Do you have access to God?

TRANSCRIPT

I was recently visiting Memphis, Tennessee. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, my family is there, my parents are there, my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, I got to see a lot of people, but to my surprise one person I didn’t expect to see that I did see was a friend, Matt Daniels. Now, Matt is a missionary in Montevideo, Uruguay, so he was up in Memphis visiting his family. His dad actually is sick but it provided an opportunity for he and I to get together and just be friends again. I hadn’t seen him in probably 4 four years, but he used to be a very special person in my life. He was somewhat of a mentor for me and helped as I was growing in my faith and growing in ministry and all the other things that are wrapped up in that. So I really appreciated seeing him.

And while I was with him we talked about ministry in Montevideo. Do you know anything about Montevideo or Uruguay in general? You may know that there is not a strong Catholic background down there. There’s really no strong religious background, in fact, that city, Montevideo is considered the largest unreached people group in Latin American, and there he is amongst the elite of the society, middle class, upper middle class and upper class, people who are highly educated. Their culture is very European in the sense of education and some of the antagonism towards the church that has arisen in Europe as well in the last 120 years. But, he was just describing some of the challenges of reaching lost people in Uruguay.

And as I was listening to him talking, as I was thinking about that, it kind of struck me that we spend a lot of time focusing on reaching people from another faith tradition, or with no faith tradition and bringing them into the church, bringing them to the gospel, bringing them to Jesus Christ. But one thing that we rarely talk about is people that are in the church that leave the church for some other religion, or some other faith religion, or decide they don’t believe in anything.

And, I don’t know if you’ve met anyone who’s done that. I haven’t me too many people that I know that have left the church and gone to some other religion. I remember a friend in high school, who was named John, and he left the church to become Buddhist and I have to admit that I was really surprised. Why would you leave the church to become Buddhist? You know, it doesn’t make sense to me and I know, we’ve been growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, it’s the…. Have you ever heard of the term the Bible belt? Or it’s just like this kind of area Where there is largely evangelical Christian. We call Memphis the buckle of the Bible belt. It’s right in the middle of the Bible belt. This is where everyone goes to church. If you are 16 years old, you have a youth group. If you are an adult, you go and you take your kids to Sunday School every week. It’s just what you do and here is this guy who’s going to be Buddhist. I didn’t understand and I asked him about it and I said, ‘why do you want to be Buddhist? What is it that attracts you to Buddhism? And honestly I don’t remember everything he said, but I know that he felt that he was looking for some answers that he did not find in the church. He was looking for truth which he did not find in the church, and he was looking for a place that really connected with who he was at first and allowed him to be all that he could be.

And I just remembered thinking, how sad it is that this guy left the church of Jesus Christ to pursue truth and to pursue his own ability to be everything that he could be and the sad reality is that he was so close to what he was looking for and he went looking for it somewhere else. Now, there is a good possibility that he wasn’t hearing the truth in this church. It happens, however he was so much closer among the people of God than he was with Buddhism and actually that’s something that the text that we’re going to look at tonight speaks to. It speaks to this question of what happens when you’re so close to the answer and yet you’re drawn by something else. You seek truth somewhere else, you seek you’re fulfillment in something else, when you’ve already really become part of the people of God. And so we’re going to be looking to the book of Hebrews tonight, and we’re going to go to chapter 4 and see what the author of Hebrews says to us and to the people he was writing to there. But as we do, let me pray for us and then we’ll look at the text.

Father, we ask that you would allow us to have open eyes tonight, Lord, that you’ll allow us to see what it is that you have for us in the word. Father we thank you for your word, we thank you that it is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Father we thank you that it is useful for teaching and correcting, Lord, also useful for training us in righteousness. And Father, we ask that tonight as we hear these words, as we consider the truths that are spoken here, that they might have impact in our hearts, and in our lives, that we would see how they relate to those around us and also how they relate to us, how they relate to our situation, each of us. Father, I pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I think I’m going to come down, because I feel like for a fairly not large group, I’m far away. Is that ok? So in Hebrews 4, verse 14 through 16, we read the following:

“…. Therefore since we have a great High Priest who has gone to the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God that has held firmly to the faith we profess, who we did not have a High Priest who was unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but if we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need….”

Now, originally the author of Hebrews was writing to a group of Christians who had come out of Judaism. They were used to making offerings for their sins on a regular basis. They would go to the temple, or at least once a year, for the day of atonement or if they lived anywhere near the temple, which likely they didn’t, but anyone who did, would go on a regular basis and make an offering for their sins. And they had these sins that, when they had done something wrong there was something that they could tangible do to make things right again. They didn’t have to rely just on thinking that everything was ok or someone saying, ‘no, it’s going to be ok, your sins are taken care of’. They could actually physically do something, and that gave them a lot of confidence, it gave them a lot of assurance that their sins were taken care of, that they were no longer going to be punished for their sins. And they went through this process, day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out, their entire lives, they made sacrifice after sacrifice, after sacrifice.

There was no one in sight, until one day someone came to their town and told them a story about a Jew just like them, named Jesus, and this Jesus was teaching something a little different from what they had heard before. He was teaching that instead of just having faith in some system, that they could put their faith in him and that he would give them forgiveness for their sins, because he was teaching these crazy things, he was actually put to death, but much to the surprise of those who persecuted and murdered him he rose from the grave as an indication that God had accepted him as a perfect sacrifice for their sins. These people heard the gospel for the first time and they were floored, they were amazed. Wow! You mean, I don’t have to go every day, or every month, or every day and offer a sacrifice for my sins. You mean, Jesus can take care of every sin I’ve done and wash it away. Yeah, that’s exactly right, friend. That’s what they heard, that’s the message they heard, the message of the gospel Jesus Christ. That there is forgiveness of sins, that you don’t have to be bogged down by guilt and shame and condemnation any more, but you can have freedom. And they accepted this message gladly, they heard testimony after testimony of people who had seen Jesus after he was raised from the dead and who had experienced the blessing of being free from their sin and they took their past life and they turned around and put it behind them and said, ‘No more, I’m a new man, I’m a new woman, I’m a new creation. I’m no longer bound by my sin’, and they were excited.

Was anyone excited when they first made that decision and they said ‘hey, I could put all that behind me and it’s over, it’s gone, as the east is from the west, the Bible says. So far as he removed my sins from me. God has taken care of it by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, to die for me. Amen. And then the next day, they get up and they’re talking to their spouse, and they say, ‘What are you talking about? It wasn’t me who did, it was him. It was you. And they sinned.

Where they at work and they were weighing the fish that they were trading and they put a little weigh on the scale and they sinned. Or who knows? Maybe they saw the woman, on the other side of town who had a reputation and went to see her, or maybe she was the woman of the other side of town with a reputation. And they sinned. They said, what do we do now?

I know Jesus took care of all that stuff, but what do I do now, because I have new stuff. Jesus has died back then and covered all my stuff, my sin, my junk, and now I’ve got new sin, new junk, new stuff, what do I do? And they were scared.

Because in the past they always relied on this acts that they could do to take care of their sin, they’d go offer a sacrifice the day of atonement. The priest offers a sacrifice for the entire nation, very holy special sacrifice for the whole nation, all their sins wiped out as long as they were repentant, as long as they confessed, then the sacrifice was enough to take care of their sin.

But now they didn’t know what to do. So, they’re actually thinking, ‘ok, we’ve accepted this message and we were free from our sin, but now we’re in big trouble because we have new sin and we’re not supposed to sin now that we’re Christians. Now that we’re Christians we’re not allowed to sin any more and we’ve sinned. What are we going to do? And a lot of them thought, well, let’s go back to the sacrifices, they always worked before. The sacrificial system, it will take care of our sin.

So, the author of Hebrews is writing to this group of Christians who had come from Judaism who were thinking, ‘we need to go back to what we knew so that we can have a sense of relief from our own sin. We accepted the message, we understand but we’ve got this new stuff we need to take care of.

Now, my hunch is that there is not one person in this room who is thinking, I’ve got a sin, I’ve got to go back to the sacrificial system of the Jews. There’s probably thinking ‘let’s get on a plane and go to Jerusalem and rebuild that temple and rebuild the altar so that we can make a sacrifice because I don’t know what to do with my sin. There’s probably no one thinking that. But there might be someone here thinking this: I was forgiven from my sins, I became a Christian, I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, my Lord, I’m not supposed to sin any more, so I’m still sinning, what do I do?

Ok, I got it. I mean, ….. time every day so I don’t sin ever again, ever, ever again. I’m going to do it every day and you might do it every day. You feel like me, you might miss a day or more than one day, every once in a while. And you think, ok, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Ok, I’m going to get in an accountability group and then I’m not going to sin any more so I’m not going to deal with this problem of having sin in my life on a regular basis. And that way I’ll be free from the burden, the guilt, the shame, because I won’t sin any more and on your way to your accountability group you sin, you do something and your accountability group screams, don’t stop going. But you still sin.

Ok, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I’ve still got this sin, I’ve still got this problem, I still don’t know what to do, I still don’t have guilt and shame. What am I going to do? I have to stop sinning. So you focus on this sin that you have, and you say, ‘I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to do it, and you do it.

Ok, regroup, re-attack. I’m not going to do it, not going to do it, not going to do it, not going to do it; and you do it. There is this cycle, spiral, downward spiral. Whenever you really mess up bad and you fall on your face, you stand up, you start at the top of the cycle and you start going down. Not with everything, we don’t always sin every time we can. We don’t sin in every way that we can. But we each have our sin, we each have our problem, we each have our guilt and our shame. This speaks to that.

It’s not just the first century Jewish Christian who needs to hear the message, Hebrews 4, 14 through 16, it’s all of us, because I think in some way, we all want to revert back what we used to do either relying on our determination and self will, or relying on others to help us through or some method or procedure that we can do to make our lives better. And yet we find over and over again that we can’t. We can hold off from that picture actually.

So, that’s the question that this passage addresses. It says, what do we do if we’re struggling with our sin, if we’re struggling with the fact that we can’t change ourselves, we can’t make ourselves better. I’ve gotten better, I became a Christian, I’m so much better than I was, trust me, but I’m not perfect yet and I’m still doing with that sin. Yeah, you can hold off on that. Yeah, thank you.

So, in this passage we find that that’s what he’s been talking about, he’s talking about before, he’s talking about people that are struggling with this idea and then he says to them, you need to hold firmly to the faith you profess. In verse 14, “…. Hold firmly to the faith you profess and the reason is because you have a great High Priest, Jesus, the Son of God, who has gone to the heavens…..”

Now, what is it about Jesus, the Son of God who has gone to the heavens, who’s a great High Priest that helps us to deal with our sin, that we have now, that we’re going to tomorrow, that we’re going to have next week. What is it about that that helps us? Or first of all, it is important to know what the High Priest does. It’s very important that Jesus is a great High Priest.

Now, when he says, ‘great’, it’s not like there’s a high priest and then a great high priest. He’s just a really good one, he’s a great one. He’s the perfect high priest. Now, what a high priest does is he mediates between God and man. He mediates between God and man. He is the one where I’m here and God is way out there, and he makes it where we can come together because if you know anything about the Lord, you know that he cannot be in contact with sin and if you know anything about sinful humans is that they cannot be in contact with the Holy Lord.

You may remember stories in the Old Testament where people see God and they immediately fall to their knees and say, what with me, I’m a dead man, because I’ve seen the face of the Lord and I’m a sinner. Isaiah, that’s his story. He comes into the presence of God in the throne room and he thinks he’s dead because he’s a sinner, he’s a man of unclean lips and actually what God does, is he has his angels going purifying Isaiah so that he can stay in the presence of the Lord and not meet his doom.

You see the same thing with others, multiple times in the Old Testament, this idea that if I see God I die. When God brings the people of Israel out of Egypt, the Jewish people come out of Egypt and they go to God on the mountain and they say, ‘No, we’re scared, we don’t want to see God face to face, we’ll die. Moses, you go for us, you’ll be our mediator.’

And Moses goes, talks to God and comes back and tells the people what’s going on. And then he goes back and talks to God and then comes back and tells the people what’s going on. So, he’s a mediator.

And then Aaron becomes a mediator, a high priest. What Aaron is able to do is make a sacrifice for all of Israel so that they can be in right standing with God, so they don’t have to be ridden by guilt and oppressed by shame for their sin, because it’s washed away by the sacrifice that the high priest alone can make.

So now we have this picture up here of the tabernacle which is where they made the sacrifices. I like the one on the top because it’s clearly made for children, so I can relate to it, but you see there is this kind of a wall of, it’s a tent and inside the tent there is a courtyard, and inside the courtyard, there is another little building. So you’ve probably seen this before if you’ve been to Sunday School, but just in case I’m going to explain what’s going on here.

The outer court is a place that only certain people can go, so even to come inside there’s a door on the left there, that little gate there; just to go in there in that place you have to be set aside for God, you basically have to be a priest, or you had to be someone to set aside for the work of God, you had to be holy. If you’re not holy you cannot go in there, and there’s an altar there, and there’s a basin there, and that basin is for ceremonial washing, and the altar is for the ceremonial sacrifices.

But then, that little building on the top right, is represented here on the bottom. Inside that little building, in the middle spot, is what it’s represented there, only the priest could go in there. You had to be a priest to go in there because that’s the holy place. So, there’s a lamp standing there, there’s a table, bread on it, there’s another altar. That’s the holy place. You had to be priest, only a priest could go in there. No one else because you cannot go in the presence of God if you’re not holy, and priests are washed, and purified and set aside for God, they’re holy.

But then, there’s another room with a veil in between the holy and the Holy of Holies; and the Holy of Holies, only one person can go, once a year. Well, two, the high priest and the presence of God. The only two people in that room are God and the great high priest. And the high priest can only go in there once a year and if anyone else goes in that room they die.

And in fact, tradition tells us that the high priest, would go in there with bells on his uniform, his ….. I forget what you call it, and he had a rope tied to his leg and if they were listening and they hear chic, chick, chick, chinky, chinky, because he’s in there doing his thing, he’s actually scattering blood all over the room to make atonement for the sins of the people of Israel, chic, chick, chick, chinky, chinky… that’s all they hear..… chic, chick, chick, chinky, chinky…

If it stops they’re concerned because that may mean that he’s palmed on the ground dead before God because he wasn’t acceptable, because maybe he was hovering some sin that he didn’t tell them about, so just in case, they had a rope tied to his leg, if the bell stopped they drag him out of there, because they can’t go in and get him. They had to pull him out, otherwise he’s going to stay there for a whole year until the next high priest goes in there and it’s going to smell. But that’s what tradition told us, that’s what happened.

So, this is a very special place and no one has access except the high priest. No one has access to God except the high priest, because the high priest is the mediator between God and men. And so the first thing that we need to know about Jesus is that he mediates between us and God, the Father, and without him we have no access to God. That’s a tuff situation to be in and it’s a situation that many people are in on a regular daily basis, they know they have no access to God. They need access to God but they don’t have it and they look for it, they look for it, and they look for it, anywhere and everywhere, but they can’t find it, because it can only be found in one person, Jesus, the Son of God, who went to the heavens.

Now, I want to speak just for a second on what it means that Jesus went to the heavens. We see in the rest of the book of Hebrews, that this tabernacle was actually built based on what he’s in heaven. So God has a throne room in heaven and he told Moses, you build this throne room, exactly like you see my throne room in heaven; so he shows him his throne room in heaven and then Moses builds this one exactly the same. So this tabernacle, or the temple, or the place where we go to meet God or that Israel went to meet God is a copy of the one in heaven. It no longer exists on earth but it still exists in heaven, and actually that’s where Jesus is.

So, we read later in Hebrews that Jesus is sitting in the throne room at the right hand of God. So in this tabernacle God has….. you see, I don’t now if you can see, it says, arch of the covenant and mercy see. Well, the arch of the covenant was actually the throne of God, it was the place where he sat and ruled, the place where he sat and judged and the place where he sat and distributed mercy and grace to people who needed it, to the sacrifice that was brought. He could either destroy, he could kill the person who came in that had no business being in there, showing his authority, his power, or he could give grace and mercy. That’s where he sat.

And so Jesus sits at God’s right hand in the real tabernacle, I say real, the original tabernacle, the original throne room, the one that cannot be destroyed, the one that cannot be erased, the one that we see in revelation, that comes down from heaven to the earth. I may sound a little silly or maybe old-fashioned, but we need to think of this as a physical place. It’s not just some spiritual concept, that oh, theirs is this reality that God is on the throne and it’s kind of a spiritual reality, and you know, he’s on a throne but if he’s not actually on a throne because he’s a spirit and…..

No, no, no….. there is a throne, a physical place, with a physical throne that God sits on and Jesus sits at God’s right hand. But unlike the high priests of the Old Testament he doesn’t go once a year and then leave, he does something very audacious. He goes in and he sits down and he stays for a while, he actually kicks his feet up, relaxes, because this is where he belongs. He doesn’t have to leave before he dies. No one’s going to rope tight around his leg, there are no archangels that are going to be dragging him out when the bells stop to ring.

He sits down, that’s his home, that’s where he belongs, in the Holy of Holies with God in the throne. Only the Son of God can take that place and we have a high priest who is not bound by the stipulations of the Old Testament’s high priests. We have a high priest who sits before God and stays there and has access to the Father 24/7, 365 days a year, every year and he made one sacrifice, he made the sacrifice of his own body, his own blood, his own will. He sacrificed everything he had and instead of going into that throne room, that Holy of Holies and sprinkling the blood of a goat, or of a bull, he went in there and spread his own blood, the Holy of Holies. He made a sacrifice that covered all our sins, not just the sins from that year.

But what those people didn’t understand is that that covered all the sins forth, it covered all the sin that was to come as well. Now many of us would say, of course it does, of course it does! And yet we live like it doesn’t. We live as if we got saved and now it’s up to us to make our lives better. we accepted the sacrifice Jesus made and now we’ve got to work really hard so we don’t need the sacrifice any more. That’s how we live so often, I know I have, I know I do. It’s not past tense, it’s present. So many times I forget that it’s not Jesus that saved me, it’s Jesus who saves me every day. We never graduate from the gospel of Jesus Christ. We never get our gospel diploma and then move on to bigger and better things, the gospel is it. That’s life, it’s the gospel. You’ve got to live it, every day in and out, and we have to act like we believe it.

And so often we don’t, so often we go on with our life as if it’s up to us, but then the question is: so how does that work? How is it that I can really trust that Jesus sacrifice is not only good for all my sins, but that I don’t need to bogged down by guilt or shame the rest of my life. Jesus doesn’t even understand, he doesn’t know what it’s like, and that’s what he addresses next. He says: No, you don’t understand, we don’t have a great high priest who can’t sympathize with us, we don’t have a high priest who’s never been in our shoes. We have a high priest who knows exactly what it’s like to be us, who knows exactly what it’s like to be with temptation.

You see, Jesus experienced every temptation. We see this in a couple of ways. Have you ever heard the passage about the lust of the flesh, the eyes and the proud of life, kidn of three broad strokes of ways that we sin. It’s been noted that Jesus kind of overcomes each of those in the temptation passages of the gospels.

You know, Satan says, hey, Jesus, you’re starving, turn this rock into bread and eat it, because you’re hungry. And he started growling and he’s like, oh, that sounds good, that bread would be nice. I guess no one told him that when you come off a fast you’re supposed to eat things like yogurt or something, I don’t know, don’t just jump into the bread, the pizza. But anyone, he said, all that bread looks nice, sounds nice. His flesh is crying out, ‘make the bread, make it, you can do it, eat it, give me some food!’. Because I don’t believe that Jesus’ fasting for 40 days was something that, oh, he’s Jesus, so it’s easy. Oh, he’s God so it didn’t hurt. Only by God’s miraculous power was he able to fast for 40 days.

Has any one known some one who’s fasted for 40 or close to 40 days? Well, in this church it happened. Multiple people did it. I’m not saying there was no miracle involved because, amen, there was a miracle involved, but it’s a physical possibility to fast for 40 days. It’s possible, it’s about the time that if you go any further your body truly breaks down, but you can do it for 40 days. You need water but no food.

So his body said, do it! Do it, Jesus! Do it! Just eat, I’m hungry! Lust of the flesh. He says, No, men does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes through the mouth of God. I probably screwed out the quote there, every word from God is how men live, not by bread. So that’s not the way God called me to do it, so I’m not going to do it that way. And then he takes Jesus up and he says, ‘Look at all this, all the kingdoms of the world, they can be yours, like that. All you have to do is bow to me and I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world’, which is interesting that Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Oh, but they’re not yours, they’re my dad’s’. No he says, ‘ok, well let me think about that. No, but the lust of the eyes, everything he sees he can have, and then Satan says, ‘You know what? God says that if you, as you walk to serve that you’ll never even stub your toe, the angels will protect you if anything is about to happen you physically. Why don’t you through yourself up of this high place here and let the angels of God protect you?

And then there maybe a part of Jesus fleshly nature that said, I can do that. I’m Jesus. I can do whatever I want. If I jump, yeah, sure, they’ll catch me. Yeah, yeah. Do it, do it Jesus. Do it, do it. He doesn’t do it because that’s the pride of life. So it’s been said that Jesus overcame every type of temptation there is.

But on a much broader scale we know that he endured temptation after temptation, after temptation and as I was going through this, I was actually talking to my wife about it, and the question kind of arose. Well, but Jesus never sinned so wasn’t easier for him not to sin? Because he didn’t have to overcome the sin nature, overcome anything like it, does he really know what it’s like? And it made me think, the more you sin, the less you understand temptation. The more you sin the less you’re tempted. That may seem like an oxy moron, but I firmly believe the more you sin, the less you’re tempted. And I’ll tell you why. When you’re tempted and you give in, you’re no longer tempted. Is that a true statement?

But you might be tempted again, but I’ll tell you what. If you’re on a diet and you’re really tempted to eat that cake, when you eat the cake, you’re not tempted to eat the cake any more. You ate it. There we go…. agreement. Or, you know, if you’ve known anyone who’s struggled with a dependency: alcohol addiction, drug addiction, cigarettes, whatever it is, it’s an actual addiction. It doesn’t matter… they crave it when they stop, they’re trying to be abstinent, they crave it like nothing else, they want it and they dwell on it, and they think about it and when they do it, they’re so much better, relaxed… oh, thank you, Jesus, right? No.

