THE ANDY STANLEY COLLECTION TEN(1): THE RULES

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1 WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. WONDER. DISCOVERY. PASSION. Bottom Line: Relationship always precedes rules with God. introduction: To many, Christianity is about following a set of rules. And if you asked them Why? they would point to a single source the Bible. Specifically, they would probably mention the Ten Commandments. But what most people miss is the whole context for that list. God established a relationship with the Israelites long before He even gave them the rules. He wanted them to know they were His people. The reality is that following the rules will never make God love us more. In fact, when you try to live them out, you begin to see just how much you need Him. With God, the relationship always precedes the rules. Always. USER AGREEMENT The rethink Group, Inc. gladly grants permission to churches, schools and other licensees to tailor XP3 TM materials to fit their unique leadership requirements, locale and format preferences. However, if you wish to edit the content substantively, including teaching scripts, small group dialog and any other content in which biblical principles and concepts are presented, you are obligated to do so within the doctrinal guidelines we ve expressed in our Statement of Faith (see page 2). These resources are intended to be downloaded and printed for use by the subscribing entity only and may not be electronically transferred to or duplicated by other non-subscribing entities. Any unauthorized reproduction of this material or incorporation into a new work including podcasts or video of this content is a direct violation of U.S. copyright laws. The Andy Stanley Collection is a product of The rethink Group, Inc; 2009 Andy Stanley. All rights reserved. XP3 and the XP3 logo are trademarks of The rethink Group, Inc. wonder. discovery. passion. Chief EXECUTIVE Officer Reggie Joiner writer Andy Stanley XP3 Team Jared Herd Tim Walker Sarah Bragg Kristen Ivy Sarah Anderson Contributors Holly Crawshaw Laura Whelan Mark Brown CREATIVE DIRECTOR Scott Bragg Technical & Web Support Hadley Brandt Alex VanRossum Chief Operating Officer Reggie Goodin Partner Support Kristie McCollister Debbie Joiner

2 Statement of Faith ABOUT GOD God is the one and only true God, yet He exists in three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. God is the Creator, so everything belongs to Him and is under His control. God is holy, so He is righteous, majestic and loving. God is all knowing and purposeful, so He s at work to bring about His will. No person, thing or idea compares to God. ABOUT THE SCRIPTURES God reveals Himself to us through the Bible, and it is 100% accurate, reliable and authoritative. ABOUT PEOPLE People are made in God s image and for His pleasure. But everybody falls short of God s intention, or ideal, for people. In other words, everyone has sinned. As a result, we are all separated from Him, even though He wants an intimate relationship with each of us. ABOUT SALVATION That s why Jesus, God s Son, came and lived on this earth, died and rose again. God offers His free gift of salvation to all who believe in Jesus and accept Him as Savior, the only way to be forgiven and reconciled to God. Anyone who accepts this gift is adopted as a son or daughter into God s family and will live with Him forever in heaven. Scripture marked NIV is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

