BYOG Killjoy God. Transcript October 7 and 8, Aaron Brockett Luke 7:36-48

Transcription

1 Transcript Aaron Brockett Luke 7:36-48 How are we doing? You guys good? Good. Good to see you. I want to welcome those of you here at our Northwest campus, and would you please put your hands together and greet all of our other campuses right now. Those of you at our North, Downtown, and West campuses, we love you guys. So excited for all that God is doing in and through you. We just want to greet anyone who happens to be a guest or here for the first time at any one of our campuses. We re so thrilled to have you. If you have a Bible or a Bible app, go ahead and meet me in Luke chapter 7. That s where we are going to be today. As you re kind of getting those things out and getting turned there, I just want to share a little bit of exciting news that relates to our entire church, but specifically our Downtown campus, for you to just be aware of, largely, and for you to celebrate and to be praying for during this time. A couple of years ago, we were only one campus and now we have four different campuses. So as we ve added campuses and as we ve grown, and with Jake Barker getting ready to be sent out to plant a church out in California Jake has served as one of our executive pastors and teaches often we just knew that there were some organizational changes that needed to take place so I just want to make you aware of some of these so that you can celebrate it and be praying for them. One of the first big transitions happened a couple months ago. Our North campus pastor, Greg Anderson, became the executive pastor for our entire church. Greg transitioned out of that role and he oversees all the day-to-day operations as well as the entire executive team. If any of you have ever had the chance to have a little bit of face time with Greg, you just know how much of a people person that guy is, he loves God and he loves people. He pursues his wife, Katie, and their children and he s just a great friend. Greg is doing a phenomenal job. Stepping into the North campus pastor position is a guy named Aaron Hoover. Aaron s actually leading our Las Vegas mission trip this weekend. Aaron has such a heart for Jesus. He attended this church for many, many years before he came on the staff at the North campus. He s doing a great job. Then the next big transition that I just want you to be aware of we announced this Thursday night at Downtown s Night of Prayer and Worship is that our Downtown campus pastor, Petie Kinder, is transitioning into a brand new role. Petie is going to be our Campus Ministries pastor,

2 so what that means is that he s going to be having all the campus pastors report to him and he s going to be aligning them and resourcing and encouraging them. If any of you have ever been around Petie, he s just one of the most joyful people I ve ever been around. He s just constantly screaming, Let s go! Even for just no reason. It s just like, Let s go where? But Petie is a gifted, gifted communicator. He s a great leader, so you re going to be seeing Petie in the teaching rotation a bit more as Jake gets ready to transition away. Then our new Downtown campus pastor just got named Thursday night. He s a guy named Ryan Bramlett, and Ryan is a just going to do a great job. What I love about this guy is he started attending our church about six or seven years ago at the invitation of a girlfriend. He was not a believer, and the only reason why he came is because he was into her, and he ended up receiving Jesus, came on to our staff, and now he s leading our Downtown campus. So I just want to speak to all the guys that are here because of a girl. You could be on our team one day. I just want you to know that. Anyway, I just want you to be aware of those things. Some of you may or may not know any of these individuals, but I just want you to be praying for them and celebrate them. If you do know them, reach out and send them some encouragement. I just love what God is doing in and through our church. It s just a joy to be here and to be able to serve with all of you. This weekend is kind of a special weekend for me too. I was thinking about this this morning as I got ready. It was 10 years ago this weekend that I did my trial sermon here. If you don t know what a trial sermon is, it s when they want to hire you, but you have to preach and actually impress them first and everybody votes on it after. It s a glorious experience. That happened 10 years ago this weekend, and man, it s just blown me away what God has done in and through our church. I just want you to know how much I love being your pastor and how excited I am for the future. We are in week three of this series called BYOG, and what that stands for is Bring Your Own God. What we mean by that, especially if you re new coming into this, is that most of us, including myself, have all either invented or inherited a view or an understanding or perception of God that isn t entirely accurate, helpful, or true. Maybe we picked some things up along the way on the internet or maybe we had a teacher tell us something about God one time that was this distorted image that got developed in our heads about who God is. If we think that God should always give us what we ask, when we ask for it; if we feel like he is obligated to protect us from all pain and difficulty in this life; if we think that he should make us 2