But, that’s how you feel. It’s when you don’t sin that you experience all the temptation has to offer. If you hold out for 2 hours, you know, 2 hours were the temptation, if you hold out for 33 years, you know 33 years a temptation, you’ve seen everything a temptation has to throw at you and you’ve beaten it.

Jesus knows temptation. I have some slides, I don’t know if we can get those up here, let’s look at the first one. Can we do that? Ok, so, simple graph. Resistance to sin, temptation, ok? This is my theory: that there is this line that goes up and tells you, however much you resist is how much temptation you have.

So, let’s go to the next one: so, let’s assume that you resist sin, ok, let’s say that’s a four, you’ve resisted sin to 4 where you’ve experienced temptation to four. Ok? Well, you know, I don’t know if this helps anyway, I just thought to put it up there, so I thought it was kind of funny.

If you resist temptation on the next slide, this is always fun, right? If you resist temptation to 10, if you resist sin to 10 then you know temptation at 10. But you never got all the temptation had to offer as long as you gave in. But once you give in, temptation is over, right? But if you don’t sin, then you experience temptation all the way up to infinity although at some point this is the great thing about Jesus, of religion, of Christianity or whatever you want to call it, the gospel.

If you resist sin to a certain point, temptation cannot go any further. There comes a point when you resist, and you resist, and you resist and it gets harder, and harder, and harder and harder and then all of a sudden it gets easy. All the sudden it’s not a nearly as attractive as it once was because you’ve built a resistance to that temptation, but you don’t experience to that temptation. But you don’t experience that till you go the hard steps of being tempted.

And what this passage tells us is that Jesus knows what it’s like to be tempted. In fact, he knows it better than you do. I imagine that no one in here has experienced temptation to its greater degree in every area of their life. Guarantee you there’s not one person here who has. I know, I haven’t. There are areas where I know what it’s like to be tempted that much, but not in every area. I mean, there are some things about the grace of God I just don’t struggle with as much or at all that I used to. I’m not really tempted to go to steal my sister’s candy, you know, I’m not really tempted to go hit some guy that I get mad at, but I used to be and it was hard not to. But, I never did, never did, never did, and now it’s not so hard, like, why would I hit that guy?

There are areas, but not every area like that. There are areas of my life where I have not experienced temptation to the fullest, but Jesus has. And if you think Jesus didn’t experience your type of temptation, well, friend, it’s not what the Bible says. That’s not really understanding what temptation is all about because Jesus never sinned, actually proves that he knows temptation better than you do. So God know, Jesus knows what it’s like.

So, don’t think he doesn’t understand because he does. He understands your weakness, he understands what it’s like to be tempted and he knows why you fall. There’s actually a great psalm where it says that God knows you’re made out of dust, he knows how he formed you. You’re just dust, you’re dirt, you’re made of this earth here that’s crumbling when it’s dry and muddy when it’s wet. It’s not that great of a building material, but that’s what he build you out of. So he knows you’re frail. He knows you’re weak. He understands. He made you that way. He made you weak for a reason.

I’m not saying the reason was that he wanted you to sin, he made you weak for a reason and he knows that you’re weak. So, he understands and he’s experienced everything you’ve experienced in terms of temptation.

And he says, buy the thing about you is that although he understands perfectly, he never sinned, he was without sin. He didn’t mess up. He never fell. One thing that he doesn’t experience is the guilt and the shame. He knows the temptation, but he doesn’t know the guilt and the shame because he never messed up. He sees it, he’s really good at empathy, so he understands it, but he’s never experienced it. That’s the only thing.

But any man, because if there were no perfect sacrifice, we would have no hope. And really here is where it gets down to it, it’s ok, what do I do about the sin that I have if all this stuff is true? What does that tell me about my sin? And what does that tell me about how to live a victorious Christian life? What does that tell me about changing my behavior and not being racked by guilt? What does that tell me about how to move in this world and not be constantly racked by condemnation, by shame and by the pain of messing up and again, and the consequences that come with my sin.

Well, friend, the writer of Hebrews tells us, you already have the answer. That Jesus, who died on the cross for all your sins is still there today with that perfect sacrifice having made; it’s one sacrifice he made it once, but he’s still ministering in the Holy of Holies as your high priest, on your behalf so that you have an answer for your sin. And all you have to do is go to him. All he says, is ‘Come’.

You know, when I was younger, I used to actually to step at night. In my own sin, I had a Luther complex, I don’t know, I just, I would just be going in circles about my sin and feeling ‘I can’t pray to God, I can’t go to God about this. I’m a Christian and I’m sinning, and that’s not acceptable. I can’t go to God. I got to get this stuff right because God has nothing to do with sin, God can’t interact with sin. God does not want me like this. And I remember reading this passage and weeping because finally I understood: God is not holding me at bay when I sin, God’s drawing me closer when I sin. When I’m struggling with that condemnation that’s when God says, ‘I have open arms’.

It’s interesting that he doesn’t say, we read it before, I’ll read it again, it says; ‘let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in the time of need…’

It’s funny that he doesn’t say, ‘Go to the throne of grace and stay there all the time, so that you receive mercy and grace all the time.’ He says, when you are in doubt, when you’re struggling, when you’re in need, then go to the throne of grace. It’s like there’s this special invitation for sinners to come to God when they’re sinning.

It’s not that now, that you’ve been saved the alter, or the face of God or experiences of God is reserved for the super righteous. In fact, God says, no, it’s still the sinner I want. Just like Jesus did, in the parable when he talks about these parable where they’re going out and trying to get the low lives, and go out and get the people that no one wants, he’s a doctor, they’re for the sick not for the healthy.

He’s like, I want the sick and when he makes them better, he says, I still want the sick. This is a strange thing because we think, well, we started with the gospel well, now we’ve got to g and do something else, but no, he starts with the gospel, continues with the gospel and ends with the gospel. There is nothing but the gospel. There is nothing but Jesus Christ crucified for your sins and resurrected from the dead, raised to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, to mediate between you and God and minister in your behalf in the throne room. There’s nothing else. That’s all there is, that’s all you have. If we refuse to go to God at that time. I don’t think he withholds his grace. But I don’t think you will experience it the way you will to go to heaven.

There’s this thought ….. I want to read to you in a second, but it’s not that we think either one of two things often times. Either I’m sinning and I can’t go to God, that was my problem, sinning and I can’t go to God, or we get this crazy idea, Paul talked about it as well, that oh, grace comes to sinners, so I’m going to sin all the time, so that I get all the grace. Well, that’s not what we’re talking about.

The reality is not in the middle either. It’s just neither of those things, it’s just something totally other. It’s a totally different paradigm that only those who really grasp the gospel can live by. Now, grasping the gospel was not something that only really only intelligent people can do. In fact, its the intelligent ones the one who have hard times with it sometimes. But when you internalize the truth of the gospel, only then can you live this way.

And there is this quote that I want to read it, it’s from Dallas Willard, I wrote it down, from Renovation of the Heart. He says this about grace, because he’s talking about these two contrasts, he says:

“We consume the most grace by leading a holy life and which we must be constantly rappelled by grace, not by continuing to sin and being repeatedly forgiven.

You see, it’s not that forgiveness affords us the most grace, because remember when you sin, you only face as much temptation to the point that you sin. You need more grace to withstand more temptation. So, it’s by living a holy life that you receive the most grace.

So, I want to expand this idea, when our time of need might be, because I was first talking about our time of needing when we are in sin, when we have guilt, we have shame. That’s the problem that were facing the original readers, the original hearers of this letter of discernment. They were facing the problem of what do I do when I’ve been saved but I have this guilt, shame and sin. He says, ‘don’t worry, Jesus is still ministering on your behalf. Go to him and he’ll give you grace. He’ll give you mercy, he gives it freely. He’s opened that space. He’s opened that place that normally would be reserved for one person, once a year, and he’s opened it up and he says, ‘ Come whenever you need to.’

You’re not necessarily going to live in the throne room but you can visit it any time, and you should visit it when you really are struggling. But let’s expand that a little bit, let’s actually expand it backwards, because the struggle starts when the temptation starts. The struggle doesn’t start when you sin and I think this promise is valid for those who are trying to withstand temptation, for those who are struggling against the desire to sin. The promise stands for you, for me, that when I’m being tempted, that’s when I can go to the throne of grace.

And let me tell you that’s the only way that you’ll see your life really change. I know, I’ve experienced times where I had a sin in my life and I said, I’m going to get rid of this sin, I’m going to get rid of this sin, I’m going to get rid of this sin, and I just get further, and further, and deeper and deeper into the thing, focus right on it. That’s what we try to do. We focus on it so I can get rid of it, and all you do is feed it.

But you see, what Jesus says, ‘you got that sin, now focus on me, think it closer to me, and closer to me and your sin gets further away and further away and that’s the only way. It’s not taking the responsibility away from you. You still have to make that decision. You still have to act, you still have to walk away. But the only way you can walk away is by going to Jesus. The only way you can withstand the temptations of life is by following Jesus and what he’s saying is, ‘come, take refuge in me when you’re struggling with sin. Don’t go out there and fight it, and pray for me to help you. Come to me, I’ll take care of it. You just come to me.

Now, you had to withstand temptation. You know, stand firm, flee sexual temptation, we have these commands, but what they’re saying is ‘don’t go after and try to whip it. You try to go after it and beat your sin, when you should be either standing or running from it, not getting closer to it and focus your eyes in Jesus.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to someone who had to drive. I had the privilege of helping a few people learn to drive. One of the little tricks that you can give someone is: when you’re driving in a little two lane road and you’re going this way and there’s a car coming this way, a lot of new drivers tend to creep towards the middle lane. They creep towards the line because they are looking at that car and they’re thinking, ‘I don’t want to hit that car, don’t want to hit it’. And you say, ‘hey, hey, hey, look at the other side of the road, look at the line on the other side of the road’. And then they say, ‘ok, I’m looking, I’m looking,….’ And they get closer to the other side of the road.

Or may know some people who, when you’re driving down Washington street or something and there’s all these cars on the side, and you’re helping them learning to drive, so you’re in the passenger seat, they’re already here. And they’re like, this far from the other cars, and you know like……. lane…. They’re looking at these cars, don’t want to hit these cars, don’t want to hit these cars, like look over here. Oh, ok, I’m looking over here… don’t want to hit those car. And that’s how life is.

We get side tracks on the things on our right and our left, but the sins, the temptations that come, Jesus says, no, just keep the focus on that sinner and you’ll be quiet all right. Don’t focus on the things you don’t want to hit. You’ll hit them. Focus on me and then let the others just go by. Right?

That’s the mystery of the gospel or one of them. There are other mysteries. That’s a mystery of the gospel. See, we get so tied up, it’s not that we’re going back to Judaism, only we’re going back to the temple and I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near animal sacrifices. You’d have peat all over you and you know, there’d be protests and stuff, ‘Save the donkeys’, I don’t know, whatever you’d sacrifice, the goats, sorry, not donkeys. You can’t do it, I mean, I’m not for killing animals, I’m saying I don’t want to, but that’s not really is our problem. Our problem is this: that we’re trying to do things on our own, so to continuing in the gospel.

And Paul talks about it in Galatians 3. He says, ‘why do you start with the spirit and then go on to other things? You foolish Galatians. Silly people, why are you so crazy? Why are you doing such a foolish thing as start we the spirit, start with the gospel and then kind to get on with your life the way it was before, thinking it’s going to work now. It’s foolishness. It’s what we do every day. It’s what I do every day.

So, this passage tells us, hey, you don’t have to live like that any more. Go to God, go to Jesus, the throne room curtain has been flung wide open, in fact, it’s torn in two when Jesus died in the cross, the veil has been torn, you have access to the Father. You’ve got Jesus who’s mediating for you, and who’s ministering on your behalf and he’s applying his death to your life on a daily basis.

Remember, it’s not a freedom, or a license to sin because that’s not where the real grace, the ultimate grace comes from. The ultimate grace comes from God empowering you to walk that life that you’ve wanted to walk, to live the life you wanted to live. And what he’s saying in this passage is be strong, hold firmly to your faith, don’t give up on it yet, don’t go off to Buddhism, don’t go off to atheism, don’t go out to something else, trying to find your answers. You hold fast, you hold on to that faith, if you’re strong, he’ll give you strength. The strong get the strength of God, it’s not the people who flee, it’s the people who stand firm in Christ, who are strengthened, who are empowered, who are given grace and mercy. And he holds that out to you right now, he holds it out to you, this moment, in this building, that whatever it is you’re struggling with you offer to him, you go to him, whatever it is that’s been tempting, you say, ‘God, I’m going to leave that over here and I’m going to go to you, the throne of grace, I need your mercy, I need your compassion, I need your understanding and I need you right now.’ And he’s saying ‘right, here it is. Come get it!’

So, I’m going to do something a little different tonight, actually to do things a little different but I’m going to play a song and I want to offer you the opportunity to go to the throne of grace. Now, I said it’s a physical place but you have access to that place through Jesus Christ.

Now, you’ll be able to walk around and do something there, some day, I’m quite sure, you’re going to go sightseeing, take pictures, I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re going to go there one day, but right now we have access to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is in you, Jesus Christ is in there, in that throne room.

So, I’m going to play a song and then you can be on the floor, you can be up here, you can be in your seat, but I’m going to play a song and then leave a moment of silence, just an opportunity for you to go to the Lord, wherever you need to. I think a lot times we offer people opportunities to come up and share their praises or come up and share their concerns or maybe something weighing on your heart. This is really about sin. This is really about you having freedom from that sin, walking in truth, walking in righteousness, walking in holiness. That’s what this is about and this is a daily step, a daily process, there are no short cuts here. This is not a magical moment, this is you saying, ok, I should have been doing this every day but I haven’t, so I’m darn well going to start tonight.

So, that’s what we’re going to do now.

Oh, Lord here I am now

Bowing humbly down before your throne of grace.

I am in awe of your unmerited love

In spite of my sinful ways

Oh Lord here I am still

Turning and clinging to you

My strength and my shield

My Father, my Teacher, my Master

The lifter of my trampled spirit

The author of all that is righteous and holy

I’m praising, all glory to you my sweet Savior

In you sweet Lord Jesus, I rest, I rest

Oh, I rest.

Oh, my sweet Lord Jesus,

Savior of yourself and set me free

Oh I lift up my voice and praise you

You are worthy, you are worthy, Lord.

Oh, Lord here I am now

Bowing humbly down before your throne of grace.

A call for obedience

TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever known you’re just supposed to do something and you just didn’t want to do it. Maybe it was someone like, when you’re younger your parents told you to do something and you thought, ‘you know, I just don’t want to do that. I’m not going to do that.’

Or maybe it was an appointment you were supposed to keep and you didn’t really want to have that meeting and so you kind of put it off, and put it off, and then you knew you were going to be late, and then you just called the person, ‘ok, I’m going to be late, sorry, I can’t do anything about it, I can’t make it’. You just decided you were going to blow it off.

Or maybe, it’s something else entirely, but it’s a point sometime, and I think we’ve all had one of these points sometimes, when we decide, you know, this thing that I’m expected to do, I just really don’t want to do it, so I’m not going to do it. Can we all relate to that in some way or another? I know in my life there are a lot of those things through the years that I just decided, you know, I’m not going to do it.

And sometimes you say you’re going to do it, and you know you’re not going to do it. You say, sure, I’ll do that, in the back of your head you’re thinking, yeah, in some other lifetime, you know. If I had nothing better to do, and trust me, I will have something better to do, but… That’s how we act sometimes. And maybe not all the times, and maybe not even often, but it happens occasionally.

And tonight, the passage, we’re going to be looking at something that’s horrid. We’re going to be looking at something that’s difficult and before we jump into that passage I just want to share a little story that kind of relates to this, and it’s a story from the Bible and it’s in the book of John and it is John, chapter 6, verse 60.

And actually, I heard a sermon on this topic recently on the radio. It was by J. Vernamin Gee. Has anyone ever heard of J. Vernamin Gee? He does this through the Bible on the radio, and the guy… when did he do that? When did he record these things? Back in the 50s, something like that, and he’s got this great southern accent, and I love it, because I feel like I’m at home when the radio comes on and he’s on the radio, because I’m from Tennessee and he says, ‘Brothers, when you sing it that the Lord has called you’…. you know, he has that kind of ways that I just love.

But he was preaching on this passage and it’s really great because he brings out this idea on Jesus’ teaching about how the Jews, the people that if they wanted to be right with God had to eat to his flesh and drink his blood, and this is just, you know, on the verge of blasphemy for a Jew. You know, a Jew is not supposed to drink the blood of any living creature, and you know, all the stuff…. It’s kind of idolatrous sounding and they say, they grumble and they argue with him and he says, ‘no, you have to’.

And they say in verse 60 “.. on hearing it many of his disciples, not his 12 disciples but many of the other disciples, said, ‘this is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’. And Jesus turns to the twelve and he says, ‘do you want to leave too?’, because his disciples were leaving. He turns to the twelve, and he says: ‘Do you want to leave too?. And Simon Peter answers him, in verse 68 “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words to eternal life.”

And I just bring that up to say, that sometimes in life there are things that we don’t want to do, but when it’s the words of Jesus that are hard, when it’s the teachings of the Bible that are hard, we just have to realize that no matter how hard it is, there is nowhere else we can go. And I say that tonight just to make this point: we need to decide right now whether we’re going to follow the teachings of Jesus, whether we’re going to accept the teachings of scripture.

Before we get into the hard teaching, we need to decide right now that we’re going to accept it and that we’re going to live by it.

Now, some of you in here, may not be at the point when you’re ready to do that maybe you think, you know, I’ll wait and see what it is and then I’ll decide. It’s your choice. But as a committed follower of Christ, we need to decide now that we’re going to accept the teaching that Jesus gives. And so that’s kind of my preface into the passage that we’re going to look at tonight, which is actually also in the book of John, in chapter 14.

So, if you will turn to John 14 and a lot of us have read this passage before and we probably didn’t fall on the ground and think, ‘oh, Lord, this is too hard. Oh, how can we do this?’ We probably haven’t had that experience where we just in total rebellion say, ‘No, Lord, I’m not going to do what this passage teaches me to do.’ We probably haven’t been there. You’ve probably read this many times and you never felt that. But in our lives we act like that, we act like the person who says, yes, I’ll do it and then turns around and doesn’t. And we have all sorts of reasons and means by which we get out of this teaching, but let’s look and see what Jesus has to say in chapter 14 of John. And we’re going to start in verse 15:

Jesus says: “…. If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever, the spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Before long the world will not see me any more, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I’m in the Father, you are in me and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me, he who loves me will be loved by my Father and I too will love him and show myself to him’.

Then Judas, not Judas Iscariot said, ‘but Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?’ Jesus replied, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching, my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me, will not obey my teachings. These words you hear are not my own, they belong to the Father who sent me. All this I’ve spoken while still with you, but the counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace, I leave with you, my peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. You heard me say I am going away and I’m coming back to you. If you love me, you’ll be glad that I’m going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. I have told you now before it happens so that when it does happen you’ll believe. I will not speak with you much longer, for the prince of the world is coming, but he has no hold on me, but the world must learn that I love the Father, and I do exactly what my father has commanded me. Come now, let us leave”. The word of the Lord.

This passage has a lot of things that, we as Christians are very interested in. There’s a lot of interesting things about the Holy Spirit, about Jesus coming and going and coming again, about his relationship with the Father, about his relationship with us, about his relationship with the prince of this world, the devil. There’s a lot of really interesting and important information for us as believers. And I think the tendency, at least in my life, and the life of a lot of people I’ve known, and churches I’ve been in before, and I think even in this one, I think the tendency for us is to look at a passage like this; it’s a kind of a long passage, and to focusing on those things about a comforter or a helper of the Holy Spirit, to focus on the things about how we’re united in Christ, and Christ is in the Father, and therefore we’re in the Father, to be focused on the fact that Jesus has promised that God will reveal himself to us. Those are great promises, but the thing is we often overlook one of the most important parts of the passage, something that is repeated over, and over, and over again: “… if you love me you will obey my commandments. Those who obey my commandments are the ones who love me. Those who don’t obey my commandments do not love. If you follow my word, if you keep my word you love me….” And he even says: “… I love the Father and I show it by doing everything that he tells me to do..”

And that’s the part of this passage that I want to focus on tonight. And it’s kind of a hard teaching because, as Christians, we talk about a relationship with God, a relationship with Jesus Christ, how we love God, we love Jesus Christ, we sing about it, you know, we sang about it tonight, how much we love God. And yet sometimes our life does not reflect the love as defined by Jesus in this passage.

And we don’t want to hear that we don’t love God, because we feel good feelings towards God. We really like him. He’s come through for us in the past, he’s been there when we needed him. If you haven’t experienced that, it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that there’s someone great out there, someone amazing, someone powerful out there that’s on your side. What a wonderful feeling! And yet Jesus says, that if you love me, you’ll obey my commandments, and he says, if you obey my commandments, then you love. And it’s this inescapable conclusion that for Jesus, loving God and obedience are completely tied together. You can’t have one without the other. You just have to take this face value, you’ve got to take Jesus’ word at face value and say: ‘ok, Jesus, you’re saying that if I’m not obedient, then I don’t love you; or that if I love you I will be obedient’. I’ve got to take that face value and wrestle with my life, because I think what we do so often is we reason a way of it, we reason ourselves out of the implications of that statement.

Well, what Jesus means is that if we love him, we’ll try to be obedient, because we know that no one’s perfect, right? And how can you have to be obedient to love God? That means no one would love God, because no one is always obedient. And we reason our way out of it. But he doesn’t say, if you love me you’ll try to keep my commandments. He doesn’t say, if you try to obey me, then you love me, and if you don’t try to obey me then you don’t love me. That’s not what he says. He says, if you love me, you will obey my commandments. If you love, you will obey my commandments, that’s what he says over and over again. He says it like six, 7, 8 times in this passage. This isn’t the only place we find it either. There are other places in scripture where we see identical or very similar teaching.