3 Creating the ENVIRONMENT: Ten We believe that the set, stage, music and everything in your room communicates a message without you saying a word. That s why we put together a list of production ideas to help you set the stage for the session and the series. From the music you play when students come into the room to the worship set your band plays, we want to make sure that your room conveys TEN in a multi-sensory way. There is a downloadable checklist available in your series downloads that will give you all the elements for this session (and the entire series). Background Playlist for THE Ten Series: New Divide by Linkin Park (from New Divide-Single) The Climb by Miley Cyrus (from Hannah Montana: The Movie, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) One Time by Justin Bieber (from One Time-Single) I Want You to Want Me by KSM (from I Want You to Want Me-EP) Ten by Jimmy Eat World (from Clarity) I m Not Who I Was by Brandon Heath (from Don t Get Comfortable) God One and Only by Hillsong (from Faith+Hope+Love) I Run to You by Lady Antebellum (from Lady Antebellum) Love Story by Taylor Swift (from Fearless) Show Me What I m Looking For by Carolina Liar (from Coming to Terms) Worship playlist for Ten session 1: Happy Day by Tim Hughes (from Hold Nothing Back) One Way by Hillsong United (from More Than Life) Song of Hope by Robbie Seay Band (from Give Yourself Away) Nothing But the Blood by Charlie Hall (from Passion: How Great Is Our God) Everything by Tim Hughes (from Holding Nothing Back) The set The story of the Ten Commandments is epic and because of that, we want to display the name of this series in a big way. Purchase giant foam board or any kind of cardboard material, then cut out giant letters to spell the word TEN. Make it as big as you want. Remember, we are going for an epic feel. Once the letters are cut out, you can paint them dark gray or black. Place them in the center or at the back of the stage. Illuminate the letters with lights if you have the means. This would be a great project to enlist students help. SERIES ART Art for PowerPoint backgrounds and for series promotional ads is available as a free download with every series. Visit the XP3 web site, log on to your account and download the images to use in your presentation, newsletters and web site. VIDEO Both a video bumper and a video communicator are available for the TEN series as a video download from the rethink store. You can purchase the videos by logging into your XP3 account and clicking on the XP3 videos link. The TEN video communicator was created to be used in Session 1 of this series in place of a live communicator. The bumper video was created to be used as an intro for all five sessions of TEN series.

4 Middle School Adaptation: Ten The following activities will help middle school students connect with the subject matter in ways that engage them physically, mentally, socially and sometimes emotionally. You can also adapt the TEN series for middle school students by using the teaching outline found in this document to edit the teaching script to a 20 minute presentation, and also by using the separate middle school small group dialog questions (found in the series downloads) that are geared specifically for 6th-8th graders. GAME: the crazy ten commandments This game is to be played at the beginning of sessions 1-5. This game continues from week to week. The game show host chooses two students from the crowd to come on stage and play The Crazy Ten Commandments. Each student chooses a number Each number corresponds to a Crazy Commandment (listed below). The student must obey the commandment, performing silly or crazy acts for the audience. The students compete to see who can be more crazy the students in the audience will select the winner by applause. The one with the most applause wins. This winning person is given the Crazy Crown, (which can be anything from a handmade crown to a store-bought crown). The next week, the winner comes back to play the game and a new challenger is chosen. Once a commandment is picked, it is eliminated from the list. The Crazy Ten Commandments 1. Thou shall yodel passionately. 2. Thou shall do a river dance. 3. Thou shall write your name in the air with your rear-end (this needs to be a guy). or Thou shall belch your name (this needs to be a girl). 4. Thou shall give your best monkey imitation. 5. Thou shall sing the song The Star Spangled Banner in a country voice. 6. Thou shall sing the song Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in an opera-style voice. 7. Thou shall do an interpretative dance. (You choose the song.) 8. Thou shall dance for 10 seconds with no music. 9. Thou shall lead the crowd in signing with the motions to the song YMCA. 10. Thou shall do a free-style rap about McDonalds. optional top ten: Top ten As a lead-in to the teaching script each week, have someone read off a top 10 list (David Letterman style). Some possible lists include: top 10 worst Facebook status updates, top 10 school classroom rules, top 10 things not to say to parents.

5 Teaching Script The teaching script is divided into five sections. Introduction: This introduction is intended to connect you, the communicator, to the audience usually through a personal story or observation. We ve included our stories, but you may want to substitute your own story in this section. Tension: The tension moves the message from the me mentality of the introduction to a we mentality. For example, a transition statement might be, At some point in our lives, we have all been jealous of someone over something. Truth: Once the tension builds, the next logical step is to uncover the truth of what the Bible says about the topic. Application: At this point, the message moves to a you mentality in order to teach the application. The you is the student. Take God s truth and unpack how it relates to each student so that he or she can apply it to everyday life. Landing: Here it is important to land the message on what each student needs to know and do with what they ve heard. Just as the message began with a personal story or observation, the message also ends with a me mentality. For example, one possible landing statement might be, I have a greater sense of purpose knowing that God created me in His image. Leave the students with a clear sense of what all of you should do with what you ve heard.

