Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlife gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:27] Good morning.
[00:00:29] Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody. Got all your fingers still? We good? Kept all the digits. All right, let me say welcome to those of you who are watching on church307.com to the guys over at the prison, to our friends at the jail, those of you who are here in the room. We are in week two of a series we're calling Gravity. And I want to spend the first part of today's message just kind of laying some groundwork that I think we can build on for the rest of this series.
[00:00:56] Let's ask this question. Where does gravity pull you down? Pulls you down, pulls you to the couch, right? It does not pull you to the gym.
[00:01:09] It doesn't pull you to jump rope.
[00:01:13] It pulls you down. It does not pull you to your to do list. Gravity pulls us down. It makes it harder for us to do the things that we are supposed to do. And we are kind of using this idea metaphorically. We're talking about how not just physically but emotionally and spiritually, we feel the drag of this world that regularly pulls us down and keeps us from doing the things that we are supposed to do. That pull keeps us from stepping up in our spiritual lives, in our faith of following the things that in doing the things that God has positioned us.
[00:01:50] So then the question becomes, in our lives, who pulls us down?
[00:01:56] If, if there is this temptation not to do the things that we are supposed to do, who do we blame? Whose fault is it? I think as Christians often we want to just say, well, the Devil made me do it and move on. I can blame him and I can just keep living my life. But we theologically believe no, actually, the Devil can't make you do anything. He can tempt you. He can try to mislead you and lie to you and get you to do things that you don't want to do. But when the Satan tempts us, he is pulling us in the direction of our flesh.
[00:02:35] He pulls us in the direction of our sinful desires. And that is how he's successful. He knows what tempts us.
[00:02:43] He knows what we want to do that we should not do. And he will lie to us and he will try to convince us to act on those sinful desires.
[00:02:53] The Apostle Paul put it this way to the church in Galatians he said, the sinful nature wants to do evil, your flesh wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the spirit wants.
[00:03:11] And the spirit gives us desires, gives us, it's a gift. The spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of, of what the sinful nature desires.
[00:03:22] These two forces are constantly fighting against each other. You probably have experienced this.
[00:03:29] So you are not free to carry out your good intentions. We are not totally free yet.
[00:03:36] Yet in this life, while we still live in these bodies, we still are in a war against the gravitational pull of our flesh and the gravitational pull of our spirit that are both taking us in opposite direction.
[00:03:50] But this verse says that we are not being pulled against our will.
[00:03:56] We are being pulled in accordance with our sinful desire.
[00:04:02] God is pulling us in one direction and our flesh or our sinful nature is pulling us in the opposite direction.
[00:04:10] And instead of just saying the devil made me do it, I think it is helpful for us to take a little bit of ownership and recognize that when we fall into sinful habits and recognize that it actually is us who's allowing ourselves to do that, who is saying yes to the temptations of the Satan? Douglas Wilson says this self deception is the prince of all deception.
[00:04:40] Every time we sin, we lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we cannot resist the temptation. We tell ourselves that, well, I'll just do it this one more time.
[00:04:53] Or we tell ourselves it's not that big of a deal, it's just one little sin. Or we tell ourselves that, that this sin will make us feel better if I indulge, if I do this thing that I want to do that I know God tells me I shouldn't do, but I want to do it. I'll feel better if I do this thing. All of these things are lies that we tell ourselves.
[00:05:14] And then we actually end up following our sinful desire when we listen to those lies instead of doing what we know Scripture teaches us to do and what the Holy Spirit is teaching us to do.
[00:05:29] James, Jesus brother said this. He says, do not merely listen to the Word and so deceive yourselves.
[00:05:37] Do what it says.
[00:05:39] In other words, just don't. It's not enough to just know what is right.
[00:05:44] You have to obey scripture. You have to do what is right. And notice who does it say is doing the deceiving. Here it is us.
[00:05:55] We deceive ourselves when we sin.
[00:06:00] So we've got to counteract the deception of ourselves by telling ourselves the truth.
