You're listening to Heed the Word with our pastor and teacher Ken Davis. Pastor Ken is the senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Southwest Metro in Burleson, Texas. Please join us as we study the Gospel of Luke, verse by verse.

That sin that I thought wasn't hurting anybody else, that nobody else knew about but me, that really didn't make any difference whether I was involved with it or not, that sin was vile in the eyes of God. That it separated me from fellowship with God, and that He had paid a price, a dear price, to cleanse me of that, and I had treated the price that he had paid cheaply, as though it were nothing that Christ's blood had been shed that I might be forgiven.

The Gospel of Luke is the third account in the Gospels of the life and teachings of our Savior, Jesus Christ. As believers, there are few studies that will benefit us more spiritually than studying the life and teachings of the Master. The attitude of the world today is to live your own life, to do what it is that makes you happy. The problem with this mentality is that it is flesh-driven. You see, if you're a believer, then you are not your own. Your soul was bought with a price. You're to live a life that pleases the Father. You're to walk in obedience and not according to your flesh. Don't forget to stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Heed the Word, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, please open your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 13, verse 12, as we join Pastor Ken.

My strength is made perfect in your weakness. And so Paul said, you know what? If I've got to suffer with this in order that the strength of God may be revealed in me, then I take pleasure in my infirmities. I'm grateful for them. When we struggle and when we have things that we suffer through, if through our suffering God is glorified in our lives, then praise God for our suffering. How hard is that to do? As difficult. But here was Paul, a man who none of us would question as to whether or not he was a believer, who was persecuted, who was buffeted by a demonic spirit, a messenger of Satan. So can someone who is a believer be under demonic attack? Absolutely they can. And that was the case with this woman. Jesus himself refers to her as a daughter of Abraham in the coming passages. This was a woman who I believe knew the Lord. And yet she had been bound by Satan for 18 years. That is a terrible thing. And it moved the heart of Jesus. He called her to him and he said to her, Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity. And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight and glorified God. Now there are a couple of interesting things about her situation that I want to talk about very briefly. First of all, she was struggling with something that she had struggled with for a very long time. And yet she was in bondage. There are things in your life that you struggle with, and that maybe you have been struggling with for a really long time. And you think to yourself, why, as a Christian, am I still struggling with this thing, whatever it is? Maybe it's an illness, maybe it's a habit, maybe it's an attitude, maybe it's a circumstance in your life, maybe it's outright sin. And you don't understand why, as a believer, you're still struggling with this thing. You've tried again and again and again to turn away from this sin, whatever it might be in your life. And yet you seem unable to find any freedom. And it frustrates you. You go out and you do something and you feel guilty. You feel so guilty. You just know that what you did was wrong. And so you pray and you ask God to forgive you. And you know that as the Bible tells us, that if we confess our sins to God, that He's faithful and just to forgive us for our sins, so you know that because you confessed it, you know you're forgiven and you feel free, and you're like, thank you, God, for forgiving me. And yet, a week later, there you are again in the same situation. And this behavior becomes so repetitive in your life that there comes a point in time where you're starting out on this road and you know you're about to go do this thing you ought not to do, and you know it's sin, and you know you're gonna feel bad afterward, and you know you're gonna repent afterward, and you say to yourself, God's gonna forgive me anyway. So I might as well go ahead and do it. Because no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to resist. Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to overcome temptation is to give into it. That's a false statement. It's a statement that leads to destruction, as his life would bear evidence. And here's the interesting thing. Verse 11. And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity 18 years and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up. There are certain things in our lives that when we struggle with them, we realize that there is no way that we can raise ourselves up. We're bent over, we're crooked. You know the word perverted, you know what that really literally means? It means greatly twisted. What was this woman if not that? She was greatly twisted. And I find it interesting that when Jesus healed her, it says that she straightened up. So many of us want to straighten up before we come to Jesus, right? What we don't realize is that it's coming to Jesus that straightens us up. Jesus is the one who does it, not us. This woman