6 Ten(1): THE RULES Bottom Line: Relationship always precedes rules with God. TEACHING OUTLINE INTRODUCTION The main idea for most religions is that there s a good God and there are bad people. Where did we get the notion that in order for God to answer our prayers or love us or accept us, we have to be good and behave ourselves? The idea that God loves and accepts us based on our behavior didn t come from God at all. God s message is just the opposite. TENSION So where did we get this idea? For most, it comes back to the story of the Ten Commandments. You can discover a lot about a person by the laws he or she makes. God s rules reveal what s important to Him. TRUTH I am the LORD your God (Exodus 20:1 NIV). Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat (Exodus 12:3-4 NIV). God acted first. God moved first. God proved Himself first. Before the rules, before the requirements, before God asked anything of Israel, God made His character known. He made His love known. He made the relationship known. APPLICATION Rules are never the starting point for a relationship with your heavenly Father. The number one thing for God was simply, Will you trust Me? The rules are simply a confirmation of the relationship that already existed. LANDING God has invited you into a relationship based on nothing you do but on something He s done. He has delivered you through the blood of His Son. God is not a God who operates through guilt manipulation. God has already made it clear that more than anything, a relationship matters, and His rules are simply a confirmation of that relationship.

7 BY andy stanley Bottom Line: Relationship always precedes rules with God. Introduction A. There s a widespread assumption in many world religions that people need to work really, really hard at being good. Whether they believe in a personal God, or they are just out to win some kind of cosmic religious bonus, people all over the world believe that their performance and the way they live life is directly connected to their personal acceptability. B. It s been said many ways by many people and it s been written different ways in different religious books, but when you get right down to it, the main idea for most religions is that there s a good God and there are bad people. As Christians we often translate this into the assumption that we ve got to get more good, that we ve got to act better in order for God to accept and love us or to get into His good graces. C. Some of you may be thinking, That is exactly right. This picture of God is your picture of God. This version of Christianity sounds pretty much like you would expect. But before we go any further, I want to raise a question about this assumption. Where did it come from? Where did we get the notion that in order for God to answer our prayers or love us or accept us, we have to be good and behave ourselves? Why do we act like there is a list of rules we have to follow in order to earn God s love? D. Maybe you re here today and you re not even really sure there is a God or a heaven. But if I were to say to you, Okay, let s assume there is a heaven, do you think you re going there? why is it that your first reaction would probably be to look at the kind of life you re living and say, I hope so? Why is it that in our minds there is a direct link between our behavior and how acceptable we are to God? E. This assumption is the same thing that causes some people to avoid going to church until they ve cleaned up their act. They ll say, I want to go to church, but before I do that, I ve got to get some things straight in my personal life. I ve got to change some habits. I ve got to stop hanging out with a certain group of friends. I ve got to do better, so that when I finally show up at church and begin to pray, God will look at me and say, Hey, you re not so bad; in fact, you re a whole lot better than you used to be. I mean, if you had come to Me two weeks ago, no dice. But you know, these last two weeks, you re a different person! Because of that, you are more acceptable. I m going to pay attention to your prayers now. When we say it that way, it sounds silly, but people act and think like this all the time. F. Then there are others of you who are Christians. And maybe you re not so sure you have to behave your way into God s good graces, but there have been times in your life when you ve sinned and done something you consider pretty terrible. And whenever that happens, you find yourself thinking, I wonder if I m really a Christian. Maybe I ve got to start over and begin again at square one. I haven t been behaving, and since I haven t been behaving, God might not be as accepting of me, so I ve got to fix this. G. See, I don t think it matters if this is your first time in a church, or if you have been coming all your life. The point is, a lot of us are living with this assumption in mind that God s acceptance of us is directly related to how well or how badly we are behaving. But I think this be-good-so-god-will-love-me mentality has done more to keep people from God than to bring people closer to Him. This idea has done more harm than good. It has caused more problems than it has fixed. And the reason is simple: Guilt does not motivate you to get right with God. It just makes us feel badly. Essentially we can live with guilt for years without getting closer to God, and the more bad things we do, the guiltier we feel. In fact, we end up feeling alienated from God to the point that the very idea of finding acceptance with God just seems impossible.