[00:06:07] This is why it is so valuable to meditate on Scripture, to have a Habit in our lives where we are reminding ourselves of truth.
[00:06:17] That you wake up in the morning and you say, God, today I am yours, today I will pursue you.
[00:06:24] I like to start the morning every morning right now, just with a little worship music. On the way to the gym, I'm listening to worship music to bring my attention to God.
[00:06:35] Scripture teaches us that God gives us the grace that we need to resist every temptation that comes our way.
[00:06:46] That His Spirit is in us and it is leading us.
[00:06:53] But we have the free will to act in accordance with that Spirit, in accordance with his grace.
[00:07:00] Or we can go in the opposite direction and resist his spirit.
[00:07:05] Paul said this to the church in Romans.
[00:07:08] You may believe there's nothing wrong with what you are doing, but keep it between yourself and God.
[00:07:16] In other words, there's this conversation going on between you and God and your Spirit.
[00:07:22] Blessed are those who do not feel guilty for doing something that they have decided is right.
[00:07:28] If you've decided it's right and you're being honest with yourself, you're not deceiving yourself. You are blessed to pursue that which is right.
[00:07:36] But if you have doubts about whether or not you should eat something, you are sinning. If you go ahead and do it.
[00:07:48] For you are not following your convictions, God given convictions.
[00:07:54] If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning.
[00:08:02] That's a different way of talking about sin than most people talk about sin.
[00:08:06] We talk about sin as this long list of do's and don'ts.
[00:08:11] Right and wrong, black and white.
[00:08:15] Actually, Scripture teaches us that something can be right for me and wrong for you or wrong for you and right for me.
[00:08:23] If the Spirit has convicted me and told me that it would be sin for me to drink alcohol, then I would be sinning by drinking alcohol.
[00:08:33] If the Spirit has not given you that conviction, then you are free and blessed are you when you do what you believe is right. What the Spirit has given you as a conviction.
[00:08:48] So obey the Spirit, follow the Spirit, trust the Spirit and do what is right. But don't deceive yourself.
[00:08:55] Don't do it. Don't lie to yourself and say that you've not been convicted.
[00:09:01] I think we have to rely a little bit more on God's ability to lead each of us.
[00:09:09] And we have to listen and we have to obey.
[00:09:14] Because remember at salvation, that is the point at which we say, God, your will be done. I surrender to you. You are the Lord of my life, God, your will be done. In my life, I will obey. That's what salvation is surrender. You are my Lord.
[00:09:32] Damnation is the opposite.
[00:09:35] Damnation is when God says to us, man, your will be done.
[00:09:42] This is separation from God. This is when God leaves us to the consequences of our actions.
[00:09:49] When God leaves us to the consequences of our sin. That is separate. That is what scripture describes hell as.
[00:09:57] Hell is separation from God.
[00:10:01] So you are free to do what you want to do and suffer the consequences of all the pain that results.
[00:10:07] Because what does your sin do? It hurts you and it hurts the people around you.
[00:10:12] So God calls us out of that sin because he loves us.
[00:10:17] It's not out of some righteous, hateful anger that God causes us to do things we don't want to do. He causes us to do things that we don't want to do because he knows they're best for us.
[00:10:30] And every time I do hard things, I recognize that the results will be good.
[00:10:36] So keep surrendering to God.
[00:10:38] No matter how many times you mess up, no matter how many times you fall short, no matter how many times you have to come to God and say, God, it's me again. I sinned again. I failed again. Can you forgive me again?
[00:10:51] And to that, God every time says, yes, I forgive you. I love you. My love for you is unconditional. His mercies are new every morning.
[00:11:03] Okay, if you want to open up your Bibles, if you got them. Today, we're going to be going through a story in Luke chapter 10. In the beginning of this story, a guy comes up to Jesus. He's a religious leader, and he comes up to Jesus and he. He pretty much asks Jesus, what is the minimum amount that I need to do in order to be righteous?
[00:11:23] Like, I want to be righteous.
