shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary.
I am the Lord.
If you walk in my statutes and keep my commandments,
do them and do them.
Then I will give you rain in due season
and the land shall yield her increase
and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.
Now, this is the way I like to think of this whole chapter.
I'll continue here in a second.
But when I was even a kid, I remember the if-then statements.
If this, then this will happen.
See, people always act as though God just loves people
no matter what and there's no problem
that you can always be saved.
But we don't believe that.
We believe that there comes a certain point in time
that it's too late for you.
Now, if you wanna read Romans 1 and get back with me
and then go watch some of Pastor Steven Anderson
or some of Pastor Roger Jimenez on that,
they cover it very well about Romans chapter one.
But people always just act like you can live a life of sin
and then you can go to God and say, I want more blessings.
You can sin and it won't affect your salvation,
but it will affect your walk with God.
Now, the if-then statements, I point this out
because if you do this, then God will bless you.
Now, if we continue and the Bible says in Leviticus 26,
verse five, and your threshing shall reach unto the vintage
and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time
and ye shall eat your bread to the full
and dwell in your land safely.
And I will give peace in the land and ye shall lie down
and none shall make you afraid.
And I will rid evil beasts of the land.
Neither shall the sword go through your land
and ye shall chase your enemies
and they shall fall before you by the sword.
And five of you shall chase 100
and 100 of you shall put 10,000 to flight
and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.
For I will have respect unto you and make you fruitful
and multiply you and establish my covenant with you.
And ye shall eat old store and bring forth old
because of the new.
And I will set my tabernacle among you
and my soul shall not abhor you.
And I will walk among you and I will be your God
and ye shall be my people.
I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth
out of the land of Egypt
and ye should not be their bondmen.
And I have broken their bands of your yoke
and made you go upright.
But, and this is a turning point,
but if ye will not hearken unto me
and will not do these commandments,
and if ye shall despise my statutes
or your soul abhor my judgments
so that ye will not do all my commandments
but that ye break my covenant,
I also will do this unto you.
I will even appoint over you terror, consumption
and the burning ague that shall consume the eyes
and cause sorrow of heart.
And ye shall sow your seed in vain
for your enemy shall eat it.
And I will set my face against you
and ye shall be slain before your enemies
that they that hate you shall reign over you
and ye shall flee when none pursue with you.
And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me,
then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.
So basically this is just saying,
if you do not do this, I will punish you.
Bible says, whom God loveth, he chases.
He loves his people, but he will chase in them.
He will chastise them.
Now, if we keep going,
and I will break the pride of your power
and I will make your heaven as iron
and your earth as brass
and your strength shall be spent in vain
for your land shall not yield her increase.
Neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.
And if he walked contrary unto me
and will not hearken unto me,
I will bring seven times more plagues upon you
according to your sins.
And I will send wild beasts among you,
which shall rob you of your children
and destroy your cattle and make you few in number
and your highways shall be desolate.
And if ye will not be reformed,
we'll get to that's the very important word
of this whole thing.
And if you will not be reformed by these things,
but will walk contrary unto me,
then and then will I also walk contrary to you
and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.
Now there's a whole bunch more to that chapter,
but the whole point of all that was,
I wanted to show you that if you don't do this,
then this will happen.
These are the consequences.
If you were raised in a God-fearing home
or just a good home, your parents had rules.
You don't follow the rules,
you get chastised, you get chastened.
Now, the reason I'm picking on the word reformed here
is I came from a Lutheran background.
Brother Garrett Weiss here, he was a Catholic
and him and I can sympathize on a lot of things
of talking because the Lutherans and the Catholics,
as the joke goes, they're one and the same.
They really are.
And a lot of people will say,
well, you know, they're from the reformation.
I don't even like the word reformation.
And the reason I don't is because to say
that you're gonna reform the Roman Catholic Church
is to almost say at one point in time,
the Roman Catholic Church had something right.
I mean, the whole Roman Catholic Church
started by Constantine.
And the only reason he started it
was because he was superstitious
and he saw a cross in the sky and said,
we gotta carry that.
I had a vision, we gotta carry that in front of us.
And because of superstition,
we have the world's biggest lying church,
the Roman Catholic Church.
And what came out of that?
Martin Luther.
Now, Martin Luther had some things right.
He would say it was all by faith and we'll get to that.
But the thing is, people always say,
well, I'm reformed.
The way that the Baptist preacher
who showed me the plan of salvation worded it was,
you can't reform a corrupted seed.
Now, if you start with say a stalk of corn
and it's deformed and moldy,
you're gonna cast it out.
What good is it?
Now, if you're gonna start with a deformed church
like the Catholic Church who preaches heresy
that you can work your way to heaven
and that there's ways to appease God outside of faith,
how can you start there and ever aim to say,
oh yeah, we're gonna reform this.
We're gonna fix this.
No, don't reform, reject.
And the title of my sermon is
the five fundamental fallacies of the Lutheran Church.
And there's way more I know that I could go into,
but for the sake of time,
I picked five that really spoke to me.
So like I said, don't reform the Catholic Church.
Utterly reject it.
And that's what Martin Luther should have done.
The Baptist preacher that showed me the gospel
and got me saved,
he said, Martin Luther,
there were many other churches around at that time
that he could have gone to,
but he said, no, I'm gonna try to fix it.
He wanted the 95 Theses to fix the Roman Catholic Church.
Why are you trying to fix something when it's so corrupt,
when it's so evil from the get go,
when you could just go to another church,
but that was because he was indoctrinated with it.