And so, what I want to do tonight is I want to force us to wrestle with that statement, with that idea, with that truth that those who love him keep his commandments. We need to wrestle with that in our own lives. And I don’t want us to too quickly worm out from underneath that difficult saying. So that’s the first thing tonight: there’s means to recognize that this is a truth, this is a statement of Jesus Christ that we have to take at face value.

Now, I will say that I don’t think Jesus is saying that if you fail to keep my commandments ever, then that means you don’t love me. He’s not saying that. He might be saying something more along the lines of ‘when you are in obedience you’re displaying love to me, and when you’re in disobedience you’re not displaying love to me.’ That might be what he’s saying or might be part of what he’s getting at and we’re going to have to explore that in the passage a little bit and see if that works, see if that is adequate, understanding of his teaching here, because I really, again, I want us to wrestle with this tonight.

So, Jesus says, if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments, you will obey what I command, you will keep my teachings. He says that multiple times here, and I want to know, can he just mean that we’re showing love when we’re obedient? And I think the answer to that is near the middle part of this passage:

“Judas says ‘Why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?’….”

Think about that for a second. Why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world? Because Jesus said he would reveal himself to us, even when he was gone. He doesn’t ask, why is it that you’ll show yourself to us sometimes and not show yourself other times? He doesn’t ask, why will you sometimes show yourself to these people and sometimes show yourself to these people? It’s a very categorically, making this division between two types of people: those who are going to be revealed that Jesus is going to be revealed to, and those who Jesus is not going to be revealed to, which are they called the world.

And he says, ‘If anyone loves me, there in verse 23, he will obey my teaching, my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own, they belong to the Father who sent me.”

I think the idea there is you can’t just say that he’s talking about sometimes you obey and sometimes you don’t. That’s not what he’s getting at. That doesn’t make sense to this answer that he makes. This doesn’t make sense to the question because the question talks about two distinct groups of people that we basically understand that once you’re in this group, you’re in this group always, and once you’re in this group you’re in this group always, because he says ‘we’ll come and make our home with him. The one who obeys my commandments, I will come and make my home with him.’

You don’t make your home, he doesn’t say he’s going to pitch a tent and then like maybe go and pitch his tent somewhere else when you’re not being obedient. He says he’s going to come and make a home with him, a dwelling and abode. This word that’s used here, he says I’m going to make my home with you is referencing a very physical, permanent dwelling place. That’s the idea.

So then, what can he mean? If he doesn’t mean if you ever are disobedient then you don’t love me. And he doesn’t mean that you’re either showing love or not showing love by your obedience or disobedience. What can it mean? Is anyone nervous? Does anyone really want to hear the answer? Do I fit that category? Probably the wiser we are, the more nervous we are, but the most sure what category we’re in. Did you catch that? The wiser we are, probably the more worried we are, but also the more sure what category we fit in.

I think Jesus is saying that those people whose lives are characterized by obedience, those people who generally are striving to be obedient to the words of God, to the words of Jesus, those people are the ones who love God, those people are the ones who have life in Jesus Christ, those people are the ones who will have God revealing himself to them, who will have God make his home with them. Those are the ones.

And I think, as we walk in our Christian life, as we gain experience and wisdom in the Christian life, we realize that we have to be very nervous about our obedience to Jesus. We can’t take anything for granted, but we know that we have committed our lives to him. We know that we’re dedicated to the things that Jesus has called us to. We are sure of the fact that we love God and God loves us and he is with and in us, and part of it is because in a sense, this passage is talking about the future, but it was a specific point in time that for us is now past, does that make sense? Jesus is at…. Had the last supper and he’s pointing to a future time, but the future for him has already come for us. So, the spirit of God who has made his dwelling with us, already testifies in the hearts of believers that he has made his home with us, that he is with us and therefore he is loved by us and we are loved by him. Does that make sense? Do you get the idea that this should already be a past event for so many of us. If we’re believers in Jesus Christ, this is a past event.

He says, I will send someone, but for us he’s already been sent. He says, I will make myself known, but for us he’s already made himself known. So, for a believer who understands his or her position in Christ, this is still something that we have to take seriously and we have to wrestle with, but we don’t do it with fear in the sense of, oh, no, am I really the one with Christ? Do I really love Jesus Christ? Do I really love God? But with the kind of reverend fear that says, I understand that if I fail in obedience, if I turn the other way, if I change my life and no longer serve God, no longer seek God, no longer obey his teachings, then that’s a sign that there’s some serious trouble in my life, a serious trouble in my future. That’s a sign, I need to always be concerned about that.

Paul says, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. He’s talking about that on going recognition that our salvation is based on our trust in God’s mercy and we can never take mercy for granted, we can never just assume that we can live how we want, get on with our life and then have all the expectations of glory that are to come.

So, we’re going to take this statement of face value, we’re going to understand that it’s talking about a lifestyle obedience. Now, then the question might be, what constitutes a lifestyle of obedience and what fails to constitute a lifestyle of obedience? But that’s a tough question.

The Bible is actually very silent on how obedient you have to be to be considered obedient. Jesus goes to a tree on his way down to Jerusalem and there is no fruit on it, and he says, this tree should be bearing fruit and it’s not, so it’s going to wither and die, and when they pass by a day or two later, it’s withered and dead. There was no fruit on that tree. If there had been one piece of fruit, would he had let that tree live? If there had been two pieces of fruit, would he had let that tree live? I don’t know.

But the point is, that tree was clearly characterized as not bearing fruit which translates to us a person clearly characterized as someone not being obedient to God. That’s what that tree symbolizes. The tree bearing fruit for our purposes here tonight is the person whose life is characterized by obedience to God. But again, how obedient? I don’t know and I can’t answer that question in your life, I can barely answer that question in my life. I do know that the spirit of God will testify to you whether you’re being obedient or not, whether you’re living a lifestyle of obedience or not. I can promise you that.

In fact, the Bible tells us that the spirit of God convicts the world of sin. Why would the spirit of God convict the world of sin? Why do we need to be convicted of sin? It all ties into this thing, the concept theme through John 14, that we have to be obedient, we have to obey the teachings of Jesus. We have to obey the commands of Jesus. We have to. There’s no way around it, we have to do it. But there is a reward for obedience and actually I kind of set them all already, the ones in this passage, but we have, if you love me, you’ll obey what I command and I’ll ask the Father and he’ll give you another counselor to be with you forever.

One reward of obedience is a sense is the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is the one who comes on beside us and helps us as we struggle on this life to be obedient to Christ, as we struggle against the disobedience of others, this Holy Spirit comes on beside us and helps us. You might have the word comforter in your Bible, you might have the word counselor, you might have the word helper. Swirl is a very interesting word, you may have heard it before, paracletos…. Very common word that we’ve…. You know, if you’ve been in the church for a while you may have heard that term. Basically it means someone who comes alongside. Someone who comes alongside to do what? Well, a lot of things to comfort, to counsel, to help. You know, it’s actually in a sense the word is not very specific which is why it can take on such a great meaning, because the person who comes alongside, comes alongside to do whatever the person comes alongside to do. That’s kind of a cheap way out of it, explaining what he does, he does whatever he wants to do, he does whatever he’s going to do; but that’s what he does, whatever he’s going to do. He comes alongside and he does it. That’s what the Holy Spirit does.

But in this context the Holy Spirit comes alongside to help us obey the commandments of Christ. And we need that help. If you’re familiar with Galatians 3, Paul comes to these people who lived in Galatia and he says to them: ‘you’re so foolish. Why is it that you got saved by the Holy Spirit but now you’re trying to continue in Christ through your own works? You see, to say that is obedience that indicates our love and to say that we have to be obedient to have relation with God, does not mean that we then are on our own and we don’t trust in God’s grace and we don’t trust in God’s spirit. No, it’s the exact opposite, because obedience is so important we have to trust in the grace of God all the more, we have to rely on his Holy Spirit to move in our life, to give us the ability to be obedient, to give us the strength to be obedient, to give us even the desire to be obedient.

Have you ever been in a funk and you just don’t care if you’re obedient? And you pray, Lord, help me care, because I don’t even want to be obedient right now. I don’t even know why I’m praying for you to make me care, because I don’t care. Where do you think that prayer came from? The spirit of God in you? Perhaps, mayhap, my favorite archaic term. It’s the spirit of God in you that allows you to pray that prayer. It’s the spirit of God in you that gives you the desire to be obedient. It’s the spirit of God in you that allows you and informs you, and encourages, and empowers, and strengthens, and enables you……. to be obedient. Everything you need to be obedient comes from God.

So that’s one of the benefits of being obedient. Now, that’s kind of weird, right? If you’re obedient you’ll get someone to help you be obedient. It’s what he says. Those who love me will obey my commandments and I will send another one like myself, another one like Jesus, who will come alongside you and help you in your times of need, who will come alongside you and comfort you, who will counsel you, who will teach…. We’ll see that later, he will teach you all things, he will remind you of all things that I have taught. It’s an interesting part of the passage.

Says, but the counselor, the paracletos, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of everything I said to you. What is he reminding us that Jesus said? That maybe one day Jesus may be said to his disciples, ‘hey, let’s go get lunch’. Is the Holy Spirit reminding me that statement, everything Jesus said? No, his sayings, his words, his teachings, his commandments.

In fact, when you see in the NIB, what is it he says? If anyone loves me he will obey my teaching. Anyone who loves me, he will obey my word. That’s what he said. He will obey my word. The Holy Spirit will remind you of everything I said. You see the connection? The role of the Holy Spirit in this passage is to help us to remember, understand and follow the words of Jesus, the commands of Jesus. And isn’t some unusual thing that we see in the scripture. Constantly Jesus is saying things about obeying him: follow my commandments.

My goodness, the most famous passage on evangelism is the Great Commission. As you’re going make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them all the commands that I’ve given you. Teach them all the commands so they understand and know and know about the commands. No, so that they’ll do the commands.

When you disciples you’re teaching people to do the right thing. Now, again there’s that word teach. Does teach just mean inform? Teach them all the things I commanded. No, teach them to do, as a teacher, especially when you think about Jesus was a teacher, a rabbi. Back in those days a teacher had a lot more authority than teachers do now. Teachers in here, anyone? You have a lot of authority, right? Yeah, if people want to give it to you, if the kids care, right? You have good kids, you have bad kids. Sometimes you are supposed to have authority but it’s hard to enact that authority.

But, you know, Jesus as a teacher, he had a lot of authority, people come to him. I have a dispute with my brother, give us the answer, what shall we do? They didn’t just want information, they wanted the teacher to tell them what to do. That’s what we’re talking about here. Does the spirit of God teach you as you read the Bible, does he reveal things about the Bible to you? Of course he does, but what he’s talking about here, when he says teacher, that he will teach you all things. He’s not saying that you’re going to have all knowledge if you have the spirit.

What he’s saying is the Holy Spirit is going to work in your life so that you become obedient and to the point that you resist or accept he work of the Holy Spirit in your life, is the degree to which you will have that obedience. Because it’s not just teaching knowledge. It’s teaching to make you do something. So that’s one of the benefits of being obedient.

The other is, God will himself to you, will reveal Jesus Christ to you and the Father and the Son will make their home with you. Now, what better place to be? What better location on earth to be than in Jesus’ home, and Jesus’ home kind of moves with you, as you walk his home walks with you, as you get on the train, or the bus, or the plane, or the car, Jesus’ home is right there, moving along with you: no t-pass, no extra ticket, but he’s right there with you. What better place to be on earth than in the presence of God?

And sometimes we say, and rightly so, the presence of God was with us tonight, and what we mean is he revealed himself in a very unique way, right? But isn’t the presence of God with us always? And it’s, you know, we invite the presence of the Lord in this room, wasn’t he here before we got here? Didn’t he come in with us when we came to the door?

Now, it’s right to do that. Please, continue to pray that God will be present. Continue to pray a prayer inviting the Lord here, because what we’re saying by that is, ‘Lord, we recognize that we need you and we’re asking you to be with us.’ But we’re also saying, ‘Lord, we also expect you to answer that prayer because you’re with us all the time, because you like to be present with us, because you enjoy being present with us, because you love us and we know you love us because….. what does Jesus say? Because we obey your commandments. Well, that’s where….

We know that God loves us because we obey his commandments. It’s a hard sell in a lot of churches today. It’s a hard sell in the world, for sure. That idea is not very common in the sense that it’s taken that seriously. Because what we say is, ‘oh, brother, what you’re teaching here is legalism. What you’re teaching here is that if we just obey, if we just do everything right, then we earn our salvation’. No, that’s not what I’m talking about.

You see, obedience is not a condition for salvation. Obedience is not the means to salvation. But obedience is the means to sanctification. Obedience is a requirement of sanctification and by sanctification what I mean is that journey that we go on, to live out our salvation. We’ve been accepted by Christ, we’ve been accepted by the Father because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and we have a right relationship with God, we’re perfect in his eyes, now, we’ve got to start living out that relationship that we have through Jesus. We have to start living out the position that we have in Christ. We have to put on righteousness. We have to take off our old self and put on a new self. This is all through the Bible, this idea of holiness, obedience, righteousness. I think….. be there for holy because your Father in heaven is holy, your God in heaven is holy. Did you read that early tonight?

We got to be holy. We have to be obedient and again, it’s so easy for us to take the hard edge off of that. Oh, yeah, we have to be holy, we have to pray, and read our Bible, and we have to go to church, and when you ask someone sometime, how’s your Christian walk going? You know, Christian walk, what does that mean? But we say stuff like that, what is your Christian walk? How’s your Christian walk going? Oh, pretty good, I’ve been praying a lot and you know, I’ve had great times of worship and I’ve been reading my Bible and you know, …. Yeah, it’s good.

Oh, how’s your obedience going? What? Well, I asked you how your relation with God was, so it seems natural that you would tell me about how obedient you’re being? No, that’s the last thing on our mind. Right? It’s the last thing, we’re not worried about our obedience, but God is. God is very much concerned with our obedience and if we take the edge off, then we are doing ourselves a disservice and we’re really saying to Jesus, ‘I want to love you on my terms. I don’t want to love you on your terms, which is the demand of obedience. I want to love you on my terms’. And that really gets at the other side of this, you know, not teaching legalism because love without obedience, in this relationship with God, is just sentimentality, it’s just sentiment. If you have good feelings for God, but you’re not obedient, you just have a sentiment. That’s all. And if you have obedience without love, then that’s legalism.

Like the student with the teacher. I asked the teacher the other week, do your students obey you because they love you or because they have to? I think they do, because they love me. That’s great. She’s a really good teacher. She’s a great teacher and I bet her kids really do love her. But I see a lot of students obey a teacher because they had to and they hated that teacher. I’ve seen parents, I used to be a youth pastor, parents would ask me, ‘you know, my kids are doing this, should I make them stop? Should I forbid them to do… ? You know, should I forbid them to go out because if they go out they might drink? Should I forbid them to do this because if they do that they might smoke? Should I forbid them … forbid them, forbid them….

And, one thing I would say is ‘yes, you need to put a barrier around your children, a barrier to keep some of the world out and a barrier to keep some of their sin in.’ You know, restrain a little bit. That’s right and good. But some parents push and restrain and restrict so much that the child has one or two options: they can either rebel or their spirit can be broken, and they obey, but they don’t love.

And then some parents don’t have any rules, and their kids love them, but there is no obedience because there’s no rules, and we’ve seen what happens, or I’ve seen what happens with those types of children. I have not in my immediate family, but in my family, that was the ideal that was lived out, we’re going to give our children every choice so they can make their own decisions so they can be their own person. They are not doing so well today. They are all, all but one’s an adult and not one of them is doing so well. They didn’t have any order, they didn’t have any restraint.

So, you see, you have to have love and obedience working together. And that’s not legalism, that’s a true relationship with God. That’s the relationship with God that he wants and that’s what’s so great about it, it’s that it’s going to be good because that’s the one that he desires for you.

So, now the question is, how do we be obedient? This verse, this passage really only talks about one thing that I see in terms of how to be obedient. We’ve already talked about it, the spirit of God must be present for you to be obedient, but there are other questions and other answers that might be there in terms of how to be obedient. And the first thing, I just want to throw out some ideas: 1) learn to be obedient in the little things, so in a sense, practice obedience.

If you have small things that you need to be obedient in and you do them and you do them, and you do them, what you’re doing is you’re practicing saying, yes, Lord; yes, Lord; yes, Lord; yes, Lord; and then this big thing comes that you really weren’t ready for and it says, ‘do this’, and you say, yes, Lord. What, what did I say? You’ve practiced it so much that you just do it, it’s just natural. God tells you to do something and you do it.

Again, I think it was Tolu who shared a story about a woman who practiced obedience and God told her, you know, make a left turn here, or something and she just did it and saved her life. You know, crazy stuff like that. I don’t know if it’s that crazy. Right? But the idea is that she practiced obedience and so when some weird thing came, she knew it was the voice of God and she just did it. When some difficult thing comes, she’s going to know it’s the voice of God, she’s just going to do it.

I pray that I would practice obedience enough so that I don’t have to think about being obedient, in the sense that I don’t have to consider whether I’m going to obey this command or not. And that’s why I said before we got…. That we had to decide beforehand that we’re going to accept the teaching, that we’re going to do what it says and that we’re going to follow it.

In the Christian life we don’t have the option of deciding which rules we’re going to follow. We don’t have the option of considering a command to determine whether or not we like it or whether or not we’re going to do it. I mean, in a sense we can, but we really don’t have that…. God does not afford to us that privilege. You know, I think we’re used to in this country, thinking ‘well, that’s the law but it’s not a good one, so I’m really not going to follow it.’ Or at the best, we’ll try to change it, right? If you don’t like a law, try to change it.

Well there is no option for that with God, there is a law and you do it whether you like it or not, there’s no congress, like that’s effective, but there’s no means to change any laws, there’s no voting, there’s no petitioning. A lot of us filled out a petition in the last couple of years on something we didn’t like. We can do that, but not with God, we don’t have that option.

So that’s it, you’ve got to practice the obedience. We talked about how the spirit helps us, he teaches us to be obedient, he reminds us about the things we need to be obedient and he comes alongside us to do those things. Really, other than practicing obedience, the most important thing we can do, I mean, other than… actually in order to practice obedience the most important thing we can do is to actually know the commandments.

Who in here could recite the ten commandments? Anyone? One, two,…. Any language, I don’t care, Hebrew, whatever…. Five, six, some of us are thinking maybe I can, let me check: do not steal, do not………. You know, yeah, there’s ten of them. They’re all there. you know, do we know them? How many of you when Jesus said ‘obey all the things I commanded you, how many of you know what things Jesus commanded of us? In this passage, right before this, Jesus talks about washing each others feet, serving each other, he commands us to serve each other.

He says, “… a new command I give you, love one another…” By the way, when he says, love one another, just a few paragraphs away from this chapter, don’t think that that loving is so different that it doesn’t require any obedience or submission, or something, you know. He’s talking about a similar type of love. Those are the things, we have to know the commandments, we have to practice them.

So, I just want to, kind of restate this idea that I set earlier also, that obedience is not the means to salvation, but it’s the means of sanctification. But we still have to do it by the spirit, Galatians 3, Paul says “… why did you start with the spirit and then you went to your own ways”. No, you’ve got to keep doing it with the spirit, it’s still a spiritual thing. obedience is a spiritual act. It requires discipline, it requires fortitude, it requires strength, it’s a spiritual act. Every time you’re obedient you’re doing something spiritual. It’s a worshipful act, every time you’re obedient you’re worshipping the Lord. And it’s a loving act, every time you’re obedient you’re loving God.

So, we as a people need to do those things. We need to practice those things. Now, we’ll say if anyone in here says, ‘you know, I haven’t lived a life of obedience. I haven’t had a life characterized by obedience, and you know what? I don’t even love God, or maybe I’ve said I loved God but realized tonight I never really have. Maybe you realized that you haven’t had the confirmation of having the spirit of God come to you and reveal himself to you and make his home with you. Well, the good news is that because obedience is not the means of salvation you don’t have to get everything straight first. You come to God just as you are, you come to God in whatever state you’re in. If you are just covered in, shall we say, the filth of sin, if you reek, if you are stained in more ways than one, if you are so consumed with your own concerns that you consistently put aside de things of God, then you’re in the perfect spot, you’re in the only spot you could be, because God says it’s the people who don’t obey, the people who aren’t righteous that have an opportunity for salvation. Have you ever heard that one before?

It’s not those who are righteous who are saved, but it’s the unrighteous who are saved. Jesus said, I came not for the healthy but I came for the sick. So, if anyone in this room is in that situation, when you say, you know what? I’m just in a bad place. I don’t know God. I don’t love God, I don’t obey his commandments. Then, take heart, you’re in a great place because at this point all you have to do is say, ‘Jesus, I accept you. I accept you. You’re the answer for me.’ We’ll get the obedience thing afterwards.

When we are worried about sanctification, we’ll get that obedience thing in order. The Holy Spirit will make sure of that. But the Holy Spirit might be target on you now and saying, you’re going to make a decision just to love in the sense of submitting yourself to God, that you reach out to Christ. Jesus is talking to his disciples hours before he goes to the cross, in a moment of hours he is going to be taken and strung up on a cross, for sins that he did not commit, because each of us needed someone to pay the penalty for our sins, each of us needed someone to sacrifice himself, to die so that we could live. And the work Jesus did on the cross is for your salvation, the work Jesus did on the cross is so that you could have life, so that you could love him, so that you could obey him. And it’s the same death that brings us salvation, it’s the same death that allows us to be obedient.

I’m not going to explain all that tonight, but just know that it’s the same act that allows us to be obedient, because it’s that act that allows the paracletos to come. It’s that act that allows another counselor, another comforter to come and to be with us, to encourage us, to teach us, to bring us to a point of obedience.

So, I want to pray for us and I do want to offer an opportunity if anyone wants to pray to accept Christ, wants to pray a very simple prayer that says ‘I have not been obedient, but I know that Jesus went to the cross so that all that could be wiped clean, and I accept that in my life.’

So I’m going to give you an opportunity to pray that if you like, but I’m also going to pray for everyone here. So, if you would, just close your eyes, bow your head and I’m going to start with that prayer, if anyone feels that they need to make that decision tonight, to give themselves to Christ so that they can have a life that’s one with God, where God dwells with them, where God is revealing in their life, then just pray this prayer with me.

