Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: So if you've been with us these last few weeks, been in this little series called killing my old man. And this week is a conclusion. You guys finally get to have Rabbi Beck next week.
But I just want to review a little bit about what we've been talking about, especially if you haven't caught what we've been talking about.
This has been three parts. And the first part was recognizing the problem. The problem was what? The old me. So we had to identify the old me, see exactly what the old me looked like so we could deal with it. Second part, second week was creating a disruptive event, and this we called the death of me. So this is how do we kill the old me?
And this week we are working to recreate our identity through Messiah. This is called the new me. And even though we killed the old me last week, we're going to figure out how to keep that guy in the grave this week, okay? Because he's like whack a mole. I mean, everywhere you look, he's popping up, trying to get out. Right?
So the problem, as I've just alluded to, and this is what we've said from the beginning, is that most of us have come to faith in God through Yeshua, but we still have our old identity and mindset. Unfortunately, we may have added Yeshua to our identity, but we've never really surrendered our identity to. To him. Thus, our old man still controls us, and the new man is lying dormant somewhere in us. And we have to get this guy to the surface. We have to let him out. So this is actually Blake. If you can pull up the one photo that I had from last week. Again, last week we discussed the need for the old man to die. And we had this illustration of this guy right here. Remember him? Smeagol, aka Gollum.
And he is the sort of the representative that we have of this contradiction of two people wrestling out this battle within us of one person wanting to take over, another person wanting to take over the next minute. Sometimes we want to do the right thing, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we want to live by the flesh. So I got an email that really speaks to this, this week, asking this specific question. They sent this email with the quote from Romans 718 that says, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for I had the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. So that's a problem, right? So. And they asked, so how exactly does one acquire the ability to carry it out? What's the process or the solution.
So really?
Pardon me?
Really. That's what we're dealing with this week. We are working on the solution. I think originally in my original outline for this series, I had, the beginning of the week is the problem, second week is the solution, and then the third week is the work. And so we're going to be talking about the solution and the work that needs to be done. So I've got good news and I got bad news for you.
The bad news first, right? Okay. Always.
You heard about the. The guy that. The doctor that called the man, he said, I've got the good news, and I got bad news. Said the. He says, oh, my goodness. He said, the good news is, he goes, you have 24 hours to live. He says, that's the good news. What's the bad news? He says, I was supposed to call you yesterday.
So anyway, I've got good news, and I got bad news for you. Today we're going to do the bad news first. So the bad news is you were born with a Yetzer hara. Does everybody know what I mean by that? Gets her yet? Sir means inclination. It's basically a drive of force within us. The hara, that literally means the evil or the bad. Okay? And so the yes or hara is just the thing within us that has a tendency to gravitate towards doing something that is not necessarily evil or bad, but something that's not motivated by spiritual pursuits. Okay? This is the thing within all of us that makes us want to succeed in our jobs, makes us want to marry and have kids and buy a big home and. And whatever, all the different things. But it also can lead us down a very, very destructive path if left unchecked. Okay, so.
So the bad news is you were born with this, and you will have it until the day you die. So it's not going away anytime soon. Don't. Don't anybody start on that track, okay? The good news is that you're also born with yet or hotoven. Okay? The yes or ha tov is literally the good inclination. Okay? Ha tov, the good. So yes or ha tov, the good inclination. In our prayers, we say various things to ask God to help us with these. With this struggle inside us. We say things like, unite our hearts to love and fear your name. Now, if you haven't learned about what the liturgy and different things means, this sounds like we're saying, hey, all of us who are praying unite our hearts so we can be in one accord in unity. Right? But it really is a reference to the two hearts that we have within us. And this is in the Hebrew, we have this whole thing. I think I've mentioned it a few times, but the word Levabica, your heart is spelled with two vavs. And that is a reference that the sages say to the two hearts within us, these two inklings, these two passions and desires that are wrestling against one another within us. And so we pray that our hearts would be united to love and to fear. Your name. God's name. We also pray a prayer that says, compel our Yetzer hara to be subservient to you. Okay, that's a hard one, right? So we want our. We not only want to serve God with our yes. Or ato, the thing that naturally wants to serve God, but we have to figure out a way and ask God to help us to serve him with the Yetzer ha as well. But we have the problem of this constant battle.
