Worry and Anxiety

Worry and Anxiety

Chet Phillips

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Well, good morning. My name's Jeff, one of the pastors here. Grab your Bibles, let's go to Philippians chapter 4. We'll be in Philippians chapter 4. That's on page 637, if you have a blue and white Bible. Today is our last week of our Killjoy series where we've been spending some time taking, taking some time to look at different things in our lives that just rob us of joy.

As Christians, those who follow Jesus, we've been given joy, been given life in Christ, and we have just some things that kind of play with us that we've gotten used to. And so today we're going to be talking about worry and anxiety, and we've kind of flipped this morning, so we're going to spend a little bit of time, but we're going to come out and spend a little time praying and singing, and so we wanted to have time for that, so I'm getting started this morning. And so we're going to get to Philippians in a second, but it's going to take us a second to get there, because I want to kind of lay the framework for us so that we can all kind of approach it the same way and know exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about worry and anxiety. We're going to use those terms interchangeably today as we walk through, and I realize that there's four of us.

We have things to actually be worried about, actually to be anxious over. So let's say, you know, it starts off, maybe you're in high school, and so you begin to, should I go out for a sport? If I go out for a sport, will I make the team? If I make the team, will I actually get to play? If I get to play, will I be any good? Will we win?

Should I ask somebody to a date? Should I go to that party? What should I wear? How's my hair? Do I smell okay? Like there's things to be concerned about.

Maybe it's not just kind of the social stuff, but you're like, should I, when I graduate, should I go to school? Should I get a job? If I go to school, where should I go? How many schools, how many colleges should I apply to? Because I really want to apply to enough so that I get into one, but not so many that I have to apply a lot. Like I don't want to have to write a bunch of essays.

So how much do I do that? Am I going to graduate? When do I graduate? What am I going to do? Let's say you go to college.

You do get into a school. Let's say maybe a couple of schools told you you could come. So now it's like, okay, I've got to figure out which one to go to. But you pick one, you go to college, then it's like, okay, well, am I going to make any friends here? How's that going to go? Should I go to that party?

Should I invite someone to the party? Should I go to the party and try to find someone there to invite to something else? Should I date? How's my hair? Do I smell okay? Like there's, you go back through some of this stuff.

What, I've got to pick a major, and I have an exam this weekend, or the end of this week, and it's in chemistry. Maybe I'll wait until after that exam to pick a major because it might pick for me. Like if I fail that, not chemistry. I'll pick something else. If you begin to try to think, what am I going to do when I graduate? Am I here to get a degree and find a job?

Am I here to find someone to marry? Am I going to get married? Do I smell okay? Like there's going to be, like you continually kind of have things to worry about. Let's say you do start dating.

Let's say you do graduate. When I graduate, are we going to get married? Am I going to start a job? Where? What kind of Job? Am I going to make enough money?

Do I go to graduate school? No, I'm tired of school. So I'm going to start a job. Find one. Finally find one. Let's say you do decide to get married.

Let's say you're in that spot. So you go to get married. Now you've got all some other stuff to be concerned about. How did I move in with one other person and suddenly our expenses tripled? How did that happen? How is that how math works?

Are we going to be able to pay our bills? Is my job going to be good enough? Am I going to do a good enough Job? Am I going to get promoted to it? Can I stay in this job for a long time? Is this a career?

Is this a job? Maybe if you've been married for a while and this is kind of you start thinking of, should we have children? Can we have children? Will we be able to get pregnant? If we get pregnant, will that work out? If it does work out and we have a baby, will that work out?

Will we be able to keep a baby alive? If we do keep it alive, what happens when it becomes a teenager? Let's say you have a girl. What if she wants to date in the future? What if she wants to date a boy? What do I do?

Should I buy a gun or a shovel or both? Which is scarier? A machete or a shotgun? You have things to be concerned about. Then your kids are going to go to school.

