Is God Mad at Me?

00:00:07

- Camp is important to me because I get to

00:00:10

better my relationship with God and hang out with my friends.

00:00:15

It's awesome, the best week ever.

00:00:17

- The best week. - Yes. Yes.

00:00:50

- I got to meet all these new people at camp,

00:00:52

and I'm so grateful to be here.

00:00:54

And it's just so important to me.

00:00:56

- Relationship with God is just only getting stronger from here.

00:00:58

This is a great place to kind of reconnect more trust into Him.

00:01:21

- Well, hey, welcome to Crossroads. I'm Andy.

00:01:23

And here we believe that you are made for an adventure with God.

00:01:26

We're unpacking the book of Romans today,

00:01:28

written by the Apostle Paul.

00:01:29

And it was a letter to the Romans

00:01:31

for how to live a life following Jesus.

00:01:33

And it wasn't just for ancient Rome,

00:01:35

it applies to us on our journey to follow Jesus

00:01:37

right here and right now.

00:01:39

We're going to start off our time with songs

00:01:41

that talk about building our life on Jesus,

00:01:43

the one that we can trust and follow.

00:01:49

- All right, here we go. Put our hands together.

00:09:33

- God, I thank You that you stick close,

00:09:35

that You're with us even in hard times.

00:09:38

It's who You are, it's Your promise.

00:09:44

Sing these words out, even when the rain comes, we say.

00:12:30

- He won't, y'all. He truly will never leave us

00:12:35

nor forsake us is what Scripture says.

00:12:36

When we're saying, when I say that He won't,

00:12:38

I don't want you to have a false reality

00:12:40

that He won't always meet up to every expectation

00:12:42

that you have, that He won't always come through

00:12:44

with the way that you want to hear and answer prayer.

00:12:46

But I am saying that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

00:12:49

He will be with us always.

00:12:51

He does not have limited power.

00:12:53

He has unlimited power and unlimited love

00:12:56

and unlimited grace and unlimited goodness.

00:12:59

This is the kind of God that that I love

00:13:01

and I'm so grateful to have.

00:13:03

And that's why I love worshiping like this,

00:13:05

because worship is just a response to seeing who God is,

00:13:09

the seeing that God and what He does and what He gives.

00:13:13

I think I left my phone that has the scripture,

00:13:15

but I have a scripture and I think I got to memorize.

00:13:17

Romans 12: it says, In view of God's mercy,

00:13:20

we offer our bodies a living sacrifice that is holy

00:13:23

and acceptable in our reasonable act of worship.

00:13:26

I told you, it's in view of His mercies,

00:13:28

in view of what you've seen God give you.

00:13:30

And maybe you don't know who God is,

00:13:32

maybe you don't even believe the whole God thing yet.

00:13:34

It's all right. I'm glad you're in this place.

00:13:36

And I believe that God wants to reveal Himself to you today.

00:13:40

He wants you to know Him better.

00:13:41

It's the desire of His heart.

00:13:44

And this last song we're about to sing,

00:13:46

I truly love this song.

00:13:48

It says God is King and high praise belongs to Him

00:13:51

because He is the King that reigns forever.

00:13:53

And just a couple of days ago, I don't know if you know this,

00:13:56

but we actually have the church body

00:13:57

more than it's in this room, and it's online.

00:13:59

It's at other sites, but it's also

00:14:01

at Warren Correctional Institute.

00:14:03

We go into prisons and we have brothers in there

00:14:05

and sisters that are part of our church family.

00:14:08

And we got to sing this song just this past Friday.

00:14:10

And it was an incredible time, especially when we sing

00:14:12

the words like I lift my hands up, lay my whole life down,

00:14:16

hits different, something different when I get to do this

00:14:19

amongst people that

00:14:20

are not experiencing freedom at the moment.

00:14:23

But yet they still see in view of God,

00:14:26

He's worthy of this kind of worship,

00:14:27

He's worthy of this kind of release,

00:14:29

this kind of just praise unto Him.

00:14:31

So I want us to erupt in this place as we sing this last song,

00:14:34

giving praise to the High King forever.

00:14:38

Y'all ready? Can we sing this together?

00:17:14

- This next part says I lift my hands up

00:17:17

and I lay my life down.

00:17:18

So as we sing this song,

00:17:20

can we just lift our hands as an act of surrender?

00:17:22

Sing this.

00:20:09

- God, I'm so thankful for Your goodness and for Your mercy.

00:20:14

I think about the times where I've,

00:20:17

I put things before You, God.

00:20:19

I've put things in priority over you and let them control me.

00:20:23

And it's left me in a place of darkness

00:20:26

and sadness and sorrow and as I sing this song,

00:20:30

it says: All hail, all praise to the Lord,

00:20:34

Most high, my king forever.

00:20:38

And it reminds me of how sovereign You are.

00:20:40

And when we put You in that number one spot

00:20:42

that You give us all the things that we need,

00:20:45

Your goodness and Your mercy and Your grace, God.

00:20:47

I've experienced that and I'm thankful for that.

00:20:49

Would You remind someone of that this morning,

00:20:53

God, who you are?

00:20:55

In Your name we pray. Amen.

00:20:56

Come on. Can we give it up for God one more time?

00:21:00

- Camps are a way to take an adventure

00:21:02

that pushes you out of your comfort zone and closer to God.

00:21:05

Just ask anyone who's gone to a Crossroads camp

00:21:07

and I think you'll hear a similar story

00:21:09

about how they came home different

00:21:10

and almost always in a good way.

00:21:12

No, definitely always in a good way.

00:21:14

Actually just met a guy this past weekend from Kentucky

00:21:17

who last year his wife signed him up for Man Camp

00:21:20

without even telling him about it.

00:21:22

She waited until a couple of weeks before

00:21:23

and then told him and he just kind of had this moment.

00:21:25

He got angry at first and was like, "You know what?

00:21:28

If I'm going to do this thing,

00:21:29

I'm at least going to have an open mind."

00:21:31

And it changed his life.

00:21:33

Really, really great things happen when we allow ourselves

00:21:36

to go outside of our comfort zone

00:21:37

to be stretched a little bit.

00:21:38

And if you want to grow this year, man,

00:21:40

I really highly recommend

00:21:42

you check out one of our upcoming camps.

00:21:45

Crossroads is all about fueling ministry

00:21:47

and making a difference in our world.

00:21:48

And here's an unlikely source

00:21:50

who really understood what giving is all about.

00:21:55

- You had to be very careful around him.

00:21:56

You couldn't say, "Gee, I like that watch."

00:21:59

He'd take it off and give it to you.

00:22:00

You couldn't say, "Gee, that's a beautiful painting."

00:22:02

He'd take it off and give it to you.