Father, I recognize that I have sinned, I have recognize that I’ve been on disobedience, and Lord, I know that obedience is not the way to get saved but it’s trusting in Jesus Christ. Lord, I thank you that you sent your Son to die for me, so that I could be saved. And Lord, I commit myself now to seek a life of obedience.

And Father, for every other person here, Lord, I pray that your Holy Spirit would not be lacking in our lives, that your Holy Spirit will not hold back but that he would convict us of our sin, that he would compel us to do the right thing, Lord, that he would enable us to walk in a life of love towards you, that he would enable us to walk in the truth of our relationship with Christ, that as we’re made holy in Jesus Christ that we would walk holy.

Lord, let us never allow ourselves to reason our way out of obeying your commandments. Lord, may your Holy Spirit convict us if we ever use our intellect to reason our way out of obedience. If we ever use our circumstance to give ourselves a break so that we don’t have to be obedient.

Father, I pray that you bless us, bless us with the hard reality of obedience. Lord, let this congregation be marked by people who say, no matter what the cause I’ll obey. Let this congregation be marked by an idea or a practice of obedience so that as soon as you speak we’re there. When you say go, we say where and we go. When you say do this, we say, yes, Lord we’ll do it with no hesitation.

Lord, start with me. Lord, we all need this teaching, we all need your help. No one graduates beyond the cross. No one graduates beyond the Holy Spirit. No one gets to the point when they are so spiritual that they don’t have to be obedient any more. Quite the contrary, Lord, the more we grow in you, the more you expect, the more consistent we need to be in our obedience. So Lord, thank you, thank you for your word, thank you for your spirit, thank you for loving us and dwelling with us and giving us the understanding that we might follow you. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

Why do I have to suffer?

TRANSCRIPT

It’s very fitting that we talk about living in outside of the areas of comfort, because the thing I want to talk about tonight is actually directly related to that idea: living outside the areas of comfort. And in fact, I even want to take it to a further extreme and living in the areas of discomfort, living in the areas of pain, living in the areas of suffering; to take it that far.

And I want you to think tonight about this idea. Does it ever seem like to you that the world is not supposed to be like this? Do you ever feel like you are in a situation and you say, God it’s not supposed to be like this? This is too hard, it’s not supposed to be this hard. Or, I’m your child, why do I have to go through this? Or maybe just in general, you look at the world and you think: This is not the way God intended it. Well, it’s that very idea, that very sense that the world is not supposed to be like this that I want to address tonight. And I want to talk a little bit about not why the world is like this necessarily, but how should we respond to a world that so many times broadsides us, knocks us flat on our back and then kicks us when we are on the ground. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever experienced something like that?

And just to very quickly say a word about the widow that Elijah was ministering to, it’s in first Kings Chapter 17. You don’t need to turn there but basically this widow agrees to feed Elijah instead of her son, and God pulls through, he brings flour and oil in abundance a never-ending supply of flour and oil. And she thinks, all right, I’m blessed and then, her son dies. She thinks, my son and I are going to die, but because of the prophet we’re going to live and right when she’s all excited about what God’s doing in her life, she still loses her son. It’s like a punch in the stomach. Her air gets knocked out of her. I was sure he was going to live, and then he dies.

And she says to Elijah, what have you against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son? And there’s even reason to believe that another way to interpret that is, Did you come to remind God of my sin and kill my son? Why did you come here and bring God’s eye upon me and have my son die?

But that’s where the really big miracle happens. It’s in that deep pain, in that great zone of discomfort and hardship. That’s where the biggest miracle that she sees comes from. And that’s what I want to talk about a little bit tonight. It’s that idea that at some times we think that we’re in the worst situation and it can actually be a good situation.

So, if you turn with me to Romans, Chapter 8, we’re going to see what Paul, as he speaks by the Holy Spirit has to say about this concept of suffering and how we respond to it and what God’s plan is in it.

So it’s Romans, Chapter 8, we’ll start in verse 18. This is what we read: “….. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved, but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express, and he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the spirit because the spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”

You see, the very first thing that Paul says here, he says, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us…. He actually, just earlier in Chapter 8, he’s talked about the suffering that Christ went through, the suffering that he endured on the cross so that we could be brought to glory and ultimately said that he could be brought to glory, which is an interesting idea in itself.

But he’s talking about Christ suffering and how we are actually supposed to live in the sufferings of Christ, that we are actually united with Christ in his sufferings. But he makes an encouraging point: the sufferings we face now are nothing compared to what we’re going to see.

And I think that’s the first perspective that we, as Christians, need to learn is that we what we experience here on this earth is nothing compared to what God has in store for us, the good outweighs the bad, if you will. And I’m not saying that the bad is no longer bad, because there’s more good or anything like that. But that we have a hope that’s greater than the situation that we currently experience.

And if you think about some of the sufferings that you’re enduring, or the sufferings that you have endured in the past, some of them are really hard to deal with. I think about, the first thing that comes into my mind is: my sister was diagnosed with skin cancer and we didn’t really know what the extent of if was. We didn’t know how bad it was going to be and just a few years earlier, my grandmother actually died of cancer.

That was a tough moment for us and we thought: why God, why her, why now, why a mother of a beautiful three-year old girl, why did she had to get cancer? Why my sister? You know, I don’t want to lose my sister, it’s very selfish but a very real thought, why my sister? That should happen to somebody else, not me. And so, just you know that the story turns out actually pretty well, they were able to get those small bits of cancer on her arm out, and so far they have no signs of any recurring problems, and that’s a great thing. And we were relieved to hear that, and we praised God that he protected her from something that could be much worse.

But I know in many of your situations the ending wasn’t so happy. You know, your relative did pass away, or your loved one was gone, or maybe it’s something completely different from losing a loved one. Maybe it’s losing a relationship or maybe it’s always struggling in the same area of your life, over, and over, and over again. Or maybe it’s even milder than that, maybe it’s the thing where every time you finally get your finances in order, something else happens.

Now, I can relate to that. We finally get all the bills paid off and then the car breaks down and it’s 800 dollars. And I’m thinking, God, why now? And then, we finally get that paid off and then something else breaks or something else comes up, or someone has a need. And it really tests you. You know, can I give to this person in need in this moment or how in the world am I going to get through this situation? And your trust is to waiver, but then you remember, ok, this isn’t the end, not only this isn’t the end of the world, by this isn’t the end of eternity. There’s something better out there that all this is going to be worth. It’s going to be worth it to suffer as a Son of God, as a co-sufferer with Christ, to get the reward that’s coming.

And that’s really the first thing that we, as Christians, should learn. It’s that it’s worth it. All the hardship, especially when it’s for the gospel, or for Jesus, when you suffer for the gospel it’s all worth it, because there’s something so much better coming.

But there is also another interesting idea that I want to pull out of this text and the rest of the night I really want to examine that idea. And so, we’re going to go through this and talk about this for a little bit.

But first in verse 19 Paul says, “…..The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed…”

The creation is actually waiting, all the created things, that means us, that means animals, that means the earth itself. Somehow this wood maybe is waiting for us to be revealed as sons of God. I don’t know exactly how that works or what that looks like, but on some God level, it just makes sense that even the earth itself, even the creation itself is not quite right with itself and with God.

And he goes on to say (verse 22): “….the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up to the present time…”

And we see this not last year, but the year before, in a years time span we saw an incredible number of natural disasters, and we saw earthquakes, tsunamis in Asia, Pakistan, India, that killed tens of thousands of people. We saw the hurricane Katrina and then actually another hurricane came right after that. We’ve seen all types of disasters where it’s almost like the earth, if you think about, the way the earth is structured. You’ve got these big plates, these tectonic plates and when they rub against each other they kind of really exemplify that idea of earth is groaning. You know, there’s this rumbling deep in the earth as if it suffers under the way things are, under the pressure of life, so to speak, with again, those tectonic plates and earthquakes and volcanoes, you really see that picture, this pressure that’s on the earth and it grumbles and drawls and groans.

And it happens in so many ways, you know, it’s everything from the climber they get to cut out in a snow storm on a mountain, to us when we have our whole day planned and then the thunderstorm runs our outdoor picnic. You know, it happens in so many ways and again, it’s kind of like this idea that something just shouldn’t be this way.

But it’s fine to me if we kind of go back a little bit, I’m re-tracing here, if we go back and see that “…..the creation was subjected to frustration not by choice but by the will of the one who subjected it……”

And we almost expect God or Paul to say there, it was subjected to frustration not by choice, but because of our sin. But it doesn’t say that, it says it was God’s will, the one who subjected it. It was his will and then we say, why would God do that? But he gives the answer:

“….. in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God…”

There’s some idea out there that God had, that if I subject creation to frustration then there’ll be greater joy in its liberation than if I never did it. Or that he has some purpose in bringing hardship into the world and creation itself that allows for this greater joy to come as they’re reunited with humanity in the glory of God’s redemption.

And if God’s going to do that for the earth, how much more is he going to do it for us? If God is willing to create this pressure and hardship and destruction for his creation, so that they can experience the glory of his redemption, how much more is he going to do that for us?

And I think that’s another part of what we experience in this world, as we experience hardship, as we experience suffering, as we experience the time in and time out feeling like we just get knocked down and then kicked while we’re on the ground, and we don’t know why. But there’s something greater coming. And that’s what he continues to talk about in verse 22:

“….We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit….”

We’ve received our salvation, we’ve experienced the gifts of the spirit, we’ve experienced the power of the spirit, we’ve seen miracles, we’ve seen lives transformed, we’ve seen people’s physical conditions changed through healing, through renewing in the mind, both a renewing of how we think, but also those mind illnesses that people experience of depression. And we see joy coming. We’ve experienced the first fruits of the spirit but even we, who’ve done that, we “…..groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies….”

We don’t yet have the full glory that God intends for us and we just have to wait and groan and yearn for it. But I think that’s really the other side of the equation here, the other reason that we, and the other perspective we should have in suffering. It’s not only that we realize that what’s coming is greater than what we experience now, but we also realize that the hardship that we experience now, actually makes us yearn for even more.

Does anyone in here really want to go to heaven? Does anyone in here think, man, you’re not thinking about taking my life, but when it’s time, when God says, all right, come up here, I’m there. You know, do you want to be there with God? Would you want to be there as badly if life were perfect here? Does that make sense? Would you want to be God so much if this was just ok? You know, I’ve got it pretty good here. Yeah, I don’t have streets of gold like in heaven, but you know, I have enough money for everything I want, my relationships are going good, nothing bad ever happens. I haven’t been sick in who knows how long, and none of my friends or family have been sick. And I never had a bad relationship, if you’re dating, you know, you’ve never had a bad day in your relationship. Your marriage is perfect, you never argue, nothing bad ever happens, would you get down on your knees and say, come, Lord, come. Come quickly! Why? Why would you do that?

God knows that we would yearn for his return if we had it just a little too easy. And hear me out, I’m not saying that God’s out to get you and I’m not saying that we should seek out suffering. We all know there’s enough of it without seeking it out, right? But what I am saying is that when we are in suffering, let’s remember God’s purpose in it. Let’s remember that it’s nothing compared to what’s coming and if it weren’t for this I might not want what’s coming so badly.

And I think that’s a perspective that we don’t have a lot in the church today. We don’t have this concept that suffering serves a purpose in my life. Maybe you’re thinking, this is ludicrous, this is off the wall, I don’t know if I can buy this. You know, this idea that suffering actually produces in me a hope for my salvation. But you know what? If you turn back a few pages, or one page in my Bible, to Romans, chapter 5, he really spells it out for us, in verse 1of chapter 5, he says:

“…. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into his grace, in which we now stand and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God….”

So, there’s this hope in the glory of God because of our salvation. He says, not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope; and hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us. We would almost be tempted to think that it’s our hope that allows us to make sense of our sufferings. And in a sense, it’s our sufferings that allows us to make sense of our hope. It’s the suffering that produces perseverance and character and hope. It’s not hope that produces perseverance.

Does that make sense? This idea that I think we come with this idea that because we have such strong faith then we can persevere, and the Holy Spirit is saying to us through this text that it’s because you suffer that you learn to persevere and that’s what gives you the hope. And of course, it is a cycle, the hope then does allow you to persevere with more strength and it does help you, enable to build a stronger character. But that character, if we look at this passage, that character has to come first.

And we see it in another place as well, in Hebrews, chapter 12. The author of Hebrews says, “… we have not yet….” I better turn there so that I don’t misquote. Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 4:

“… in our struggle against sin you’ve not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood…”

It’s talking about persecution there very specifically, you haven’t yet shed blood because of the sins of others who are persecuting you for the sake of Jesus Christ.

“……You have never resisted to the point of shedding your blood and you have forgotten the word of encouragement that addresses to you as sons,…..” and he talks about how my son should not regard lightly of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines us he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as his sons.

And somehow this suffering, this hardship can be used by God as discipline. Now, discipline doesn’t just mean to punish, an athlete needs discipline, a great musician has discipline, a great executive of company has discipline. It means to be trained. So, God trains us even through sufferings, are you sure Stephen? Well, next verse:

“…. Endure hardship as discipline….”

When you experience hardship you’re experiencing the discipline of God, because God is treating you as sons, for what son is not disciplined by his father. If you’re not disciplined, and everyone is disciplined, then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have human fathers who discipline us and we respect them for it. Again, not so much just bearing punishment, but actually we’ve all had fathers who have trained us, who have taught us, who have encouraged us to discipline, and we respect them for it.

How much more should we submit to the father of our spirits, and live? And one of the greatest verses follows, verse 11, “… no discipline seems present at this time, but painful.”

Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. So, you see, it’s a very common thing in the scripture. James talks about it, Peter talks about it, Paul talks about it, the author of Hebrews talks about it, Jesus even talks about it. This idea that when we endure hardship that it creates in us a hope for the future, it creates in us perseverance, character, righteousness.

But I want to go back to Romans and see how this is played out in the rest of this passage. So, if we come with this idea that, first of all, our present sufferings are nothing compared to our future glory, so it’s something much better is coming. And then we have this understanding that the suffering actually produces in us a hope, a yearning, a desire to be with the Lord, to see things made right. This world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s going to be the way it’s supposed to be at some point in the future. God is going to restore and redeem everything.

So, then what is the last thing that he talks about? In verse 26 of chapter 8, he says: “… in the same way the spirit helps us in our weakness…”

How does he do that? We do not know, we ought to pray for, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. You may notice that this passage talks about creation groaning, it talks about us groaning, it talks about the spirit groaning. Those groans are not all that different, just different parties that are groaning. The spirit groans too because God is saying ‘hey, guys, I know it’s not supposed to be like this, but you have something so much better coming and just…. Yearn for it, groan for it, seek after it because it’s coming and it’s going to be worth it, it’s going to be great.

It says that we don’t know we ought to pray for but the spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And I just want to take a second to talk about this, this verse because I’ve heard a lot of people talk about it, and I don’t want to take away anything from what anyone else has said, but I want to make a point about it.

First of all, people say, you know, when I don’t know what to pray for, God gives me wisdom on what to pray for. That’s so true. The spirit of God does give us wisdom when we don’t know what to pray for. But I don’t think that that’s what we’re talking about right here. And people say, when I don’t know what to pray for I pray about the spirit and the gift of tongues. That’s so true. God uses the Holy Spirit to enable certain people who have the gifts of tongues to pray in tongues and in Corinthians 14 it talks about how we can pray with our mind, but we can also pray with our spirit and it’s referring to the gifts of tongues. And that’s a great thing.

But you know, I don’t think that that’s what’s going on right here, and I’ll show you why. It says not that the spirit allows us to pray but that he prays for us, he intercedes for us. He’s not giving us a thought of what we should pray for so that we pray correctly, and he’s not even speaking through us in the gift of tongues. He’s praying, we’re not praying. We don’t know what to pray for. He’s praying.

And the other thing is that it says that he prays with groans that words cannot express. Just very quickly, the word that is translated ‘words cannot express’, it actually just means ‘non words’, he groans in non words, that’s basically what it means there. The spirit groans in non words. He’s not even praying in words. But what I think is going on here is that the spirit, as he connects with God, because it says that he is in accordance with God’s will later in that verse, as the spirit of God connects with God and also connects with our spirits, that he groans for us, on our behalf because we’re praying the wrong thing. And so he prays the right thing for us.

And you might ask what is the wrong thing that we’re praying? Well if we look at this passage, probably the first thing that comes to my mind that we’re probably praying the wrong thing for, is that we’re probably praying the wrong thing in relation to our sufferings. If we look at this in the context of the passage, it’s about our sufferings, you know, things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be and we’re probably praying with an improper perspective about our sufferings.

We might be praying, ‘Lord, get me out of this suffering’, and the Holy Spirit is saying, Oh, you’ve got to stay in there so that you learn perseverance and character and hope. And we say, ‘Lord, why am I experiencing another hardship?’; and he’s saying, ‘Because you have to grow, you haven’t learned your lesson yet. You’ve got to stay in there a little longer.’

We say, ‘Lord, take my friend out of this situation’, and he’s saying, ‘I can’t do it yet, because he’s still has to take something out of it’. He’s groaning on our behalf because we’re praying the wrong prayer. Now, there are plenty of other times when we probably pray the wrong thing and this idea that God will pray on our behalf is very true. But right here, what we’re talking about is in relation to suffering.

Now, ideally, I guess, we should at least have a better understanding that we should pray or that we should know what to pray for. Now, we can still to get our suffering, don’t get me wrong, because God does not intend for us to stay there forever. We can still pray to get out of a difficult situation because God does not intend for us to live in a difficult situation for the rest of our lives. God intends for you to see healing. God intends for you to see restoration in your relationships, in your home. God intends for you to have financially… to get out of that whole you’re in. He intends to see those good things happen in your life, but maybe we’re trying a little too early to get out.

And as we strive to get out of a difficult situation we sometimes miss the point of what we can get from it. We miss the lesson that’s in it and I remember telling my wife Sonia, about that time that you know, we paid it off, the car, and actually she has a car and I have car. We paid it off the truck and then the car broke down and that repair was about four times what the truck was and I was just trying to figure out how to pay for the truck. And then this one comes. And then, I just paid that off and then something else came, and I thought: ‘Honey, if we don’t learn a lesson quick, we’re never going to have any money. Whatever God’s trying to teach us, we got to learn it quick because otherwise our car is going to keep breaking down and something in the house is going to keep breaking and I’m going to lose something I have to buy again. So, whatever it is, let’s figure it out.’

And it was probably me, because I’m very stubborn. But I think, you know, maybe if I were just to learn the lesson, then this particular string of suffering or particular string of hardships might stop. I don’t know, but I think the point there is valid; that sometimes we are just so concerned with getting out of a hard situation that we don’t realize that God has a purpose for that hard situation, that he has a reason for that hard situation.

And that’s what this passage is all about. Paul is saying, you know what? We’re going to unite ourselves with Christ and his sufferings if our Master suffered, we’re going to suffer. But here’s the good news: it’s going to be so much better at the end and because of the suffering you’re actually going to grow more than you ever thought. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a really tough season and then when you came out of it you realized, oh, my goodness, I’m a different person. I’m not the same person I was six months ago or a year ago and I grew more in this last six months than I’ve grown in any other six month period that I can remember, that it was the toughest six month period I’ve ever experienced in my life. Have you ever experienced something like that? Have you ever seen that when life is always kicking you when you’re down, that you get stronger, you can take the blows a little easier the next time.

Part of it is just a natural way that God has created us that in a sense what doesn’t kill us make us stronger. But part of it is that spiritual reality that for the children of God, he uses difficult situations to form you into the image of his Son Jesus Christ, and he uses the hard times that come to chip away the things that don’t need to be there anymore. And he uses it to increase your hope for the glory that’s coming. And that’s the message that Paul has.

And just to top it off, a verse that we’re all very familiar with in the very next section, verse 28, he says, “….. and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who’ve been called according to his purpose…”

That really tops it all. It says, and you know it’s true, you know God is going to work this out for your good. And sometimes we try to think, well what’s the good of this situation where these people died. I don’t know, but I guarantee you that God’s going to work it to good. And I guarantee you that the people who go through that difficult situation are going to come out stronger on the other side if they are sons of God and if they are submitting to the spirit of God in that situation.

And so there is also a little warning in there, if, if you’re a son of God, if you submit to the spirit of God in that situation, because really we can go through very difficult situations and just refuse to learn our lesson, and refuse to recognize what God’s doing, and refuse to accept that hardship as discipline. We just simply refuse and I think what God does, he keeps you there, and keeps you there, and keeps you there until he wears you down, until something kind of breaks. And then we do, we each have to be broken to experience that which God has for us in those difficult situations.

So I do say again, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who’ve been called according to his purpose.

So the next time you’re in suffering keep that perspective, keep that perspective that things are going to be better in the end and it’s worth it. And keep that perspective that God is going to use this to build me up, I’m going to grow through this, I’m going to experience God’s blessing. He’s going to turn it all to good somehow and I don’t have to know how, and that’s the final thing.

You don’t have to know how. You just have to believe. You just have to trust that God’s going to do it. If you look at the different situations in your life, you still may know why you had to go through those, you still may now know what lesson you learned and you still may not know what result of that did God turn to good. But that’s ok, he doesn’t promise that we will. But still it’s that perspective that we need to have, that we need to pray, ‘Lord, when you’re ready for me to get out of this suffering, when you’re ready for me for this hardship to end, by your grace let it end, Lord. Until then, keep me here because I probably need it. I know I need it.’

And that’s the perspective that we should have. If you would bow your heads, I want to pray for us in regards to this that we would have that perspective and live by it.

Father, I do pray, Lord, that we would be changed in our thinking, Lord, and that as we change in our thinking that we could submit to this hardship, Lord, as your discipline. Lord, that we would understand that when we face difficult situations that first of all, Father, that there is no reason that we have to be out of it right now because some idea that you don’t want us to be there, that sometimes you actually want us to be there and experience it for our own good.

And, Lord, there is no reason that we can’t allow that situation to point us towards the glory that awaits us, Lord. The redemption of our bodies, the redemption of the earth, the redemption of the creation, a time when we will no longer experience these hardships, when we’ll no longer see people die from natural disasters, will no longer see relationships broken apart. Father, we’ll no longer see mothers and children separated, evil of others tearing apart the lives of the weak, of those who are not protected, because, Father, there is going to come a time when everything will be as it should be, where the world will be the way the world is supposed to be, the way you intended it to be.