[00:11:25] Can you. Can you just give me the minimum requirements? I just want to just, like, get through by the skin of my teeth type thing. Jesus, what do I need to do?
[00:11:35] And Jesus, as he usually does, does not directly answer the question. Instead, he answers the question by telling a story.
[00:11:42] Jesus makes up a parable in reply. Jesus said a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. First character of the story, this unnamed man going to Jericho. So Jerusalem to Jericho, probably a Jewish guy, probably an Israelite.
[00:12:04] They stripped this man, these robbers stripped this man of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
[00:12:16] Well, a priest happened to be going down the same road.
[00:12:19] And when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.
[00:12:23] So too a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him passed by on the other side.
[00:12:30] So you've got a man beaten, dying on the side of the road. When all of a sudden two heroes appear. Well, you'd assume they would be heroes. Any Jewish audience would have heard a priest and a Levite. These are the pastors of their community. The. This guy. These are supposed to be the people who are going to step up and do the right thing. But instead of doing the right thing, they pass by the other side. In other words, they gave into the temptation, the gravitational pull of selfishness.
[00:12:59] They had better things to do with their time.
[00:13:02] They don't have time to worry about this man eating on the side of the road. They're going to tend to their own needs, not to his.
[00:13:09] But Jesus says a Samaritan, dun, dun, dun.
[00:13:14] As he traveled, came where the man was. And when he saw this beaten man, he took pity on him.
[00:13:21] He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.
[00:13:27] Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of the man.
[00:13:35] The people listening to this story would have heard Samaritan and thought villain.
[00:13:40] But Jesus turns this villain into the hero of the story. And what made this man the hero?
[00:13:48] He was the hero because he resisted the gravitational pull of selfishness.
[00:13:55] He actually loved this man who he should have hated, this man who had been robbed.
[00:14:02] You know, at New Life, we say, come as you are, and we mean it.
[00:14:08] No matter what you've done, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter how worthy you feel to walk through those doors, please come as you are. You don't need to clean yourself up before you come into this church if it takes you walking in with muddy boots. We even have carpet squares. We can replace a carpet square.
[00:14:31] Come as you are.
[00:14:33] But inevitably, that challenges each of us.
[00:14:36] Because if we invite everybody to come as they are, there are certain people that we have a hard time building relationships with. All of us, all of us have something inside of us that there is a certain type of person that we tend to separate from. No matter where you are, you have these people.
[00:14:53] And the challenge for us is when we say, come as you are, we have to then follow that up with the action of building relationships with those people who come as they are, are, and are not like us.
[00:15:05] This is the challenge that the Samaritan is faced with on this road.
[00:15:09] And he meets the challenge. He does that which what God called him to do. Rather than judging this man on the side of the road, he showed love for this man.
[00:15:20] And Jesus said, which of these Three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?
[00:15:28] The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him.
[00:15:33] Jesus told him, go and do likewise. Don't just know what you should do, go and do it.
[00:15:45] Don't wait for somebody else to do what God has positioned you to do.
[00:15:54] Yeah, I've lived in gillette now for 14 years this month and 14 years I've noticed that there is a certain type of person in Gillette. And it's the type of person who does not see themselves as Gillettians.
[00:16:10] Gelatins. I don't know.
[00:16:14] You know, they kind of see Gillette as just the place that they're at on the way to somewhere else.
[00:16:20] Right. This is just a temporary spot. So they never fully adopt this place as their own and they just kind of. They don't fully invest.
[00:16:32] They're just kind of in this in between state.
[00:16:35] There's a lot of people who came here thinking, I'm going to do three months of work and make a little bit of extra money and then we're going to pay down some debt so that we can afford to buy a house in a place where we really want to live.
[00:16:47] But then you came and you kind of enjoyed making a little bit more money and you bought a house and you met some friends and you joined the church and okay, it kind of became a place. Maybe we'll just stay a little bit longer. And that little bit longer turned into a little bit longer and a little bit longer and that's why you're here.
[00:17:03] And you've not actually gotten to the place where you're fully ready to say God has me in Gillette.