00:22:04

One time we were coming out of the Waldorf Astoria

00:22:06

in New York City on our way to a gig,

00:22:07

had to go out the back entrance

00:22:09

because he had been mobbed if you go out the front.

00:22:11

And he had a big apartment at the back of the Waldorf Astoria.

00:22:14

So we're coming out of the building

00:22:16

and a woman come running out of the door screaming,

00:22:18

"Mr. Sinatra. Mr. Sinatra, please. Mr. Sinatra."

00:22:21

And the security stopped her.

00:22:22

And she's hollering, "Please, Mr. Sinatra."

00:22:24

So he turned around and he said, "What is it?"

00:22:26

And he walked back to her.

00:22:27

She said, "My husband is home sick. He's very ill.

00:22:29

If you would sign an autograph, it would mean the world to him.:

00:22:32

And he said, sure, and he signed the autograph.

00:22:34

And she said, "Oh, what beautiful cufflinks."

00:22:36

And there were $2,000 cufflinks, I know where he got them at.

00:22:38

He said, "Thank you."

00:22:39

He finished the autograph and he took the cufflinks off

00:22:41

and he handed them to her, "Give these to your husband."

00:22:44

She said, "No, no, no, I don't want them.

00:22:45

I was only admiring them."

00:22:46

He said, "No, I want you to have them.

00:22:48

I want your husband to have them."

00:22:49

So we get in the car.

00:22:50

I said, "Frank, that was beautiful. That was wonderful.

00:22:53

But why did you do that?"

00:22:54

He said, "Tommy, if you possess something

00:22:55

that you can't give away,

00:22:56

then you don't possess it, it possesses you"

00:23:01

Well, it's -- Well, I never forgot that -- that was.

00:23:03

"It's okay, " he said, "If somebody said, 'Gee,

00:23:05

I like your Mercedes Benz, ' and you don't give it to them.

00:23:08

But when you're alone in the bathroom and you're shaving,

00:23:11

you got to admit that that guy in the mirror,

00:23:13

that car owns you because you can't give it away.'"

00:23:16

Man, that idea that nothing that we have is truly ours,

00:23:20

that we're just renting it is a really beautiful idea.

00:23:23

I liked Sinatra before this,

00:23:25

man, I like him even more after this.

00:23:27

And if you're wanting to go deeper with God

00:23:29

and follow maybe more about what He has to teach you

00:23:32

about how to be generous with who He's made you to be,

00:23:34

and even with your gifts and your resources,

00:23:37

hey, you can head to Crossroads.net/give

00:23:39

for more info to join that team of faithful givers

00:23:42

who make this possible or to ask some good questions

00:23:45

about what Crossroads believes about money

00:23:47

or what we spend our money on.

00:23:49

And today we're unpacking the book of Romans.

00:23:53

Just like Sinatra experienced

00:23:54

great levels of freedom around his money,

00:23:57

the apostle Paul wants us to understand

00:24:00

how we can experience freedom in every area of our life

00:24:03

as we center our lives more around Jesus.

00:24:06

And Kyle is going to explore how that grace

00:24:08

offers you and I the opportunity to live more freely.

00:24:37

- Hey, everybody, I'm Kyle if we've never met before.

00:24:40

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

00:24:42

I have to start with something that's a little bit awkward,

00:24:45

and that's just to admit that I sinned.

00:24:48

I sinned greatly, and I didn't mean to.

00:24:51

It happened the last time I talked to you guys,

00:24:54

I did a message about wisdom,

00:24:55

and honestly, I thought I had everything in it.

00:24:57

I had Bible verses, quotes from famous theologians,

00:25:00

Hebrew words even in it, stuff Jesus said,

00:25:03

thought it had everything.

00:25:05

And then you all texted me and emailed me

00:25:09

and stopped me in Kroger to tell me I committed this massive sin.

00:25:15

It's not one of the seven deadliest sins,

00:25:16

but according to you guys, it's like number eight.

00:25:20

I mentioned I got a new puppy and I didn't show you a picture.

00:25:23

I'm so sorry!

00:25:25

Please just find it in your hearts to give me grace

00:25:28

and let me fix it right now.

00:25:29

This is Annie, my puppy

00:25:32

She's a german shorthair pointer.

00:25:34

She's the cutest puppy in the entire world.

00:25:37

So incredibly sweet, except for when she's eating poop

00:25:40

or peeing on the stairs or chewing my face,

00:25:42

which happen to be her three favorite things

00:25:44

in the whole world.

00:25:46

Just, once again, don't get a puppy.

00:25:48

I've got one, I'll send you pictures of it,

00:25:50

if that's what you need in your life, very happy to do that.

00:25:53

Like you heard, we're starting a series of talks

00:25:56

on the book of Romans today.

00:25:58

And the book of Romans holds this special place in the Bible.

00:26:01

See all of the Bible, all of it is profitable.

00:26:05

We see this in 1 Timothy 3:16.

00:26:07

It says, All scripture is breathed by God

00:26:09

and is profitable for teaching,

00:26:11

correcting and training and righteousness.

00:26:13

The whole thing is good.

00:26:14

And Romans kind of holds this, like,

00:26:17

top of the whole pyramid place in Scripture.

00:26:21

It's the standout book in the Bible,

00:26:23

if there were such a thing.

00:26:24

St. Augustine, Martin Luther, John Wesley,

00:26:26

just to name a few important figures throughout history,

00:26:29

they actually pointed to the book of Romans

00:26:31

as the thing that unlocked God for them

00:26:33

and actually brought them to faith.

00:26:35

Here's what Martin Luther said about the book:

00:26:57

It's this powerful, powerful book.

00:26:59

Not by accident, by the way.

00:27:00

It was written by Paul, who's the greatest theologian,

00:27:04

evangelist, church planter who ever lived outside of Jesus.

00:27:08

And in Romans is Paul's magnum opus.

00:27:10

It was written towards the end of his ministry.

00:27:13

And so he's able to bring not just his kind of theories

00:27:15

about God and theories about how it all works,

00:27:18

but his decades and decades of experience.

00:27:21

And so it has this unrivaled breadth, this deep logic

00:27:25

and this mature understanding all baked into it.

00:27:29

In fact, when Harvard was founded,

00:27:31

it was a Christian university,

00:27:33

as were many of the Ivy schools.

00:27:34

And for the first hundred years of its existence,

00:27:37

law students were actually required to study

00:27:40

the book of Romans, not for the theology content,

00:27:42

not to learn about God, but to actually study

00:27:45

Paul's incredible skills of debate and reason and logic.

00:27:49

He has this way in Romans of he presents an argument

00:27:52

and then he knows what you're going to object to it.

00:27:54

Like, he reads your mind and he voices those concerns

00:27:57

and he immediately kind of responds to them

00:27:59

and he does this again and again.

00:28:01

It's this incredible, incredible book,

00:28:03

and it holds this really firm purpose and place in Scripture.