They get in high school and you start thinking, are they going to go to college? It starts over. Am I going to retire? Will my health last? Will this sickness go away? And for people who have anxiety and worry, it gets a compound on itself.

So for people who are anxious, who are worriers, you begin to worry about, will I worry? Will I get anxious? When you're anxious and you're worrying, you begin to worry, will this go away? You see, all of us have some anxiety. All of us have some level of worry. And none of us like it.

For people who struggle with anxiety and worry, this is an issue that you have. You don't think, yeah, no, this is good for me. I love my anxiety. I love my worry. I love my stress. I love that I grind my teeth when I go to sleep, if I can fall asleep.

I love that I wake up in the morning and think, will I get through the day without being anxious? That all of us who struggle with anxiety and worry, we really have one major overarching question, I believe, which is, what do I do with this? I know that it's an issue. I don't have legitimate things to be anxious over. But what do I do in my anxiety?

What do I do in my worry? So as we get into this today, I want us to know a few things. There are, worry and anxiety are both a mental state and a feeling. There's some form of physicality to worry and anxiety. Here's what I mean. You can't be worried mentally, so you're thinking about what could happen, what might happen, what if this happens, what if this is how this happens.

There's just a mental state, kind of riding in circles in your brain, thinking through all the things that could go on. But there's also a feeling to it. There's a pressure. There's some people describing like a balloon fills up inside of them or like they're being squeezed. Maybe your blood pressure rises, your heart starts beating faster, and they can go together, and one of them can cause the other. So you want to have something that you're thinking about that causes all of the feelings, all the physical feelings.

Some of us actually begin the physical feelings first before we even begin to think about what on earth is worrying us. It's almost like, for some of you, it's almost like you're a little animal in a cartoon, and the background music changes. So what was like happy little, I'm not, I'm a musician, but something like that. Suddenly the background music changes to like a, like violence coming in, there's some sort of theory, and you don't know what's about to happen, but you know it's not good. And so maybe that's what your anxiety feels like. You don't know what's going on, but suddenly it's like the background music changed, and your body is telling you something bad is about to happen, but you can't even think about what it is.

And so this anxiety, this tightness, this stress, this pressure, this balloon inflating inside of you makes you begin to run in your head. What could it be? What's going to happen? How is this going to happen? I want us to know a few things as we go together this passage. We have to see a few things clearly to understand what's going on.

One, worry and anxiety are not simply circumstantial. Not simply circumstantial, meaning that some of you are worried or are worried, how am I going to pay for this? You don't have money, so you're worried. How are we going to pay all our bills? How are we going to keep our house? How are we going to?

And then here's what happens, though. You can talk to anybody who has money. Getting money doesn't take away the worry. You just begin to worry about other things. How am I going to keep what I have? How am I going to get more?

You begin to be concerned over your possessions now. Worry is not simply circumstantial. It's not like you can move to a different circumstance and it goes away. It does have circumstances tied to it, certainly. And there are, for some of us, we are worried about, well, this is a specific thing I'm worried about. Of course you are.

But worry and anxiety are not merely circumstantial. So if you took away the circumstances, you'd be fine. Worry also tells us some truth. Our anxiety is telling us some truth. Number one, it's telling us that the world is not how it should be. Alan Tipping, a pastor at Midtown Fellowship, he laid this out.

He said, the worry tells us some truth. I thought it was helpful. So one, it tells you the world's broken. It's not as it should be. There are actual things to be worried about. Actual bad things that can happen.

There's brokenness and pain and sickness and death. They exist. There are real things to be worried about. Secondly, our worry tells us that there are actual things to care about. Real things that we should be worried over. Real things to love and to value.

That our worry tells us the truth. It tells us that our world isn't as it should be. And that there are actual things worth loving. Worth being concerned for. And thirdly, our worry tells us that we're not in control. So not only is the world broken, not only are there things actually that we should care about, but thirdly, we at times have no control over any of that.