3 feel better about ourselves all the time and not intrude in our personal lives in any way, then eventually that false god will let you down because he doesn t exist. For many of us, I think that we ve sort of brought our own God to the table. Maybe that God just didn t work, and so we ve become disillusioned with him or we ve maybe walked away from the church or walked away from organized religion or God. I would say that more of us, though, probably find ourselves in this category. It s not that we ve rejected God, maybe we really want to believe in God, but something s in the way. We ve got some questions that just don t have answers. We ve got some experiences that don t have resolutions. We ve got some pain that is still hurting us. We want to get there. I mean, it s why you showed up today. It s why you re not ready to let go of God, but something seems to be in the way. So what we re doing in this series and we re about halfway through now, we re going to conclude this here in another few weeks is that we just want to bring about some of the most common misconceptions about who God is. I m just doing my best to try to deconstruct those misperceptions and then reconstruct a picture and a description of the one true God. If you are a believer, I want to give you greater confidence in that one true God. If you don t know God, I d like to introduce him to you and have you respond to him by the end of this series. Here s the question that we re kind of wrestling to the ground for all of us. It s just simply this: Who is Jesus to me? I m not asking who Jesus was to your grandma. I m not asking who Jesus was to your mom and dad or to your neighbor or a friend, but for you specifically. Who is Jesus to you? The reason why this question is so important is not only because Jesus reconciles us to God, and we re going to talk about that here in a minute, but Jesus also shows us what God is like. In other words, Jesus is God incarnate, so if you want to know what God would say, then listen to what Jesus said. If you want to know what God would do, watch what Jesus did. If you want to know how God feels about us, then look at how Jesus interacted with people. So far in this series, we ve talked about On-demand God and last weekend we looked at Bodyguard God. Here s the one we re looking at this weekend, and I think this is maybe the biggest misconception about God maybe in this whole series. It s Killjoy God. I think for many of us we kind of see God as this cosmic killjoy who has created all of these rules that we ve got to abide by, and these rules are confining and they are just impossible to live up to. I think that a lot of times this perception of God gets sort of fed by or shaped by things in our culture, like maybe Homer Simpson s annoying Christian neighbor, Ned Flanders, or The Church 3

4 Lady. These are characters who sort of depict Christians as mean spirited, condescending, and judgmental. Maybe this would describe the church that you grew up in. They were just mean spirited, condescending, and judgmental; constantly telling you, Don t do this. And feel bad about doing that. So we end up sort of reflecting that upon God, so it s not a joy to follow God. We find ourselves actually just feeling this burden rather than a weight that is lifted. One of the things that I ve learned being a pastor is that that information shared with people who don t know me makes a lot of people nervous. If I ever get on an airplane, I m sitting next to somebody. We have a lot of small talk, and let s just say we re talking and they start dropping a few colorful words, and then, inevitably, they will say, Well, so what do you do? In that moment, I tell them and I can tell they re running this inventory, like, Okay, what did I just say? How many words did I just drop? They re trying to retract it all. I think at times, there are people who wonder, once they find out I m a pastor, is it okay if we have a good time around you? Is it okay if we enjoy ourselves? I was officiating a wedding a few years ago, and afterwards, there was this reception. I walked back to where the reception was, and I was by myself, and I could tell they had this open bar that wasn t open yet, and they had this dance floor; nobody was dancing yet. I went over and I got a piece of white wedding cake because, honestly, that s why I go to weddings. If any of you are with me in that, like I love the white wedding cake. So I m just over there filling my face with it. I m just kind of waiting around for the reception to start, and it s not getting started. Eventually, the bride and the groom, they kind of made their way over to me and they said, Hey, pastor, thank you so much for doing our wedding, and everything that you said today was just perfect, and we just really appreciate all your time. They kind of went on and on, and it finally dawned on me that their thank you was actually a disguised goodbye and I didn t receive the message. I was just like, Well, you re welcome. You want to walk with me? I m going to go get another piece of cake. They were all just kind of awkwardly waiting around, and then eventually they kind of made their way back over again and they said, Pastor, are you staying for the reception? It just hit me. I realized that they were all waiting for me to leave so that they could get this party started up in here. I had no idea that my presence was actually ruining everybody s mojo. Maybe for some of us, that s just our perception of God. Our culture celebrates individuality. This is how our culture would say it: Everybody should have the ability or the freedom to pursue what is right for them, and that if you stand in the way of what is right for them, that that s actually wrong. 4