00:28:07

It is the most thorough description of the story

00:28:13

of the gospel of God's grace in all of Scripture.

00:28:17

Now, gospel just means good news.

00:28:19

It's just a fancy way of saying good news.

00:28:21

And if you were to kind of unlock that good news

00:28:23

and find the very center kind of white hot core

00:28:25

of that good news in there, you would find grace.

00:28:29

And so the series of talks that we're going to do

00:28:32

is all about grace.

00:28:33

Grace just is God choosing to look on us,

00:28:36

to view us with favor and to offer us goodness

00:28:40

even when we don't deserve it. That's grace.

00:28:43

All along we're going to look at this.

00:28:45

Next week, this this message, by the way,

00:28:46

is kind of a two parter.

00:28:48

Next week, we're going to talk about Grace, how to unlock it.

00:28:50

I find that for many of us,

00:28:52

whether you've been following Jesus for a long time

00:28:54

or you're brand new to the faith, there's like this block,

00:28:56

this almost emotional block of

00:28:58

if I can understand that grace exists,

00:29:00

I can learn about it,

00:29:02

but I can't access it on a daily basis.

00:29:04

How do I feel that God looks on me with favor

00:29:06

and with pleasure?

00:29:08

We're going to look at that next week.

00:29:09

But as I as I studied Romans,

00:29:11

as I poured through the beginning chapters,

00:29:13

as I did research on it, I actually came to the conclusion

00:29:17

that the place we need to start today

00:29:19

is as unexpected and uncomfortable, frankly,

00:29:22

as it is critical to understanding

00:29:24

the story of God's grace.

00:29:26

It has to do with a central plot point in the story

00:29:30

that I think our current cultural tide

00:29:32

is trying to entirely edit out.

00:29:36

And that can't happen because,

00:29:37

see, if you miss this plot point,

00:29:39

you actually miss the entire story of grace.

00:29:42

You don't get to have it.

00:29:43

And I've seen people who edit this out

00:29:45

and I'm telling you, they end up walking away from faith.

00:29:49

Now, what is it?

00:29:50

Well, it's revealed in a single incredibly odd phrase

00:29:54

right in the middle of the first chapter of Romans.

00:29:58

If you're following along in a Bible app,

00:29:59

you've got a Bible, if you're watching at home on your lap,

00:30:02

just underline Romans 1:16.

00:30:03

That's the verse we're going to dig into today.

00:30:05

We're going to come back to it again and again and again.

00:30:08

It says this, Paul writes:

00:30:21

I am not ashamed of the gospel.

00:30:25

That's odd, isn't it?

00:30:26

I mean gospel, again, it means good news of God's grace.

00:30:29

What is there to be ashamed about in good news?

00:30:33

Weird.

00:30:34

You know, it's like me standing up here today going,

00:30:36

"I am not ashamed of the good news

00:30:39

that all three Cincinnati Pro sports teams

00:30:41

are great at the same time.

00:30:43

Not ashamed of that. Not ashamed.

00:30:45

Short King Luciano Acosta and the The FC Cincinnati,

00:30:49

Elly de la Cruz and the Reds, Joe Burrow and Bengals,

00:30:51

I'm not ashamed of any of it."

00:30:54

Of course not, it's good news.

00:30:56

Why would you be ashamed of it?

00:30:59

This is the question that we're asking today.

00:31:02

To get an answer, we need God to show up and speak to each of us.

00:31:05

Pray with me as we start.

00:31:06

God, we're asking You to just show up to unlock this story.

00:31:11

We don't want to miss any parts of Your truth.

00:31:13

You say Your truth sets us free, Lord.

00:31:15

So give us openness.

00:31:17

Help us be open minded to hear You out

00:31:20

and to receive this completeness of grace. Amen.

00:31:25

Okay, so Romans was actually written

00:31:27

to a specific people group.

00:31:28

Can anyone guess who Romans was written to?

00:31:32

So it's Romans, by the way, is Romans.

00:31:34

If you guess that you get a free Bible,

00:31:37

they're out at the information center, so just go get one.

00:31:40

They're actually available

00:31:41

for anybody who wants one all the time.

00:31:43

Anyway, we're into Romans.

00:31:44

Now Paul didn't actually know the Romans.

00:31:46

He had never gone there.

00:31:47

He hadn't met them when he wrote this letter.

00:31:49

Now, he wanted to, but he had never been there.

00:31:51

And in Romans,

00:31:52

it was a really interesting collection of people.

00:31:56

It was kind of some Jewish believers

00:31:58

and then Gentile believers.

00:32:00

Gentile is just a Jewish word that means not Jewish.

00:32:03

That's it. It's not like a people group.

00:32:05

It's just all of us who aren't Jewish.

00:32:08

So there's the Jews and the Gentiles.

00:32:09

But what had happened about ten years before Paul wrote Romans

00:32:12

is the Roman emperor Claudius had expelled

00:32:15

all of the Jews, believers included, from Rome

00:32:17

for a period of about five years.

00:32:19

And so they left.

00:32:21

And the Gentiles kept going,

00:32:22

and they kind of evolved their understanding of God

00:32:25

and scripture and what's important and what's not.

00:32:27

And it kind of went over here.

00:32:28

And then the Jewish believers came back

00:32:30

after the exile was lifted.

00:32:31

And these two parts of the church

00:32:33

just weren't seeing eye to eye.

00:32:36

It was a church divided.

00:32:38

And so Paul's purpose in writing Romans

00:32:40

is to attempt to unify the church with the thing

00:32:43

that creates unity,

00:32:44

the gospel of God's incredible, unrivaled grace.

00:32:49

That's his heart in writing this entire thing.

00:32:53

So I want you to imagine for a minute you are now Paul.

00:32:56

Congratulations, you're Paul.

00:32:57

You are the world's greatest theologian, evangelist,

00:33:00

sharer of the good news who's ever lived

00:33:03

alive on the planet at this time.

00:33:05

You're in your prime.

00:33:07

You are Michael Jordan in 1991.

00:33:09

You are Serena Williams in 2013.

00:33:12

I'm going to go ahead and call it your Joe Burrow in 2023.

00:33:15

That's you. Okay?

00:33:17

Height of your powers and you're going to write this letter.

00:33:21

And you're thinking, how should I start this thing?

00:33:24

What would you start to write about?

00:33:27

The Gospel of God's grace.

00:33:29

Would you start, "God is love"?

00:33:32

Would you write, "For God so loved the world, Jesus saves"?

00:33:37

Or maybe you just start with a kind of a nice intro,

00:33:39

"Boy, do I have some great news for you."

00:33:43

How would you start the letter?

00:33:46

Now, on the other side, I want you to imagine

00:33:47

that you are the Roman church.

00:33:49

You've heard of these letters that Paul sends

00:33:52

all around the world to other churches.

