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Houston's First Baptist Church is a relevant biblical community where we gather our hearts, grow our souls and give our lives as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). This podcast provides weekly messages from Pastor Gregg Matte and others. Visit us at HoustonsFirst.org to learn more about HFBC, and visit us in person the next time you're in Houston!
Now while you're turning in your Bibles to Romans chapter 6, Romans chapter 6. Please, I need a little bit more trouble on this thing. Please, sir, Romans chapter 6. While you're turning there, I want to say something. The Bible says, If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. That's the only way to be free. Through the Son, Jesus Christ. It also says, I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly. Remember this. Jesus Christ gives life and freedom. And everything else, no matter how much it sparkles and glitters and glows, gives slavery and death. Okay, I'm not going to give a long homiletical exposition of a passage of Scripture tonight. I want to just pick out one verse of Scripture with some real punch and ask you to read it with me, and then let's look at it. Study it. Romans 6, 16. Romans 6, 16. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness. That's all. Whatever and whomever you yield yourself willingly as a servant, you will become a slave of that. So you'd better make dead sure, young person, on this youth night that you choose wisely. You'd better look a long way down the forks of that road and make sure you know what kind of a master you're enlisting in his army to serve because he's going to be your captain. And the devil has no happy old man. The finished product of the brewer's art is in the gutter. But the man of distinction usually becomes the man of extinction if he takes the wrong way. Look long down that road. Make dead sure you know which way you're going. How many of you on this first of our two youth nights are under 25 years of age? Raise your hands. Let's see. Wonderful. This message is for you. Those of us who are 26, pretty much already hopeless. Now, there is a prominent philosophy in life today, not started by Hugh Hefner, a sort of Freudian theory that expression of natural desires is normal and good, and suppression of anything that is normal and innate, which therefore being normal must be of God, and what is of God would be good, is the way to find unhappiness. Therefore, whatever you can think to do, whatever you choose to be, whatever philosophy you live by, whatever desires and dreams and hopes and instincts and hunches and wishes and motives and impulses come to mind, just open the gates and let it rip. That's the way to be happy. But Jesus says, be dead careful. You know what you're doing. Because whatever road of life you choose to follow, wherever you make your Lord, whatever gang you run with, whatever crowd you follow, whatever banner you fly under, is going to become your master. And when you get ready to leave, when you get ready to change, when you get ready to pull out, you might find out that you are the slave rather than the willing servant, and you can't get loose. The cry of the moral revolution in America today has one watchword. Freedom. Every young person is saying it. Freedom. Every philosophy is saying it, freedom. Every rebellious group is saying it, freedom. And you know what? I agree with them 100%. That's my middle name. John F. Besey. That stands for freedom, you know. I'm for freedom. That's what this revival is about, to give freedom. That's the message of the church, freedom. That's the crux of the gospel, freedom. That's why Christ came, to give freedom. God wants you to be free, absolutely free. But the thing that burns me up and makes me mad at the devil is that the devil is selling young people today a bill of goods. He's selling them a bill of goods as to how to be free and what freedom really is. And they're getting short -cutted and sold on the river. I want you to listen very closely. Freedom is the name of the game. Freedom is what life is about. Freedom is why Jesus Christ spread heaven wide open and came to this earth to die on a glory, awesome cross. To give you freedom. But freedom is not merely the right to rebel. Freedom doesn't come by doing what you get good and ready to do. There's only one way to have freedom, and that's by discipline. If you don't play by the rules and discipline yourself, then you don't have any freedom. And those who think they are free become slaves. And those who become slaves of righteousness become free. You see, the devil is alive from the beginning, and those very agencies by which many of you think you're going to become free, like a little bitty pat rattlesnake that grows up and turns and coils and strikes you, that very thing that you thought made you free will enslave you. And that thing to whom you yield yourself that is right, to whom you willingly make yourself a servant of God and good and righteousness, will ultimately free you. They don't tell us that. It's all mixed up. Now that's my thesis. And I want to give you six or seven illustrations of that, and we'll go home. Number one, let's take war. I don't like war, I don't like killing, I don't like bloodshed any more than anybody else in the world. But if everyone in the world said, I'm going to be free, nobody's going to make me fight, nobody's going to make me defend my country, I'm free to do what I get good and ready to do, then the Second World War would have seen the rape of this country, and Korea would have seen communism come, and Hitlerism and Nazism throughout the years, and you wouldn't be here, you'd either be dead or in a slave camp tonight. You