5 That is not a new idea. It has been around for a really long time. In fact, there s this German philosopher (Immanuel Kant) who existed in the 1700s. He said it this way when he was describing human enlightenment, he said human enlightenment is...one who trusts in his or her own power of thinking rather than in authority or tradition. Freedom to determine our own moral standards is considered a necessity for being fully human, which is just the 1700s way of saying, Leave me alone. I want to do what I want to do. A Killjoy God just sort of seems to stand in the way of that. A Killjoy God, we imagine, would say: Well, if there s anything fun, I m against it. If you enjoy something, then you need to stop it. If you color outside the lines, don t live by the rules, then I m going to punish you. If you drink, smoke, chew, or date girls who do... Killjoy God. Maybe for many of you, this was just the experience that you had growing up in church and you were like, Why would I live my life according to a set of rules that were put in a book and written 2,000 years ago? Why would I serve a God who won t let me follow my personal wants and desires? That s oppressive, it s narrow minded, it s inhibiting and life is too short to live that way. Maybe this would articulate a little bit of what s holding you back from wanting to follow after God. For a long time, this is the way that I felt, and I don t know that I had the boldness or the clarity to be able to say it that way, but I felt that way, especially as a young man. When I was growing up, I just sort of felt like God was going to smack me if I got out of line, that he was constantly waiting for me to break the rules. Honestly, this just, I think, came out of well-meaning Christians and I think that s what most of them were, well meaning who, in the name of personal holiness and Christ-likeness, which I am for both of those things (in fact, I m going to talk a little bit about the placement of those things here today in the message) I think oftentimes as believers we expect something of unbelievers that we shouldn t yet expect because they haven t yet been transformed by the heart and mind of Christ. So in the name of holiness, in the name of Christ-likeness, we end up sort of giving off this perception that God is a killjoy, and that was definitely the impression that I got. One of the experiences that crystallized this in my mind was when I was in a high school youth group and we were going on a youth group trip to St. Louis to the Six Flags there. We were all on the bus and we were all listening to music; we all had our headphones on. I was listening to one of my favorite songs of the time. It was a song called Pump Up the Volume. If any of you ever remember that, it was a very, very simple lyric. It just said, Pump up the volume. Pump up the volume. Pump up the volume. Dance. Dance. That was name of the whole song. Every now and then I tune into it. I love that song for whatever reason. So I m just jamming away on it. 5