00:33:54

The church in Corinth got one, the Ephesians got one,

00:33:57

the Thessalonicans got one. You haven't got one yet.

00:34:00

Okay, then finally, if somebody runs into the city

00:34:03

and they're like, "Guys, Paul wrote us,

00:34:05

finally one of the famous letters, we got one."

00:34:08

Now, this is before churches had buildings so met in homes.

00:34:10

So it would have gone something like, "This letter came,

00:34:13

guys, we're not going to --

00:34:14

no one's going to read it until tonight, 7:00 at Jimmy's.

00:34:18

Okay. So bring bring chips and dip or hummus and pita."

00:34:22

I don't know what they ate back then, pizza?

00:34:25

I don't know if they had it.

00:34:26

"Just bring some stuff.

00:34:27

We're all going to sit together

00:34:28

and we're going to read it out loud.

00:34:30

It's going to be awesome.

00:34:31

You're not going to want to miss it." So everyone's like, Yeah.

00:34:33

So 7:00, everyone shows up at Jimmy's house

00:34:35

and they jam in there and the guy at the front,

00:34:37

he's like, "Guys, guys, guys, here we go.

00:34:39

We're going to start reading.

00:34:40

Everyone get quiet here.

00:34:42

Boy, this is going to be, it's going to be amazing."

00:34:44

He starts reading and Paul does what Paul does

00:34:46

in most of his letters like there's this giant

00:34:48

kind of way too long intro with lots of run on sentences

00:34:52

about who he is and he kind of gets through that stuff.

00:34:54

And then there's this cool part where Paul is like,

00:34:56

"I really want to come meet you guys."

00:34:58

And the whole room kind of swoons.

00:34:59

Like, "Paul, The honor would be all ours.

00:35:03

And also, I mean partly yours because we're pretty great.

00:35:05

You know, pretty cool, you want to meet us."

00:35:07

Then the guy gets into the heart of it, okay?

00:35:08

He's like, he's like, "Hey, guys, here comes, here comes,

00:35:11

here comes. Paul writes," and the guy reads Romans 1:15.

00:35:21

They're like, "Yeah, you know, get your praise hands ready,

00:35:24

get ready to shout, Amen.

00:35:25

This is going to be great.

00:35:26

Here comes the Gospel. He's about to preach it."

00:35:28

And then the guy settles in, Romans 1:18:

00:35:41

And no praise, hands go up, and no one says amen.

00:35:46

Paul keeps writing, guy keeps reading:

00:36:04

Paul amens himself because

00:36:06

he knows no one else is going to do it, right?

00:36:11

In the room, I think they're thinking at this moment,

00:36:14

they're like, "Okay, that was not what we expected

00:36:16

for the start of this gospel of grace thing.

00:36:19

Maybe, though, maybe those harsh words

00:36:20

Paul's talking about someone else.

00:36:22

Maybe, maybe it's not us.

00:36:24

Let's just keep -- let's just keep reading through here."

00:36:26

So Paul keeps writing and the guy keeps reading, Romans 2:1:

00:36:49

Eww, there's that word again

00:36:56

And they're like, "Oh, he is talking to us in this room.

00:37:00

He didn't address it to the wrong people."

00:37:02

And at this point, the Gentiles start thinking,

00:37:04

"Well, well, maybe the you refers to the Jews,

00:37:07

like, they're wrong and we're right.

00:37:09

We're going to win this divided argument.

00:37:11

We're going to be proven right."

00:37:12

And the Jews think, "Well, maybe the you

00:37:14

refers to to the Gentiles, we're going to be proven right."

00:37:18

But Paul keeps writing and the guy keeps reading, Romans 2:9:

00:37:22

There will be trouble and distress

00:37:24

for every human being who does evil:

00:37:26

first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

00:37:29

But glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good:

00:37:31

first for the Jew, and then the Gentile,

00:37:33

for God does not show favoritism.

00:37:34

All who sin apart from the law

00:37:36

will also perish apart from the law.

00:37:37

And he goes on and on and on.

00:37:39

It just again about sin and they're being implicated by it.

00:37:43

And at some point you just imagine someone goes,

00:37:45

"Okay, but like what did Jesus say?

00:37:48

Is Jesus involved in any of this?"

00:37:51

And so Paul keeps writing

00:37:52

and the guy keeps reading, Romans 2:16:

00:38:01

Paul says, Jesus will actually judge you as my gospel,

00:38:05

my good news declares.

00:38:07

And then Paul doesn't stop.

00:38:08

I'm not going to read you all three chapters.

00:38:10

You can do it on your own if you want to.

00:38:12

But for almost three entire chapters,

00:38:15

Paul goes on and on and on about sin, our sin and God's wrath.

00:38:21

And then he wraps it up with this absolute mic drop

00:38:24

pinned to everyone, Romans 3:10:

00:38:42

No one. Paul just kind of lays it out for everybody.

00:38:47

And so anyway, welcome to church.

00:38:49

The exits are clearly marked behind you.

00:38:52

They're on every level. Okay?

00:38:54

I mean, seriously, right?

00:38:56

Like, if this was today, we'd all be on Amazon

00:38:59

leaving one star reviews.

00:39:01

Letter arrives smeared with sin and God's wrath.

00:39:04

Didn't love it.

00:39:06

Asking to exchange for another one. Still on hold.

00:39:09

Right, that's what we would we would write.

00:39:12

It's just this, like, what are you doing?

00:39:15

See in this room that Paul was writing to, though,

00:39:17

were these two beliefs, these two kind of outlooks on sin,

00:39:21

and they were the same two beliefs

00:39:23

that are present in this room

00:39:24

or wherever you're listening today, the same two.

00:39:27

You fall into one of these two categories.

00:39:30

The first is the Gentile mindset or belief system about sin.

00:39:34

The Gentile mindset is basically that people

00:39:37

are inherently good and sin doesn't really exist,

00:39:40

except in like extreme cases, you know,

00:39:43

genocidal dictators, murderers, that sort of thing.

00:39:47

But not in, like, average people like me.

00:39:49

I'm basically good. That's the Gentile mindset.

00:39:53

And then there's the Jewish mindset.

00:39:55

Maybe you have the Jewish mindset, that's actually

00:39:57

that people are inherently sinful.

00:39:59

Sin is real, and actually in many people that's in them.

00:40:04

But because of your special beliefs and behavior,

00:40:07

you're good.

00:40:09

See, both mindsets actually arrive at the same conclusion.

00:40:12

And the conclusion is, I am good.

00:40:15

But Paul wrote something different.

00:40:17

Paul wrote, "There is none who does good, no, not one."

00:40:21

By the way, not even himself.

00:40:24

Paul doesn't write this and exclude himself.

00:40:26

He's not going, "You're all super bad.