It's not going to end.
This is where both the sacrificial work of Yeshua and our faithfulness to him is the game changer. Okay, so let's talk about this.
You guys are familiar with the encounter with Yeshua and Nicodemus, right? So, John, three famous line that we quote, you know, for God so love the world, he gave his only begotten son, so forth. And so within this, he has this conversation with Nicodemus. And Nicodemus is a teacher in Israel. He's a rabbi, he's a scholar, he's part of the Sanhedrin.
And Yeshua says this to him. He says, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot come into the kingdom of God.
And so Nicodemus, he responds, well, how can a man be born when he is old?
Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born. Now, from a purely western perspective, we think, you know, although this jew, he just doesn't get it, right. This. This guy Yeshua's bringing this new information and stuff, and he just didn't get it because he. He just is involved with, you know, the things that. That are so legalistic and things like that.
And so. But the thing that we don't get when we don't understand it from a jewish perspective, in a jewish context, is that Nicodemus already knew the terminology and the phraseology, and that was particular phrase and terminology for becoming a convert.
So think about this. I tell a jewish person, unless you become a jew, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. What does that sound like?
That's what they're hearing. That's what he heard in his mind. Unless you become jewish or a jew, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. Is like scratching his head, thinking, I was born that way, you know?
And so Yeshua is reusing this expression to show, just like you are going down under the waters of the mikveh in your conversion process to become something new, there has to be something that happens on the inside as well. And even though you may be born one way, you have to experience this transformation. So Yeshua answered, saying, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. So, you know, a lot of people get hung up on this one part.
Shua adds the phrase born of water to this. And so in, you know, catholic churches, high church denominations, everything, there's a huge emphasis and baptist denominations, of course, huge emphasis on this baptism. And there's an argument that, that goes on of the efficacy of baptism. What does the baptism actually do? What does the immersion actually do?
Is it your repentance, confession, and turning and clinging to Yeshua that changes things? Or is everything still the same until you actually undergo the waters of baptism?
And a lot of these denominations say, it only takes when you're water baptized.
Sabrina actually grew up in a church that basically said, it doesn't even take there.
It takes when you speak in tongues, which is very problematic.
So he has this phrase, unless you're born of water and spirit. Well, what does this mean?
It means that a person has to be transformed, like I said, both on the outside and the inside. He can't just make a private confession and go about his business.
There has to be a radical transformation between who we were and who we are, the old me versus the new me. Fortunately, we're not left alone to accomplish this, though, right? Yeshua told his disciples, but you will receive the power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. This is acts one eight. I grew up in a charismatic denomination, and so we always translated that, or, I should say, interpreted this to mean power to perform miracles or that kind of thing, cast out demons and so forth, which. That is one aspect of that. That's true. This is what Yeshua gave to his disciples. And he told him, but the problem is, he had already given them that power. In Luke nine, he sent out the disciples. He said, I give you all authority over demons and so forth, and to heal and everything. So he'd already given them that. So in acts one eight, what are they waiting on? What kind of power are they waiting on? And so my answer to this is, they were waiting for a power to do something different.
Paul in Romans one, he says, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it is the righteousness of God.
Excuse me. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith. From faith, or faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. So my question. And this is.
So, if that's the case, what is this righteousness of God? Well, it's the way God desires for us to live right when we are in right standing that is declared to be righteous. And so it's what he has revealed to us in his word. What about this phrase from. From faith. And this is the ESV, from faith for faith. That's an odd phrase. Well, I'm not a scholar here. I don't have a definitive answer. But knowing the Hebrew and the greek concepts of both the Hebrew word emunah for faith, and the greek pistos for faith, and how they can have a dual meaning, both of these, because we have two english words for this one word, but Greek and English, I mean, excuse me, Greek and Hebrew, they only have one word that can mean. Have a range of meanings. And so I think one could understand this. To read something like, from faith to faithfulness, maybe because this is our goal, right?
We start at one place, but we've got to end up somewhere else.