see, if somebody did not discipline themselves and pay the price, you wouldn't be free. But because someone was disciplined, now we're free. But if we were all free to do what we got ready to do, to fight or not to fight, then we would be slaves. But we are free because someone was a slave to what was right. Strange, isn't it? The devil doesn't tell us that. They don't put that in the centerfold of playboy, and Freud doesn't preach it. And the crowd and the gang doesn't understand it. That's why I say that young people are being shortcut. They're being shortchanged. They're being sold down the river. They're being sold a bill of goods, and that's what makes me angry at sin. That's what makes me angry at Satan. Man, I want you to have a blast. Frankly, I think life is a gas. I really do. I have more fun. I mean just pure deal of fun being alive than most people that have good sense. I really do. You know why? I'll tell you why. Because I'm free. Here's another illustration. Somebody says, I'm free. Man, ain't nobody going to tell me which way to drive. I don't care about the red lights or the yellow lights. I don't care about the stop signs or the one -way streets. I'll go whenever I want to, whichever way I want to go. So you run the red lights. You go the wrong way down the street. After all, you're free. Nobody will tell you what to do. And you run head on to each other. There are all kind of wrecks and intersections. Everybody gets killed. And now you're up there in the hospital with a broken neck and a busted back and your legs half chopped off. Now you're a slave to your own stupidity. Here's a man who has the discipline to obey the rules, wants to stop lights, play the game of life the way God laid it down, and that man is free to get home safely tonight. You just walk out of here at night and say, nobody will tell me what to do. You run every red light, you go up every one -way street, after all, you're free, remember that, and you see how long you live. You'll be free, all right, you'll be free to be buried, free of charge. But the man who disciplines himself and obeys by the rules is free to live. Now, you take all the newborn babies. Ben has a little newborn baby son, four days old. Now, nobody is going to make him separate that baby and discipline and care for that baby. Just put him in there with all the cancer patients and all the smallpox patients and all the venereal disease patients and all the patients with every kind of contagious infectious disease. After all, we don't regiment, we don't separate, we don't discipline. Just do what you want to. Put him anywhere you don't want to. Don't spray the room, don't disinfect, don't take care of him. After all, he's free, he can go where he wants, he can do what he wants to do. He won't live three days. If he does not discipline that baby and play by the rules and isolate him from wrong and do what's right, that baby won't even be free. He will be a slave to disease and he won't live a week. I repeat, freedom is the name of the game, man. I mean, that's what it's all about. But freedom is not the right to rebel. Freedom comes by discipline and if you don't have discipline, you don't have any freedom. Now here's Harry High School. About the time he's 14, 15 years of age, he discovers he knows more than his teachers. If there's nobody smarter in the world than somebody 15, he discovers they know more than their teachers do. And they get tired of all that history and philosophy and psychology and all that stuff, man. Now they got sideburns halfway down their ankles. They got the collar turned up, daddy. I mean, there's some big something, you see. Now here they are. Oh, Harry High, oh, Harry Dropout. He gets his girlfriend pregnant. He's living across town in a little two -bit shack, making 40 bucks a week, pumping gas or pushing broom. He can't get a good job. He can't get an education. He can't take a trip around the world. He can't buy a car. He can't buy a television set. He can't do anything. He's broke. He's a slave to his own ignorance. They ought to make him study, man, he's free. Get a lawyer to Harry High School in about five years. Now here's a boy who decides to study, to play by the rules, to do what's right, to discipline himself, to educate himself, to make something out of himself. Now he's 25, 30 years of age. He's graduated from college. He's got a nice home and car. He's got friends. He's got self -respect. He's got his health. He's got everything. He has made something of himself. He's now free to go and be and develop and possess and become because he disciplined himself and the one who was free is now the slave. You try to get somewhere in the world when you ain't even got enough sense to spell your name right. See how far you'll get. You see, freedom doesn't come by just kicking over the traces and doing what you want to do. Freedom comes by way of discipline. The next illustration, take smoking. That's just a little thing, but it's an illustration. Frankly, I don't care two hoots if you smoke. Somebody said, well, smoking sends you to hell. No, sure won't. Make you smell like you've been there. Won't send you. I was, the other day, I was, the other day I was passing by a cemetery. I said, man, that's Marlboro country. You see? Somebody said, preacher, can you smoke and go to heaven? Sure you can. The more you smoke, the faster you'll get there, too. You bet you can. Sure can. So, now why does a kid start to smoke? I remember when I took my first cigarette. Oh, it was terrible. I had a couple of calls and, oh, that thing was awful. But you know why I smoked my first cigarette? Because that was the vehicle of my independence, you see. That was the symbol of my freedom. That was the way