Father, I pray that each of us here with that perspective can approach the hardships in life with a grounded hope, Lord, with a grounded understanding that you can use it for our good. Father, teach us how to pray and Father, when we pray the wrong thing please by your spirit pray for the right thing.

Let us always seek to be where you want us to be, on the path that you want us to be on. I do pray a blessing on each person here, Father, that you would keep the suffering, keep the hardship to a time frame, Lord, your time frame, that if anyone is experiencing any of the difficulties we talked about or any other difficulty in their life, Lord, that they would grow from it but that they would also be redeemed, Lord, they would also be renewed, that they would be restored from that hardship, that you will create in their life an abundance where there was nothing. As the book of Joel says, where there was just dust and no plants, and no trees or flowers, Lord, that the vines would grow again and the wine would be held in abundance, that the weed would grow up, that the trees would grow up, there would be an abundance of fruit, an abundance of food.

Lord, in the same way where relationships have been broken, Lord, bring beautiful relationships to replace them or renew those relationships better than they ever were before. Father, when loved ones are gone, Father, we pray that there would be an increased togetherness as a family because of that, that there would be a greater sense of cherishing those that we have still with us.

Lord, I pray that even when we have sinned and brought hardship on ourselves that you would bring to us a sense of a need for change in our life, and Father also, that you would just bring the fullness of life where there was once only a glimmer or just a shadow of what life can be.

Father, if any of us needs to be reprimanded, Lord, and even, and this optional because I can’t pray this for you, but if you’re actually willing to pray, Lord, I accept the hardship that can come so that I can growth in my life. I accept the hard road that lays ahead of me in order for me to overcome the sin, in order for me to overcome this consistent improper attitude in my life.

Lord, I welcome your discipline. Lord, I welcome you carving away the parts that you don’t like, even if that knife, that carving knife is going to hurt. Father, like clay before a potter I accept you taking away those parts of my life that don’t look like the in product you have in mind for my life.

Father, if I have features that don’t match the features of your Son, Jesus Christ, take them away, even though it will hurt. So I encourage you to be willing to pray that prayer because I can’t pray it for you and many of you in this room have prayed that prayer, Lord, whatever it takes, whatever it takes, this in my life has to change. I have to be altered. I have to be given man handle a little bit, for your glory, no matter how much it hurts, Lord, I take it.

Father, we pray these things in your precious son Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.

Reflections on Christmas

TRANSCRIPT

Tonight as we continue to gather in the name of Jesus Christ which is what we do every week, we have a special time tonight because we get together in his name and to celebrate his birth. And we did a lot of reading throughout the service so far, we looked at Genesis, Deuteronomy, Second Samuel, Isaiah, Micah, Luke, Mathew. We’re going to look to a few more books of the Bible tonight. That’s a lot of reading, but the reason we did that is because that’s kind of the starting point. If you’re not aware of Jesus coming to this earth as a baby, then it’s really shocking.

I was reading a book about this Max Locato, actually one of the readings that Tola did tonight is from the same books by Max Locato. And he writes about a story where someone is sharing about how God who created the universe, comes to earth as a baby, trading his white robes of righteousness for dirty rags…………. Now they are probably clean but he’s making a point, you know.

This dirty little manger, he talks about the rats scurrying across the floor, he talks about, that we heard about the manure and the stench of the place. That God would do that is absurd, it’s completely absurd, that God would give up all that he has to come to this earth as a little baby to be born in a manger. But the absurd story that we have to tell is true and that’s the reason we’re here tonight, because there’s an absurd story that’s true.

As we think about that it should strike us some place deep in our soul, deep in our psyche that we’re not worthy of this absurd story…… for one second, we’re not worthy of this absurd story.

But I just want to take a moment to recap because we’re talking about how Israel really from before there was an Israel, from the time of Adam, there’s been this expectation that a Savior was coming. Expectation that a conqueror was coming, expectation that a king was coming.

And as we look in the Old Testament, all throughout the Old Testament you can see that avidness in the scripture but those these passages we read tonight and a lot of these prophesies about Jesus have to do with this idea that a savior is coming, someone who’s going to redeem Israel, someone who’s going unite the world in harmony and peace. And once again, where it’s apart and torn us under previously. And that’s the whole back line of the birth of Jesus.

You have this people who have a great history and a great God who’s done reckless things through them and he’s brought them out of very horrible situations before. We talked about, in that last song, Jesus going into Egypt and hearing the song of the captive children and that alludes to the captive children of Israel who were slaves in Egypt for 400 years, and God provided a way for them to come out. He delivered them. And the people of Israel were expecting God to deliver them, and he did.

What happened is that through time, through the course of history Israel was bound again, they were bound by foreign oppressors and invaders, they were bound by legalistic leaders who enforced a very strict interpretation of what God had called Israel to be and to do, that was not accurate. They were bound by circumstances that were going on around them, world circumstances, and they were bound by their own sin. And they knew they needed a Savior, they knew they needed a deliverer.

And I ask you: are we in such a different place today? Are we in such a different place from Israel that we don’t need a Savior? Don’t we have oppression around us? And some of us feel it more than others, admittedly. But isn’t it there? Don’t you look around and see that things aren’t right? There are people in power who use their power to benefit only themselves and not to take care of others, right? There are people who use their power to put other people down. There are people who use their power from money at the expense of other people’s health.

Just a little thing, we were watching, Sonia and I were watching a documentary on food, and it was talking about the way food is processed and the way food is being genetically tampered with in experiments to create different types of food and how these companies are putting down these private farmers so that their profitable alter crops can be grown. There’s, it’s kind of, you know, there’s an agenda behind the person making the documentary. That’s fine. But that’s the picture of what happens in our world, because use their power to pull others down, people use their power so that they can be lifted up and a lot of times we are underneath that.

And don’t we have world situations around us that we feel at mercy to. There’s a war in Middle East, most of the wars are in the Middle East. There are economic situations here at home, there are international relations that are strained all over the western hemisphere, north and south America. There are all kinds of problems in the world and we have our own sin. Just like Israel. Just like the people of Israel we have our own sin and we need a Savior, just like they did.

And so what happens is that you have thousands of years where these people are expecting the Savior. And they are expecting someone to come in and rule with a sword and bring righteousness and whip the people on shape and get things going and really restore Israel to what it was before, in their mind what the perfect life was: when there was plenty of wine, and plenty of grain and lots of gold and silver flowing through the streets of Israel, lots of power in Israel.

And what they got was a little baby. And they weren’t expecting it. And all of Jesus’ life throughout the gospel you read things like, this guy can’t be the Messiah, this guy can’t be the Savior, because we know his parents. We know his brother, we know his sister. This guy can’t be a Savior, this guy can’t be something special. Or can anything good come from Nazareth? You know, this statement, can the Savior come from this little, back water place that’s not supposed to be a great place? Shouldn’t the Savior come from Jerusalem? You know, we have repeatedly in the gospel these instances where people are not able to grasp who Jesus is simply because how he came into this world.

And that’s the absurd part. And that’s why it’s hard to believe. I think it’s one of those things were they had, and we also have, preconceptions that prevent us from seeing something when it’s right in front of our face. Prevent us from seeing the truth when it’s right in the front of our face.

You know, all these prophesies from the Old Testament that we look at now and say, oh, that’s Jesus, that’s Jesus, that’s Jesus, in the psalms, that’s Jesus. In Isaiah, that’s Jesus. In Micah, that’s Jesus. Everywhere in the Old Testament, oh, that’s Jesus and they couldn’t see it, because they couldn’t get over that little fact that Jesus came in an unexpected way. He came as a little baby in a dirty place, from a little teenage girl who was poor in the middle of nowhere, so to speak.

And again, that’s the same problem that a lot of times we have with Jesus. We think, and some of us, think: how can I put my trust in a man, how can I put my trust in a person who lived 2000 years ago and I can’t even prove that he existed?

If you are fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on your perspective, last night you may have seen a program that Barbara Walters did on heaven, what is it called? Heaven, where is it and how do you get there? And we got to hear from really intelligent people about where heaven is and how you get there. People like the Dalai Lama, which is probably and intelligent person, from some Catholic bishops, from Joel Austeen, from some rabbis, from Richard Gere. Richard Gere was telling us this is how… now of course, Richard Gere says, heaven’s on earth and we don’t need to die to go to heaven. You know, thank you, Barbara Walters for letting us know what Richard Gere thinks about how we get to heaven. But it’s this interesting thing, that people are still trying to figure out how we get to heaven and we already know.

And that’s the point. Jesus came so that we could go to heaven. Jesus came so that we could have life with God, so that we could experience life and relationship with the Father. And you probably know the passage in John 3:16, it’s a very simple passage, but it just talks about why Jesus came. So we know that Jesus came, you know, we do. A lot of us here know that Jesus came, we believe Jesus came. But we’ve heard about that tonight, he came as a baby, in an absurd way, in a manger, through a little teenage girl, with manure and urine and sweat and smell, dirty old shepherds who came –if you are a shepherd, I apologize- dirty old shepherds who came to worship him. You know, and some magi too, some kings or magi. But the first ones there were just the shepherds, they’re outcasts in the society and that’s how Jesus came.

But the second question is: why did he come? In John 3:16, John tells us for God so loved the world, actually it’s Jesus talking, for God so loved the world, the manner in which God loved the world was this: that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but will have eternal life. Life with God heaven.

And he goes on to say, “for God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Now, when God tells us that he sent his son to save the world and to give eternal life, that’s it, folks. We don’t need Richard Gere any more. We don’t need the Dalai Lama. We don’t need, honestly, we don’t need the priest or the pastor or the rabbi, because we have Jesus Christ telling us right here. Jesus, who is God is saying, God sent me so that you could have eternal life. So that you wouldn’t perish, so that you wouldn’t be condemned. So that whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he does not believe in the name of the one and only Son.

And that was one of the questions posed last night: what happens to the people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ? The honest thing ……, it’s not because of us, not because of our Christian religion but because of what Jesus Christ says; there is only one way to get to heaven, and that’s through him. And if we don’t accept him we stand condemned already.

So that’s the first message of Christmas. The first message of Christmas to us is that God sent his Son so that we could have everlasting life, so that we could go to heaven, so that we could be saved. Saved from our circumstances, saved from our sin, saved from oppression. That he would deliver us, that we don’t have to fight ourselves, that he would for us on our behalf, that he would come into the earth and take hold of our lives and direct them the way that they should be directed, the way God desires them to be directed and the way we need for them to be directed. Because there is no difference between what God desires in our life and what we need in our life. There is no difference, though we often think that there is.

But that’s why Jesus came. And if you know the story, you know that he wasn’t just someone born and someone who walked around the earth, but Jesus actually paid quite a price so that we could have salvation, so that we could have a relationship with God, so that we could go to heaven.

Jesus paid quite a price for that. He died an innocent man’s death, for he died a guilty man’s death but he was an innocent man doing it, that clarifies. He was an innocent man who was basically killed by capital punishment, died on a cross, but not for his own sins, but for the sins of the world. And the gospel teaches us that Jesus took our penalty upon himself when he died.

And there’s really, it doesn’t get more complicated than that in a sense. We can study this the rest of your life, we can try to discern the deeper insights of the scripture and of salvation, but the basic idea is this: Jesus came to this world and while he was here, he died for our sins so that we could be saved. And that’s the gospel. Amen. That’s right.

And again, that’s parts of the message of Christmas, because without a baby and a manger, we have no salvation from our sin. Without a God on earth, without some person who is God and man, which again, how do you …… on that? How do you figure that out, other than just say that it’s true. And we affirm and believe that is true, but how do we understand it? We can’t, but we trust and we believe because that is through Jesus Christ, again, that we have salvation.

So, as we think about Christmas, it’s really easy for us to get distracted, right? How many of us have bought all our Christmas presents already? How many of us haven’t bought all of our Christmas presents yet? Right. You know, who has their Santa Claus, and their Reindeer and their elves and other things up and out and decorations? Who has their nativity? I’ll be honest, I don’t have a nativity, my daughter, we dress as an elf but she has little pointed ears, so I don’t know what that says about us, but it’s easy to get distracted in the way of how we’re going to pay for all these presents, and how are we going to do all these things and how much credit card debt are you going to have in January, right? And we get distracted.

But again, I want to reiterate. I want to say again, the message of Christmas is that God came to this world to save you from your sins. And as we focus on that, I think what happens, or what should happen in our lives is that we should approach not just Christmas differently, but life differently.

I was being interviewed recently, I was ordained recently by my home church, back in Memphis, Tennessee and they kind of grill you with all these questions, and they ask you all about what you believe, and your past and how you feel about your calling and all these things like that, and one of the questions they asked me is something about when did you first commit your life to Jesus Christ. And I told them that I was a 13 year old boy, I was on some trip with the church and the pastor was preaching this very message that I’m preaching to you, not a Christmas message but the message of the gospel: that if you put your trust in Jesus Christ you will be saved, very simple. You put your trust in Jesus Christ, you will be saved.

And somehow just clicked that if God indeed came to earth and if he indeed died for my sins then this is the biggest thing ever, there is nothing bigger than this. There’s nothing better than this, there’s nothing more important than this and what else can I do except devote my life to this. Now, whether that means being a pastor or just being a person who just commits himself to the Lord in your life, it’s really, that’s not the important thing, the important thing is this: there’s nothing more important, there’s no story that has a greater importance, a greater way.

And it’s actually interesting if you read C.S. Lewis, he talks about a thing called a true myth. And a true myth, just like any other myth, is this kind of grandiose story that carries either a moral or it carries some type of meaning for a culture, a society, a group of people, it kind of creates and under current for that culture. But it’s true, it’s a true myth. And that’s what the gospel is. The gospel is a myth, it’s this grandiose, absurd story that creates a foundation for everything that we do, that runs through all of our life, that it’s not just some moral but it’s something that we latch on to and we build our lives around, and we build our culture around, as a people. And it’s true.

And again, it’s just some of these things that are not really profound, other than to say that, in any other way than that they are absurd but true. As I wrestle with that the last few days, this message that’s crazy, absurd, ridiculous, a myth grandiose, but true, it’s really hit me. That this is the most important thing ever, and we have to shape our lives around it because it is something that grounds our culture as a body. It is something that should focus our lives as believers.

And so, kind of the second message of Christmas, is that our lives need to be devoted to this gospel, to this Jesus who came in a manger, who walked the earth, who died for our sins, not to mention that he rose again. How crazy is that? Raise from the dead, you know, from … the King of all Creation was murdered, you know, capital punishment, then he was placed in a tomb that he couldn’t even afford to buy, he had to borrow. Then he rose from the dead and appeared to hundreds of people. You know, that’s an absurd story but it’s true.

And I keep repeating that because it’s important. It’s important that you not just of this as a cute little story for Christmas time. It’s important that we not see a manger setting and think, oh how cute! We need to look at a manger setting and think, oh, my goodness how can it be? My Lord, how can it be that you sent your Son to die for me?

Now, that’s the response we should have to Jesus Christ at Christmas. But there is one other message of Christmas. So, we have the message that God on earth to die for your sins. We have the message that we should devote our lives to the Savior. And then there’s a final message, and that’s this:

When you read in the Nuevo Testament when people present the gospel, one of the things that shows up time and time again is not just that Jesus died, was raised again, but also that he’s coming back. We have a God who, he’s gone through this all process and he’s going to do it again. He hasn’t left us high and dry. He hasn’t gone off to some other more important things. He’s not too important to come back where he was before to finish what he started.

And if we read in Acts, Chapter 1,ou see Jesus talking with his disciples. Let’s see…. And in verse 3, “after his suffering he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive, like maybe he was walking and talking and healing, I don’t know. He appeared to time over a period of 40 days and spoke about the Kingdom of God.

On one occasion while he was eating with them, he gave this command: Do not leave Jerusalem away for the gift my Father promised, but you’ve heard me speak about. For John baptized with water but in a few days, you’ll be baptized with the Holy Spirit. So when they met together they asked him more, are you at this time going to restore the Kingdom of Israel? He said to them: ‘It is not for you to know the time or the day the Father has set by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the world.

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them, ‘Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand there looking into the sky? The same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

How many of us wake up every morning wondering if this is the day? I don’t. It’s really easy after 2000 years of defer gratification to continue to expect something to happen, right? It’s very hard. It’s not just the daily tasks that we have to do that distract us. It’s not just the simple absent-mindedness that every person probably has about things that aren’t right in front of their face.

But I think on some level, there might even be a hint to disappointment. And we’ve hoped before and we’re afraid to hope again. We thought, ‘Jesus, come soon. You know, come and take me to be with you, take me out of this difficult life.’

I’m not talking about wanting to take your own life, but saying, ‘Jesus, come take me out of this. Let me be with you.’

Paul talks about it, he says, you know, I want to be here with you to help you but it’s really to my benefit to go and be with the Lord. And how many times have we thought, you know, maybe when you first became a believer, when you were a little kid: Jesus is coming. And he didn’t come.

And it’s hard because, I think a lot of times we do get a little disappointed and we don’t want to hope too much. Yeah, he’s coming some day. Yeah, maybe in my lifetime, maybe in my daughter’s lifetime, maybe in my grand child’s lifetime. Maybe a hundred years from now,

Check, check, colonized all the planets and the solar system, maybe after we’ve done all that, Jesus will come back. You know, where’s the expectation? Because we’ve lost hope.

And the third message of Christmas, every year, it reminds us: don’t lose hope. Your deliverer is coming. Your deliverer is standing by. That’s the third message of Christmas.

And we can’t sit idly by pretending that he’s not coming back when we celebrate when he came. Because, if he came, he’s coming back. It may not seem logical. But if he came he has to come back, because God promised he was coming and he came. And God promised he’s coming back, so he’s coming back. That’s the message of Christmas.

So, ready your heart, prepare yourself now because Jesus is coming again. He didn’t just 2000 come years ago, he’s going to come again. And it could be tonight. It could be tomorrow. You don’t know, stay ready. Don’t lose hope. Don’t come to the point when you’re disappointed so much that you don’t want to hope any more, that you don’t want to try to believe any more, because you have to try, don’t you?

It’s not like you just sit back and all the time thinking about, Jesus might be coming, Jesus might be coming. You have to try to believe because it’s not easy after 2000 years of a delay. You know, a lot of people in Jesus’ time when he went up to heaven, they thought he was coming back in their lifetime. And you see, everyone, you couldn’t do this today, and some people do this today, but Christians sold everything they had and just kind of lived together and shared everything. One of the reasons they did that is because they didn’t thing their property was going to be worth much in a few years, because Jesus was coming back, all new things starting. Why would you invest? Why would you save? Why would you plan for tomorrow when tomorrow is not coming?

It’s like that Sting song, brand new day, sell the stock and spend all the money. We’re starting a brand new day. That’s what you do when you think is coming tomorrow, right? That’s what you do. What you do when you don’t think Jesus is coming tomorrow, …. Do this, do this, invest, save, prepare for the future, do that. Yes, if you need help with that. Talk to somebody. You have to do that. But you also have to live with the expectation that you don’t need to.

But how do you do that? How do you do that? I don’t know, so I’m not going to tell you how, but I know that we have to. I know that in our lives we have to live as if Jesus were coming back. We have to live lives that are crafted around the truth of the gospel because we have to remember and know that God came to earth and he’s coming again.

So, with all that, it’s kind like a lot of stuff, but it’s really some simple, profound truth, we need to think about that this season, because this is the best time of year to do it. It’s not easy, you know, doing taxes, and… to think about Jesus coming, dieing for us, for our sins and coming again. You know, it’s not even easy for you students, at the end of school, you’ve got finals, you know, you probably had finals last week, so now that you’re on break, focus on this for a little bit. If you’re off work this next week, focus on this for a little bit. If you’re at your job, Mark, I know you’re going to be at work, focus on it at your job. You know, hey, it’s not snowing, right? you’re blessed.

So, this is the time because it is easier now, believe or not that in any other time. So as we close I’m going to pray a prayer for us that we will be able to focus our lives around these truths.

So, if you will, let’s pray. Bow you heads with me. Let’s pray. Father, again, we thank you and we praise you for this time. We thank you that there is a Christmas, we thank you that we have a reason to celebrate Christmas. Father, we thank you that we have a time set aside whether Santa Claus is involved or not, our entire culture sets aside time to celebrate your birth. Or to celebrate the day that God became man, that you came to earth.

Father, we thank you that you had a purpose for coming. That you came so that we could have life with you, so that we could be reunited with you, Father, just as Mary was united with her baby upon that delivery, came face to face with the God of the universe.

Father, Jesus has made a way for us to be united with you, to come face to face with you in full, open relationship. And God for that we thank you.

Although we also ask in this time that you would compel us to remember, Father, not only what you’ve done but what you’re going to do.

Father as we think about the promises you’ve made and fulfilled, let us not forget the promises that have yet to be fulfilled. …. Shape our life, let them shape the way we think, shape the way we act. Father, we will ask in this time, Christmas season, that we will make some space that you’ll allow us to make some space for that, so we can focus on those things and think about how that might impact us.

Father, we do await your Son. We do await his coming and glory, the way he left, he will return. Not a baby in a manger, but a powerful lawyer, a powerful deliverer, a powerful savior.

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse whose rider is called faithful and true with justice, he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crown. He has a name written on him that no one knows but himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood and his name is the word of God, the armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth come a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with the armed sector, the treads the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God almighty. On his robe, on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

He’s not coming the way he came last time, but he’s coming the way he left; in power, in glory and he’s going to come down from the air.

And as we await that let’s enjoy this Christmas season.

Do you feel loved?

TRANSCRIPT

It’s a great opportunity to share with you this evening, and as is my custom, I guess, I’ve been preaching for a very short time, but I’d like to start with a question, because questions get us thinking. And we start thinking we’re engaged, we can really wrestle with what it is being discussed or talked about or presented or you know, whatever the case can be.

So, my question to you is, do you feel loved? Francoise, do feel loved? Great. Sam, I almost forgot your name, because it’s the pressure you know, do you feel loved? Good. Do you feel loved? Do you feel loved? Have you ever been in a relationship where you knew the other person loved you. You knew that they were committed to you. How did you feel in that relationship? It feels pretty good, right? There’s some comfort, there is peace.