could in no wise straighten herself up. Anyone have any experience with that? Wow. Wow, don't we? You know, as a pastor, when you teach every week, eventually you run out of stories of your own. And so you have to go find new stories, right? But one of the great things is if you continue teaching long enough, eventually enough new people come that even though you've told the story before, there are enough people who haven't heard it yet that it makes it worth telling it again. And I've kind of come to that place. Because you see, I I was in the same position as this woman. There was a time in my life as a believer when I struggled with a particular sin. Suffice it to say that the Greek word is pornea. Do all the grown-ups know what I'm talking about? Okay. There was this hidden little secret sin in my life that nobody knew about except for me. My wife didn't even know. I'd been a Christian for a couple of years now, and the Lord had really done work in a lot of the different areas of my life. But in this particular closet of my life, I'd kept him locked out of it. Now there were times that I would feel very, very guilty for my sin. And I would go to him and I would confess my sin before him, and I would ask him to forgive me, and I knew that he would. I believe fully that the Word of God is true, and that when we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us of our sins. And yet I fell into that same pattern that I described a few moments ago, that it got to the point where I knew I was going to sin, I knew I was going to feel guilty, I knew I was going to repent, and so I would go out and sin deliberately, willfully, disobediently. Not like I stumbled and fell, no, I jumped. I presumed upon God's grace. And friend, that is a dangerous place to be. In time, my wife discovered what I was involved with and basically said, either that goes or I do. And so I said, Well, obviously, I love my wife more than this junk, right? Besides, I'm in control of this. I can let go of that anytime I want to. So, okay, I will quit for my wife. I can't tell you how fast I fell. It was pathetic, really. When I realized that I could not straighten myself up, that I could not walk away from this sin myself, then I got a little scared. And I said, wait a minute, I thought I was in control here, but this thing is in control. You know, Jesus said, You are a slave to he whom you serve. And the fact of the matter is, I was serving my own lasciviousness. I was serving Satan in that area of my life, and I hadn't even realized it. And what I didn't realize is that I was a slave to this habit, to this material. And so then I said, Whoa, whoa, this is not right. Now I've got to quit this stuff, not for my wife, but for myself. Because now I don't want this in my life anymore. And so I tried again and I failed again. In fact, I failed so miserably that I became discouraged in my failure. And I said to myself, it's no use even trying. I was at a point in my life where I was about to get out of the military in about three or four months, and we needed to save some money. So my wife was going to go home and live with family in California, and I was going to stay with some friends. And I purposed in my heart that when she was gone, I was going to indulge myself in whatever way I desired, because I was tired of fighting. Well, we were about to drive cross-country from Virginia to California, and a friend of hers, whom she worked with at Chick-fil-A, invited us to a Bible study. And I figured, hey, I'm about to drive cross-country, kind of risky in some ways, and might as well get some brownie points with God. We'll go to the Bible study, no problem, right? Well, at the Bible study, they were studying in uh 2 Peter chapter 2, verse 20. For if, after they have escaped the pollution of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them, according to the true proverb, a dog returns to his own vomit, and a sow having washed to her wallowing in the mire. That was their text that day. Now, keep in mind, I'm I'm sitting in the Bible study, they're going over the various scriptures, and I'm thinking to myself, oh yeah, that makes sense. Oh, hey, I understand that. And I was getting involved and I was answering some questions. And then they got to that verse. The dog has returned to his own vomit, and the pig that was washed to its wallowing in the mire, and that it would have been better for that person not to have known the way of salvation at all than to have known it and then turned from it. And for the first time in my life, I saw my sin the way God saw my sin. I realized that I was like that dog that had eaten something poisonous. And I had asked God to forgive me, and he had. And I had just vomited out all that vile poison. But having been delivered from it, I was then going back to it and lapping up that very thing. I was that pig, right, that had wallowed in the mire and that had gone to God and said, Lord, I know that what I've done is a sin. Please forgive me. And he would forgive me and wash me clean. But then after having been washed like that pig, because you see, I had been forgiven, but I hadn't been changed. Even though I was cleaned, I was a clean pig. And I would go back and wallow in the same mud that I had just been washed from. And so for the first time, really honestly, guys, for the first time in my life, I recognized that my sin was not just some rule that I had broken, that