You go to some families, and they might be polite and everything's nice together, but you feel there's no bonding of love. There's something missing in the middle of it. It is the love of God flowing, it's the life of the spirit of God, so we're called to repent from dead works. In Hebrews 9, Verse 14, it says: "Now the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses you". You need to be clean from dead works. Cleanse your conscience from dead works, to serve the living God.
Notice this: the first thing is, God wants us to be cleaned up from all the dead, lifeless, barren activities, the frustrating things, that never caused us to feel love, or to have an identity; and to instead connect with God, and the overflow is such that now we're serving God, our life is an abundance of activity and vitality.
It's not we just stop doing stuff. There's a change on the inside, in the core motivation of why we're doing it. If we're not secure in who we are, that: I am my Father's child, I'm a child of God, I've come from God and I'm going to God, I have an eternity with Him, I have a destiny on the earth - if we are not secure that we're loved by God, we will then do things to try and meet the insecurity.
We will try to act or do things that cause us to feel good; so some people are very generous people, and they give and they give and they give and they do all kinds of things, all sorts of things. But the Bible says: if you do lots of things, but don't have love, what profit is it all? It's actually driven out of a motivation to feel good about yourself. What God is wanting is to change us on the inside, so we experience love, and love flows naturally.
When people are living in dead works, they tend to relate to people on the basis of: if you can help me get what I want to get, then you can be my friend. I see you're quite a wealthy person - you can help me get what I want - I'll be your friend. But you - well no not you. No, no. You come from Flaxmere - but this is the kind of thinking that goes on - you know that! That's called partiality, where we divide the world up - people that can help us get somewhere; and people that can't help us get anywhere - now that is full of dead works.
What God is looking for is to so change us, so that His love and His nature flows out, and it's natural to love people. That's why one of the first things He does - and you'll see this in the progression of these - is after we become connected to God and experience His love, He wants us to put us in a family, where we can be immersed in a family, and learn how to grow up in love, and learn how to represent Him properly - which is the remainder of the teachings in this.
So God wants us to then serve Him, but it's a serving that's a joy! That's not something that's a burden. It's something joyful - it flows out because you're in love with Him, and you get up and you talk with Him, and you begin to experience His love, and out of that there's an overflow in your life.
So we're called to turn from Dead Works, and turn instead and replace them with something called Faith towards God. We turn away from activities which are dependent on our own effort and energy, which tire you out, get you drained, frustrated; and we become like the older brother, resentful because we're not getting what we think we should get. A lot of people burn out. Burn outs are often because of a lot of dead works, wrong motivations; but if we repent of those, and now we come into Faith in the living God, our life will begin to flourish, and something flows out of it. It's called the life of the Holy Ghost.