But now I want you to think of a relationship that you have, or maybe a relationship you’ve had in the past, where you weren’t sure if you were loved. You didn’t know if that person loved you. You didn’t know if that person was committed to you. Maybe you loved them but you weren’t sure how they felt about you. Maybe you were afraid that you would be betrayed in any moment. How did that relationship feel? Is there an easiness in that relationship? Is there a freedom in that relationship? Of course, not and I don’t care how old you are, if you’re here in this room you’ve probably been in a situation like that, where you love someone but you didn’t know if they were going to reciprocate. How that love was going to come back, in what way it would?

So, I want to tell you a story. This is a very…. It’s about, it’s a story that my dad told. When I heard it, it really touched me and I want to share it with you tonight. My dad tells us this great story about my mom and his name is Randall and her name is Marianne and he tells a story like this. I’m going to use his own words, ok, so I’m going to read this.

He says, my wife loves me. I’ve grasped this and I know this experiencially. I’ve been married to Marianne for almost 33 years and I’m still in love with her. There is no one more suited for me or who’s been more of a blessing to me. I remember vividly the night while we were dating, when I had determined to tell her that I loved her. I was so nervous that she thought I was going to break up with her. But telling her I loved her was a tense moment to telling her I was willing to commit my whole life to her and marry her. So, this was a big deal. I had a pretty good idea that she loved me, but I was making this commitment to her and it brought up all kinds of expectations. Happily she said she loved me too.

And the next step was to ask her dad for permission to marry. So, you get an idea of how old my parents are and what culture they come from, asking the father for permission.

But he says, we married and started having kids a couple of years later. We’ve always nourished a loving relationship, through our conflicts, difficult times, joyous times and every other kind of time that can come to a marriage. But there came a time in our marriage when a particular stressor seemed to become more than we could handle. It seemed as if the stress all came from me, and though we visited….. to deal with it, it did not improve.

I’ve wondered at times of her love will be enough to keep our marriage going. One day, sitting in our car porch she said some things to me that I will never forget. She said, Randall, I’ve come to the place in all this we’ve been struggling through that I can tell you, if nothing changes I will love you. I love you and I would not change the fact that we are married and are together. And he says, man, what incredible words.

It was not long after that, that we discovered the solution to the problem we’ve been having and the joy in our relationship took and even bigger upward turn.

Now, what’s the point of that story? What’s the point of these questions? The point is this: if you want to live in the fullness, if you want to be filled with the fullness of a marriage relationship, then you have to trust and experience that the other person loves you. It doesn’t work any other way and likewise, if you want to be filled with the fullness of God, you have to trust and experience that God loves you, that he’ll never forsake you, that it’s unconditional, will never stop.

And that’s what our passage is about tonight. If you turn with me to Ephesians, 3 verses 14 to 21, and I think we have it up on the screen. This is…. I have a bad habit of bringing different translations, this is the English standard version, it’s a good translation, but I use it tonight because there’s a really graphic images in this text that we could lose if we are not careful, so I want to bring this up. Then let me read this to you, it says:

“…. For this reason, -are we all there? Ephesians 3:14 to 21?- for this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power, through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you been rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breath, and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

We’ll stop there and we’ll come back to the end. You know, this passage is really incredible and it’s talking about everything we’ve been singing about, everything that we experience from a prayer time, that’s what this passage is about. It’s about the love of God.

Now, it’s interesting to know that the passage is kind of picking up, if you remember, Greg preached last week, and Paul says: “… for this reason I pray”, and he says, oh, have you heard, by the way, and he goes into his long thing about how Jews and gentiles were one people, that they’re no longer separated by the dividing wall of their religion, or their faith, or their lack of religion or lack of faith. It says, now they’re together in Jesus Christ. And he kind of picks back up where he left off.

But for that reason, really goes back to chapter 1 and chapter 2, where God just talks about all these incredible things that he’s done. Really Paul says, all these incredible things that God has done for us, and he makes this point, that we’re one people, that the gospel is for everyone. And then he comes back and he says, for this reason I bow before the Lord or I bend my knee before the Lord is the expression.

And it’s not a big consequence but most times, when people prayed in that time they would stand up to pray, we don’t do that so much, but they would stand up to pray. But Paul says, out of humbleness, out of reverence, I bend my knee before God and pray. It’s a big thing that he’s asking. But he prays to the Father and that’s where I want to hit on just real quick.

He says, “….the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”

Now, not to get into too much Greek, but the word Father is Pater and the word for family used here is an interesting word, it’s patria, you know, they sort of sound the same. If you know, almost every language Father is like papa, pater, or you know, kind of has that ‘p’ thing going. It’s the same in the Greek, it’s pater and then patria. And patria really means, that which descends from a father, so a lineage.

And really this is a special emphasis on God as our Father. It’s kind of like saying, we have God’s DNA. Every family on heaven and earth comes from God, that it’s named from God means that they come from God, that they have, we’re made on the image of God, we kind of have a little bit of God in all of us.

But the point is that we’re all one family. We all have the same father, and he’s going back to the same issue that he’s been talking about for the entire book: the Jews and the gentiles were no longer separate. Now, this doesn’t mean too much to us today, ok. I may not even know any Jews, or you know, what does it matter if the Jews and gentiles aren’t separate.

We have to understand if it weren’t for that most of us in this room would have no hope for salvation, no hope for salvation Jesus Christ. Because most of us don’t have any Jewish heritage or Jewish lineage. I mean, by the old standard we don’t have God as our Father. But God made it so that he was our Father. The Father of all families in heaven and on earth. That’s a major, major change in the course of history and that’s the one that results in us being able to have relationship with God, a loving relationship.

And again it comes back to that love, because he’s our Father. It’s all lineages. But then what Paul does after that, he’s talking about this God as our Father but he prays for power. Now, that’s interesting and we sang about tonight more love, more power, more of you in my life. That’s what I want, Lord, I want more love and more power.

But here, Paul doesn’t just pray for power, for physical strength or power for character, or power for miraculous signs, or power for any kind of you know, display of strength, or display of any kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for, kind of a dynamic outpouring of power, whatever that would be. I’m using power to describe power, but you see what I’m saying it’s not about that.

He says, that you maybe strengthened with power and then he says that you may comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, the length, the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge.

This power is for understanding, it’s not a power for what we normally would think of. So, what’s the significance of that? Why is it that this power is for understanding? The reason is this, it’s to have the fullness, to be filled with the fullness of God we have to know and experience the love of God through Jesus Christ. If we don’t do that, there’s no other power.

And Paul says elsewhere, you know, if you speak tongues of angels it’s like clinging symbols if you don’t have the love. If you have all power but you have not love, it’s useless. Love is the foundation for anything that we do in a Christian life. It’s the foundation for our relationship with God. It’s the foundation for being filled with the fullness of God.

And that’s why we need that power. And it is the same thing if you look back in chapter 1, in chapter 1 of Ephesians Paul prays that they would have power, but it’s also power for understanding, power for knowing, power for hope. It’s not power for some external expression.

But a lot of times when we read the word power that’s what we think of. But, in this case the power comes from God by his spirit to know the love of his Son. So even the power is relational. You see, the Trinity there. You see a family if you will, the perfect holy triad family. But God’s power comes through the spirit so that we may know the love of the Son.

So there is power there but it’s not power that we would expect, it’s the power of knowing. It’s the power of understanding. And it’s only by being indwelled by Christ that we can rooted in his love and that’s what it says. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

Again, faith comes from trusting, from understanding, from knowing. It has actions, it has an expression, but it’s outer expression of faith just like there’s an outer expression of love. But this power is to support these other functions, to support the faith, to support your understanding love, knowing the love of Christ.

And that’s why this power is something that helps us to live a lifestyle of being rooted and founded on Jesus Christ, and his love. Now, this undoubtedly when you first read this passage, when I first read this passage, it’s kind of a jumble of things and my wife said earlier, someone forgot to tell Paul to start a new sentence. He just keeps going on and on and on and it gets really jumbled up. And so, it’s kind of hard to make sense of every little phrase in here and it would take us a long time to pick apart every little phrase.

But the big thing is this: God who is your Father, who loves you wants you to know his love so that you can have the fullness of him. He wants you to know his love so he gives you power so that you can be rooted and founded in Jesus Christ and his love. And it seems kind of circular still. But that’s what’s going on. So, it’s an ongoing lifestyle this… when we talk about having Christ dwelling in us, we normally think of our salvation.

You know, I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, I said some prayer, I went down front, or I had some life change and now Jesus is my savior and he lives in my heart. And he does. But again, this is something that’s talking about an ongoing, continuous thing, that has to do with lifestyle, that has to do with remembering. It has to do with a continuous knowing, a continuous understanding of the love that God has.

So, if we were to think about this in terms of a relationship, we might say, just like the story of my dad, you know, I love my wife, Sonia, my wife, I love her dearly and she loves me, but every day we have to get up and walk in that love. Every day we have to wake up and love each other again. You know, she’s in my house, you know, we share a marriage bed, or, you know, she’s part of my life, she’s part of who I am, I’m part of who she is, we have this… we dwell together and yet every day we have to wake up and love each other again. And we have to wake up trusting that the other person is going to love us again. And you know, we’ve had our hard times. If you’re married you’ve had your hard times, and if you haven’t, you haven’t been married very long. But I haven’t been married very long and I’ve had my hard times.

But, you have to wake up trusting each day, and knowing each day, and expressing each day, that you love the other person and knowing that they love you in return. Because you can’t have fullness of relationship, you can’t be filled with the fullness of relationship without that knowledge and without that experience. That’s what we’re talking about.

So, one side of this is, don’t just pray some prayer and then sits down and relax and say, I got it all covered now. Jesus is in my heart, he dwells in my heart so I’m rooted and grounded in him. I’ve a foundation Jesus Christ because he’s in my heart, the passage says so, and it’s not what we’re talking about. It’s talking about something different, it’s talking about an ongoing thing, something that continues day in and day out, something that you carry with you wherever you go.

The next point I want to make is that this love of God is beyond our ability to understand. You know, it says right there, “… the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”. This word ‘surpass’ is the word that means like to throw past. It’s like you’re playing baseball and you’ve got someone running the second and you throw the ball to the left fielder, well you’ve thrown past. You’re not going to get the out,…. It’s an error, goes down in your score card, he’s thrown past. Well, then the ability to understand this love has been thrown way past our understanding, has been thrown past our ability to know.

You know, we can’t catch it. We have no chance because it’s too big, it’s too infallible, it’s too incredible to really know, to understand. And yet he’s praying that we would have power to know it. So how does that work? I think the first point is that we know God’s love by faith. We don’t know God’s love because we can get our hands around it. We don’t know God’s love because it’s simple and it’s sweet and it’s happy and … oh, that’s nice, God’s love. I can handle that, right? But it’s so much bigger than that, it’s so much more powerful than that.

So, we have to know it by faith, we can’t really know it by understanding. But he does say that we should know it. So the second way we know God’s love is by experience. And again, it’s just like the analogy of a husband and wife relationship.

You know God’s love because you walk in it. You know God’s love because you experience it. I can’t explain my love for my wife. I once told her, she once asked me why do you love me. I said, I don’t know, why do I love you? If I said I loved you because you’re smart, well, then if you stopped studying, or if you get a brain injury and you aren’t smart any more, do I stop loving you? No, do I love you because you’re beautiful? Well, if your looks go, or you’re hit on the face with a truck, that would kill you, but you know, if something happens like that, do I stop loving you? No. There is no reason I love you. I love you because I love you. I love you and this is what I told her, I love you because God gave you to me. That’s why I love you, because God gave you to me and he gave me to you, so, you’re mine and I love you. That’s the reason and that’s never going to change.

But I experience that. I can’t really explain it. I can’t explain my love to my wife. I can’t explain the love I have for my God. Can you explain the love you’ve got for your God? If it’s a simple love, maybe you can, but if it’s a love that’s grounded and rooted and the love of Jesus Christ, you have no true means to explain it, because it’s beyond explanation. But you live it. You know it because you live it. You trusted that God was going to come through for you in some situation and he did. And through that experience you gained more trust, you had bigger faith. So you trusted in God for something bigger, and he came through for you, and you experienced it and your trust was well placed and so your trust got bigger. And you trusted God for something else. He came through again. And that’s the life of faith. See, ongoing life of faith.

And again, you know, we are told in Ephesians later on, that the love Christ has for his church is a lot like the love that a husband and wife have for one another, and it’s so hard for me, just a year and a few months, decide of getting married. It’s so hard for me to explain it outside of that analogy. Because it’s the closest thing that I have. And now that I have a daughter back there, the one that was crying, bothering you, because I have her now, I’m starting to see more from God’s perspective, you know, not completely, but I’m starting to see what it’s like to love someone who can’t even love you back yet.

What it’s like to love someone who hasn’t earned any of it. What it’s like to love someone who only is a nuisance on a very physical level, on a very earthly non love level, she’s nothing but a nuisance. She frowns. She’s nothing but a nuisance: we have to change her diapers. I had to get up in the middle of the night to take care of her, we do. We had to buy things for her that I don’t want to spend my money on powdered milk. I don’t want to spend my money on diapers I’m going to throw away after they’ve been on for 30 seconds sometimes. You know, why would you spend your money on that? Now, it’s crazy and that’s what I do every day, I take care of her, we take care of her. We buy things for her, we get up in the middle of the night for her. We stop everything when she starts crying and that’s what we are to God. We’re this little nuisance that wet her diaper and cries, gets up in the middle of the night and needs someone to hold her hand and carry us. We need someone to wrap our blanket around us, we need someone to put our pants for us, and we’re always taking our socks off and so we need someone to put our socks back on again.

That’s what we are on a very mundane level. But God says I love you and you experience it over and over again. And that’s how you know. Those are really the two biggest ways to understand this love of God. It doesn’t make any sense, maybe it makes sense to my wife, she carried her for 9 months, but on some level, shouldn’t she be annoyed that she had to carry her for 9 months now that she’s out? I don’t want to have anything to do with her. That’s not the way it is. That’s not the way God is. But, that’s the love that he has, it’s beyond description and yet we know it.

You can’t describe it but you can taste it. You can’t explain it but you can feel it. You don’t understand it but you know it more than anything else on your life, if you are grounded in Jesus Christ, if you have a foundation on Jesus Christ, if you receive that power from God that allows you to open your eyes for the first time in your life and see it.

You know, when in light there are these ways, right, different… there’s a light spectrum and there are certain frequencies of light that we can’t see, and there are certain frequencies of sound that we can’t hear. I don’t know if it’s all frequencies, but you get my point. We can’t see all the light, we can’t hear all the sounds, but they are there. But imagine if all of a sudden you could see that other color, I don’t what it would look like, but there are other colors besides the colors we can see, there are other sounds beside the sounds that we can hear. What if all of a sudden you could hear them? You wouldn’t know what to call them, but you would see them. They’re right there, there’s that color that is not blue or brown or pink or green or red but it’s a color that I’ve never seen it before, and there it is, because someone opened my eyes. That’s what it’s like.

And you see when you live in that experience of God’s love, then you can have, you can be filled with that fullness of God. You can be filled with all that God is.

You know, if we look back again at chapter 1 of Ephesians, I just want to read, I just want to go there because when you look at what God is, in the first part of Ephesians then to say that you can be filled with the fullness of God sound ludicrous.

It says, “… this is the God –and let me point out, everything God does in this passage, he does for you- … this is the God who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing. This is the God that shows us before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless. This is the God who has all praise, who has all glory, who has all grace, who redeems us through his blood, he forgives our sins. He has riches that he lavishes on us with all wisdom and understanding. In him we’ve been chosen and predestined to the plan of him. He works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will. This is the guy that makes everything happen exactly the way he wants it to happen.

We don’t have a God who tries, you know, he has to try to overcome whatever obstacle’s in his way. You know, this isn’t like he’s a bulldozer and he starts pushing his rocks out of the way and then he comes up with this huge mountain and you can’t do anything with it. This is the God that takes that mountain, just brushes it away. Everything that he wants to happen, happens. The fullness of that God can be in us if we understand that love.

You know, this is the God who takes the most basic discrimination in the history of the earth: Jew and gentile. Now, if you think racial discrimination’s bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. You know, in the south where I’m from whites and blacks couldn’t sit in the same part of a restaurant. But Jews and gentiles, it wasn’t just that they couldn’t sit in the same part of the restaurant, a Jew didn’t even want to see a gentile. A Jew didn’t even… if he touched a gentile he had to go by God’s requirement and clean himself. You know, it was this most basic discrimination and somehow part of the way God…. I mean, they got it wrong in terms of what God expected them to do, but they were trying to follow God’s word, and it was the most basic discrimination you could have.

We have God because we are Jewish, then nobody else does. No one else has a chance. God said no, that wall has been broken down. The God who can do that is the God who’s offering you all of himself. There was love. But not only that, not only is God, our Father, who loves us, not only does he have relationship with us, through his Son by the Holy Spirit, not only can we be grounded in his Son and have a foundation in his Son and in his Son’s love, Jesus Christ, the love of Jesus Christ, so that we can experience the fullness of God, but on top of that he does even more.

And if we look in verse 20, it says, “now it’s him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think according to the power at work within us, to him be glory and the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations for ever and ever, amen.”

This God who is doing, who is promising all this to us is saying, ‘and you ain’t seen nothing yet’. He’s saying, ‘you don’t even…. You know, how you can’t see my love, you can’t understand my love. You can’t even understand how badly I want to give it to you, you can’t even understand how much I’m going to give it to you. You can’t even understand how much I’m going give myself to you. You have no concept of how great I am and how great I’m going to be to you’.

And when we hear that, our response should be shock and awe because the best thing we can imagine is nothing compared to what he can do. And not only nothing compared to what he can do, but nothing compared with what he wants to do. And again, if you look back at this, this passage is the climax, it’s kind of a theological mountain that Paul is climbing and building and whatever he’s doing. He’s… the whole first three chapters of Ephesians is this kind of theological treaties that comes to its climax in these verses.

But if you look back at what he’s built, he’s built this whole system where God is doing everything for you. God is doing everything for you and he’s doing everything for you. And then he says, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’. If you want the fullness of who I am be grounded in the love of Jesus. Oh, and since you can’t do it on your own, I’ll give you the power to do it. And that’s a promise, folks. That’s a promise that’s too good to pass up.

You know, I just want to take a moment to look at this very end again and it says, “… to him who’s able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think according to the power at work within us”. So, it’s that power again, that work is the power to know his love which results in being filled with his fullness.

“…. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations”. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ. Isn’t that interesting? Because if you think about it, Jesus is the Son of God, right? Jesus in the foundation in which we have to be grounded in order to receive that love, and yet the glory comes first from the church. His glory comes from the church.

Now, the church is the body of Christ and then his glory comes from Christ who is the head of the church. And it’s kind of like saying, you know, this whole family thing is going on, we’ve the Father with his lineage of all the families on earth are his, that have his name from him, and he blesses us, he gives us power by the spirit in the Son and then he talks about us being able to glorify God as part of Jesus Christ, as the body of Christ, united because that’s what this whole thing is all about. There is a people who are not united and now they’re united. United in Jesus Christ, the body of Christ brings glory to God.

And so it’s this crazy thing, and we’ve talked about it before: God does all this stuff for us so that we can glorify him. And that seems a little selfish if you think about it. If I did great things for you so that you would praise me, what would you call me? We won’t say it here. If I did great things for you so that you would say nice things about me, you’d catch on pretty quick that I was some kind of a scoundrel.

And yet when you think about it, since God is the greatest, most wonderful thing, person, presence in the universe, in the all of everything, I can’t even just say… created because he wasn’t created, but he’s greater than everything there is. He deserves all that glory and the thing is he’s doing this for us so that we can take part in glorifying him, because without his help we can’t do it. We can’t glorify him the way we’re supposed to without his help.

And really that’s the greatest calling that any of us could have: to glorify God and to be in a relationship with him. You may have heard something similar to that before. That’s the greatest thing that we could possibly do, and God’s allowing us to be a part of that.

So, at this point Paul, this whole time in Ephesians has been showing us two groups of people that were divided, who’d come together to be one group as a church. They were Jews and gentiles and now they’re a church. And it’s the love of God which is revealed in Christ that enables us to be one people, to be one family, to be one church.

Look at this room, should be one church? Should be one congregation? If this congregation didn’t exist, would we be in the same room together? Would we be friends? Would we be hanging out on a Saturday night if it weren’t for this service? I don’t think I would know any of you except my wife, because I met her somewhere else. I wouldn’t know any of you if it weren’t for one body, the church.

And chances are that we wouldn’t have crossed pass very often, and if we did we probably wouldn’t have stopped to introduce ourselves. Not because I’m better that you, or you’re better than me, just wouldn’t have happened. This is not a normal group of people that you find somewhere else. You know, maybe at a baseball game you find a diverse group of people, but they’re not there to be with one another, they’re there to watch some guys on a field. But we’re here to be together. That’s not natural, do you see that? Do you see that that’s not natural, that that’s not normal? Does it make sense what I’m saying that we shouldn’t be in the same room together except that it makes sense because of Jesus Christ?

So, as we live our calling, this reality of God’s love that brings unity has to be just implanted and imprinted on our psyche, on our thinking. We have to have glasses that say, you know, you are loved by Jesus Christ and because of that you’re united to all believers , the body of Christ. Like on your glasses and you walk around and you read that all the day. If you could somehow do that. If you could have you know, maybe one of those colors, the color of lens that illustrates love. You know, we talked about seeing through a colored lens. If there was a color of love, that’s the kind of lenses you’d have to have on your glasses, to see the world the right way. Because we have to think like that. And the Bible talks about it, rooted in Christ, grounded in Christ, established in love and these are words that reflect an ongoing, continuous sustenance, an ongoing, continuous, dependence on that love of God.

You know, think of roots for a tree, the tree doesn’t grow roots, get its water and then move on. It stays there, it has to. And the foundation of a building, you don’t use the foundation to build the building and once it’s done its job you move the building. It needs the foundation to stay up. The tree needs those roots to live. We need to be grounded in Jesus Christ to continue in the love of God and to have the fullness of God in our lives.