And so we start by having faith, but we end through that faithfulness.
Hebrews 914.
When the book author of Hebrews is comparing the sacrifices of Yeshua to the sacrifices of animals, he says, how much more would the blood of Messiah, who, through the eternal spirit, offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Now, a lot of people get hung up on this. Dead works. They think it's, you know, doing the Torah, but that's not at all what he's talking about. Dead works is simply the things that you're doing that don't have anything value to them, right? It's just you're going around life and doing stuff that. That has no eternal value to it. The things that. That doesn't matter in eternity. And so the things that actually remove you from God's presence separate you from him. And he says in this passage, from roman, I mean, excuse me, hebrews nine he says that God will purify our conscience from these things so that we can serve the living God. That sounds good, right? If we're struggling, we have. Our consciences are pulled one way and whatever, and we need that extra boost, that help. So, in this, God has promised that we can be transformed.
But it involves two parties.
Guess who those are.
Him and me. Him and us. Because he can't do all the work. He created us to be autonomous beings. He created us to actually do stuff. That's why we have a whole bible of instructions, right? We have all these pages. We have all the apostolic scriptures telling us all these things we need to be doing as well. But it also, you know, we can't do it on our own, either.
We can do a lot of it, but ultimately, it's a partnership.
He can only do so much without our involvement. So last week, we began to hit the topic of immersion, or baptism, or in the Hebrew tevila. Okay? And when we give our lives to God through our attachment to Yeshua, we experience this thing called new birth. And as the apostolic scripture tells us, we become what? A new creation. Very good. A new creation. Creation.
In the apostolic scriptures. We hear about this in two corinthians, chapter five.
But let me. Let me paint this picture for you.
By the way, Shelley Patterson, if you are online, if you had that baby and you haven't told us, you're in trouble. So hope you have a wonderful. We're praying for you. Have a wonderful birth. So she's due any day.
But an infant, when an infant is born, it doesn't become an adult overnight.
That would be a problem.
I tell people, I may have been born last night, but I read all night long.
But anyway, an infant, you know, they're helpless.
They're just cute, you know, they. All they do is eat, sleep. They receive external stimuli. They also have to pee and poop, but they can't clean themselves up yet. What's up with that? I mean.
I mean, get real. Come on, guys.
That's right. You made your mess.
Unfortunately, many believers are stuck in this stage of their spiritual development.
When they poop in their pants, they don't take any responsibility for it and expect God to continue cleaning up their messes.
They don't go to the restroom to do their business because that would be doing works, and that's legalism, because they are simply a sinner saved by grace. And if you know me, hopefully you know that. That's one of my pet peeve phrases.
That phrase is not, should not apply. To us, as if we have been transformed by Messiah, then that phrase doesn't apply to us. We were sinners saved by grace, and we are still saved by grace. But we are no longer that sinner, that person.
We are a new creation, and a new creation is something new, entirely different. Right? So if in Judaism, if a person converts, becomes a convert, you are not allowed to bring up who they were.
You're not allowed to bring up their past.
You're not to refer to them necessarily as a convert. You're supposed to see them on the terms of an equal, supposed to see them as the new person they are.
So last week, as I mentioned, we discussed the importance of immersion or baptism.
So when we come to God through Yeshua and undergo this water, the waters of the mikveh, we're like a newborn baby.
And unfortunately, most people, like I said, stay this way and don't develop and don't mature. Their development is stunned because they have no nourishment and no spiritual parent to disciple them.
They've been born again, only to die due to malnutrition.
So here's a big truth that nobody probably told you. When you came to faith, when you came to the Lord, when you came especially a lot of times when we come to faith, in certain traditions, the truth that is missing is redemption or salvation is not for the sake of freedom alone. Many people are so excited. They've been free, they've been forgiven, whatever.
But that is not the end game.
The end game is something completely different. So we are in a time right now between what, two holidays?
Passover, Pesach and Shavuot or Pentecost. We're in between these two. We're almost smack dab in the middle. Right. So at Pesach, what do we celebrate? What do we remember?
The exodus, redemption. Right.
At Shavuot, we remember celebrate the giving of the Torah.