No control over health. No control over wealth. No control over happiness. No control over relationships. We have no control over it. That our worry is telling us some truth.

It's not telling us the whole truth, but it is telling us some truth. So that for us, worry is not in and of itself. And I'm going to clarify this as we keep going. But worry and anxiety, this feeling, is not by itself wrong or bad. It means that you have no faith and don't love Jesus. That there is a level of physicality to it.

There's a level of blood pressure and heartbreak and real things to be concerned about. The Bible's question is, what do we do with our worry, with our anxiety? I want to read this from Luke 12. It's going to be on screen, so you don't have to flip there. I just want you to see this. This is Jesus talking.

And he's talking about the cross. I have a baptism to be baptized with. That's the cross. That's a baptism he's going to go through. He refers to it at some point as a baptism of fire. He's going to the cross.

I have a baptism to be baptized with. And how great is my distress until it is accomplished. So this is Jesus looking forward to the cross and saying, I'm distressed. That word also means hard pressed or squeezed. I'm bound. I feel it.

I feel like someone is putting pressure on me. I'm distressed until it's accomplished. Now, Jesus was not a worrier. He was not anxious. But he felt this distress for a legitimate reason, a legitimate purpose.

We see him in the garden of Gethsemane. In Gethsemane, before he goes to the cross, the night before he goes to the cross, he is sweating drops of blood. He feels in himself anxiety that he's on his knees praying and pouring himself out to God. So for the person in the room who struggles with anxiety, for the person who at times has panic attacks or anxiety attacks or maybe you're on some medication, what I want you to hear is anxiety by itself is not immediately simple or wrong. The Bible's question is, what are you going to do with it? And so that's what we're going to spend our time on today is actually beginning to ask the question, what do we do with our anxiety?

How do we respond? Because for us, it does rob us of joy. It does, it can derail us for you. A month. And you may be, you're saying, I have legitimate things to be worried about. Yes.

But what do we do in those legitimate moments? And what do we do in the illegitimate moments? What do we do with our anxiety? The other thing we've talked about as we've gone through this series and we won't have as much time to spend on it today is that we have three enemies. The flesh, that's us. The world.

All of everything outside of us in the devil. And as Christians, we should pray about all three. So Jesus says the normal prayer is, forgive me my sins, that's flesh. Leave me not into temptation. That's the world. And deliver us from evil or the evil one.

That's the devil. So that's a normal way for all of us to pray. And I would encourage every person who struggles with anxiety as a, this is a part of life for me. I would encourage you to pray those three ways about your anxiety. God, if this is me causing undue anxiety, I pray that you'd forgive me. I pray that you'd help me.

If there are ways that you can help me avoid situations and circumstances that make me anxious, temptation should be anxious. I pray that you'd help me there, keep me from it. And if the enemy is involved in my anxiety, he doesn't get to me. So if he's jacking up my heart rate or making me feel this extra pressure just in the name of Jesus, I get to be free from that. So if you've listened to the majority of this series, that makes sense to you.

If you're new today, probably doesn't. I'd love to talk to you afterwards. We're just not going to spend a lot of time on that today. This morning. So anxiety is both a mental state and a feeling.

I'm going to pray and then we're going to start reading Philippians 4. God, we thank you that your word helps us in our anxiety. We're as anxious as a society as we have, as medicated as we are, as worried as we are. I'm so thankful that your word talks about this. That you talk to real humans where they are. You need us where we are.

You begin to help us. Let's pray that through your word today we begin to learn how we ought to respond to our anxiety. And that we will grow in our love for you and our trust in you. In Jesus' name. Amen. Philippians 4, verse 4.

Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice. That means celebrate. Be happy. Have joy in it. Overwhelming joy.

So you say, have joy in the Lord. Rejoice. I'll say it again. Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand.

It means Jesus is prominent. He's coming back. He's here. Verse 6. Do not be anxious about anything. Well, there you go.