6 One of the responsibilities of the student ministry volunteers at the time was to go through the bus and make sure that we weren t listening to anything that we shouldn t listen to. So they came up to me. They kind of tapped me on the shoulder, and they were like, Aaron, what are you listening to? I was like, Pump Up The Volume. They go, Well, is it Christian? I was like, I don t know. Is pump up the volume Christian? There s just a simple lyric. Pump up the volume. Pump up the volume. Pump up the volume. Dance. Dance. They were like, Well, it s dancing and we know what dancing leads to. I m like, Well, King David danced. I m trying to do this argument. They re like, I think you need to shut it off. I remember in that moment thinking to myself, If God is against this, then what else is he against and what does God expect of me anyway? How do I stay on his good side? What else am I doing that God frowns upon? So maybe this would be the question that would kind of clarify it for you: What does God really want from me anyway? What does God want from me? I tell you what. If that s your primary driver when it comes to your perception of God, that s exhausting. There s no joy in it whatsoever. There s no pleasure in it whatsoever. My guess here is that you won t hang with God very long if this is the question that s driving you. You ll eventually let go. You ll walk away if you haven t already. So I want to look at a passage of Scripture that speaks to this and answers some of these questions and gives us a different picture of God than, maybe, what you came in here with today. So hopefully you found Luke chapter 7. I want to start in verse 36. It says, One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to have dinner with him, so Jesus went to his home and sat down to eat. When a certain immoral woman, now that s how she s introduced to us. We are never given her name. This is the only description we have. An...immoral woman from that city heard he was eating there, she brought a beautiful alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them. So the implication here is that she is a professional prostitute. I know that she didn t start out that way. I d love to know her story. I d love to know how she grew up. I d love to know what happened to her, the decisions that she made that sort of caused her to go down this trajectory. What s interesting about this story is that she seems to know who Jesus is ahead of time, and she goes to pursue a conversation with him, whereas this is very different than, say, take another story where a woman is hurting, the woman at the well, and Jesus actually went out of his way to interact with her, and for the first half of the conversation, she had no clue who he was. This woman knows who he is. She goes immediately to see him, and she seems to have been impacted by him in some way already. So she comes and she expresses an incredible amount of 6

7 public affection and appreciation to Jesus. She does it in such a way... I mean, just imagine if you were sitting around a table and somebody came in in the middle of the meal and they just drop at the feet of the person sitting beside you and they begin to weep all over their feet and they begin to wipe them with their hair. It would make you a little bit uncomfortable. There is a killjoy at this dinner party all right, but it isn t Jesus. In verse 39, it says, When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. She s a sinner! As if he isn t. It s really kind of a silly accusation that he makes, where he is like: Well, if Jesus was a prophet, he would know what kind of a woman this is. Jesus didn t need to be a prophet to know what kind of a woman this is. Her reputation preceded her. Everybody around that table knew what she did for a living. What this Pharisee is questioning is how Jesus could be associated with her, and in this way. What you need to understand is in the first century, you just didn t speak to somebody of the opposite sex out in public that you weren t married to. Not only is it not just a conversation, she comes in and she s touching him. Not in a sexual way, but certainly in an intimate way. She s just weeping all over his feet and drying them with her hair, and this Pharisee is thinking these judgmental thoughts about her. Look at verse 40. I love this. Then Jesus answered his thoughts. That is so cool. Just a little tidbit for you. If you ever get around Jesus, watch what you think. Wear one of those little tinfoil hats or something just to try to block him reading your mind. He says, Simon, he said to the Pharisee, I have something to say to you. Notice how hypocritical this is. Go ahead, Teacher, Simon replied. Just a moment ago, he was secretly judging him. Then Jesus told him this story: Now this is sort of unexpected. You would expect Jesus to just kind of hit him between the eyes with some truth, but instead Jesus sort of goes through the side door by telling him a story. It s a very simple story. He says, imagine A man loaned money to two people 500 pieces of silver to one and 50 pieces to the other. But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that? Simon answered, I would imagine he answered sort of rolling his eyes because this is pretty simple, I suppose the one for whom he canceled the larger debt. That s right, Jesus said. Now look at this, verse 44. Luke wants us to know this. Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, so he s looking at the woman, but he s still talking to Simon. Look at this woman kneeling here. When I entered your home, you didn t offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she has washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn t greet me with a kiss, but from the time I first came in, she has not stopped kissing my feet. You 7