8 INTRODUCTION (CONTINUED) TENSION H. The strangest thing about this assumption, this idea that God loves and accepts us based on our behavior, is that it didn t come from God at all. In fact, God s message is just the opposite. God s message is that you don t ever, can t ever, won t ever find acceptance with Him through your behavior. Not ever. I mean God sent the clearest message possible. And if you are going to miss the next couple of weeks or if your mind is just somewhere else, here s the point of the next few weeks God s laws and rules are not conditions of a relationship, they are confirmation of a relationship. God s laws and rules are not conditions of His love, they are confirmation of His love. A. So where did we get this idea that we need to perform our way into God s good graces, and we need to shape up and behave so God will love us? For most of us it comes back to the story of the Ten Commandments. Whether you ve thought about it this way or not, there is just this underlying assumption that God came down and gave us rules to live by, and these are the standard for measuring how good you are. The really strange thing about our understanding of the Ten Commandments is that even though this idea has so infiltrated our thinking and our perception of God, most of us can t even really name all Ten. We know Thou shall not murder and Thou shall not steal. Beyond that we might get one or two, but that s pretty much it. All we are really certain of is that there is a standard and we should be living up to it, but we probably aren t, so we feel guilty. B. But the real story is that God broke into human history to give us not conditions for relationship, but a confirmation of His relationship with us. In fact, buried in the story of the Ten Commandments is the secret to the relationship between God s love and God s law. Very early on, God made it clear that we could never behave our way into His good graces that was never the point of the Ten. C. Now I want you to turn in your Bibles to the place where we find the story of the Ten Commandments. Does anybody know what section of the Bible that s in? The front or the back? It s in the Old Testament; that s the front section of your Bible. It s actually right there in the second book, called Exodus, in the 20th chapter. D. And while you re turning there in your Bibles, I want to make an observation that we are going to keep coming back to throughout this series: You can discover a lot about a person by the laws they make. This is true in your family, in your handbook at school and in your work. You can tell a lot about a person by the rules he or she establishes, and you can tell a lot about a person by who he or she gives the rules to. For example, the number-one rule for one teacher may be different from the number-one rule for another based on what s important to him or her. Ms. Smith s number-one rule might be no talking when she s talking because it keeps her from losing her train of thought. Now Mr. Jones, on the other hand, may really enforce the rule about no chips or sodas in the classroom. Maybe he s really passionate about people eating healthy. But the rules a person sets says a lot about him or her. Now, here s what s incredible. For the next few weeks, we are going to look at God s rules. And in these rules we find the secret to God s character. We re about to discover what s important to God because God s rules reveal what s important to Him.

