What's up, everybody? How are we? We good? It's spring. It's spring in Kentucky. Let's go. Let's go. Hey, if you got your Bibles and I hope you do, go to Galatians chapter 5. We're going to pick up right there here in a minute. Our keyword again is freedom. I want to add my voice to those who have already said this. Happy Mother's Day. All right, happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. Let's give them a hand. Hallmark gave you a holiday. You deserve way more. You deserve way more than that.

So, hopefully we can honor you today. My mom is an amazing, remarkable person. The way I like to

describe it is she's very capable. She has more degrees than Fahrenheit. I mean, she just loves to learn

and things like that. But one of the things that she is very capable of is growing things. She is an avid gardener. And I would love to tell you that growing up, I really appreciated that. I did not, because what that meant is I was an avid digger of holes. That's what that meant for me, is I had to dig holes. And the thing was, we lived in a lot of apartments. So I'm pretty sure we planted stuff on ground that was not our property. Like, Mom, why are we out here? This isn't even belong to us. And so to this day, one of my favorite things to do is to take one of my three sons, or all my three sons, slow down the truck to about five to ten miles per hour, shove them out the door at her house and make them go do yard work for her because I have paid my dues. And I am not a

gardener. Like that's not my thing. But because I grew up with her, I can at least tell you the difference between these two things, fruit and weeds. One of them you cultivate, the other you kill. Now, for me, this time of year, I start doing a whole bunch of research this time of year on like, what's the most nuclear weed killer there is? Because I'm just so tired of the weeds coming up everywhere. And so I give a lot of my time and attention towards one of those things, but not the other thing. Like we have some fruit trees at my house because my mom bought them, of course, which meant I had to plant them, of course. And so I don't spend as much time as I should

cultivating those fruit trees. In other words, they don't look as good as they could. They don't grow as much fruit as they could if I spent time cultivating them, but I'm busy spending time trying to kill all the weeds. Let me ask you two questions right out of the gate today. What are you actively trying to cultivate right now in your life?

Second question, what are you trying to kill?

The distinction between those words is really, really important.

What you cultivate is the thing that you're going to nourish, you're going to feed,

you're going to water, you're going to give time, attention, and energy toward, affection toward.

The thing that you're trying to kill is what is that you have decisively and aggressively targeted to say, I want to be done

with that in my life, because that's where we're going today in Galatians. If you got your

Bibles again, Galatians 5, we're getting to the point where Paul's starting to wrap up some of what

he's saying to these churches in this region called Galatia. But there's just a few more things he wants to hammer home. And where we're going to pick up today is actually in the place that we've left off with every other sermon. Because Galatians 5-1 is really like the cliff's notes of the whole letter to the Galatians. How many of you are old like me

and you know what Cliff's notes are? All right? See, the kids these days, they got AI. We had some random dude named Cliff. You know, it was like, I don't want to read the Great Gatsby. Man, you got the Cliff's notes. I don't want to read Shakespeare. Man, you got the Cliff's notes and you'd borrow those things. Somebody would go to Joseph Beth and buy them for you,

and then hopefully Cliff knew what he was talking about enough that you studied the Cliffs Notes the night before to actually know what it was all about, where Galatians 5-1 is the Cliff's notes of the entire letter to the Galatians when it says, and hopefully you're getting this memorized by now, for freedom Christ has set us free, so stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

And what's really interesting about that, by now for freedom Christ has set us free so stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke

of slavery and what's really interesting about that and we talked about this a couple weeks ago

is that the people of galatia were primarily not religious Jewish people prior to paul arriving on the

scene and preaching the gospel they were primarily pagan people so So when he says, don't submit again to

a yoke of slavery, he's actually not talking about them being in danger of going back to their

pagan ways. He's actually talking about them swinging on a pendulum towards another kind of slavery,

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