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Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community
Chapel.

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My name is Joe, I'm
one of the pastors here,

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and if you are seeing me on the screen

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in East Hall or in the Gym, welcome.

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I have to do that
because we are in the middle of remodeling

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our sanctuary as part of our
Every Minute Matters campaign,

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and that means we are displaced
for the time being.

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We have all kinds of services,

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everybody's going to a different service
they went to before.

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And I just want you to know,
this isn't the first time that happened.

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Back in 1997, when we were a church
of a little less than 600 people,

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we sold our building to Seton Catholic

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School up there on Stow Road,
and we moved into Cog Valley

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Christian Academy for three years
while we built this building,

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and for three years
we did what we called church out of a box.

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We were displaced, we would pull up
a big truck in the back of the school

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every Sunday, and we would unload
everything we needed to do church.

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And then at the end of the services,
we would load it back in.

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We did that rain or shine, snow or sleet
and we had a blast.

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It was,

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I remember laughing together
with guys in the middle of winter

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when somebody threw a package
of baby wipes and they were frozen solid,

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and we thought there were going to be some
chapped buns today, you know?

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But we
grew not just in a number of people,

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we grew closer together.

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And that's what I want to encourage
you with now.

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Church people are people of habit.

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So you've been coming any length of time
usually sit in the same section

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around the same people,
and now you're around different people.

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So go ahead and ask them who they are,
how long they've been coming.

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Lean into this time that we are displaced,

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check out a different venue,
but just see what God does.

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Because part of the thing
when I look back on the time we did

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church out of the box,
is some of my favorite memories.

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That's what I want for you.

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When you look back on this summer of more,
that you will look back with

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great memories of what God did in
and with and through you during this time.

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All right.

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Okay.

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We are in a series on Proverbs

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where we're looking for wisdom
and we're calling it More Wisdom.

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More life.

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Wisdom is what you need
for all those decisions

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in life that are not right or wrong
decisions.

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The right and wrong decisions in some ways
are the easy ones.

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Because at least
you know what God has said when he gives

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this clear instructions
about your sexuality, or about your money,

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or about how to treat other people,
that's easy, because at least you know.

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But then there are other decisions
where you

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you just don't know exactly what to do.

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That's when you need wisdom.

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And one of the interesting things
about Proverbs is that Proverbs

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doesn't tell us so much
how to make wise decisions as it does.

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How to become the kind of person
who makes wise decisions.

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And today
we come to the topic of self-control.

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And this is the proverb.

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This is Proverbs
chapter 28 verse or chapter 25, verse 28.

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A man without self-control is like

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a city broken into and left without walls.

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A man without self-control is

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like a city broken into and left
without walls.

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A person without self-control
is not going to live their best life.

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If you don't have self-control,
you're going to mess your life up,

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and probably the lives of the people
that are around you.

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Okay, so here are my three points
that I want to pull out.

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Just cover.

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In our time together,
I want to talk about the danger,

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the cause and the cure.

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That's it.

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The danger, the cause and the cure.

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First the danger.

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So Solomon, who wrote this proverb,
says that a man without self-control

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is like a city broken into
and without walls.

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One of the great advantages,
if you lived in the ancient world,

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was to live in a city with walls,

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because walls meant safety,

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it meant security, it meant peace.

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And to live there
meant that you enjoyed those things.

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Nehemiah.

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In the book of Nehemiah,
Nehemiah is an exile.

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Israel has been conquered by Babylon.

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He has gone to Babylon.

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He has risen to the place
of being the cupbearer for the king.

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And he hears that
the walls of Jerusalem are rubble.

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And he sits down and he weeps.

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And then he does.

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He kind of comes up with a plan to restore

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Jerusalem, and his plan
isn't to have economic restoration.

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He doesn't come with a like a temporary
government or anything like that.

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What he comes with
is a plan to rebuild the walls,

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because he realized that the walls
were the most important thing,

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because the walls were protect anything
and everything that's valuable to you.

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Solomon says.

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Your soul, my soul, are just like that,

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that we that self-control is what protects

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what we think
and what we feel is valuable in our lives.

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And without self-control.

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We are like a city without walls.

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All right.

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So he has come to us
and told us this, this whole idea

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that self-control is what we need in
self-control is the ability

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to manage your desires,
to manage your longings.

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It's actually the ability
to order your desires in the best order

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possible, in order to have the best life
you can have.

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I remember when my kids were teenagers,
and I was trying to talk to them

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about self-control,

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and they wanted me to give them
more freedom so they could make

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their own decisions instead of me
making so many decisions for them.

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And I don't know if they'd taken
a physiology course or what.

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This is what I landed on, I said.

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I said, self-control is like this.

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There are two types of creatures.

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There are creatures with endoskeleton
and creatures with endoskeleton.

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And in

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creatures like a human
being, where your bones are in the inside.