9 TRUTH A. Before we begin, there s a little Bible history we should cover. This Old Testament story comes from the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible. Exodus is really all about the nation of Israel exiting Egypt. Leading up to what we are about to read, the nation of Israel had been in slavery for 400 years. Just to give you some perspective, that is twice as long as the United States has even existed as a country. But the Israelites legacy wasn t one of explorers and democracy. Most of their history as a people was in slavery. B. Basically their story begins with this man named Jacob who had a really big family. Jacob s family moved into Egypt where they started to grow. As they grew, the Egyptians saw them as a threat and decided to make slaves out of the Israelites. The Israelites grew to be so large that they became a completely separate people group, but they were all slaves. They were called the Israelites because Jacob was called Israel by God, and they were all descendants of Jacob. For 400 years, every generation of Israelites had lived in slavery their entire lives. All they knew was slavery. They had a slave mentality. They had really poor self-esteem. They didn t have their own government. They didn t have their own king. They didn t have their own rulers only their Egyptian masters. C. The place where we re going to pick up in just a minute is after the Israelites have been rescued from slavery, after having escaped the pursuit of the Egyptians. God brings them to a mountain and calls Moses, the one God had chosen to lead the Israelites to freedom, to the top of the mountain. And here s what He says in Exodus 20:1: I am the LORD your God (NIV). Now, some of you have probably heard this verse before, and you are going, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. No big deal. But just stop here for a second, because this is a big deal, and I don t want us to miss it. When God talks to Moses, He says, I am your God not I am the God, but I am your God. God makes it personal. He implies that the people He is about to speak to have some sort of relationship with Him. But this is crazy because Moses and the Israelites really haven t done anything to get in a relationship with God. In fact, they don t even know what they should do if given the opportunity to be in relationship with Him. How could God already be their God? D. Let s go back a bit before the mountain, before God tells Moses He is a personal God. Remember how the Israelites were slaves for 400 years? That whole time, God doesn t say one word to His people. Not one. He is totally silent. But after 400 years God shows up, and He tells Moses that He is calling the Israelites to freedom. Then God sends Moses to Pharaoh the leader of the Egyptians to tell Pharaoh that God is calling His people to leave Egypt and go to a new land all their own. It probably doesn t surprise you to hear that Pharaoh doesn t exactly cooperate with Moses. I mean, the entire Egyptian economy was supported by slave labor, so letting the Israelites go would have been costly. But just because Pharaoh isn t willing to listen doesn t mean Moses is going to back down. As a result, God performs some amazing stuff, sending down plagues that are rocking the Egyptian world, and all the while the Israelites are watching this happen, thinking, Who is this God? Who is speaking and acting on our behalf? Who is this God who has come to our rescue? But even after nine pretty amazing acts of God, Pharaoh still refuses to free the Israelites. E. And then something unexpected happens. Look at Exodus 12:3-4. God says: Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat (Exodus 12:3-4 NIV).

10 TRUTH E. (continued) So God hasn t spoken in 400 years and the first thing He tells His people to do is to go have a meal. And He doesn t stop there. God goes on to tell them exactly how to prepare this meal and what needs to be done in each family to get ready. Then God asks them to do this one thing that doesn t make a bit of sense. He asks them to take the blood of the lamb that they are going to eat and spread it on their doorposts as a sign that they trust God (Exodus 12:6-7). That s it. God says, Just take some of the blood that you will have from preparing this meal that I instructed you to eat, and spread it over your door as a sign that you trust Me. And as a result of the Israelites obedience, God spares them from the last plague the death of the firstborn son in each family. When Pharaoh s own son dies, he finally decides to let the Israelites leave Egypt, and they walk out together as a free nation. They have been rescued by God, their God, who has taken a personal interest in them. Ultimately, here s what God was saying to the nation: I want to be your Deliverer. I want to come down into the midst of your greatest need and I want to be your Rescuer. And all I need you to do is trust Me. Some of the things I am asking you to do sound a little crazy, but I just want you to do this unusual thing as evidence of your confidence and your trust in Me. I want be your God; I want you to trust Me. F. So this is the history so far between Moses, the Israelites and God. The Israelites have been set free. They are led by God Himself into the wilderness, out from Pharaoh s rule, and now we are back where we started on a mountain, Mount Sinai, with Moses. And Moses is standing there about to receive God s commandments with the memory of all God has already done fresh on his heart. This is what Moses knows: We re not here to get in with God; we re here because we re already in with Him. We re not here to establish a relationship; we ve already got one. We re not here to find out if He s going to be our God; clearly, He is. He delivered us from our captors and we hadn t done a thing to deserve it. We don t even know the rules. But He has already acted on our behalf anyway. And having established the fact that we are His and He is ours, now He is about to give us the law we are to live by. G. See, a lot of us may think we know the history of the Ten Commandments already. But we come in halfway through the story. All we see is this big, powerful God ordering some things from a ragtag group of people who don t know any better than to obey His demands. But that isn t the whole story. And if we aren t careful, we ll miss the bigger story we ll miss the greatest message you or I could ever hear. We know from looking back at what happened in Egypt that by the time God gave the commandments, a relationship between Israel and God had already been set into place. God had already acted on Israel s behalf. If we miss this, we miss the whole point. God acted first. God moved first. God proved Himself first. Before the rules, before the requirements, before God asked anything of Israel, God made His character known. He made His love known. He made the relationship known. By learning the whole story, we see that beginning a relationship with God is not based on our rule-keeping. God established a relationship with His people before they even knew what the rules were. God chose for Himself a people, not because of what they had done or how they had performed. They trusted Him when He made Himself known. Their trust as God led them and rescued them was all it took to establish a relationship that God initiated. And it was only when that happened, once the relationship had been sealed, that God gave them these laws we call the Ten Commandments.