[00:17:11] I believe that if God has you in Gillette, he has you in Gillette for a reason. Why? What has he called you to do here?
[00:17:20] What is your place that you are supposed. What is, what is the thing that God has called you here to do?
[00:17:27] Don't wait for somebody else to do it. Step up and do the thing.
[00:17:32] Step into the calling that God has for you in the place where you are.
[00:17:39] Did anybody here ever do a group project in school? Like the teacher said, okay, gather into groups and you're all going to do this project together.
[00:17:50] I'm going to guess you did a group project like that. How many were in a group where you felt like you needed to do all the work because you knew the grades of the other people in your group and you were not going to trust them to do the work? Right. So you're Like, I'll just do it.
[00:18:08] Just give me the work. I'll do it. You guys step back. Let me show you how it's done.
[00:18:14] That was kind of me. I'm a control freak. When I was growing up in school, like, I was the one who. And then what did I do? I got really mad at everybody else who wasn't doing the work because I was happy to do all the work. You guys are gonna take all the credit, but I'm the one doing all the work. This was me then. There's another type of person who joins a group like this and thinks, you know, if I just kind of sit back and be quiet, somebody else is going to do the job.
[00:18:41] Anybody like that?
[00:18:43] Any coasters in there? Really, guys? Liars. We got a bunch of liars in here. This is church.
[00:18:52] There are certain people in the group that just kind of sit back and they just let somebody else do the job. It's not like I asked them to. They volunteered. They just did it and they sat back and they never actually got involved. What's the consequence? They didn't do the learning.
[00:19:07] They didn't benefit from the job that needed to be done.
[00:19:13] I think we all fall into one of those two categories at some point in life. Maybe not in every area of life, but in some area of life, we both fall into one of those two traps because there is a gravitational pull in our lives to kind of pull us towards selfishness in one way or another.
[00:19:31] Either I'm going to be selfish and do all the work and get all the glory, or I'm going to be selfish and I'm not going to do any work and I'm not going to have to. I'll let somebody else do all the work that needs to be done. So we're going to talk about these two gravitational pulls today.
[00:19:45] So trap one, let someone else do it. Sociologists call this social loafing.
[00:19:54] They tested social loafing using tug o War.
[00:19:58] Here's how they tested it. They gather a group of volunteers together and they pit them together to figure out who has the strongest pulling strength.
[00:20:07] And so these people are going to prove themselves, and they give them a rope that's attached to some kind of device that can tell how strong they are in pulling this rope. And each person gets up and is proving how strong they are by pulling this rope as hard as they possibly can.
[00:20:21] And every person did this, and they kind of did a competition to figure out how strong everybody is.
[00:20:26] And then they took the amount of strength that each person had in Pulling on this rope and they added it all together.
[00:20:35] And then you would assume that's how strong their team is, right?
[00:20:40] So if they all can pull that hard, you put them together, you add together all of their strength. That should be their team's strength, right?
[00:20:48] Not so much.
[00:20:49] They took the whole team and they got everybody on the rope and they said, okay, now everybody pull with all of your might on this same rope.
[00:21:00] The problem is, when they were all pulling on the rope, their combined strength was not anywhere near as strong as it should have been. If you added together their strength, it should have been much greater than what they could pull when they're all pulling together.
[00:21:17] Why is that what happened?
[00:21:20] Why was their strength too little when they were working as a team?
[00:21:24] Social loafing?
[00:21:26] Because all of them kind of knew, I don't really have to give all of my strength because nobody's going to really know how hard I'm pulling.
[00:21:36] When it's just me pulling by myself. Everybody can see that number. I'll do whatever it takes to get that number of pulling strength as high as I can.
[00:21:43] But when we're all pulling together, nobody's going to really know. And I don't want to pull a muscle.
[00:21:49] I don't want to work too hard, I don't want to strain myself.
[00:21:53] And so as a team, they're much weaker. Social loafing. We just kind of have this idea of thinking somebody else will do it, somebody else will step up. This is the common thing that people say about churches. They say 10% of people do 90% of the work.