You're welcome. Paul says, do not be anxious about anything. And if you just stop there, that wouldn't be helpful. Some of you who struggle with anxiety. When I say Philippians 4, you knew where we were going. You're like, yeah, here we go.

Okay, Philippians 4. Somebody, you've memorized this. Maybe some well-meaning person in your life used it as a Bible bullet to shoot you with. Shoot you with. Shoot you with. Shoot you with.

So you were trying to be anxious. You're welcome. Let me help you out here. First of all, Paul doesn't stop here. He's telling the truth. What he's saying is right.

Don't be anxious about anything. But he's going to tell us how. And he's going to give us some help. For the person in the room who has an anxious spouse or an anxious sibling or parent or roommate or friend. The Bible does say, do not be anxious. But it says a lot behind that that helps us out.

Don't just say this to people. Really anxious about my test. Well, don't be. Thank you so much. You fixed me. Some of you, maybe your spouse is anxious at what you do.

But you just tell them the reason why they shouldn't be. You give them a reason. You're like, no. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to be anxious about that. Even the Bible says, don't be anxious.

And then you get frustrated with them. You have a very. For those people who do not struggle with worry and anxiety. There are a few things that can be as frustrating as being in a close relationship to a person who struggles with worry and anxiety. No amens. No anybody.

But just that's a real thing. Because if you don't think about it. If you don't struggle. If you've never experienced it. You've never had a panic attack. You've never.

Like any of those things. When somebody's freaking out. And it seems like for no reason whatsoever. It is very hard when you go. Okay. You logically understand.

Like nothing's going to get you. Yes. I'm still freaking out. Well, stop. That'd be like walking up some stairs behind a person on crutches. And yelling, go faster.

Repeatedly. If they could. They would. The only benefit of being the person with crutches is they can hit you with them. The person who's anxious cannot make you be anxious too. So.

Yes. What Paul says here is true. Don't be anxious about anything. But it doesn't stop there. So we're not going to eat it.

It's going to help us here. Alright. Do not be anxious about anything. But in everything. By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God.

Okay. As I was studying this. I got more and more excited about what I think Paul's saying here. Don't be anxious about anything. Don't let anything cause you anxiety. Don't let anything stress you out or overwhelm you.

And then he says, but in everything. Pray. Don't be anxious about anything. Pray about everything. Here's what I think we need to see. Very clearly this morning.

Because anxiety is both a mental state and a physical feeling. Paul says the way to immediately counteract worry and anxiety. Is to begin praying. If you are praying. You are not worrying. And you're not being anxious.

That's really good news. And here's what I don't mean by that. And here's what I don't think he means by that. The feeling immediately goes away. So you're anxious.

You're stressed. Your heart's pounding out of your chest. Or you just have a lot of things to worry about. You're worried about your children. Maybe it's not a whole lot of anxiety. Maybe there's not a whole lot of physical feelings going on.

It's just a mental thing. What he says is no. Start praying. Start making your requests known to God. Start taking the things that you're running around in your head that you're concerned about. Start just praying about them.

It's kind of like this. If I have work to do and I don't do it, I'm lazy. The second I start working, I'm not lazy anymore. But my circumstances haven't changed. There's still all the work to be done. So what he's saying is circumstances aren't going to immediately change.

Maybe your feeling isn't going to immediately change. Your level of anxiety isn't going to change. But as soon as you start praying, it's no longer anxiety. It's no longer worry. Because we're in anxiety are godless. They are aimed nowhere or at yourself.

You begin to act like you're the person in charge of everything when you are worrying, when you're anxious. What Paul says is no. Start praying. And that immediately makes you not worry and anxiety, even though the circumstances are the same and the feeling is the same. I think that can be very free for those who struggle with worrying and anxiety to be able to know, if I'm praying, I'm doing what I'm supposed to. If I'm making my request known to God, I'm immediately doing what I'm called to do.