11 TRUTH (CONtinued) H. Remember how God started out talking with Moses in Exodus 20? It makes a lot more sense now, knowing what came first. I am the LORD your God, He said. God even follows this up with a little reminder: You know, the one who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. This was just God s way of giving Moses a clear and dependable reminder that they already have something going. A relationship has already been formed. APPLICATION A. Here s the important thing to remember as we begin this series: Rules are never the starting point for a relationship with your heavenly Father. They never come first. If God gives you rules to follow, it s because you re already in you already have the relationship. God knows that rules without a relationship always results in rebellion. It s human nature and God knows that; He created human nature. He s not so foolish as to say, Here s a bunch of rules. Do the best you can to follow them and I ll decide, based on that, if I accept you or not. Relationships just don t work like that. B. The problem for a lot of you is that your first taste of God is with the rules not with a God who loves and accepts you and has already chosen to act on your behalf regardless of your behavior. This is why some of you have resisted church and resisted God. It s why some of you have resisted anything to do with religion or spirituality. Your whole context for God has been, Here s a bunch of rules, do the best you can, and if you do well, God will accept you. But God never said anything like that. He never implied that, never inferred that, never modeled that, never illustrated that. In fact He did the exact opposite. When He came down and spoke to Moses, He essentially said, You re in. You re Mine, and I m yours. And the commandments are not a condition of a relationship; the commandments are confirmation of the relationship. The commandments are not conditions of My love; the commandments are confirmation of My love. Because relationship always precedes rules with God. And the biggest thing to God came before the Ten Commandments, back when they were in Egypt. When God initiated this relationship, the number one thing for Him was simply, Will you trust Me? C. Over the next few weeks we are going to look at all the commandments because, like we said in the beginning, you can learn a lot about someone based on the rules he or she makes. And this is true for God as well. When we understand the context of this story, we begin to get a picture of God that we may have never encountered before. He isn t a power-hungry tyrant. He is a loving, protective Father. And when we understand what He asks of us in light of who He has revealed Himself to be, we encounter a God who is concerned more with a relationship than with anything else. D. Let me just give you sort of a silly illustration. If you re a dog owner and you have a fence, whose dog do you keep in your fence? Your dog, right? You put your dog in your fence. Did your dog become your dog when you put it in the fence? I mean, putting it in a fence, did that make it your dog? Now, what if the dog ran off outside of the fence is it still your dog? Let s say the neighbors down the street call you to let you know they found your dog, but you say, It s not my dog because it s not in my fence. Because, in your mind, what made it your dog was that it was inside your fence. Once it got out of your fence, it wasn t your dog anymore. You d sound crazy, right?