00:40:28

But me, I'm pretty -- I'm pretty great."

00:40:30

That's not the attitude of Paul.

00:40:32

He mentored this guy named Timothy

00:40:34

and he wrote him two letters that are now part of the Bible

00:40:36

and 1 Timothy 1:15 he wrote this:

00:40:48

Of whom I'm chief.

00:40:49

And I just want to be really clear at this point,

00:40:51

this is how I think about myself, too.

00:40:53

I don't stand up here going, "Let's talk about sin

00:40:57

and God's wrath and how it's in all of you."

00:41:00

No, this is me.

00:41:04

I'm full of pride and anger and bitterness

00:41:07

and all these things. I can't escape it.

00:41:09

I didn't always think this.

00:41:11

I would have defaulted more into the Jewish mindset

00:41:14

that, you know, some people were bad,

00:41:16

but not really, not me.

00:41:18

And maybe even a little bit of the Gentile mindset,

00:41:20

like, "Well, I just haven't done the bad stuff,

00:41:23

you know, because I went to church.

00:41:25

And if you go to church long enough,

00:41:26

you'll see someone stand on a stage

00:41:28

or you'll watch a video of them

00:41:29

telling their story of coming to faith."

00:41:31

And the ones that make the videos

00:41:32

are, like, the dramatic ones.

00:41:34

It's always like, "I was a warlord who sold drugs

00:41:39

and never showed people pictures of my puppy.

00:41:42

That's how bad I was. And now I'm saved," right?

00:41:46

And I would watch those and I would think,

00:41:48

"Okay, well, I've never done any of those things,

00:41:50

except for the puppy picture now.

00:41:51

But back then I didn't have a puppy.

00:41:52

So it's like I haven't done those things.

00:41:55

I'm just kind of a normal person, you know?"

00:41:57

And I would hear sin talked about and just think,

00:42:00

"Okay, but not really, you know, not me."

00:42:05

But then some things happened in my life.

00:42:08

Like I got married and I had kids

00:42:10

and there were these moments where I couldn't escape it.

00:42:13

Like when all of our kids were newborns,

00:42:16

we'd bring them home from the hospital.

00:42:17

By the way, new parents, they don't come sleep trained.

00:42:20

That's not a feature.

00:42:22

We haven't figured out how to kind of program that yet.

00:42:25

Maybe someday, but that's not how they come.

00:42:27

And so they wouldn't sleep.

00:42:28

And my wife would sometimes wake me up

00:42:30

in the middle of the night to help.

00:42:31

She's exhausted. She'd wake me up to help.

00:42:33

And my immediate instinctual reaction every time

00:42:37

for all three kids was anger. Anger, "I've got to get up."

00:42:42

This is towards my wife, who I made vows to,

00:42:45

for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer.

00:42:47

Apparently not for lack of sleep, though,

00:42:49

I didn't put that in there.

00:42:50

Maybe I should have.

00:42:51

And I'm angry and this is this is to help with my kids,

00:42:54

the people I'm supposed to love the most in the entire world.

00:42:57

And so I had to come to this conclusion that

00:43:00

actually the baseline natural me is not good,

00:43:04

is not loving, is not kind.

00:43:07

It's mean and selfish and angry. I can't escape it.

00:43:11

So I don't stand up here saying

00:43:12

some of you are sinful and I'm not.

00:43:14

I stand up here saying

00:43:15

I consider myself chief among sinners. Chief.

00:43:19

And see this moment for you of choosing to believe

00:43:24

that you might be what the Bible says

00:43:26

you are apart from God full of sin.

00:43:30

This is the moment that Paul says he's not ashamed about,

00:43:36

that sin is in us and that God's right response

00:43:39

to it would be wrath, Romans 1:16:

00:43:50

I mean, just think about the rundown

00:43:52

of the story of the gospel of grace.

00:43:54

Let's just examine it part by part

00:43:56

and see if we can find any other offensive parts.

00:43:58

Here's, just make a little quiz, okay?

00:44:00

There's a loving creator

00:44:02

who made you for a beautiful purpose.

00:44:04

Is there anything offensive or shameful in that?

00:44:08

No, not really.

00:44:10

He wants the very best for your life.

00:44:12

Anything offensive or shameful in that? No.

00:44:14

He loves you so much that He sent His Son to rescue you.

00:44:18

Anything offensive or shameful in that? No.

00:44:21

He wants you to live in Paradise forever with Him.

00:44:23

He's preparing a beautiful mansion for you in heaven.

00:44:25

Anything offensive or something to be ashamed about in that? No.

00:44:30

But, friends, that rundown is not the gospel of God's grace.

00:44:34

See, the Gospel of God's grace is that

00:44:35

in spite of our sin and in spite of the justified wrath of God,

00:44:40

God chooses to look on us with grace.

00:44:44

Now, if any part of you has been ashamed

00:44:46

of the parts of the Bible that kind of make you,

00:44:49

like, uncomfortable, to share that you're a believer

00:44:51

at work or you're a Christian or you go to church at work.

00:44:54

It's these parts, isn't it?

00:44:56

I just wonder, have you ever felt that way?

00:44:58

I'll just admit I have, because it's uncomfortable

00:45:01

to say I believe in sin and the wrath of God

00:45:04

the way the Bible describes it.

00:45:05

Increasingly if you say that,

00:45:08

if you admit you're a believer,

00:45:09

you'll be labeled as backwards, as hateful, as bigoted.

00:45:14

And when you go to work, you don't want that

00:45:16

to be the thing people think about you, do you?

00:45:19

And so we just kind of smash it down a little bit.

00:45:22

But I'm telling you,

00:45:23

you can't have the good news without the bad news.

00:45:25

You don't get a Savior unless there's sin to be saved from,

00:45:27

friends, that's not how it works. It's not how it works.

00:45:31

If you're not sinful, God can't be kind and gracious.

00:45:35

Paul actually says if you choose to reject

00:45:37

that you are sinful, you are showing contempt

00:45:39

for the riches of His kindness.

00:45:41

He writes this in Romans 2:4, right in that section

00:45:44

where he's saying, "I'm talking about you, not someone else."

00:45:46

When we talk about sin,

00:45:47

we always go to the other person and their sin.

00:45:49

And Paul is going, "I'm not talking about them.

00:45:52

I'm talking about you, to you."

00:45:53

And right in the middle of that, he writes:

00:46:03

His kindness.

00:46:05

But see, if we're not sinful, then God's not being kind to us,

00:46:08

He's being fair, just fair.

00:46:10

He's just giving us what we deserve.

00:46:12

And so Paul is saying you have to accept

00:46:14

that you're full of sin in order to accept

00:46:15

that God's giving you grace.

00:46:18

Now, I think there's this cultural tie

00:46:20

that's trying to edit out sin, to change it,

00:46:23

reduce it, squash it down, edit it out.