8 neglected the courtesy of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has anointed my feet with rare perfume. I tell you, her sins, notice this and they are many have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love. Then Jesus said to the woman, Your sins are forgiven. On down in verse 50, he says, Go in peace. In other words: Your conscious is clear. I ve taken the load off of you. Now here s the question that I had as I studied this passage. What did she do to deserve this? We don t necessarily see her confessing sin. We don t see her acknowledging Jesus as Savior. They didn t have a little baptistry out back and she didn t say, Look, would you please baptize me? Not that those things are unimportant, but she didn t do any of those things. All she did was she just expressed an extravagant amount of affection and humility, and Jesus says: Your faith has saved you; go in peace. You see, Jesus is celebrating her extravagant response. He isn t crushing it. This woman seems to be aware of some things that the Pharisee was simply blind to. She was aware of her sin and that she recognized a need for a Savior, not because she wasn t loved and not because she wasn t good enough, but precisely because she was. She had some things that she knew that she couldn t deal with on her own. She d been trying and she couldn t, and so knew she needed a Savior. More specifically, she knew she needed Jesus. I want you to know this, that grace really isn t all that great until you recognize your need for it. Grace really isn t all that life changing until you realize what it is that you ve been rescued from. Her extravagant response here is a response to that. What I want you to see is that a Killjoy God would have shamed her for her extravagance. He would ve sent her on a guilt trip. He would have flinched at her touch or scoffed at her attempt to wash his feet. A Killjoy God might have said: You think this is enough to pay for what you ve done? You need to get yourself together and you need to go to church next Sunday, young lady, and you need to show me that you can make better decisions and that this isn t just some desperate attempt to save face. But the minute that you mess up again, the second that you fall back into your former way of life, it s over. That s something a Killjoy God would say, but that s not what Jesus said and it s not how he responded to her. This is never his response, not to her and not to you and me. Jesus response is always grace with truth. It s not just grace, grace; it s not just truth, truth. It s not just grace, grace, like: Hey, it s okay. It s not really a sin. It s no big deal. And it s not just truth, truth, like: You should be ashamed of yourself. How dare you? It s the two-intentions that are actually life changing. It is extravagant love and it is extravagant grace along with an offer to actually go and live a better life except this time it s in the strength 8

9 and the power and the guidance that Jesus is going to provide, and Jesus is able to do that without dismissing your value or dismissing you as a person. See, if your perception is that of a Killjoy God, then likely you ve maybe heard or experienced some things that have led you to a few of those assumptions. Do any of you ever feel this way? Just kind of like, I feel like God is never satisfied with me. It doesn t matter what I do. It doesn t matter what I say. It doesn t matter how many times I read my Bible or pray or whatever, it just feels like he s never satisfied. How many of you have a person like this in your life? How many of you have a killjoy boss? You re afraid to answer out loud. Yeah, it doesn t matter how many hours of overtime you put in; it doesn t matter what you do; it doesn t matter how good of a job you do, you just can never seem to satisfy him. Some of us maybe are married to a killjoy spouse. It doesn t really matter what we do, they re just always on our back. Maybe you have killjoy kids. It doesn t matter how much you sacrifice, doesn t matter how much you give them, they just want more and more and never say thank you. Maybe you ve got a killjoy friend, a killjoy roommate. What s it feel like to be in a relationship with somebody and you just can never satisfy them? It s a major day ruiner is what it is, and day ruiner isn t even a phrase; I just made that up right here and now. You can take that with you and use it if you want. Whenever you re around other people who are killjoys, it s just not very much fun. I just wonder if you ve heard the message of grace so often that it just doesn t affect you anymore. It s like a seed that falls on hard soil and just bounces off. Just be honest. Some of you have tuned me out over the last several moments as I was talking about grace. You ve heard this so many times. You remember sermons on it. You can recall passages of Scripture that speak to it. If somebody were to ask you about the grace of God, you could explain it. But you haven t received it. Your heart is so hardened toward it. You just feel like, I don t know if this is true for me. You re not living in it. I m saying it that way. It s one thing to understand how grace works; it s another thing to actually hold onto it and live in it. And when you can hold onto it and live in it, that s transformational. Not long ago, I was talking to a lady out in the lobby here at Northwest between services. She walked up to me and I could tell that she was upset, so I just asked her how she was doing. Immediately, she just began to share with me that she was struggling. She said, You know, I ve grown up in church and I ve been a believer for a long time, but through tears in her eyes, she said, but I m beginning to have some doubts. She was like, 9