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And so your strength and structure
come from the inside out.

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And then in skeletons like a crab, where
the strength comes from the outside in.

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And I said to them, listen,
until I'm sure that you are formed

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an end skeleton and you have strength
from within to manage your desires.

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I will be your ecto skeleton,
and I will make those decisions for you

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like you need to do your homework
before you watch the movie.

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I wanted to find a way to see
if they could

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order their desires
in the best possible way.

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One of the dangers, by the way,
of growing up in a home like mine,

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where the parent was responsible
for giving the structure,

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is that sometimes
in, the child can go away to college

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and then find out that all their structure
and strength came from outside of them,

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and they get to college
and they become a city without walls,

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and their lives are just run over.

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And that's
what you hear about all the time.

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So that's the danger.

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That means my second point,
which is the cause

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if you have no self-control,
then you're you're in a terrible trouble.

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I mean, you'd be homeless

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like, my my two year
old grandson has very little self-control.

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But he's only he's only two,
but he can't live on his own.

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That's what that means.

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You know,
most of us have some self-control.

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We have walls.

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But we might have breaches in the walls.

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Places that aren't completely solid.

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You know, the Bible has a couple of images
for Satan.

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One of them is in John chapter
ten, where Jesus says that Satan is

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like a thief who comes in
to steal and kill and destroy.

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And then in first Peter, he describes
Satan as a lion who is prowling around.

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So if you think of you,
your soul being like a walled city,

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you have Satan prowling around
looking for a breach that he can get into

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in order to steal and kill and destroy.

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Right.

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And then the question is,
what causes a breach?

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Well, if self-control is the ability
to order your desires

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in the best possible order,
then a breach happens.

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When an order gets
when a desire gets out of order,

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when a teenager decides to watch the movie
and not do his homework,

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and then he never gets around
to his homework,

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that's a breach that there will be chaos
that happens.

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After that.

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He doesn't know exactly how much chaos.

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There's a movie.

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Years ago, starring Ted Danson
and Ethan Hawke.

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And in that movie, Ethan Hawke as The Sun,
Ted Danson as the father, and Ted Danson

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had left the family years ago,
and the family had kind of blown up.

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And now Ethan Hawke was a young,
young man,

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and he sits down with his father
and he says to him, what happened?

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Why did you leave us?

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Why did our family just disintegrate
and blow up?

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And after some hemming and hawing
and Ted Danson said, well,

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I guess when I was working and

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I started making money,
I felt like a success.

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So I wanted to work more.

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And the more I worked, the more
I felt like I was failing at home,

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and the more that made me want to work.

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And then things just fell apart.

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What happened?

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I mean, there's nothing wrong
with wanting to be successful.

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Nothing wrong with making money.

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What happened with Ted Danson in that
movie is that it just got out of order,

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and it caused a breach,
and then he lost everything.

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Felicity Huffman, 2019.

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She was the star of the sitcom Desperate

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Housewives, and in 20 1817,
she was like a darling.

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And then in 2019, she got arrested
because she got put in prison,

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because she spent $15,000

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to bribe a proctor of the SAT
to correct her daughter's answers

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so that her daughter could get
into the college she wanted to get into.

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What happened?

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There's nothing wrong

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with wanting your daughter
to get into the college that she wants.

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Nothing wrong with loving your daughter.

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What happened
was that desire got out of order

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and became so important to her
that it caused a breach,

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and she ended up in prison,
losing everything that she held dear.

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So how do we create a life

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where our soul is protected,

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where we have walls
and no breaches in our walls?

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And that brings me to my final
point, which is the cure.

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A few weeks ago, I read a

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novel about a terrorist,
and in that story, the mastermind

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who recruited the terrorist was describing
how he got him to do everything.

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And he said he was a young man
without self-control.

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And somebody without self-control can
easily fall into the control of another.

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It's like Bob Dylan
wrote a song back in the 60s and 70s.

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Everybody serves somebody and he says, it
may be the devil,

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it might be the Lord,
but you gotta serve somebody.

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The reason that's so important is Felicity
Huffman didn't wake up one morning

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and think, hey,
I'm going to try something that could

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and will land me in prison,
which she got up that morning

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and just said,
I love my daughter so much that she became

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the servant of that desire.

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There's a guy named Jonathan Edwards
who is an 18th century pastor,

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theologian, thinker.

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He's actually considered
one of the best minds

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that ever came out of America.

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And he said something that I think
is pretty profound.

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He said that every human being always does
what they most want.

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They always follow the deepest desire.

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And I say, that sounds profound.

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That's profound to me.

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Because if that's true, that means

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that the secret for self-control
is not willpower.

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And I always thought it was always
thought like, I want something really bad.

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I just have to will myself
to not get that.

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But that's not what he says.

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That's not the way it works.

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And somebody challenged him
and he said, no, I've had to do things

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I don't want to do.