00:46:26

It's not a new thing, by the way.

00:46:27

You know, the very first lie

00:46:29

and the very first sin in the Bible

00:46:31

are actually about the idea that that's not sin.

00:46:33

That's what happened, according to Genesis,

00:46:35

in the Garden of Eden.

00:46:36

God didn't really say that.

00:46:38

That's not really sin.

00:46:40

And whether you think that's allegorical or historical,

00:46:43

it doesn't matter, the same point holds,

00:46:45

"That's not sin" is the first thing.

00:46:47

So it's not a new phenomenon.

00:46:49

It's also always been present throughout history.

00:46:52

It's not like there's a period of history

00:46:54

where this wasn't the case and people just woke up every day

00:46:57

and were so excited to admit that they were full of sin

00:46:59

and share that with their neighbors.

00:47:01

No, that's never actually happened.

00:47:03

One example, we can rewind the clock., just 100 years ago,

00:47:06

the theologian, anti-Nazi activist and eventual martyr,

00:47:10

Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to New York City in the 1930s,

00:47:13

and he visited churches.

00:47:15

And this was his observation, he writes:

00:47:36

It's not new. It's always been present.

00:47:38

And at the same time it's also increasing right now,

00:47:41

we just have to say that, it's increasing right now

00:47:43

in our corner of Western culture.

00:47:46

In his book Live No Lies, which I highly recommend,

00:47:49

John Mark Comer identifies kind of

00:47:51

three cascading tectonic shifts in culture

00:47:54

that press on those of us who would hold to

00:47:56

the view of the Bible with sin and the wrath of God.

00:48:00

The first is the shift from the majority

00:48:02

to the minority in culture, he writes this:

00:48:23

We've moved from the majority to the minority.

00:48:25

Have you sensed this shift over the last decade

00:48:28

in your neighborhood and your workplace?

00:48:30

What that does is it actually cascades into the next shift,

00:48:33

which is from the place of honor to the place of shame.

00:48:37

No longer are the biblical morals

00:48:38

and ideas of sin and wrath honorable.

00:48:40

And they're not just weird or outdated either.

00:48:43

They are actually viewed as as immoral and as hateful,

00:48:47

which cascades into the third shift,

00:48:49

the shift from widespread tolerance to a rising hostility.

00:48:53

See friends, when you choose to agree with the gospel,

00:48:56

you will be offensive to the world that doesn't

00:48:59

and you will be shamed.

00:49:01

That's just part of what comes along with it.

00:49:02

And I'm sorry, and I think that that stinks.

00:49:05

And I just want to admit at this point,

00:49:06

if you've felt that, man, I have to. I have to.

00:49:12

And it stinks that it's that way.

00:49:14

And I wish that it wasn't, but that's where we're at.

00:49:18

Because of that, though, we're tempted to make some changes.

00:49:21

Again, I understand why.

00:49:22

I understand why we're tempted to make some changes.

00:49:25

Now, Sarah and I, we bought a house

00:49:27

about four and a half, five years ago, real fixer upper.

00:49:30

It was built in 1979, hadn't been remodeled

00:49:34

in any way, shape or form since then.

00:49:36

And so we spent the past five years

00:49:37

just DIYing nearly everything in the house.

00:49:40

We're not even close to done,

00:49:42

Done pretty much all the work ourselves,

00:49:44

with one exception, and that is drywall.

00:49:47

Drywall is from the devil. It's awful.

00:49:51

And if you're good at it, more power to you.

00:49:53

I am awful. So I hired that one out.

00:49:54

Nothing else. We do all the work.

00:49:56

And I've learned that if I don't show you pictures,

00:49:58

you get mad at me. So here's a picture.

00:49:59

This is a before of the house.

00:50:01

And the time period it was built, it was when it was like,

00:50:04

how many rooms can we chop this space into?

00:50:07

That was kind of what was in fashion.

00:50:09

So it was all divided.

00:50:10

And so what we've done is we've modernized it

00:50:12

and made it more of an open concept, taking out walls.

00:50:15

So here's the after of our living room right there,

00:50:17

took out the walls, opened it up.

00:50:19

Those windows are my greatest mathematical achievement

00:50:22

I've ever made in my life.

00:50:24

Measured all the angles, all the stuff.

00:50:25

It was insane.

00:50:27

Now, when you remodel a house

00:50:29

and you make it more of an open concept,

00:50:30

that can be great, right?

00:50:32

I mean, houses need to be updated,

00:50:35

they need to be freshened.

00:50:36

But what I've seen is that some of us

00:50:38

take this same approach to the gospel,

00:50:40

and what we try to do is we try to remodel it.

00:50:43

We try to make it more of an open concept,

00:50:45

just kind of knock some walls out, you know,

00:50:48

move the walls on God's lines on sexuality,

00:50:51

just kind of make it more of an open concept.

00:50:54

Just kind of redraw what it says about money and greed

00:50:58

or loving your enemies or serving the poor

00:51:01

or executing justice or welcoming strangers.

00:51:04

We just kind of move that stuff around a little bit.

00:51:08

We just move it.

00:51:10

Now, when when you do that, what happens is

00:51:14

your remodel will always end up as a removal.

00:51:18

Because you take the S and you swap it for a C

00:51:22

and then you add an E and it's not sin anymore,

00:51:25

now it's the word nice.

00:51:27

We're all just kind of nice.

00:51:30

I was poking around Instagram a couple of weeks ago,

00:51:32

and I came across this post from another large church.

00:51:35

And I don't mean judgment on them,

00:51:36

I don't mean misunderstanding them.

00:51:38

So I just want to say that out loud.

00:51:39

It just it just hit me.

00:51:41

And the post's caption said this:

00:51:43

Pastor X came with an encouragement

00:51:46

to let us know that we're doing good

00:51:48

and an invitation that we can be even better.

00:51:51

We're doing good. You know, Jesus is like vitamins.

00:51:54

You're probably good, but man, with a little bit of Jesus,

00:51:58

your bones would be stronger.

00:52:00

You'd have more energy throughout the day.

00:52:02

You just do a little, a little bit better.

00:52:05

See what I find in our culture, what we're doing is

00:52:08

we're going, you know, "I like the parts about Jesus

00:52:11

and His love in here, but this --

00:52:14

this part is just kind of inconvenient.

00:52:15

I'm just going to -- I'm just going to take these out.

00:52:18

That's getting -- that's getting better."

00:52:20

We just kind of edit it, modify it.

00:52:25

Parents, you know, like a good dad joke?

00:52:30

I think those get mislabeled,

00:52:32

because I think there's also good mom jokes. Okay.

00:52:34

You don't get credit for that.

00:52:35

I just want to give you credit. There's mom jokes.

00:52:37

My kids are walking our dog, Andy, in the neighborhood.