that I expressed to the world that I was some big body. I was grown up. Why, as 14 years old, man, I discovered America. And the first time I got up the courage to smoke in front of my parents, I found a great satisfaction psychologically by saying, I am independent, I am mature, I am free now. I am out from under your restraint. Here's the symbol of how free I am. Now, you get a load of that old boy when he's about 55 years old. He's got cancer in the lungs, sclerosis of the liver, high blood pressure. He cannot stand to sit through a meal. He can't even taste his food. he's skin and bones, he can't wait to get out of church, he's having a nicotine fit, and he runs outside and you call him on the phone and it's just a minute, quit, oh he'd like to quit, boy he'd like to stop smoking, but he can't you see, because he is a slave to that little two inch piece of tobacco, it's got him, it's mastered him, now he's not free at all, you see that little rattlesnake climbs on you and that thing that you think made you free becomes your master and enslaves you, funny about life, isn't it, now he's not free at all, you see that little rattlesnake climbs on you and that thing that you think made you free becomes your master and enslaves you, funny about life, isn't it, they say that people smoke, no the cigarette smokes, you suck that makes you a sucker that's just a little thing but it gets the point across now here's all Sally's Sunday school the kids call a square man she's from Squaresville she's nobody but she just decides she and all Tommy training Union decide that they'll be a couple of squares they'll do what's right and they won't smoke now you look at them they're 30 40 50 years old they're free to enjoy good health they're free to keep from coughing their full head off they're free not to have cancer of the lung they're free to taste their food and they're free to outlive you by eight years and when you're dead man they're still swinging and going now who's a slave and now who's free from that by again freedom is not merely the right to rebel freedom comes by discipline you don't discipline yourself man you're not gonna have any freedom boy starts to drink remember when I had my first drink oh I hated that stuff I took that first bottle of beer that was terrible but I remember when I was about 15 the first time I got courage to go in and slip in and get some guy to sell me a six -pack and drive up to my girlfriend's house boy like I was some big something else man I was 10 feet tall I was free I was grown up I was somebody because I was drink I was smoking beer very good drink a beer that's what you do actually now here's this guy he's become one of the 11 ,000 alcoholics in America now he cannot keep from drinking the thing brother I'd like to get on television and debate the dry wet business you know what I do I'd get me 50 bums off the street and I drag them across the camera one at a time one at a time and say here they are listen to your testimony let him tell you a thing or two about the finished product of the brewers art now here he is here he is he's 50 years old he's lost his nerves he's lost his health he's lost his self -respect he's lost his home he's lost his money he's lost his job he's glossed everything he's an alcoholic he goes from door to door from church to church begging for a handout begging for old clothes he is a slave to that alcohol quit oh he'd like to quit but he can't he's a slave to that thing that was once the agency of his independence it's turned on him it's mastered him and old Richard righteous decides that he'll play by the rules yeah they call him a square sure he's a phony sure they make fun of him sure he's a kid sure he's a squirt and a religious punk and all the rest of that the difference is when he's 50 he's still got a job home self -respect family business he is free to be to amount to possess to live to enjoy life because he was a slave to his own need he enslaved his own needs he controlled them he didn't let them control him now he's free and the other man is a slave strange about life isn't it A friend of mine named Joe Perdue, who became a Christian. He'd been on speed and drugs for about five years. We were sitting in Wichita, Kansas, in the Holiday Inn. We were talking one night. He said, say that again. I said, what do you mean? Say what again? He said, what you said? He said, why? He said, because everything you say goes, psst, psst, psst, psst, psst. I said, Joe, you better get in the car and drive home. He said, I can't. He said, I've lost my depth perception. I can't drive at night. When he was 17, he decided to drop out of Squaresville and hit the drug route. And Joe Perdue was going to be free to off the shackles of restraint in the church and the preacher and religion and morality and righteousness. He was free. Now with his mind and his central nervous system and his brains and his body irreparably affected, he is a slave to that very thing that once made him free. He's really free. You see, the squares aren't all square. I repeat, let not sin reign in your moral bodies, mortal bodies, that ye should obey the lust thereof. Neither yield yourselves members as instruments unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under sin in the law but grace. Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey servants ye are whom you obey, whether of sin unto death or whether you yield yourself as a servant of obedience unto righteousness. Make up your mind which way you're going to go. I submit to you that the moral, the sexual revolution, the right revolution is a colossal bust because it promises something it cannot produce. It promises life and gives death. It promises freedom and gives slavery. It promises happiness and gives enslavement. And the society, a dropout of society, said in Time Magazine last week in New York City, as her mind and body was being eaten up by dope and venereal disease, she said, it's not like they show in one stock. It's not like that at all. She said, oh God, if the world could see the way we really end up, most of us, that the wages of sin is death. Man, I'm not against you. You'll never have anybody love you any more than your preacher. Have anybody love you any more than the church. I know you'll never have anybody love you more than Jesus, any more than the Lord. We want you to be free. We want you to live. We want you to have fun. We'll live to be a guest. People say to me all the time, man, I don't dig church. You want to be very honest with you? I don't dig most of the churches I've been to myself. It is so square and stained glass, and they talk in such high -sounding tones, I don't even know what they're talking about in the cell. But if you can get out and get past and beyond the stained glass facade of religiosity and get to Jesus, man, you'll live. You'll really live. That's why my concern is that the First Baptist Church shall strip the facade and the playing of the high church and off of all that we do and get to the heart of the matter, communicate the gospel with people in a way they can pick up and understand and live. I want you to know, friend, if you'll turn on to Jesus, you'll really live. I pastored a church for several years that had an average age of 17. About 700 young couples were attended rather regularly. I could tell you story after story how they came and said, Preacher, we had a sex experience before we were married. We were free. We were going to be married after all. We didn't have to play by the rules. And the guilt, the memory, has eaten us up. You can say what you want, friend. You can't kill your conscience. God has put in a spiritual indicator, a spiritual sheriff, and you know down in the inside what makes the difference. Before I moved down here, I was dealing with two couples. One had been married 17 years, one had been married 24, not a couple of kids, adults. In each case, they had had one experience of sex with each other before they were married. And that was all. And in each case, each of them was now suspecting their partner of being unfaithful. And the truth of the matter was that I knew that in neither of the cases had they ever been unfaithful since they'd been married. But they were just never, ever dead sure they could trust each other. The suspicion, the doubt was there. Why? Because the respect and the love and the trust that makes marriage a real bag that makes life a real gas that makes living living was gone and the vitals were eaten out of it. Many a person will carry to the grave a personality disorder marked, scarred, saved by the cleansing, guilt, forgiving power of the blood of Christ from which they will never recover. But those kids who loved each other and when passions ran high, disciplined themselves and said, Dear God, we will wait for those that have the dust. Sure, it's tough. You say, well, I can take some girl in my arms and hug her up and we can dance on the dance floor and go out and neck and pet and all that. Doesn't turn me on. Honey, let me tell you something. If your boyfriend says that, I don't know. One of two things is true. He's either more of a man than I am or he's less of a man. One of the two. I don't know which. But I'll tell you one thing. He isn't the same kind of a man. I'll tell you that for sure. And if he tells you he can take you in his arms and paw over you until you are like some kind of goods on sale, I've seen marked down in stores that say slightly handled but greatly reduced in value. For you, if that boy with Roman fingers and Russian hands, that international lover can tell you, Honey, it don't affect me, baby. It don't do nothing for me. You better turn him in. He ought to be in a sideshow. He's a freak. They don't like that. Those who found it tough, sure it was hard to discipline themselves. They had the dust now. But brother, they have the diamond of a beautiful life hereafter. Those that had the diamonds now have got the dust later. As they say, you pays your price and you takes your choice. But you better be dead sure you choose wisely. Because to whom you yield yourselves servants, their slaves you become. I repeat, the devil has no happy old man. The ones who have lived life to its fullest, who have drunk of the cup of joy to its ultimate reality and are really living, with the smiles on their face that have enjoyed life, are those that have done right and disciplined themselves and served Jesus Christ. Kids, that's the way to go. Man, that's where it's at. Get with Jesus. Get on the harness. Discipline yourself. Doesn't matter if you're the only one out of 50 or 400 or 5 ,000 tonight that has the courage to walk this all and say, I give myself completely to God. I'll do what's right. Be man enough. Be woman enough to be that one and come and do it. That's my sermon. Here's the invitation. Gerald, I like to ask us to change and sing, stand up for Jesus. Don't turn to your books. You know it. I'm going to ask everybody here, 21 years of age, down through nine, listen closely, who is willing to say, I am promising God to the best of my ability to make Jesus Christ the Lord and the Savior of my life, to live by the Word of God, to discipline my body, to control my emotions, to do what is right, to honor Christ in my life, no matter if I have to walk out of here and throw away every pill and every dirty habit and every wrong influence and every bad crowd, no matter what it costs me, I'll do it because it's my life and I want to be free.