many reasons. But in this particular case, many people misunderstand him because they don't read the full context. You know, we just pick out passages and choose them here, and then we create our own story.
But we need to read several passages, several chapters at a time at least, if not the whole book, to understand this. Because he's already told us what the solution is in the previous chapter, in chapter six, he says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin? That grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized, immersed into Messiah Yeshua were immersed into his death, we were buried with therefore with him by baptism into death in order that just as Messiah was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we've been united with him in a death like this, like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this. We know that our old self insert old man here was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might not. Excuse me. The body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now, if we have died with Messiah, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Messiah. Sorry, this is a long passage, but I want you to get this. We know that Messiah being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. How many would like that, having known dominion over you? Right? For the death he died. He died to sin once for all. But the life he lives, he lives to God.
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God through Messiah Yeshua.
And here's the summation right here.
Let not sin, therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. And here's the key verse for sin will have no dominion over you. So most people who are immersed in Yeshua don't realize the implications.
Our immersion in Yeshua means dying to ourselves so that he might live in and through us. So how do we put off the old man? Put away the old man, subdue the flesh, become the character with the amazing character arc of transformation.
How do we truly live?
It's actually quite simple. We first have to die.
And if we haven't died, the old man, the old me, the old you, still controls us. And all of our choices, harbors all of our fears, all of our doubts, and prevents us from ever experiencing the new life that Yeshua came to give us.
What does that new life, that new man look like?
That's what we'll discuss next week.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom please visit our website, shalom macon.org, to learn more about us. Join our live services, access other teachings, sign up for our newsletter, join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world, or contribute to the work of Shalom Akin. Thank you for watching, and we look forward to connecting with.