my sin was not something I had done that I shouldn't have done, that sin that I thought wasn't hurting anybody else, that nobody else knew about but me, that really didn't make any difference whether I was involved with it or not. That sin was vile in the eyes of God, that it separated me from fellowship with God, and that he had paid a price, a dear price, to cleanse me of that. And I had treated the price that he had paid cheaply, as though it were nothing that Christ's blood had been shed that I might be forgiven. I would presume then to walk right back in to the bondage that his blood had freed me from, and that in sinning I was setting my sin and my pleasure as being more important than the sacrifice of Jesus. You see, I had tried to quit for my wife and I had failed. I had tried to quit for myself and I had failed. So now I said, I am gonna quit for God. I'm gonna quit for the Lord. I went and dropped my wife off. Never told her about any of this at the time. And I went back, and boy, I'll tell you what, that little church was called Life Center. It's an interesting part of the story. You know what it's now called? Calvary Chapel, Manassas. They became a Calvary Chapel, but at the time they weren't. That little church became my second home. If the doors were open, I was there. Sunday morning for services, I was there. Tuesday night for their little, you know, prayer meeting, I would be there if I could. Thursday night, they had uh what they called an agape feast where the people in the church would just cook and everybody would come in and the pastor and the deacons, they would serve everybody, and we would just have fellowship together. Friday nights, it was a worship service. Every Friday night was prayer and worship. Almost every day of the week there was something going on in this little church, right? I was getting home from work, and instead of turning on the TV while I ate my dinner, I'd sit at the table and I'd read my Bible while I ate my dinner, right? I was focused on God. My heart was set on the Lord and on finding him and serving him and on staying free from this sin. And you know what? I was doing good. I was doing real good. Then one day a friend of mine asked me to house sit for him. And I knew that this friend that I had known before had a similar bent. And I knew that somewhere in that house was that thing that I was trying to be freed from. And just knowing that it was in that place was enough. That's all it took to know that here I was in this house alone, and that the object of my sin was present there with me. And here I was, I was supposed to be house-sitting for this man, and what do I do? I'm going through all his stuff, trying to find that thing that my flesh was craving. And I failed. I failed miserably. It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning church, right? And I'm sitting on the floor, and the Holy Spirit saved me. Because in my heart, I'm saying, How can I go to church tomorrow after what I've just done? How can I even show my face? God doesn't want to see me there. See, that was Satan. He was attacking. See, I didn't know enough at the time to know that that's what it was. Because he had me in bondage. Now I was born again. I truly believe I was born again. I had given my life to the Lord, he had saved me from my sins. I was growing in Christ in many different ways in my life. There was fruit evident in my life. I was born again, baptized, spirit-filled. But there was this area in my life where I, just like this woman, was in bondage because of Satan. And there was nothing I could do to straighten myself up. And then praise God, the Holy Spirit spoke and he said, You are going to church tomorrow. But I can't. No. That's what Satan wants you to think. You are going to church tomorrow. And I said audibly, okay, I'll go. Didn't want to go. Didn't feel like I was supposed to go. I mean, in my flesh, I thought, hey, I'm filthy. Why would I? No. I went, guys, I'd like to tell you that the worship team just played some wonderful songs, and in the spirit, in the presence of worship, uh, my chains just fell off my arms, but you know what? I couldn't sing a lick. I couldn't sing at all. I'd like to tell you that the pastor preached a message that bam just hit me right between the eyes and that I repented in tears. That didn't happen either. I don't even remember what he taught on that morning. I'd like to tell you that a prophetic word came and someone came and laid hands on me and said, You're free. No, I don't know. None of that happened. What happened was this. As I sat there, unable to worship, unable to receive the word, unable to even pray, I felt completely defeated. And a realization, a revelation came over me. I had tried to walk away from that sin for my wife, and I had failed. I had tried to walk away from that sin for myself, and I had failed. I had tried to walk away from that sin for God, and I had failed. The common denominator in each event was that I was trying. And there was nothing that I could do. There were no number of steps, there was no self-help book, there was no amount of self or spiritual discipline that I could exercise, no amount of the Bible that I could read, nothing that I could do to straighten myself. And so I prayed. Not an eloquent prayer, but I prayed simply this. I said, Lord, I don't want this in my life. I know that you don't want this in my life. And I have tried to walk away