But as the Ramban says, these two festivals are actually connected.
And what do we do in between them every day? We. What?
Count.
Count over what? No, I'm joking. We count the Omer. No. Do we count up or down?
Up. Okay. Because we are working toward something.
The Lord knew we needed a link between these two events. What's the link? It's this counting of the Omer. Because freedom has no purpose in and of itself.
Freedom can only enable one's purpose.
You're not free to just be free, because that gets you in a lot of trouble.
The Lord releases a person and sets them free.
Not so we can be free. He sets us free. So that we can fulfill that purpose that he created us to accomplish. And so many of us struggle with our old man because we're relishing in the fact that we're free rather than living out our purpose through the freedom that we were given.
You have a purpose. Every one of you in this room have a purpose. We all have a purpose. Are you living up to it? Are you pursuing it? Are you just willy nilly? I'm free. I've been set free. So I'm done.
So let's talk about this, how we truly become this new man.
Galatians 525 says, if we live by the spirit, then we will keep in step with the spirit. I've always loved that phrase. You know, if we live by the spirit, then we will keep in step with the spirit. I don't even know what that means. I mean, what does that mean? Right? How do you keep up? It's like, where'd he go?
No means we are walking with God and what he's doing instead of doing our own thing. And we're on the same path. We're on the same trajectory.
And so how do we do this? Why do we struggle with this? And I'm going to give you two reasons. We struggle with this and how to overcome them. Okay, so the first reason is sort of a double. It's either we are lacking fear or lacking love. If you guys have been following along in the Tanya portions that some of us guys are doing through the week, then you'll recognize this stuff that's been talked about quite a bit. And the second reason is we're feeding the wrong person. And I'll get to that in a minute.
So, fear and love are what we're going to call the two wings of the Talmud.
Talmud means a student or a disciple. Okay? So, we have love, we have fear. One on each side. So love on the right, fear on the left, because love. Love helps us to do the positive commandments. If you love someone, you're going to do things for them.
Fear is connected with the negative commandments that thou shalt not. If you have fear, you're like, oh, I'm not going to do that. Right. Let's explore this just a little bit more.
What? Why do I need to love God if I'm doing what he wants me to do?
You guys may have recognized this song, and when I started thinking about this, when people are questioning love, the first, of course, what's the first thing we think of? What's love got to do with it?
The second thing is do you love me?
Do I what?
Do you love me? Do I love you? For 25 years, I washed your clothes, cook your meals, cleaned your house, giving you children, milked your cow. And after 25 years, why talk about love right now?
Okay, for those of you who don't know this, this is fiddler on the roof.
And, you know, they've been married 25 years, and he just realized, my children are in love.
Are me and my wife in love?
How does this fit into things? We never really thought about that. Just thought this is what we were supposed to do, be committed and have the obligation.
And in our relationship with the Lord, it can be the same way.
We can just be doing what's right but not have that heart connection.
But guess what? We're commanded to.
We recite in the shema v'ahavta adonai, elohecha, bechule, vavacha.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all of your. And it's in the Hebrew, it's all your very. Okay, all of your much. It doesn't really make sense in English, right?
All of your resources, all of your everything.
And so this is how important it is, because God said, I want you to love me so much that I can't even give you a word to describe what that means because it entails everything.
So love is wonderful, and it's needed. It's a necessary component. It's that wing on the right.
But it doesn't necessarily keep us from sinning.
It should. But if you only have love for Hashem, it won't keep you from sinning.
Why? Because it's like the guy who's madly in love with his wife, but also madly in love with alcohol, or madly in love with another woman or whatever. Fill in the blank. Okay? You can have multiple loves.
They don't keep you from one another. And a lot of people have this problem if they don't have this other component of fear. And so why should we fear God?
A lot of people object. Perfect love casts out fear. We don't need to have fear of God. Right? But this is, of course, a misquote and a misunderstanding of this, because Yeshua told his disciples, he didn't tell the masses. He told his disciples in Matthew ten, he says, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.
Right?
So fear alone. If you only have fear, it's a barrier to intimacy, and it keeps everyone, including God, at arm's length.