[00:22:09] 10% of the people do the volunteering and the giving and the showing up and making sure things happen.
[00:22:16] There's some truth to it, right?
[00:22:18] So the 90% of us just get to enjoy the 10% of us that are downstairs watching our kids.
[00:22:23] Thanks, guys, for doing the work. I got a little social loafing to do.
[00:22:29] This happens in the church all the time.
[00:22:32] So for 14 years, I've been getting this email every week from our giving platform that we use. When you give to new life, you go to our website and then it's this giving program that we use. And every week I get on Tuesday this email that says how much was given to the church that last week.
[00:22:54] And so 14 years, 52 weeks a year. I've seen a lot of these emails and I've started to see the trends. When is our giving going to be up? When's it going to be down? And it's kind of predictable. I mean, not exactly, but a little bit predictable. I know that at the beginning of the month, the first week of the month, our giving is going to be up a little bit because a lot of people get paid at the beginning of the month and those of us who tithe, tithe are first fruits. So our first thing that we, the first person that gets our money when we tithe is the church. And So I give 10% of my income back to God. And so as a result, the first week of the month is a little bit bigger sometimes the third week because people get paid twice a month.
[00:23:36] But there are two times when I can predict that giving is going to be very low.
[00:23:44] Got an idea. When those two times are Christmas, you think because of gifts, actually that is one of them that is low.
[00:23:54] But actually our biggest gift of the giving of the year is the end of the year for end of year giving.
[00:24:00] Actually one of our lowest giving weeks every time is if I ever talk about giving, if I ever preach about giving, if I ever preach about tithing, that Sunday, terrible giving.
[00:24:17] So this Sunday not looking good. Sorry guys.
[00:24:22] It's inevitable. It happens every single, it's not an anomaly. It happens every single time. Why?
[00:24:29] Why is it, what happens that causes our giving to drop off? When I talk about giving, I don't know for sure. I've got theories.
[00:24:36] One of my theories is just, it's the cowboy mentality.
[00:24:40] Nobody's going to tell me what to do.
[00:24:42] I'm my own man. If you're going to tell me to give, I'm not going to give. I'll give later because I can't look like I'm doing it in response to what you told me to do.
[00:24:53] Another theory is that it looks self serving when I talk about giving.
[00:24:59] I get my paycheck from the church. By the way, I don't get a bonus when giving is up.
[00:25:05] So it looks like I'm just telling you to give for some self serving purpose.
[00:25:10] And so maybe it's a defense mechanism and you kind of feel like I've been cheated a lot in my life and salesmen and all this stuff, ah, I'll give somewhere else if they're going to. If all they care about is my money.
[00:25:24] I don't know what the reason but giving is down. When I talk about giving, second time that giving is down.
[00:25:31] You know Easter is one of our biggest attended Sundays of the year.
[00:25:37] Every single year by far.
[00:25:40] But it is one of our lowest giving Sundays of the year.
[00:25:45] That one's weird because I don't talk about giving on Easter.
[00:25:50] Why is giving so low on Easter social loafing. This is my theory.
[00:25:57] My theory is that at Easter you show up and you see all these people.
[00:26:01] This place is packed. There's got to be tons of people that are giving on Easter, right? Do you know how many rich people are in this room right now?
[00:26:11] I'm sure there's a couple rich people writing giant checks. I don't got to worry about giving my money.
[00:26:17] I got my own bills to pay. I'm not going to worry about paying the church's bills.
[00:26:24] So Easter giving is low.
[00:26:27] A rich guy will give. You know what the Bible says? You know what Jesus always says about rich people giving?
[00:26:33] No. He celebrates the widow's mite.
[00:26:35] The poor widow giving everything she had.
[00:26:39] Actually, I don't. When I click in on that email to see, like when it says how much we get each week, if I click on it, it'll actually tell me who gave what. Now, I do not pay much attention to who gives what to the church, but I know enough and I've seen enough to know that there are trends also in who gives.