from it, but God, I cannot do it. And he said, now we're getting somewhere. Will you please take this from me? Lord, if you want me to be free from this, then you have to set me free. And he did. He did. He set me free. And he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight and glorified God. Doesn't say she was made straight and went shopping, doesn't say she was made straight and went and got a job. Doesn't say she was made straight and went on Oprah with a great new diet program that healed all of her ailments. No, she was made straight and she glorified God. Now, when she was made straight, when she began to glorify God, you would think that this woman who had been in bondage for 18 years would have been just ecstatic, and that everyone around her would have been ecstatic and would have said, Hey, that's awesome. Wow, praise God, right? That the pastor of the church would have come up to Jesus and said, Brother, can we get you for an extended speaking engagement? Let's have a revival. I mean, this is awesome. You would think. But you see, there was a little problem. Jesus had done this on the Sabbath. Now, on the Sabbath, you weren't supposed to do any work at all. None. If somebody was ill or injured, you were only allowed to provide medical treatment if their injuries were life-threatening. And in the event that their injuries were life-threatening, the medical treatment that you were allowed to provide was to only go far enough to keep them from getting any worse. But it wasn't supposed to be anything that would help them get any better. That was it. Those were the rules according to the religious teachings of the time. And so Jesus' miraculous healing of this woman, frankly, was against the rules. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. And he said to the crowd, There are six days on which men ought to work. Therefore, come and be healed on them and not on the Sabbath day. He begins to rebuke the people. The Lord then answered him and said, You hypocrite. I mean, that's really what he's saying. You hypocrite. Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it away to water? So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound, think of it, for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath? And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. You see, guys, when Jesus Christ does a miracle in your life and sets you free from that sin that so easily besets you, and your friends come to you and say, What do you mean you don't want to go drinking with us this Saturday night? What's with you? Or when you go to that person that you've been living with and you say, I've got to move out. You're breaking up with me? Look, what we've been doing this far, this is sin. We can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. Guys, when Jesus Christ sets you free, don't expect the world to applaud. Don't expect even the religious community to applaud. You know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, new believers. A new believer comes into a congregation, is born again, right? And he's excited and on fire for the Lord. And all the old fogies around him who've been with the Lord for years, look at him and say, Oh yeah, you're excited, huh? Just pee him a new believer. Yeah, don't worry, it'll wear off. You'll calm down. It's okay. I mean, you know, right now you're all zealous and enthusiastic, that's great, you know, that's okay. But, you know, hey, it's okay, don't worry. In a little while, you'll be just like me. Heaven help us. When Jesus sets you free and you begin to rejoice over the liberty that God has given you, don't expect the world, or even other believers necessarily, to be happy about it. But don't let that stop you from glorifying God. Jesus said, if you continue to my world, then you're my disciples indeed, and you will know the truth. The truth will set you free.

Do you ever feel like the circumstances you're going through are more than you can bear? That God is in some way punishing you? Well, consider the words of Paul, and we know that all things work together for the good. To those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. So we learn from this verse that all things, not some, but all things work together if we love God and are called according to his purpose. Just something to think about from your friends here at Heed the Word. Heed the Word is the daily Bible-teaching ministry of Ken Davis, Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel in Burleson, Texas. There's a great deal more that Pastor Ken has to share with us from the Gospel of Luke, so please join us again. Maybe you'd like to add today's message to your study library. Our online media is always available and free of charge. CD copies are also available upon request for free, but supplies are limited, so order today. To order a CD, simply log on to HeedTheWord.org and select the order a message option. There you'll find a convenient order form to fill out. The only information you need to remember is today's date. This ensures we get you the right teaching. So log on to heedtheword.org and place your order today. Or better yet, join us this Sunday for worship at 1030 a.m. Directions are available on our website. That's heedtheword.org. Well, we've run out of time today, but tune in next time as Pastor Ken will continue teaching verse by verse through the Gospel of Luke. That's next time on Heatheword.