Now, if you’ve heard….. And I said this is kind of the climax of Paul’s theological mountain that he’s climbing, this is the apex of his thought and after this he goes on and he talks about all the things that you should do because of it. You know, he builds the theological mountain and he talks about all the things that you should do because of these ideas that he’s presented.

But, how does this passage affect us? A big part of it, it’s just like the story I told you with my dad. He really wasn’t sure if my mom could keep loving him. And I’ll tell you what, I know what he’s talking about. Honestly I have no idea when that story, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I was there, I lived in their house, I’ve no idea what he’s talking about, this problem they were having, so I don’t know what it was. But I know what it’s like to wonder and I’ve done so many horrible things, can this person keep on loving me? And I know what it’s like to wonder, I’ve done so many horrible things, can my God keep on loving me? I know what it’s like to think that.

And that’s what this passage is about. When you are unsure of God’s love for you, you’ve no basis to build any kind of a spiritual wall, you’ve no business, you’ve no basis on how much to build a relationship with God. But when you have a freedom that comes from knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt that God’s love is never going to leave you, you can blossom like my dad and my mom, their relationship went to a new level. When she said the words, you know, ‘even if nothing changes I love you’. Even if you don’t get better I love you.

Have you ever heard those words? That would make me cry, even if you hurt me and keep hurting me and you keep hurting me, I love you. Even if you fall again and again and again I love you. I’m not giving up on you. There’s a freedom in that and that freedom inevitably leads you to work a lot harder on not falling, and to work a lot harder on not hurting the other person. And, you know, I don’t know how we hurt God we can definitely do things that aren’t pleasing to him. But we can never be separated from the love of God.

And if you know that passage in Romans, Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present or things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

He was convinced of that and he had a freedom to build a whole life on that. Paul’s entire life was built on the knowledge that he could not be separated from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ. And so, that’s why I say ideas have consequences. You have to believe that, you have to know that.

You know, Roberto came up here, when we were singing and he basically preached my sermon for me, because he said some of us, you know, we’re singing about the love of God, we were singing about the power of his love, that I can sore like an eagle when I’m grounded in the love of God, and he said, some of you may not feel that love, some of you may not know the love of God to the extent that it provides you a freedom to sore like an eagle in relationship with him. You don’t have the knowledge of the love of God that can be a basis for the entire outworking of your life.

Some of you don’t know what it’s like to be in a relationship with someone where you know that they’ll love you back no matter what. You’ve always been hurt, you’ve always been betrayed, you’ve always been rejected at some level and in this life, on some level, you will always be betrayed by another person, you’ll always be rejected, you will always be dismissed, you will always be hurt, you will always be let down at some point and it’s great when you find someone who after that apologizes and says, no, I still love you.

But what I’m talking about is a God who will never do any of those things to you. a God who is willing to give his Son, up to death for you. A God who is willing to order all of creation around your knees, a God who is willing to put all other concerns, all other issues on the back burner in a sense, for you. That’s a special kind of love.

Now, we’re saying these songs, I love the worship team to come up and sing …. Love again. But, as we start singing, I want you to ask yourself, do I have that foundation? Do I know that love? Because if you don’t, then you need to come up here and get that assurance, and maybe it is, you know, I have my salvation, Jesus dwells on my heart, but I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say that he dwells in it to the extent that I can be grounded in it and know his love, that it’s beyond understanding and experience. I don’t know that, I haven’t experienced that love.

You know, come up here, we want to pray for you. Yeah, you don’t have to come up here, but it’s a step saying, God, I want to live and walk in your love. I want to experience your love, I want it to be a continuous thing. I don’t want to say, God, I’ve done my prayer, I’ve done my thing, now just let’s get on with it. If you want to say, Lord, I want to walk in your love, I want to walk in the fullness of you, I want to be filled with the fullness of God, and you don’t know that love, get up here and let us pray for you. Or stand up where you are and let me pray for you, because without that, what hope do you have? What hope is there when you don’t have what God says is the basis for everything else that’s to come?

And you know, Roberto prayed a prayer, a strong prayer, because there is power that comes when you make that decision, there is power that comes when you yield yourself to the Lord, there is power that comes when people of prayer lay hands on you and speak truth into your life. There is power that comes when God overwhelms you with his love and his spirit just washes over you and you feel nothing else except the love of God. It will bring you to tears because there’s nothing better in the world, it’s the basis for everything we do as a Christian, it’s the foundation. It has to do with knowledge, it has to do with faith, it has to do with experience. This isn’t about throwing away your brain for some cuckoo idea, this isn’t about neglecting the experiences you’ve had for some intellectual faith. This is about your heart, your mind, your experiences, everything being united in a love of God.

Ephesians 2: 19-22

TRANSCRIPT

Tonight I’m talking tonight about, we’re talking tonight about being an outsider, being uncomfortable, being a little how shall be say, feeling like a stranger, feeling like things just aren’t good or easy or something like that.

Now, has anyone in here ever been a foreigner? I don’t think anyone here’s ever been a foreigner. You’ve been a foreigner. Maybe you grew in another country and you came to the United States at a certain age. So do you remember what it was like when you first came here? Do you remember how hard it was to maybe learn a new language or adapt to the culture? Or maybe if you were here with your parents, it might have been easier, but if you came here and you had to learn how to eat this food that the Americans eat all the time, it’s not just as good as the fridge you have back home, right? And it was kind of hard to get used to that.

Or maybe you were born here in the States but you’re kind of ……. two cultures. We have a lot here that grew up,… they’re Latinos but they grew up in the United States and so they kind of have to walk in two worlds. I don’t know if Françoise from Haiti did the same thing. Walk in two worlds. And you may have felt a time when… you know, sometimes I don’t really feel like I fit into either one. You know, there is times when I struggle to make my two worlds come together. Because, you are, you’re living in two worlds and two cultures with two types of influences that pull you in different directions sometimes.

Now, maybe there’s others of you who grew up in the United States and you’re of one culture, so to speak, but imagine and think about the times that you traveled, that you’ve gone to another country. You know what it was like to not understand what is going on around you, to not understand the culture very well, to make mistakes because you just don’t feel like you fit in.

Or if you’ve never traveled outside the country, then maybe it’s something as simple as starting a new school and you’re the outsider, or moving to a new city. You don’t know anyone, you’re trying to make friends.

Well, this idea of being an outsider and a foreigner, officially we call them aliens in the sense that’s someone from the outside. That’s what the passage we’re going to look at tonight starts talking about. Because really what’s going on is when we look in Ephesians, this is where we are tonight, Ephesians chapter 2, we’re going to see that in the early church that’s exactly what it felt like if you were not a Jew. You felt like an outsider or an alien.

You see, most of the early church members were Jewish, but little by little, sure enough more and more non Jews, we call them gentiles, came to the church. And what happened is that they felt like outsiders. For so long there had been this separation between the Jews and the gentiles. For so long there had been a wall dividing these two people so they couldn’t eat together, they couldn’t marry each other, they didn’t want to live next to each other. In fact, to a Jew even being in contact with a non Jew made you dirty or unclean. Dirty is kind of a simple way of thinking about it, but that’s the idea, that there’s just no connection between these two groups of people and then all of a sudden, when the church starts to be built all these different people who never talked to each other, who never ate with each other, who never communicated with one another, were together. And so we have to wonder how was that possible?

The passage of tonight, that we’re going to look at kind of gives us a glimpse of that but we’re also going to see a little bit about what it means for us as a church today.

Turn with me to Ephesians 2 verse 19 through 22 and we’re also have it up here on the screen and this is not the NIV again, I apologize for those who have the NIV but this is the translation, the version that we’re going to be using tonight. So, let’s read it together and I’m actually going to read it twice because this thing is really dense. I think I read it…. I was reading it to Sonia, my wife and she said ‘you know, by the time you get to end you forgot where it started. So I am going to read it twice and I’m going to leave it up there so you can keep looking at it because it’s really thick. So, let’s read the word of the Lord.

“… So then, you are no longer sojourners and aliens but are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God which is built on the foundations of the Apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself being the corner stone. In him the whole building is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him also you are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit.”

Now, I’ll read it again. I’m going to read it twice because this is really dense, it’s really thick. It’s kind of tough. You’ve got to think about it, so let’s concentrate. I’m going to concentrate with you because I have to. Let’s look at it again.

“… So then, -he’s been talking about how there is this great divide Jews and gentiles and how they need to be brought together in the church. It says: “….. So then, you are no longer sojourners and aliens but are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God which is built on the foundations of the Apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself being the corner stone. In him, in Christ, the whole building is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him also you are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit.”

Now, as you thought back or as I asked you about being a foreigner, an alien, just think back to those emotions you felt, the difficulties you encountered and there’s also the joys of triumph when you learn a new language and when you understand a culture better for the first time. There’s those things too, but think about the difficulties that are involved in being an outsider in a new culture.

This is what it was like for the gentiles coming into the church as I said, they were outsiders. Most of the members of the church, the body of Christ were Jewish and they were a different culture. They were separated. But through Christ, as we’ve been talking about these last few weeks and months, Jesus Christ broke down the dividing wall between the Jews and gentiles. He made it possible for these two different people to come together and be one people.

You see, to come into the church at that time if you were not Jewish, automatically meant that you didn’t feel like you belonged. Now, in our country we have different types of people who come in and you know well about this, we have people who are maybe on a student visa or traveler visa. They come here for a time and then they go back home, or they are supposed to go back home. They don’t always do it, we’re not going to talk about that tonight. And there’s those others who are legal residents, they are not citizens but they are, what do I call them, residents, aliens, legal residents, I’m not sure. You get your green card and you can work, and you can go to school, and you can live here and you’re just here. Ok?

Now, that’s well and good. That sounds like a fair deal, you know. If you’re coming from the outside, you’re coming from another country, you get the card and you get to live here, ok? But, you know, it’s really not enough and in many ways there’s been a lot of fighting in this country what to do with all these people who didn’t grow up here, because none of our great, great, great, great grandparents grew up here either, but that’s a… you know, that’s the whole point. So what do we do?

But Jesus says, ‘you’re not just going to be you know, student visa people. You’re not just going to be allowed in the church for a time and then if things don’t work out we’ll kick you out.’ And Jesus also says ‘you know, you’re not going to be resident, permanent residents either. It’s not like you get to live here, and no one is going to bother you and that’s the extend of it.’

What he’s saying is ‘you’re fully welcomed into this body. You get the voting rights, you get the full privileges of a citizen’. And when Jesus was able to do that, to break that wall done and make gentiles full citizens in the body of Christ, it created a unity.

And you see, just very simply when Jesus did that he was stating that there’s just no room in the church for racial divisions, there’s just no room in the church cultural divides that separate people, there’s no room in the church for social divisions, economic divisions and I might add there’s no room in the church for coolness divisions. You know, sometimes we look around and we say ‘ah, I’m really glad that cool person is here’. And that cool person ‘oh, I don’t really hang out with that guy’. So there’s a division in the body of Christ because you don’t want to hang out with me. Right? and I’m saying, ‘please, hang out with me, there’s no coolness division in the body of Christ’.

And that’s something you know, I really think I’ve been in churches where people who don’t fit anywhere else fit in at that church. I think Lion of Judah can be one of those churches and I’m really proud of that, because that’s living out part of this mandate of Jesus breaking down the dividing wall.

But it doesn’t just break down this divide, there is kind of this interesting thing going on where Jesus the way he does this is by making people a member of the household of God. Now, Paul actually mixes his metaphors which, you know, I really don’t like that, but he does it. He mixes his metaphors like three or four times. He says ‘you’re part of the household’, which we would say ok, that’s your family, right? your household. And then he says ‘I’m building this household’, like a building, ok? So now the household is the actual physical house. But what Paul says going on here is that Jesus is actually our God is actually building the church as a house and it’s a metaphor for the church and so that’s what we want to look at now.

The church is being built just like a building and just like you wouldn’t start with the roof of the building and then build the second floor and then build the first floor and then the foundation. The same way God starts with the foundation. And he says that the foundation is the prophets and apostles.

So, it’s interesting. Some people have actually questioned whether what’s going on here is that gentiles are being brought into Judaism, this old system that’s been in place for thousands of years before the church existed. But actually the foundation is the prophets and the apostles. So he’s very specifically talking about the church.

Now, what’s important about that is that God doesn’t say, you know, he said come in and you’re not just a resident, you’re …. He doesn’t just say, well, ok, you come in and you join them. What he’s saying is everyone comes in and joins me.

There’s a difference there if you can see that it’s not like someone letting you in to their country and they’re still kind of the dominate culture, there’s still this tension going on. Everybody is new. Everybody starts as a foreigner. Everybody starts as an alien. But God builds a new house, a new nation, a new system on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets. Now, that’s powerful. That’s powerful because when that reality is in place again it just breaks down any right of anyone to say ‘look, well we were here first’ or ‘this is ours and you have to do what we do’.

Now, that’s extremely relevant for a church like Lion of Judah. A Latino church in the middle of Boston which by all accounts is a very international multinational city, but still it’s in the United States. And so if you come here from another country and you are going to church you don’t have to feel like ‘I have to fit in with whatever everything else is going on here’. And that’s really good because we probably don’t want to fit in there and everything else that’s going on here, because there’s a lot of things going on here that aren’t that great. But, more importantly is just this continuing idea that everyone is a full citizen, everyone is equal, everyone has the same value as everyone else, to come in and be a part of something.

So, we’re not joining them, everyone is joining Christ. So God is building that building and Jesus is the cornerstone. Now, we all know what a foundation is in our day and age we lay a foundation of concrete and steel, but in that day they used foundations of stones and the cornerstone, which we don’t really use any more, but the cornerstone was the stone in the corner, ok? And what happened was this stone was usually the biggest strongest stone and how it worked was that each of the stones in the foundation were based on the line of the cornerstone, so the cornerstone set the standard for the rest of the foundation. And also in just a way physics works, I don’t even fully understand it, the weight of the whole building within would be focused on that cornerstone. It’s kind of like this when you have two things next to each other, I don’t know if you study physics in high school college. It you push something even if it doesn’t move, it pushes back, it exerts an opposite and equal force. So, if you push on a wall, the wall pushes back. What the cornerstone does it pushes back against everything so that it’s all pushing against each other and it creates a very strong foundation.

And so, what Jesus act says in this sense is he is the cornerstone that’s holding everything together. He lines everything, he makes sure everything is in place. He supports the whole structure. So, really the church is built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets which in turn are built on the foundation of Jesus. And that’s what’s going on here. Paul saying ‘look, this church is a building, is a house that God is creating on this foundation, which is the Apostles and prophets who are in turn build on the foundation of Jesus Christ, or they’re aligned in Jesus Christ and they are supported by Jesus Christ.

So, if we want to know what we stand on we look to the word and we look at Jesus Christ and we look at the Apostles and prophets. That’s fairly straightforward. But as we go on we find contrary to what some of us may think, we don’t build the house on the foundation of the Apostles and the prophets. We don’t build the house around this cornerstone of Jesus Christ, God does. God is the one that builds his church and I think that it’s very common for us to have the idea that we build the church on this foundation; that it’s our job to come in here, work things up, get things going, get people excited and build a church.

Now, what we’re doing here in this Saturday evening service is in essence building a new church. And I believe God has called us to be a part of that. But we need to remember at all times that God is the one who builds the church. In fact, it says that, in verse 22, “….you are being built together into a dwelling place for God”.

In a sense we are the materials God uses to build the church. Greg, you’re the scaffolding, and Sonia you’re the front porch, I don’t know why, you know, you’re the column over here. You know, we’re each a part of the building, we’re a part of the structure. And so often we do think of this building as the church but we’re the church. This is the church, you are the church. I had a pastor back home who actually would call the church, church. He said ‘listen, church’, and then he’d go on. He said ‘I want to tell you something, church’ and then he would go on. and I thought that was really cool because he reminded us every week that we are the church, because we are the materials that God uses to build this structure, this house, this mix metaphor. We’re the materials.

And another interesting thing. He’s mixed the metaphors and I don’t know what to do with this. I’m having a really hard time with this but, it says “….in him the whole building is joined together and grows into a holy temple”.

So, he’s talking about the Jews and gentiles joined together in one building and then he says “….in him also you the gentiles are being built together into a dwelling place for God”.

So, you’re the gentiles are a house. So now we have one house that’s two houses. And I think basically what the idea is that there’s one big church, you know, every Christian, every believer, everyone who’s been called by God is the church, they’re the building materials for that building. But at the same time there’s all these small groups of people, all these local congregations. You know, for us, Lion of Judah, we’re a church, in fact this service is kind of a little church building that’s next to the big church building. You know, and we’re building a new sanctuary next door eventually and I guess we’re going to have two sanctuaries, so we’re going to have like two churches.

But that’s kind of what it’s like. And in the same way, this church is down the street from another church and all the churches in Boston kind of make up a bigger church of Boston, and all the churches in Boston are part of a larger nation wide church and the global church and the historical church. So I guess, I kind of think of it as a complex, or maybe a big mansion with a bunch of different little houses and wings and additions and things like that.

So, just to recap that. God’s building his house, it’s a church. He’s the one that does the work. He uses you as the material and in some kind of weird mix metaphor kind of way, there’s a bunch of little houses that all make up one big house. Does that make sense? And so what?

So, one more thing and then we’ll get to the so what. The most amazing thing about this house really is who is there. And it’s not a house, again we’re not the people who live in… we’re the members of the household, but once he moves over, we’re not the people who live in the house. The house is built for God to live in. And that’s why he calls it a temple. And if you know anything about the Old Testament temple, you know that the Old Testament temple is a place where God dwells.

You know, as Christians we get very rightly so, we get very proud not in a bad way, but in a good way we have a sense of strength and encouragement from the fact that God lives in us. The Holy Spirit lives in our hearts, in our lives. Jesus, come into my heart, live with me. You know, I have direct access with God because God lives in me. I’m an expression of God in the world because God lives in me.

But one of the things that we don’t talk about a lot is that the church also, the collective group, all of us together are the house in which God lives. So God doesn’t just live in you and live in you, and live in you, he lives in us. And that’s something to keep in mind as we think about what it is to be a church, even now as we’re creating this little church here. What does it mean to be the church is one of the things is that we are as a whole, the dwelling place of God.

And again, if you know anything about the Old Testament temple, you know that everything in there is sanctified. Everything in there is clean, everything in there….. when I say ‘sanctified’, what I really mean is that everything there is set aside for God’s service. Ok?

When you go to the temple in the Old Testament Jerusalem, and you go inside and you see in the outer court there’s this big basin with water and you don’t use that unless you’re doing something for God’s service. And you keep going inside and there’s kind of an outer room, I forget what the name of that room is, but there’s bread there. You don’t touch that bread unless it’s for God’s service, and there’s candles, sticks with candles. You don’t touch those lamps unless it’s for God’s service. And you keep going inside, if you’re very lucky, very fortunate to be the one chosen to go inside and there’s the arc of the covenant and you don’t touch that thing unless it’s for God’s service. Because these things are set apart, they’re sanctified, they’re holy. They’re not for anything else except for God’s service.

Now, that doesn’t mean that someone can’t use them for something that’s other than God’s service. I was actually reading in the book of Chronicles and I know that we all do our devotional reading of the book of Chronicles on a weekly basis, so you’ll remember that in Chronicles there’s this really wicked king and he sets up idols in the temple and he uses the instruments in the temple to worship this idol. In the same way, we can do things that are not in God’s service. But that’s our function. So there’s a difference between our function and our practice and what they had to do, what they did was they got rid of everything that they could rid off and everything else they cleaned and purified and then they could use if for God’s service again.

But I just want to note that fact that the church, if it’s God’s temple, then it has to be sanctified. The church has to be set apart for God’s service and that means as the structure of the church, as the structure of the church that we have to likewise, be set apart for God.

Now, we don’t always do things only for God’s service, but that’s our function. That’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s the standard which has been set even though we don’t need it.

So, now we’ve…. Does this seem dense? I don’t know…. It seems really dense to me. So the question then is, so what? So what? Ok, it sounds like God does everything. God’s the one building. Ok. So what do I do? And supposed you’re sanctified but, you know, so what? Who cares? Or why should I care? And I want to say one thing about why you should care and then I want to say a few things about what you would do because of that.

Now, the first kind of idea about that is, ideas have consequences. I showed to Lia some book the other day that says ‘ideas have consequences’, and it’s about …..this guy wrote a book about the different ideas in our culture that were cropping up in the fifties, and he talked about the consequences of those, the ramifications of those ideas. Every single one of those things has come true since he wrote that book. It’s very interesting to read.

But the point is what you think affects what you do. What you think affects how you live. And so sometime we look at a passage of scripture and we read it and we think ‘mmm, that’s interesting!’ and we don’t see application there. We look at this and we say, ‘ok, it’s not telling me not to sin, it’s not telling me how to worship God, it’s not telling me what to do when I have a test situation. It’s just telling me, ok, so I’m not an alien, I’m a citizen, or a member of God’s household and he’s building me…. Ok, thanks, thanks for the info. But really when you believe that, or when you know that and understand it, it’s going to affect how you act.

And I was even talking with Sonia the other day about sometimes seemingly minor theological points can really affect major role of events. And the example we talked about was the… Think about Israel and Lebanon right now. Some people have a certain view of Israel that says that Israel still owns the land, the promised land. Other people have the view that Israel does not still own the promised land that God doesn’t still demand that Israel owns the promised land. Ok? There’s two different theological view points. There are people that fight, and fight, and fight about this all the time, they argue about it, they search the scriptures, they bring up all these different verses to say why, and everyone else kind of look at them and says ‘why are you wasting your time? Come on, get on with it. Let’s talk about how we get saved and how we live a holy life and then let’s just be friends’. I agree. Let’s talk about how we get saved, talk about holy lives and let’s be friends.

But I want to point out that American policy in Israel has been affected by how presidents view the state of Israel today. The modern state of Israel whether they have a divine right for the land or not determines how US presidents act towards Israel and dramatically affects geopolitical events. And so that’s just one example of how something that seems like it’s kind of irrelevant has major ramifications in our life. And that one’s a big kind of geopolitical matter.