10 This just isn t fun anymore. She s like, I pray. I read my Bible. It just feels like God s unresponsive and it feels like I just have this feeling that he s disappointed in me. I just tried to listen for a few minutes. I didn t want to jump too quickly to some sort of an explanation; I just tried to listen. Eventually, as the conversation was beginning to wind down, I just said, Could you just do me a favor? Could you just explain to me what it is you think the gospel message is? What is it that you think God is inviting you to? She stood there for what seemed like several moments of just awkward silence. She sort of shifted around on her feet, and she was looking down at the ground. She looked up at me through tears, and she was like, I don t know. She was like, I guess I just need to be better and I need to stop sinning and I need to serve more, and she just started listing off all these things that she needed to do and it broke my heart. One of my favorite books of the Bible is the book of Romans because this was Paul at his best. He takes these very complicated things and he breaks them down and makes it clear for us. I love how Paul says this when it comes to really what it is that God has done to reconcile us. He says this once we recognize that we need a Savior. But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law... Do you realize how astounding a statement that is? I don t think you do. That s like having white wedding cake without the calories. That s like getting in shape without exercising. That s pretty much what that statement is. You can be made right with God without keeping the requirements of the law as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago. Listen to this. We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. There s a period there. There s not and also. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God s glorious standard. Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. It s understanding this. It s the recognition that you and I have a debt that we could not possibly begin to pay even if we wanted to, and God just kind of stamps it paid in full. He says: Listen, it s satisfied. We are made right. There s no way that you could fulfill all the laws even if you wanted to, and that would be miserable. You are made right in my sight. But how about this assumption? This is maybe where there s a little bit of a rub here. You say, Well, okay, I hear you, but I feel like there are just too many rules. Man, Aaron, I hear you say that we re saved by grace through faith, but then there are all these standards and there are all these requirements that are in the Scriptures, and so if we are saved by grace, why are there still all of these laws, all of these rules in the Bible? 10

11 Well, Paul explains this as well in 3:20 in Romans. He says, For no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. Here it is. The law simply shows us how sinful we are. Here s the law s function. It just makes us aware that we need a Savior. It just makes us aware that we can t do this on our own. So it just serves to help us recognize that grace is so much better than we ever thought that it was, and when we begin to recognize that fact, there s something about that that s transformational. It fundamentally altars the way in which we see God and the way in which we see holiness and Christ-likeness, that those things no longer become like something we have to do; those things actually become something we get to do and we actually enjoy it. A scene that has helped me to understand this or grab a hold of this maybe more than any other is a scene in the play Les Miserables, or maybe some of you saw the movie, where the main character is this guy named Valjean. As a young peasant boy, he and his family are hungry and so he steals a loaf of bread to feed them and himself and he ends up getting caught. He gets thrown into a prison. He s punished unjustly for it. He stays in prison until he s a young man. Then there comes a day they end up releasing him, but they give him papers that basically say he s an ex-convict. So those papers basically make it impossible for him to get a job or find a place to stay, and his heart is just hardened and embittered. He s sitting on a park bench, and a man and his wife come and they actually bring him in; they feed him a meal; they give him a place to sleep for the night. But even that act of generosity and grace is not enough to actually melt Valjean s heart. He knows this is just one night, and he s got a whole lifetime ahead of him. In a moment of self-preservation, he gets up in the middle of the night, takes his knapsack, and begins to steal all these valuables from the man and the woman, and then he leaves. The next morning, the police find him on the street. They take him back to the man s house. They ve got him in handcuffs. Valjean thinks that his life is completely over at this point, and it should ve been. He s just standing there with his face down looking at the ground, and the police say, We ve found this man. Are these your possessions? The man says, Yes, yes they are, and I m really glad that you brought him back because he forgot the candlesticks. He pulls out these candlesticks and he s walking towards Valjean. Just the look on his face, especially in the movie, where he just looks up and he s confused because he has only been the recipient of law up until this point in his life, an unjust law at that. He s never known what grace is like and he s getting an experience of it for the very first time, and his eyes are just darting around the room and he doesn t know how to receive this. I love this next line. The man walks up to him with the candlesticks and he looks him right in the eyeballs, and he says, Valjean, with these candlesticks, I ve just bought you a new life. Now 11