It's the person who technically does everything, right, but can't find a loophole, but can find a loophole by getting by with anything he wants.
It's what the ramban says. A scoundrel. With the permission of Torah, you don't have fear of God, so he doesn't know the heart of God and how to truly love others. So, in this first scenario, without the fear of damaging the relationship, love presumes that one's actions have no effect on this relationship, therefore, no real consequence.
The second scenario, without love, all of our acts of service are nothing more than clanging symbols, to quote somebody that you guys may know.
So, fear of the Lord and love of him are the two wings that we need to soar spiritually. We have to develop these two forms of attachment, or we'll simply live stale, mediocre lives of in our spiritual existence. Fortunately, these can be developed if we are willing to put in the effort. So, let's go to solution number two, our problem number two with a solution. Okay, so, the first problem was we don't either fear or love. The second is that we are feeding the wrong person. And I'm not talking about your spouse or your kids, but you've heard this phrase, you are what you eat, right? So if you're a Twinkie, no.
If you eat twinkies, no.
But I want to modify this a little bit so we can have this broader sort of picture and change the word eat to consume.
So think about that. You are what you consume. So this includes more than food, because, really, that doesn't apply in this situation right now. But what do we consume? We consume television. We consume music, podcasts, books, social media, sports. I mean, we.
The business stuff. I mean, we consume. All of us consume every day, all day long. Okay. And something I was convicted about when I started writing my books is, I don't want to be just a consumer. I want to be a producer. And that should be the same rule we have spiritually as well. But in this case, we are what we consume. Think about the stuff that you spend your time on. That's what you know the most of. That's what you interact with. That's what you live, eat, breathe, and sleep.
I've got a very, very sad real life story that speaks to the dangers of this, and this is actual. Relates to actual food. But early on in our marriage, Sabrina and I, we met a young, very young couple back at the church that we were attending. They had come from very. Both of them had come from really tragic circumstances and bad homes, had got pregnant, had a kid, got married, and the wife, her mom, who was not married, had another child who was, like, two or so, and at that time, and. But she was a drug addict, and they tried to get custody over the kid because the kid was being neglected. The kid existed for, like, two years on strawberry milk, okay, and stayed in his crib. He couldn't walk.
Okay? This is a horrible, horrible, horrible incident situation of how neglect and just pumping junk into us without any regard of that can affect us very, very badly.
So too many of us exist on a diet of strawberry milk.
And then we wonder why we have spiritual malnutrition.
The new me has daily disciplines that focus my thoughts and my heart on my relationship with the Lord and keeps me from pursuing all these other things.
It develops a routine that places emphasis on my spiritual nature, not just my flesh, my new man, rather than my old man. And these are the things that Rabbi Damian is constantly teaching us and challenging us on.
We can't be stagnant and expect to flourish spiritually. And we have a great congregation. There's no doubt about it. We all do well. But this is just a constant reminder. We need these constant reminders and motivations, right, to not allow things to become stagnant.
So many years ago, and I'll conclude with this, many years ago, a friend of mine came to me and said he wanted to thank me for something. I was like, really? What? He said that although he had been a follower of Yeshua most of his life, he had always believed that the struggles he had and the habitual sins that he was trapped in were simply part of who he was on this side of death, there was nothing he could do to change things.
He had resigned himself to the fact that he was going to be the same person with the same problems and same struggles for the rest of his life.
He was simply a sinner saved by grace.
However, somehow, which I don't know exactly how, and I don't know the conversations or the teachings or whatever, through our relationship, he realized he didn't have to accept that reality anymore. But with God's help and a lot of effort on his part, he could walk away from those issues and be somebody different, someone new.
So I'm going to ask you this question today. Who is alive in you?
Have you been nursing the old man back to health after killing him for the last whatever? How many years of your life?
Or have you been throwing dirt on his grave?
Have you truly allowed your new man to live? And if not, today is a new day. You can begin by starving that old man inside of you and begin to feed the new man inside of you. The results will be astounding, I guarantee you. Shabbat Shalom.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Please visit our website, shalommakin.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. Macon, thank you for watching, and we look forward to connecting with.