12 APPLICATION (CONtinued) LANDING D. (continued) Your neighbors would think you d lost it, because when did that dog become your dog? When you purchased it. The reason you put it inside the fence is because it already belonged to you. It is the same way with us and God. The rules God sets up are a kind of fence, but the fence isn t what makes us God s people. The fence doesn t determine whether or not we have a relationship with God. We are already God s before there was ever a fence. A. If you re not a Christian or if you have some questions about the whole Christianity thing, let me tell you something about Christians. You will rarely ever meet a Christian who changed the way he or she was living because of guilt, but you will meet a whole bunch of Christians who will tell you a story about their miniature Exodus experience. If you asked the adults in this room or even some of the other students, many of them could probably tell you their Exodus story. They d tell you they were depressed, their boyfriend left, their parents divorced, they were a social outcast, they were an addict, their life was going nowhere or whatever else was going on. They d tell you how they said to God, I ve done everything wrong! I ve broken all the rules, but would You overlook that and rescue me anyway? And God said to them, I ll rescue you anyway. B. This is the story you would hear over and over: I have changed my life, not out of guilt, but out of gratitude for what God did for me when I had done nothing. It was not guilt that drove me to change my life, but gratitude for the fact that a God of grace and mercy didn t make the rules a condition of relationship, the rules were simply confirmation of a relationship that already existed. C. We re going to talk a whole lot about why the fence exists over the next several weeks. But the point is this: God has given us rules and laws and commandments because He loves us, not as a way for us to prove something to Him. God has given us laws and rules and commandments because we are already in, not as a means of getting in. If you ve been one of those people who thought, I would love to have this relationship I keep hearing about, but look at my life. I ve got some great news: You don t have to look at your life anymore. God accepted an entire nation of slaves who had done nothing right. They didn t even know what was right. They didn t even know what was wrong. D. The message of the Old and New Testament is that God has invited you into a relationship of unconditional love based on nothing you do but on something He s done on your behalf. And just as He delivered the nation of Israel through the blood of an unblemished lamb above their doorposts, He has delivered you through the blood of His Son. This means He knew you would be a sinner, and it means He assumed you would get it wrong. And He didn t die on the cross to sort of help you get it right. He died on the cross because that was what you needed to get to God. So Jesus says to you, I want you to be Mine, and I want to be your God. I want to be your personal Savior. I want to have a relationship with you. But I just need you to do what the nation of Israel did some 3,500 years ago when I showed up to work on their behalf... I just need you to trust Me.

13 LANDING (CONTINUED) D. (continued) Let me ask you something: Have you ever done that? Has there been a time, a moment in your life when you ve made your decision to place your faith in Christ and accept His death on the cross as a payment for your sin? If not, there s no better time than now. (Note to Communicator: If you feel like it is appropriate for your group, this would be a great opportunity for you to lead a time of prayer for students who feel ready to accept what God has already done on their behalf and trust Him as their personal Savior.) E. Maybe you re not ready to make a decision like that right now, but if this story sort of shakes your understanding of who God is and what it means to have a relationship with Him, would you just talk about it with your small-group leader? Let him or her know what s going on with you as you think about your own understanding of who God is and what Christianity is all about. F. Maybe you ve been a Christian for a long time, and maybe you ve even heard a lot of this before. You know that God loves and accepts you, but there is just this constant battle going on in your heart as you look at your Mondaythrough-Saturday life and you think about the standard you believe God has for you. We re going to be spending the next few weeks really looking at God s rules, but the most important thing you can do right now is take a good look at the God who desires a relationship with you. God is not a God who operates through guilt manipulation. God isn t sitting in heaven with a chart, ticking off the number of commandments that you violate, trying to determine if He will continue to listen to your prayers. God has already made it clear that more than anything, a relationship matters, and His rules are simply a confirmation of that relationship. [TRANSITION INTO SMALL GROUPS]