12 how are you going to live? He puts them in the knapsack and tells the police officers to let him go. I love the rest of that story because he is a different man from that point forward. His heart is not bitter. His heart is not hardened. He begins to serve others out of generosity. What made the difference? It was grace. It was grace that transformed his heart. See, here s the gospel message: You and I are that man and God didn t give us his candlesticks, he gave us his son Jesus, and he says: With the blood of my son Jesus, I ve bought you a new life. But in order for that to be good news, you ve got to recognize the bad news; you ve got to recognize the fact that we are sinners, and in our culture today, that s just something you don t do. It s just not very popular to call somebody else a sinner or to even admit that you are one because some of you would say, Well, Aaron, I don t know. I mean, what you call a sin I just call a good time, but see, sin isn t just a laundry list of things that God frowns upon because he s a prude, sin played out long enough will bring pain and destruction to your life as well as to the people around you. Here s just a little pop quiz. How many of you enjoy being lied to? Just show of hands. How many of you enjoy being lied to? Okay, how many of you have ever lied? Just raise up your hands if you have. Those of you right now who didn t raise your hands, you are lying. Here s another one. How many of you enjoy having something stolen from you? You enjoy that? That s a horrible feeling, isn t it? Now, how many of you have ever stolen? Some of you are like, I ve never stolen. Okay, what about a stick of gum? Anybody ever stolen anything? So okay, yes, I ve stolen a stick of gum. How many of you enjoy having somebody lose their temper and just cuss you out? Anybody enjoy that? How many of you have ever done that? Yeah, we ve lost our cool. Listen, I could go on. Some of you are like, Please don t talk about lust. Please don t go to lust. Please don t do it. I ll stop short. Now, here s the thing. I think all of us would look at that and we would go, Yeah, I don t enjoy being lied to, but I ve lied. I don t enjoy having anything stolen, but I ve stolen. Why are those things sins? Because God s a prude? No, because those things cause pain to your life and to those you love. God says: Listen, there s a penalty for all of this, but there s also the effect of sin. I actually want to free you from both of those things. 12

13 See, grace isn t something that we should take advantage of. Grace, just like in the play Les Miserable, should transform our hearts and give us a new set of desires and a new set of appetites. Paul explains it this way in Romans 12:2. He says, Don t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God s will for you, which is, say these words out loud with me at all of our campuses, good and pleasing and perfect. He basically says that God s will for you, it s good and it s pleasing, not just to him but to you, and it is perfect. You can trust him. That s why I just want to leave you with this one last truth statement: God doesn t want something from you, God genuinely wants more for you. He really does. See, I have read books and books and books on the theology of God s grace, but I have learned more about the theology of God s grace being a father of four kids than I ever have reading any book on theology because when I look at my four kids, I don t want anything from them; I genuinely want more for them, which means at times I ve got to limit some of their freedoms so that they can have more. Oftentimes, they think I m a killjoy, and I ve just sort of got to deal with it and say, No, you may not get this yet; you may not have this perspective yet, but I genuinely want more for you. It is so rewarding, as a dad, when you begin to see them start to get that, when you see them start to grow and you see them start to mature, when you see them start to put the needs of others ahead of themselves. See, when we do things God s way, life is just better. That s the way that he s designed it. Paul encourages the Philippians in 3:12. He says, I don t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. It s this journey that s ahead of us now to say, You know what? I m going to grow in Christlikeness. I m going to grow in holiness, and you know what? It s actually a joy. Think about it this way. In many instances in our life, discipline and constraint actually lead to more freedom and more liberation. So those of you who are athletes and you want to get better at your sport; you ve got to limit yourselves. You ve got to show some constraint in some things so that way you can get better. If you play an instrument, same thing. If you want to get a promotion at work, same thing. 13