00:52:40

And our sweet neighbor Jess told him this great mom joke.

00:52:43

And so she said, "Do you know the difference

00:52:45

between dogs and cats? Do you know the difference?"

00:52:48

Okay, so dogs, see you and they go, "Wow, this person

00:52:53

loves me and feeds me, cleans up my poop,

00:52:56

takes care of my every need. They must be God."

00:53:00

And a cat goes, "Wow, this person loves me, feeds me,

00:53:03

cleans up my poop, takes care of my every need.

00:53:06

I must be God." That's a cat, right?

00:53:11

That's how they live their lives.

00:53:14

The problem is many of us are taking that attitude

00:53:16

of being a cat with the Bible.

00:53:18

We're like, "I don't like these parts,

00:53:20

so I'm just going to get rid of them

00:53:21

and make it how I want it."

00:53:24

But the person who gets to decide what's true

00:53:26

and what's good and what's right is God.

00:53:28

That's the definition of what it means to be Him.

00:53:32

Now maybe you're in the spot where you're like,

00:53:34

"You know what, Kyle? I understand.

00:53:35

I wish we could remodel sin.

00:53:37

I wish we could just remove it from the story.

00:53:39

But I understand that we can't.

00:53:40

And so what I'm tempted to do, though, is just to hide it."

00:53:43

And I see a lot of us doing this

00:53:44

and a lot of churches doing this, too.

00:53:46

We want to hide sin.

00:53:48

Parents, you have that one kid in your house,

00:53:51

the ungrateful freeloader, beloved child who,

00:53:55

sorry, doesn't like to eat green vegetables. Right.

00:53:59

So what do you do with those green vegetables?

00:54:02

Chop them up because you have this dream.

00:54:04

You have this dream that one day

00:54:07

that child will be healthy enough to do what?

00:54:10

Move out.

00:54:12

So you take those vegetables

00:54:14

and you chop them into the tiniest pieces

00:54:17

that the world's most powerful microscope can never find.

00:54:20

And you shove it into something that has chocolate in it

00:54:22

and you feed it to them, right?

00:54:24

That's what you do.

00:54:26

And I see some of us trying to do this with the gospel.

00:54:29

We want to kind of hide it. We want to sanitize it.

00:54:32

We want to make it acceptable.

00:54:34

But see, no matter whether you hide it, remodel it,

00:54:36

remove it, what you end up with is a different gospel,

00:54:39

an imposter gospel.

00:54:40

Paul talks about this

00:54:41

when he wrote the letter to the Galatians.

00:54:43

Galatians 1:6, he said:

00:54:52

See, a different gospel is the gospel without sin.

00:54:55

It's a different gospel.

00:54:57

And the headline of the most popular one I hear right now,

00:55:00

rising up in our culture, is the gospel I call God is Love.

00:55:04

And in the God is Love Gospel, which by the way,

00:55:06

is in the Bible, that is in the Bible and it is true.

00:55:10

God is love.

00:55:11

But friends, it's three words out of 727,969 words

00:55:15

in the New Testament translation of the Bible.

00:55:18

And you might go, "Well, hold on, Kyle.

00:55:21

It's not just three words. Jesus talks about love,

00:55:24

and wasn't Jesus's whole thing love?"

00:55:26

And I would say, yeah, actually, there's there's a lot to that.

00:55:29

In fact, Jesus didn't just teach love,

00:55:32

Jesus actually redefined love.

00:55:33

He raised the stakes on love.

00:55:35

He said, "Love isn't just affection

00:55:36

and being nice to someone you like.

00:55:38

Love is actually sacrificially laying down your life for them.

00:55:42

Watch this, I'm about to do it," and He heads to the Cross.

00:55:44

And then He goes, "You know what? It's not even just that.

00:55:47

It's actually doing that, not just for the people you like,

00:55:49

but for the people who don't like you, your enemies.

00:55:51

Love your enemies."

00:55:52

And He even said the greatest commandment is

00:55:55

to love God and love your neighbor.

00:55:56

So, yes, yes, yes, yes, Jesus talks love.

00:56:00

Yes, yes, yes, God is love.

00:56:02

But that same Jesus has said some seemingly

00:56:07

very unloving things to entire towns.

00:56:11

Here's just one example, Matthew 11:

00:56:22

They didn't acknowledge their sin and turn from it.

00:56:25

Jesus said, these are His words:

00:56:43

This is the place where He kind of set up shop,

00:56:45

His adopted hometown for His ministry.

00:56:52

[sings] Loving Jesus.

00:56:54

[yells] "You go to hell," is what He says.

00:56:57

Like what? How?

00:57:01

And this is an essential question to answer:

00:57:04

How does that fit with God is love?

00:57:07

And I think what a lot of us do is we can't reconcile it,

00:57:12

and so we just remove it or hide it.

00:57:14

We just try not to think about it.

00:57:16

But there actually core components of each other

00:57:19

to understand and we've got to understand what is God's wrath,

00:57:22

what is sin, and what's the relationship between them?

00:57:24

Well, wrath in the context that Paul uses it in Romans,

00:57:28

we read that word a couple of times earlier.

00:57:30

Wrath isn't what you and I think it is.

00:57:32

There's actually two words for wrath in Greek,

00:57:35

which is the language that Paul is writing this letter.

00:57:37

And the first one is Thymos.

00:57:39

Thymos is what you feel when you're in the car

00:57:42

on a long road trip

00:57:43

and your kids are being brats in the back.

00:57:45

And you're like, "I'll pull this car over right now."

00:57:49

That's thumos, it's this flare up of anger.

00:57:53

But that's not the word that Paul uses.

00:57:55

He uses a word orge.

00:57:57

Orge is a settled condition, it's not a flare up.

00:58:01

It's not a spike. It's not He's get super angry.

00:58:04

It's a constant settled condition.

00:58:07

The theologian J.I. Packer described it like this:

00:58:25

See, God's wrath is noble, because sin is shameful.

00:58:30

Sin is offensive.

00:58:32

And if you feel that when you read these sections about sin,

00:58:35

you're actually on to something true.

00:58:36

But friends, sin is far more offensive to God

00:58:39

than it is to you. Why?

00:58:42

Well, it has to do with what sin actually is.

00:58:45

Is sin just God's personal set of preferences, you know?

00:58:50

He's God so He gets to decide what He likes,

00:58:52

His just personal preferences.

00:58:54

And then He just kind of holds us all to them

00:58:56

with eternal consequences.

00:58:58

Is that what sin is? No.

00:59:01

See, sin is offensive to God because it's the behavior

00:59:05

and attitudes that kill the thing He loves the most: You.

00:59:09

That's what sin is.

00:59:11

And so God's response is much like ours would be.

00:59:14

How would you feel about

00:59:16

the thing that was trying to kill your children?