[00:26:57] I've kind of come up with this graph. This is not scientific. This is just what it seems like to me, that people who don't have much at all, or we put in the category of poor, and there's no, like, you can. You're going to define this word different than I am.
[00:27:13] But people who put who are in this category don't give a lot because they don't have it to give.
[00:27:20] They don't have. They don't have it, so they can't give it. Right. They're living paycheck to paycheck. They're trying to keep the lights on, so they're not going to give a lot.
[00:27:30] But there's also a category of people over here that you would assume are the people, like, I'm going to guess, if you're sinful like I am, you look around the room and you know what a couple people make in the room. At least you know it's more than you.
[00:27:44] And you assume they're the ones writing all the checks. Right?
[00:27:48] There's a struggle on this side, too. There's a struggle of not being able to overhear. There's also a struggle of not being able to overhear.
[00:27:55] And this is Jesus talking, not me, that when we get into this category, we get to the place where our money has us, rather than us having our money, where money can become an idol, where my life motivation is all about getting more of it. So I cannot stand the idea of giving any of it away, and our money begins to control us.
[00:28:19] So actually, Jesus gives a lot of advice.
[00:28:22] Scripture, you read Proverbs, gives us a lot of advice about how to stay in this category.
[00:28:28] About, you don't want. You don't want to be too rich. That just leads to misery.
[00:28:33] You also don't want to be too poor.
[00:28:36] The people over here need a financial peace university.
[00:28:41] You need a budget. You need some coaching. You got to learn to live below your means. And scripture will give you a lot of insight about how to do this.
[00:28:50] And the people over here need a lot of work, too.
[00:28:53] The people over here got to learn how to surrender, how to not trust in their own effort, how to not trust in their finances, and how to put their trust in God to begin a habit of surrendering more and more and more of their lives.
[00:29:10] And the reason why people are generous here in the middle is usually because they've learned the lessons of getting out of one of these two categories. Now, I'm over generalizing here because we all know that there are widows given their mites, and we all know that there are very wealthy people who are incredibly generous. They broken that temptation, that gravitational pull to make money, an idol.
[00:29:36] But generally, we've recognized that no one of us can be the church.
[00:29:45] All of us are the church.
[00:29:48] The temptation comes just to be a bystander.
[00:29:54] We think about going to church rather than being the church.
[00:30:01] We are called to be the church.
[00:30:05] Go to the next slide, please. That's. That was your cue. That was the cue. Be the church is the cue.
[00:30:11] He fell asleep back at it. Be the church.
[00:30:15] Everybody give John a hand. John, kind of.
[00:30:22] So we have to be careful how we respond to this challenge.
[00:30:26] We can be tempted to pull. Be pulled in one of two directions.
[00:30:30] To not do the things that I was called to do or to do everything on my own. So that's trap number one is let somebody else do it. Trap number two is, I'll do it all on my own. I'll do it myself.
[00:30:44] Neither one of these leads to life.
[00:30:47] If you were saved because you heard the gospel, you know that you were not saved by being good enough. You were not saved by works. You were saved by faith. But over time, we subtly start to think that. That we are sanctified by our works.
[00:31:04] That. That. Okay. Jesus, thanks for saving me. I got it from here. Now look how strong I am.
[00:31:12] Watch how many sins I can remove from my life. Watch how many good things I can do. Jesus, thanks for saving me. I got it from here, it doesn't work.
[00:31:22] Your flesh is too strong.
[00:31:25] You need Jesus to continue his saving work.
[00:31:29] The journey of salvation that turns into sanctification, becoming the people that God created us to be.
[00:31:37] The truth is, if the gravitational pull of your sinful nature, if the gravitational pull of sin in your life is overwhelming, you don't need more strength. You need more surrender.
[00:31:53] This is why we do things like tithing.
[00:31:56] Tithing is an act of faith.
[00:31:58] It says, I'm not going to rely on myself to earn enough.
[00:32:03] I'm not going to rely on my finances. I'm going to trust God to provide for me. This is why we do things like regular prayer and fasting. It brings our attention to God to remember it is not me who saves me.