14 We would simply say, By limiting some of my freedoms, it actually is going to lead to a greater sense of freedom. This is true in relationships. Whenever you give yourself in love to another person, you have to give up a bit of your personal autonomy. Love is great, but in order for us to experience its greatness we have to limit some of our personal options. C.S. Lewis said it this way. He said, Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. Do you hear what he s saying? He s like: Hey, if you want to avoid a painful life, then don t love anything. Don t give yourself to anything. Don t sacrifice for anything. But in a love relationship, in order for that to work, there s a mutual loss of independence. It can t just be one way, so if one person does all of the adjusting, all of the serving, all of the sacrificing and the other person doesn t, that relationship deteriorates. Here s what I want you to see. A perception of a Killjoy God is that you think that God is asking you to fully adjust to him, that God is asking you to serve him, or that God is asking you to change the way that you think and the way that you live. What we really need to recognize here is that God has adjusted to meet us. Every other world religion says, You adjust to meet god. Christianity says, God adjusted to meet us. Here are the fancy biblical words for it, incarnation Jesus came to us, and atonement Jesus paid the price for us. Through Jesus, God became a limited human being, vulnerable to everything that we experience. He was willing to lose his freedom so that we could find our freedom. In Christ, God says: I will adjust to you; I will change for you; I will sacrifice for you; I will serve you so that you can be who I fully made you to be. In that moment, when we recognize what it is that we ve been delivered from, and we recognize the incredible grace that God has given to us, we gladly and willingly choose to follow after Jesus. We let go of some of our freedoms only to realize that we have received something far more freeing than we ve ever known. I pray and hope that maybe throughout the course of this series, if it s not even today, that you would begin to see that God is not a killjoy, God wants to enhance your joy and that God is actually for you; he s not wanting something from you. I pray that over the course of this series that that would be re-clarified to you because maybe for some of you your spiritual passion is no longer a flame, it s just a flicker. Any time that you 14

15 come to that place in your life, a re-clarification of the identity of God and the purposes of God will stoke those flames. I hope and I pray, if not today, that some of you would say, You know what? I never knew. I just never knew any of this, or maybe I heard it before, but it never really clicked. I pray that God would give you eyes to see it and ears to hear it and that you might respond today. You know what? You could do that right now, today, in this moment together, as we take communion. I want to lead us during this prayer time, so if you would, would you just close your eyes and just for maybe the sake of focus, maybe bow your head. Maybe if you want, as you re sitting there, you could just kind of develop a posture of openness to the Lord, whether that s just kind of a couple of open hands, that always helps me just to say, God, I just want to receive what it is that you have for me. I just want to pray over us during this time that the Spirit of God would meet us in this place. Father, we come to you right now and I pray that if there are some here who have grown up in religion or grown up in the church, but did not grow up in Christ, who never really knew or understood or experienced the message of your grace, that maybe it would just click today, that it would just begin to make sense, that they would begin to see it, that you would give them the courage to at least take a step toward this, to realize that you are not a killjoy, but that you sent your Son so that we could have joy. The first step in this process is to realize that we don t have the answers and that maybe we ve been trying to live life our own way, but it hasn t been working out, and we need to learn to trust you. God, I pray that that could take place today. Maybe there are some here who are just sitting there and they re ready just to receive you as Lord and Savior and that, just like Valjean in Les Miserable, they would be exposed to that kind of grace and it would just totally transform their heart. God, meet us right where we are, just like you did the woman in this passage, and I pray that we d be receptive to what it is that you would say and do. By your Holy Spirit, meet us in this place, in this room. We want to feel your presence here. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. The ushers are going to come right now and pass these trays that have a little bit of bread and a little bit of juice on them. It just represents the body and the blood of Jesus. After a few moments of just reflecting upon the application of this message and what it is that God had specifically for you, just take the communion quietly where you re sitting and then the team will come back in a few moments and lead us in another song of worship. 15