00:59:18

That's how God feels about sin.

00:59:21

He's upset about it. He's angry about it.

00:59:24

The great Slavic theologian Miroslav Volf,

00:59:27

he runs Yale Divinity School right now, actually.

00:59:31

He said early on in his career, he used to think

00:59:34

that this idea of a wrathful God

00:59:36

was like backwards and barbaric.

00:59:38

You know, like, surely we've evolved

00:59:40

past this as humans, right?

00:59:43

And then this thing happened in his home country

00:59:45

of the former Yugoslavia, war broke out, a horrible war.

00:59:49

And he fled to save his life and his family's life.

00:59:52

And he returned after the war.

00:59:54

And he said when he walked around,

00:59:55

he saw the unspeakable aftermath of 200,000 people murdered,

01:00:00

3 million people still displaced without homes.

01:00:04

He came to a different conclusion

01:00:06

that he would actually have more problem

01:00:08

with a God who wasn't angry about that

01:00:11

than a God who was. He wrote this:

01:00:29

See, wrath is the very reaction

01:00:31

a perfectly loving God should have to sin.

01:00:35

He's going, "Guys, you're jumping out of an airplane

01:00:38

with no parachute. You're going to die.

01:00:40

Stop. What are you doing?"

01:00:43

That's the loving God.

01:00:45

It's also the stumbling block, as Paul calls it,

01:00:48

in some of his other letters, this moment that

01:00:50

we all have to get to to say, "Am I willing to believe

01:00:53

and admit that that kind of sin is in me

01:00:56

and that God's actual righteous response to that is wrath?

01:01:01

Am I willing to say I believe that that's true?"

01:01:03

It's the stumbling block. 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul writes:

01:01:08

Why? For sin.

01:01:20

If you hear nothing else, hear this:

01:01:21

A gospel without sin offends no one and saves no one. No one.

01:01:29

But the true gospel of grace,

01:01:31

the one that's willing to admit the bad part of the story

01:01:34

in order to have the good part of the story

01:01:36

saves everyone who believes.

01:01:38

It's the power of God for salvation.

01:01:40

There's a second part to that, Romans 1:16:

01:01:51


01:01:53

I got to spend last week as a volunteer at middle school camp.

01:01:56

I led a group of eighth grade boys.

01:01:58

It was as exhausting and stinky as you would imagine.

01:02:02

It was really, it was something.

01:02:05

It was also amazing.

01:02:06

At this camp we saw hundreds of kids

01:02:08

give their life to Christ for the first time.

01:02:10

We saw more than 200 of them

01:02:12

make the decision to get baptized.

01:02:14

It was incredible. [applause]

01:02:15

I actually got to baptize two of the guys in my group.

01:02:19

Here are some of those pictures.

01:02:20

Beautiful, beautiful thing to get to be part of.

01:02:24

Now, at this camp, there's kind of a series of talks

01:02:26

that we go through where we present the gospel to them.

01:02:29

What do you think we talked about night one?

01:02:32

Do you think that we talked about how God is love,

01:02:35

how the adventurous life awaits you,

01:02:38

how He wants better stuff for you?

01:02:40

Because we didn't.

01:02:41

See, we talked about how everyone makes mistakes,

01:02:45

how everyone is broken, how everyone falls short.

01:02:48

And then we told them there is a God

01:02:50

who made a way around that.

01:02:51

There's a God who offers them grace anyway.

01:02:54

That is why we saw so many kids give their life to Christ

01:02:57

because we did not skip the hard parts.

01:02:59


01:03:02

See, the truth is, God does love you.

01:03:04

He loves you so much. So much.

01:03:07

He loves you enough to yell at you and say,

01:03:10

"This thing is going to kill you."

01:03:11

And He loves you enough to die to save you from it.

01:03:15

And I don't know who you are, but the Bible says everyone,

01:03:18

and you're part of everyone.

01:03:19

So I don't know what mistake you've made,

01:03:21

what thing you can't get over, what habit you can't kick.

01:03:24

I don't know any of those things.

01:03:25

I don't know what you believed

01:03:27

when you walked in here an hour ago.

01:03:28

But I'm telling you, the power of God

01:03:30

is available to you for salvation.

01:03:33

Maybe you're a spiritually sober minded person

01:03:36

and as I've been talking, you've been going,

01:03:38

"Yeah, this is kind of clicking together.

01:03:41

There's those destructive patterns of thoughts

01:03:43

that I can't kick.

01:03:44

There's that thing I keep doing that I swear

01:03:46

every time I do it, I'm like, 'This is the last time.

01:03:48

I'm never going to do it again.'

01:03:49

And then, like, tomorrow, I do it again.

01:03:51

And then the next day I do it again."

01:03:53

And maybe you're at the point where you're saying,

01:03:55

"I see it and I believe it."

01:03:58

If that's you, I want to invite you to do

01:04:01

what hundreds of students did,

01:04:03

what millions of believers have done for millennia now,

01:04:06

is just to say, "Yes, God, you're right,"

01:04:09

and receive this gift of grace.

01:04:11

If that's where you are,

01:04:12

I want you to invite you to pray with me.

01:04:14

There's no magical words right now.

01:04:15

You don't have to say this word for word,

01:04:17

but I want to invite you to say yes to God,

01:04:20

to step into this story of the gospel of grace.

01:04:23

You can just close your eyes and pray this with me.

01:04:25

Say: God, I am sinful.

01:04:29

There is nothing I can do to ever change that

01:04:32

and I am deserving of your anger.

01:04:36

And yet I believe You made a way.

01:04:39

You sent Jesus to die for my sin

01:04:42

and I want to accept that, that free gift of grace.

01:04:47

Thank you for that. I receive it. Amen.

01:04:56

- Hey, thank you so much for watching.

01:04:58

Hey, I have something that I want to put on your radar

01:05:00

that's not going to be for everybody here.

01:05:02

But if it's for you, it is really for you.

01:05:05

We all know that life can be difficult,

01:05:07

and many of us are in a spot where we're processing

01:05:10

or working through something that is especially challenging.

01:05:12

Crossroads actually offers something that's been

01:05:14

really meaningful for me personally

01:05:17

called Healing Groups.

01:05:18

Healing Groups are the chance to walk through

01:05:20

some of life's most difficult experiences and moments,

01:05:23

but not to do it alone, to do it in the context

01:05:26

of community where you can grow with other people

01:05:28

and where you can grow and heal with God.

01:05:32

If you're interested, you can head to

01:05:33

Crossroads.net/anywhere for more info

01:05:36

or to join a group of like-minded people

01:05:39

who want to heal in the midst of things like divorce or loss.

01:05:43

Head to crossroads.net.

01:05:44

We'd love to walk with you when life is good and when it's not.

01:05:49

We'll see you next time. Thanks.

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