But, there’s all kinds of things. This one is just like it. This is going to have major ramifications on how we live. Now, some, maybe not, whether bombs fall and things like that, but it’s going to affect how you live because how you think affects what you do. So let me just look at a few things that might affect what we do if we had this understanding.

The first is we talked about, God builds the house. So, what I want to say about this is that God builds the house, doesn’t mean, ok, let’s relax and sit in the lounger. God builds the house so don’t force things. God builds the house so don’t get in the way on what God’s doing.

Again, as I said earlier, sometimes we try to whip things up and we try to get things going and we try to force things in a certain direction. But we can’t do that because God’s the one that determines how the house is built. C S Lewis’ famous…. A famous quote of his…. Basically he says, you know, when I became a Christian I invited God into my life, into my house and I asked to tidy things up. So I thought he would come in and straighten the picture frames, and maybe paint the walls and replace this old nasty couch that I had since college. But he didn’t do that. He came in and he started knocking down walls and putting nails in the boards, and he tore things down and constructed things and before I knew it, the house I ended up with was totally different from the house I started with. It wasn’t a house that was tidied up, it was a whole new house.

And that’s,… sometimes we have expectations of what’s God is going to do with our house, we think it’s our house, with our church. This is what our church needs to look like and God said ‘no, I’m doing something here. It’s totally different and I need to knock down this wall so I can build another wall over here that’s better, or maybe it has a pretty arch. Or maybe this wall was separating people and I need to knock it down entirely and just get rid of it. Or maybe the roof you have is fine for now, but in ten years that roof is not going to hold under the storm I know is coming. So I need to build a better roof.’

But that means that it’s going to hurt. That means you have to put a little effort in and you got to get up there and hammer those nails and make sure the shingles are straight and you know, now they have the nail guns but if you’ve ever done it by hand, putting on a new roof is a lot of work and it’s really hot in the summer. You get sun burnt and it’s just no fun. But God says ‘no, I have different plans than you have.’

So since God builds the house we don’t need to get in the way. Now, with that said you need to think of God as a house builder, a little differently than just the guy out there hammering. Now, my sister right now is building a house back in Memphis. She says, ‘oh I’m building a house and the foundation was laid yesterday’. So you know, of course, we all picture her, he’s out there with her boots on, laying out concrete, right? She’s mixing concrete… No, no, she didn’t touch the thing. Someone else built the house but she’s the one who said ‘this is what I want, this is how you do it’.

Now, God’s been a little bit more involved in that. He might be a general contractor. So, you see God’s the one who orchestrates all the building. It’s his, he can do it however he wants. He’s the one that’s got the blueprints but he doesn’t hammer in every nail. He tells us what to do. He kind of hires us out, right? So, he’s hired us to add on a new wing. I think this service is God hiring us out to add a new wing for example.

He’s saying you know, this house is great but it needs a little more space and that space happens on Saturday night, so I need, you, and you, and you…. you know, I’ll pay you, ok, whatever but I need you, and you and you to start building this house. By the way, when I say I’ll pay you, ….not because I’m referring to the pastors who get paid, I’m referring to a lot of people who give their time freely, but God so pays you and God so rewards you.

But he’s calling you to do a job and when you work for God you show up early, you work your tail off and then you say ‘what next, Lord?’. And you know, sometimes we get in the mentality where we come to church, it’s very common here in the United States and other places, you come to church not to do your job, you come to church not to say ‘I’m going to work hard and what’s next, Lord?’, but you come to church to watch. The worship team’s up there. I’m an observer. They are the participants, I’m the observer. Then, the preacher gets up there yackety yak. I listen but I don’t do anything. This isn’t to guilt your intellect getting involved in the committee on something here at the church. What I’m saying is the church is a place for people to be involved in the construction.

Now, of course, again, mixed metaphors, you’re building yourself into a second story, I don’t know how you take your own body and nail it up there. that’s not important. The important thing is you are indeed the material and you are indeed the worker. God calls you to be a worker in his house and I dare say that there’s many of you here who God is calling you to be a worker in this house that he’s building right now. And that is guilt true for you to get into a committee, but…

So God hired you but he’s kind of a general contractor. The other thing we need to remember is that this house is part of a bigger house. Remember I said it’s kind of like a mansion with little houses attached or maybe a complex where there’s people building, there’s building projects going on all the time. I know of a church where they have building projects planned for the next twenty years. And you think ‘guau, they’re growing!’. So they’re growing but it’s kind of like that. We are a little building project in the big building project.

So we need to act like it. If we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, let’s act like it. So, for us in this little Saturday now thing, it’s little now but it’s growing, it’s getting bigger, we need to respect the fact that we’re particular of an even bigger, not because it’s bigger in numbers on Sunday morning than on Saturday’s night, but together we’re part of the bigger thing, something that God’s doing that’s even bigger than just us. And many of you aren’t involved on Sunday morning so you don’t know what’s going on there. And I’m not saying, on Sunday morning, what I’m saying is just realize the fact that we’re part of something bigger.

One of the things I like about this church, Roberto often, who is our head pastor, he’s often incorporating other churches and other pastors and projects that the Lord has called him to. So, the Lord calls him to something and he calls up 50 pastors and they all get involved, so pastors all over the city of Boston are involved in the Lord’s work together. That’s what it means to act out this belief.

Ideas have consequences. If you believe that you’re part of something bigger and it’s not just your little house, you’re part of the neighborhood or the complex or a big mansion or however you want to think it, then you’re going to act like it and that’s one of the examples. So we need to do that and we also need to remember that we’re not the first ones here, we’re not inventing the wheel all over again. There’ve been people doing this for two thousand years. So we need to glean their wisdom and we need to honor and respect them. That’s part of what it means to live out the true present in this passage.

And then the last thing is to realize the real purpose of this house is to be a dwelling place for the Lord all mighty, but this house is a temple to God and I talked about this two weeks ago. You know, why are we here? We’re here to glorify God and one of the ways we glorify God is by housing him in our presence, but God is literally here and he’s literally present with us and he resides in our house.

So, he’s between us, he’s among us, he’s in us, he’s around us because he lives here. This is his place. This where he puts up his feet. This is where he comes home at night, if he were to come home at night. I don’t know what he does at night, but this is his house.

So, ok. Ideas have consequences, so what’s the consequence of that? What’s the ramification of that? The ramification of that is we must live lives of obedience and holiness.

I was talking to someone the other day and he said ‘you know, this ministry was a healing ministry and this ministry was a worship ministry, and this ministry was a holiness ministry. Folks, there is no ministry that is not a holiness ministry. And I’m not saying it to put down a healing ministry or to put down a worship ministry, we have a worship ministry. We hope to have a very strong healing ministry as well. But those things are no ministry without a holiness ministry. That means personal holiness, obedience to the Lord and that means corporate holiness, church holiness and obedience to the Lord.

Now, I dare say that’s a calling that most of us feel very inadequate to fulfill. I know, I thought very inadequate to fulfill a calling of holiness. But that’s what God’s calling me to do and that’s what God’s calling you too. And we don’t talk about it enough. We just don’t, we don’t talk about holiness enough. And it’s not because we don’t have a holiness ministry. You see what I’m getting at, right? Every ministry has to be a holiness ministry because the church is the temple of God, the church is set aside for God, the church must be holy. There’s no two ways around it. It has to be.

So, what does this have to do with me? It’s right there. This is what this passage has to do with you, because you say ‘Stephen, I’m not a gentile, I’m not a Jew, we don’t care about those things any more’. But I say we have to care about that because it teaches us what we need to be as a church. We need to come, we need to have wide open doors to let everyone in as a full citizen of our community. We need to let God direct how we build this house. We need to work our tails off getting the work done, that he’s called us to. And we need to remember that our work is not the only work and then we need to remember that for it to be effective at all, we’ve got to be holy.

There it is. Amen. Let me pray for us and then we’ll continue with a little worship, a little music and singing and praising the Lord for the truth that he’s revealed to us.

Father, the truths you have revealed are stark realities. Father, the truths you have revealed are extremely relevant. Father, sometimes we read over things like this and we just pass right by because they don’t seem to be important and they don’t seem to be practical.

But Father, first of all teach us that there’s nothing in your word that lacks relevance. Lord, genealogists do not lack relevance. Lord, theology does not lack relevance. Father, historical stories do not lack relevance. Lord, you put everything there for a purpose and teach us that and help us to have eyes to see the relevance, to go beyond just what’s written on the page and see what you have to write on our hearts.

And Father, in light of the truth that we’ve heard tonight and that you’ve spoken to us through your word, Father, we ask that you will compel us to act rightly. Father, that you would confirm in us these truths that we might live in light of them and above all, Lord we do pray that you would help us to live lives that are holy and pleasing to you, lives that are honoring to you. Lord, let us be a sanctified church set apart for your service. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

The locust swarm

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Miranda: I am so thankful for you having called Steve into the ministry, for carrying him through these years of studying. Now, as he prepares to bring your word to us, we pray that your Holy Spirit will be send on him on a different way, empowering him and giving him the thoughts that you want him to share with us. Bless him first, Lord, as your word descends upon him and remains there and take charge, Lord, take control of his lips, of his thoughts and even of our minds as well as we interact with your word, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Steve Johnson: I love you. I love you and I’ll never leave you. That’s what she’s been told, that’s what she believed. See, Lisa, was dating this guy for a while, she thought he was the greatest. He’s good looking, very articulate, he had good jobs, he had a good amount of money, connections around town. He was fun too. He was really everything that she wanted and you know, he said that he loved her. That’s what she wanted. That’s what she wanted to hear. She needed to hear that, that he loved her. He would never leave her.

But, you know, he made that promise and he didn’t stick. See, first there was the sex, then the pregnancy and then the abortion. He was gone. You see, he promised to stay with her and all she was left with was guilt, shame.

I love you. I love you and I’ll never leave you. It’s a beautiful day for a wedding, December 15, 1987 and Tom made that promise to his wife. He said, ‘I love you and I’ll never leave you’. But, that was before the coke.

You see, the pressure of the job, the wide arguments with his wife, the kids at home, mortgage breathing at his neck. It was just too much for him. You know, it doesn’t really start with cocaine though. For him it started with alcohol, drinking too much, getting drunk on the weekends. That was just like his scholar’s days, there wasn’t any difference. It became too much and before long the alcohol just was not cutting it. He switched to cocaine and took over his life. He lost his job, his wife and his kids. He hadn’t seen them since Thanksgiving and he sure wasn’t going to invite them over to that ratty hole that he called an apartment. You see, all he was left with was just guilt, shame and he was torn apart. He had no hope.

I love you. I love you and I’ll never leave you. Every single person in Israel made that promise to God. God said ‘if you love me and follow my ways you’ll have peace in the land, you’ll have prosperity. I’ll give everything you need and everything you want.’ And they made that promise to God and he gave them everything they needed, everything they wanted. They had everything.

But then they turned from God, they turned their back on God and said, ‘No, Lord, we’re not going to follow you any more’. And God stripped the land. He sent locusts in, his agents of destruction to just tear up everything: the vineyards, the granaries, the fields, wiped out; the wine vats, the rivers dried up. They had nothing left. They were hopeless.

Now, each of those stories is a true story. Now, the names have been changed subject to guilty and I do say guilty because every single story it’s a broken promise. It’s someone who turned their back on their promises and turned their back on the Lord and what he had planned for them.

And I wonder how many of us are in that position tonight? How many of us in some way have broken our promises? We feel hopeless, we feel shame, guilt, destruction in our lives. Are you there tonight? You may be thinking: I’m hopeless, what do I have?

But, you see, each of those stories is going to illustrate a magnificent truth about the Lord that we serve.

So that story of Israel actually comes from the Book of Joel, so if you have your Bible turn to Joel. Joel is the Book after Oseas and before Amos, it’s kind of hard to find so I’ll give you a second.

But Joel is a book it talks about the very story I was telling you. The nation of Israel is in covenant with God, they’ve made a bow before the Lord, that they would follow him and God promised to bless them. At the very beginning of this book we find that the people are not feeling very blessed so in Joel, chapter 1, I’m going to read verse 2 and I’m going to read through verse 5.

Joel says this to the people of Israel. “Hear this, you elders, listen, all who live in the land. Has anything like this every happen in your days or the days of your fore fathers? Tell it to your children and let your children talk to their children and their children to the next generation. What the locusts swarm has left, the great locusts have eaten. What the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten. And what the young locusts have left, other locusts have eaten. Wake up, you drunkards and weep; wail all your drinkers of wine? Wail because of the new wine, for it’s been snatched from your lips.”

You see, in this point time Israel had turned its back from God. They rejected the promise that they’d made to him. And what they got was this destruction. Now, I wrote down a few little facts about locusts, because I just thought, you know, we read the locusts came and ate everything and that sounds really bad.

I don’t want to give you a picture of what that might look that. So, locusts are like this grass hoppers things that they’ve got wings, and they can fly and they move pretty quick. And what they do is that they swarm and I found that there have been locusts swarms that have been found on this earth often in Africa, different parts of the world, that are 12 hundred kilometers in size, square kilometers. Twelve square kilometers full of these grass hoppers things and there’s 40 to 80 million locusts per square kilometer.

Now, if you think about that, that’s about 96 million locusts. You know, they’re ok so there’s 96 grass hopper things and say they’re coming my way, so what do I do. I go inside, right? It’s not quite like that, especially if you’re livelihood depends on farming, because what they do is they eat their own body weight every day and so I read that there was this locust swarm that was in Africa, a number of years ago, and they were eating 423 million pounds of vegetation every day. There’s nothing left.

So, and the great thing about this is that they spell it out for us. This locust swarm comes through and eats up everything, all right? And then another locust swarm comes through and eats up what was left after that. And if there’s anything left from that, the other locust swarm comes in and eats that, and as if that weren’t enough another locust swarm comes through and just eats up everything it can. And what you find is that in this book of Joel, he talks about the sheep not having food.

Now, sheep are actually able to dig up the roots of the grass and of the grain and eat the roots, but even the roots were gone. So this is a serious business. This is total and utter destruction. There’s nothing left.

Now, it’s amidst you that when we turn from our Lord our lives are filled by destruction like this, our lives are filled with a total desolation.

And maybe you’re not feeling totally desperate tonight. Maybe you’re seeing parts of that. Maybe you’ve had the first locust swarm come through, maybe you had the second, or maybe you just see the locusts in the distance and you know they’re coming. Or maybe you know what it’s like to have had that fourth locust swarm come through and your life is totally gone. Maybe you’ve been there, maybe you’re there tonight.

I’m going to read a little more about this locust swarm. We’re going to start with verse 10 of chapter one, read through verse 12.

It says “The field are ruined, the ground is dried up, the grain is destroyed, the new wine is dried up, the oil fails. Despair you, farmers. Wail you, vine growers. Grieve for the wheat and the barley because the harvest of the field is destroyed, the vine is dried up and the fig tree is withered. The pomegranate, the palm and the apple tree, all the trees of the field are dried up. Surely the joy of mankind is withered away.”

Now, again I say, I don’t think this is too different from our lives. You see, we often, through our sin, through our broken promises, we just invite the locusts into our lives. We invite things in that destroy us and tear us up. Think about the relationships that you had, think about the friend that you had but you betrayed them, or maybe they betrayed you. Sometimes it’s the sin of others. They broke a promise and there’s just a break in that relationship and that relationship is broken, is destroyed. It’s like the locusts have come in and eaten up the friendship.

If you’re married, you may know what is like to come home every night to a husband or a wife, that you don’t really talk to because it is too painful to talk. So, you just come in, you do your thing and you live your life but that relationship has been eaten up.

Or maybe you’re in a situation where you know, your relationship seemed pretty good, yet you just can’t find that perfect job. And when you go to the interview for your perfect job, they say, how come you never stayed at a job for more than two months? I don’t know if that’s anywhere in here, but just think about that. The choices we make affect our lives and it’s hard to get a good job when your employer, when the interviewer says ‘why have you left this job, and this job and this job every two months?

You see, you made choices that brink brokenness in your life. Maybe it’s drugs and alcohol, you know, it starts that ok but it just starts to eat away until your life is totally broken.

Let me give you another example that maybe isn’t so extreme. I’ve been married to Sonia, my lovely wife, who was ……. for ten months now? About ten months? And I’ve never realized how selfish I was till I got married. You see, I’ve been walking through life, you know, pretty good. I don’t feel the destruction. I don’t feel the pain. I don’t see how the locusts have eaten away at me. I think ‘hey, I’m a pretty good guy. People like me, I’ve got lots of friends. I’m doing well at school, I’m doing well at my job. This is great. Life’s good. And on the surface everything was pretty good and I get married and she says to me things like, you know, ‘why did you do that when you knew I wanted you to do this?’ my God , let’s see why did I do something I knew you didn’t want me to do? And if I really asked myself, I’d say ‘because I’m selfish and I’d rather do what I want to do than what you want me to do.’ Ok?

And it comes up again and again. And it’s like, man, I’m really selfish. Now, I don’t want you to leave tonight thinking that Stephen is the most selfish person on the face of the earth, but if you do it wouldn’t be the worst thing of all. But it’s just to point that we all have that and sometimes it’s not as obvious. Sometimes it’s not as clear in our lives that really the choices we make have consequences, and a lot of times when we make bad choices we bring destruction into our lives.

Now, what we do often is we look at our life and we see something bad and we think ‘that person did something to me and that’s why my life is bad.’

You know, we look to our past to see why it’s bad and we point to that other person. Or we say, ‘my life’s bad, I don’t know why, but I’m not willing to look at my past to find out why, I’m not willing to look at my choices’. Either way, what we do is we avoid the things that we do. So, there are times in our life we look at the brokenness and we fail to realize that it’s because of our own choices.

But sin brings brokenness. Rebellion brings brokenness. When we break our promises to the Lord or to others, it brings brokenness. That’s just a nature of sin and rebellion and broken promises, they bring destruction. They invite the locusts in your life to eat things up.

See, maybe you ask yourself, ‘ok, I get it, there is brokenness in my life. There’s a little bit of brokenness or there’s a lot. You know, it’s like the four swarms coming through that destroyed up everything, but what do I do, what do I do with that? Ok, I understand. What next?

Well if we look at Joel a little bit further, we see this really awesome thing and we find that when the people of Israel turned from God, what they were called to do was to repent. And actually the only proper response to sin on our lives is repentance. So, I’m going to read to you verses 13 through 14 of chapter 1.

Joel says: “Put on a sackcloth, oh priests and mourn, wail you who minister before the altar. Come, spend the night in sackcloth, you who minister before my God for the grain offerings and drink offerings are withheld from the house of your God. Declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly, summon the elderly and all who live in the land to the house of the Lord, your God and cry out the Lord.”

You see, what Joel is saying is ‘oh, but God did bad things in our past and he’s brought this horrible consequence. We need to repent, we need to turn back to God. And what he’s talking about is something I like to call an active repentance, or an outward repentance, but an act of repentance. This is when we have something that we’ve been doing and we direly turn and do something else and a repentance act actually means to turn from, to turn from the sin, to turn towards God.

But we actually….. ok, we’re going to do the right thing now, we’re going to do what God calls us to do.

Like with my relation with Sonia, I’d say ‘ok, I’m sorry, I repent, I confess and say I’m sorry I’m not going to do that thing any more, because that hurts you.’ and sometimes it takes months, months of work. Sometimes it takes a long time, but you’re turning and it may be gradual but you’re turning away from the thing you’re doing to do a better thing, to do the thing that God wants you to do, to have a fulfillment of your bow, a fulfillment of your promise with the other person.

Or you stay at that job even though you hate it because you need to stay somewhere for someone to take you seriously. Or stop the alcohol, you stop the drug abuse, you turn from it and do it active, turning to the Lord.

But it doesn’t leave it there. It’s not just an active turning, there’s also something else I like to call a spiritual turning, an inward turning. If we look in chapter 2 of Joel, verse 12 and 13 we’ll see that.

So, chapter 2, verse 12, Joel says, this is the Lord speaking “Even now, replies the Lord, return to him with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments”

“Rend your hearts and not your garments”. You see, rend means to break, to tear and as a sign of mourning, as a sign of repentance, the people used to tear their clothing and often people didn’t have a lot of clothes, they had a cloak and they would tear it, it was a sign that they were turning from what they were doing, that they were mournful, that they felt deep sorrow for that.

But God says, don’t just tear your garment, tear your heart. Actually, after this act of repentance will you start doing the right thing? But, actually break your heart over your sin and turn to me and love.

You see, what happens often times is we turn from this thing that we’re doing that’s wrong and we say, ‘ok, now I’m good, now I’m clean, now I’m pure, ok bless me, Lord’. It’s kind of….. it seems like a good idea, right? I’m doing the right thing so bless me.

But, you see it can’t be a very prideful thing if you don’t have this breaking of the heart, this spiritual repentance. But, when you have spiritual repentance and active repentance coupled together, when they are united in purpose, then a beautiful thing happens, because you’re really turning to the Lord. And actually part of that breaking of your heart is saying ‘God I know I can change my ways, but I still can’t do anything about the stuff I’ve already done. I can’t get rid of that.’ And God says, ‘you know what? It’s not about you getting rid of, it’s about you being mournful and about repenting of that and trusting in me to take care of that’.

You see, God wants you to trust that he can take care of the stuff that it’s in your life. So here we read “rend your heart and not your garments, return to the Lord for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding to love”.

He relents from sending calamity. You see, God is saying ‘if you just break your heart in front of me, I’m not going to bring the locusts. I’m not going to bring the destruction. I’m going to relent because I’m compassionate, I’m gracious. You see, I want to do things in your life that you can’t do to yourself.’

And that’s what he’s talking about there. It’s a different type of thing. And again in 14 through 17, he says “who knows God he may turn and have pity and leave a blessing behind, bring offerings and drink offerings to the Lord, your God”,-remember they were gone before him.

Everything was gone, he restores it. It says, “blow the trumpets in Zion! Declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly”, verse 16 “…. Gather the people, consecrate the assembly, bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing in the breast, leave the bride room, let the bridegroom leave this room, and the bride her chamber. Let the priests who minister before the Lord weep before the temple porch in the altar. Let them say ‘Spare your people, Lord, do not make your inheritance an object of scorn, a byword among the nations. Why should people say ‘where is their God?’.