[00:32:18] God, I rely on you. I trust you.
[00:32:22] Because the beauty of grace is that Jesus saw you beaten up by the world, beaten up by your sin, laying on the side of the road, dying.
[00:32:37] And Jesus left His throne in heaven and he came to this world to bandage your wounds, to heal you, to give you a new life.
[00:32:52] That's the beauty of salvation, is Jesus did what we cannot.
[00:32:57] And as soon as we start to believe that we can be good enough, that we can be strong enough to resist the temptations, that we can help all the people that need to be helped, then we isolate ourselves from the church that was called together to come and surrender to God so that he can use us to accomplish his purposes.
[00:33:23] So whichever extreme you are tempted towards more often, whether you're tempted to sit back and let other people do the things that God put us here to do, or if you are tempted to try to prove yourself, to demonstrate your strength by how good you can be, the invitation is the same.
[00:33:49] To bring our attention to God and to recognize all of this is for Him.
[00:33:55] We surrender to you. We trust you, not ourselves.
[00:33:59] We're going to take communion today. There's tables all around the room. And during this next song, we're going to ask you to come forward. There's a gluten free option over there for you guys that have allergies.
[00:34:13] And you will notice on these tables when you come to take communion today, there are no body parts on the tables. There's no blood on these tables. What you see on these tables are bread and juice.
[00:34:29] The bread is meant to signify, to represent the body of Jesus that was broken on the cross.
[00:34:39] So as we tear the bread, we remember his body that was broken for us.
[00:34:45] You'll see juice that is meant to remind you of his blood, that was shed so that your sins can be forgiven.
[00:34:54] And so we take the bread, we dip it in the juice, we eat it there at the table to bring our attention to Jesus, to remember his sacrifice.
[00:35:07] This means that there is no sacrifice happening on these tables. These are not altars.
[00:35:14] We no longer will ever again have to perform an animal sacrifice or a human sacrifice so that sins can be forgiven. Why? Because one sacrifice was performed for all sins, past and future. Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice so that your sins could be forgiven. The sins you've committed in the past and the sins you will commit in the future, they are forgiven. When you come to Jesus and you say, I surrender to you because you can accomplish what I cannot, we remember that sacrifice today.
[00:35:53] So if you find yourself in a place where you've been beaten down by the gravitational pull of our world, our hateful, angry, divisive world, Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary.
[00:36:10] He says, his burden is light.
[00:36:15] That's good. In a heavy gravity world, his burden is light.
[00:36:21] If you found yourself in a place where you've been fighting against some sin, temptation, an addiction, if you keep coming to God and having to ask him to forgive you over and over again for the same sin, you can begin to feel this weight of guilt and shame that can overwhelm you.
[00:36:44] To that I say, you're fighting the good fight.
[00:36:47] Keep going.
[00:36:48] His mercies are new every morning.
[00:36:51] And if you will allow him to, he will change you.
[00:36:55] You're gonna have to do some hard work still.
[00:36:58] You live in a fallen world.
[00:37:01] It's still gonna require some effort.
[00:37:04] You're still gonna have to keep fighting.
[00:37:07] But if you will more fully surrender to him and he will begin, will continue that sanctifying process in your life.
[00:37:15] So today, as we sing this song and we take communion, I just invite you to take some deep breaths to allow the Holy Spirit to comfort you, allow him to wrap his loving arms around you, that you will be reminded of his grace that is extended to you today.
[00:37:37] God, we surrender to you.
[00:37:46] God, would you speak to us clearly about your plan for us today, your purposes for us?
[00:37:55] Would you allow us to tune in to the convictions that you have for each of us, the callings that you've placed on each of our lives?
[00:38:05] Would you help us to be honest with ourselves and with you about the steps that we are to take?
[00:38:16] And, God, would you remove this burden that so many of us feel trying to earn for trying to be good enough?
[00:38:31] God, would you show us what it looks like to live your life of peace with the light burden.
[00:38:38] We love you and thank you in Jesus name, amen.