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Like I got robbed
and I gave the guy my money.

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I didn't want to give him my money.

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And what Jonathan Edwards said was,
oh no, no, you

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your desire was for your life
more than money.

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Your your greatest desire always wins.

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And of course, the kicker with that is
sometimes if something gets out of order,

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then the thing we desire
the most is what we lose.

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I read an article

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about the Godfather movies
because that was really interesting.

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And and this article said that one of the
that the whole Godfather one and two was,

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was designed to bring you
to the very end of Godfather two,

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because Godfather one, the way
the reason The Godfather became

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the Godfather was all because the family,
everything was about the family.

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The family was close.

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The family was to be protected.

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The family was.

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You were loyal to the family
at the end of Godfather two,

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Michael Corleone,
who's the godfather, is sitting.

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This is the last scene.

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He's sitting in a garden, alone
in a chair.

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The wind is blowing and he has nobody.

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He has no family left.

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And the reason is because

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of self-control that his desires were out.

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It created a breach.

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And what he held dear was the story.

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So how do we make sure?

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How do we make sure our desires
are in the proper order?

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Whenever I ask a question like that. What?

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How are things supposed to be?

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I always go back to the Garden of Eden
and in the Garden of Eden.

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I don't think Adam and Eve had they.

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I don't think they struggled
with self-control, at least not at first.

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I think they loved being with God.

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They loved to walk with God.

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I don't think they wanted anything
too much.

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I don't think they wanted food too much.

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I don't think they wanted success
too much.

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I don't think they wanted sex too much.

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I don't think I think everything was in
the order that it was supposed to be in.

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And then Satan comes and Satan tempts

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them to want something more than God.

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And what's interesting
is that Satan didn't tempt them to go

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from loving God to hating God.

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What Satan did was all.

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All he needed to do
was get God from being number one

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to big number two.

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That's it.

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And that caused enough of a breach
for Satan to come into our world,

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to steal and kill and destroy everything.

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There's a reason in the Gospel of Matthew

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that Jesus says
that the greatest commandment is to love

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the Lord your God with all your heart,
soul, and mind.

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Because loving God is the secret
to everything.

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The secret to self-control is not

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willpower, it's affection.

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So the question is,
then how do we love God?

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How do we get to the place
where we love him with all our heart

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and our soul and our mind?

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Now there's a story I read years ago.

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It's a great story.

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Story about a man was riding a train
and there were two men on the train.

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He was watching them.

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They seemed like
they had a kind of a special relationship.

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And all of a sudden
one of those guys went into a seizure,

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and his friend picked him up
and laid him in the aisle of the train

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and cradled his head in his lap
and tried to comfort and soothe him

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until the seizure was over
and his friend fell asleep.

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And the guy who was witnessing this
said to him, tell me about your friend.

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Tell me what's going on.

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And the man said, well,
my friend and I were.

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We served in the war together,
and one time

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we were in a firefight in the jungle,
and I got shot in my legs, and

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I was there in the jungle, and I couldn't,
I couldn't walk, and I was going to die.

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He came back for me and he put me
on his shoulders and he carried me out.

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He saved me.

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Five years ago,
I found out he had this condition.

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And so I sold my house
and I've come to care for him.

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And then he said this because Mr..

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After what he did for me, there
isn't anything I wouldn't do for him.

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We take communion every week here at.

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The reason we do
that is to remind ourselves

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that's what Jesus did for us.

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First, John four says that we love

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because he first loved us.

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The secret to self-control
is not willpower, it's affection.

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The more I will love God
with all my heart, soul, mind,

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the more I realize how much he has loved
me, the easier

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it will be for me to have desires
in their proper

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order and be protected.

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You know, there's another proverb.

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I mean, this proverb was a man
without self-control.

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It's like a city broken into and left
without walls.

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There's a proverb in Proverbs chapter 18

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that says,
the name of the Lord is a strong tower.

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The righteous
man runs into it and is safe.

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That's the thing.

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What I want to encourage you to do today.

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If you want to keep all that,
keep your soul protected,

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then figure out

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how to make Jesus front and center,

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how to make communion a reminder
how every day remind yourself

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of how much you are loved
so that your affection goes to him.

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Because the secret of self-control

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will always be what you love
and who you love.

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Run to God.

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Let him be your strong tower and build
the walls that will keep your soul safe.

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Would you pray with me?

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Our father in Heaven.

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Thank you for your grace to us.

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Thanks. That

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self-control
that it is based on our affection

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00:19:30,673 --> 00:19:34,477
and our love, and that you have given us
the greatest reason

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to really love you.

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And so I pray that you would help
all of us hearing, help me to love you

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in such a way.

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We're all my desires
fall into the proper order.

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So I become like a city with walls

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with the most precious things protected
because they're protected by you.

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Thanks.

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We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.