Here's the thing about worrying and anxiety. Worry and anxiety are a call to action with no action to take. Worry and anxiety make us want to change something. Change the situation. Change the circumstances. Fix something.

Make sure something doesn't happen in the future. And the reason we're in anxiety is because we can't do anything about it. We have zero control. Biblically, worry and anxiety are a call to action and there is an action to take. Prayer. You immediately get to pray.

And here's what I want you to know. Prayer works. You get to talk to the God who's absolutely faithful and in control of your circumstances. For those of you who feel like I'm a warrior and this won't go away, maybe you need to stop praying, Lord, take away my anxiety. And you need to just realize you've been called to pray about what it is you're anxious about. You get to spend some time praying about your children, praying about your parents, praying about your roommates, your school, your job.

You get to go before God and we get to make some requests. That's beautiful. And that's freeing. Because you say, well, I want my anxiety to go away. It might not. But it immediately is no longer anxiety when you're praying.

You can change the word. It's to be concerned. Because praying counteracts anxiety. Because anxiety is the name of nowhere. It's godless. And prayer is the name towards God.

And it's worshiping. So the way to not be anxious about anything is to pray about everything. So if you're a person who says, I'm really anxious, well, you don't have to be. Because you get to pray about everything. Not to say that it'll fix it. Not to say God will do what you ask him to.

Not to say that you feel different. But it's not anxiety if you're praying. So some of you have been praying and you feel like you're praying about something and you feel like, I'm still anxious. Not if you're praying. Not if you're praying. You may feel the same.

It's not anxiety. Okay. So you've been called to do something. Here's what I want you to see. So here's what I think for people who struggle with anxiety.

And especially when it's a legitimate, like I'm anxious over this relationship. I'm anxious over this child. I'm anxious over this thing that's going on in the life that's coming up. It causes anxiety. Maybe it causes you more than other people. So all of your other classmates are also taking exams.

But you're the one who can't sleep at night. I want to tell you a story that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 12. I think this is so helpful. He's talking about prayer. He's telling them to keep praying and not to give up. And here's what he says.

There's a widow who keeps going to a judge who doesn't love God. He doesn't fear people or God. And she keeps going to him day after day after day after day after day after day after day. And finally, he gives her justice. The judge does what he's supposed to because she kept bothering him. Now, why does she keep bothering him?

She had a legitimate thing to be concerned over. She had a legitimate thing that was weighing on her mind. So what did she do? She took it to the person who could do something about it. And Jesus says this is a model for prayer. When you have something legitimate weighing on your mind and concerning you and something that you're bothered by, that actually drives you to God.

So I actually don't think the Bible wants to eradicate all of our concern. For some of us who are anxious over things, I would just wish it would go away and I would stop thinking about this. But maybe God in your anxiety is calling you to prayer. Not to worry, but to him. That's beautiful. I hope we have a lot of people who can't sleep at night so that they get up and go get on their knees before Jesus.

That would be beautiful. I hope there's a lot of people that wake up with legitimate concerns for their children and their families and people in their community group and people in our city. So they spend time before Jesus and their anxiety still presses down on them and they run to the one who can help. That's beautiful. Because when we're praying, we're not anxious. We're putting it to work.

So Paul's going to give us... So that immediately counteracts the mental state. You may feel the same, but you're actually going to put your anxiety, you're going to put your worry to work. And then it's no longer anxiety, it's no longer worry. But Paul's also going to give us ways to pray that begin to help, I think, specifically counteract our needless worry or our worry that is too great.

So you have a legitimate thing to be worried about. So some of you, you've got an exam coming. And you should have some concern over it. Enough to study. Enough to care. To look at your syllabus.

To show up to the class on time. Some of your friends who never worry, miss the exam. And that might seem great that they don't worry, but they didn't look at their syllabus. They showed up two days late. They thought they were there on the exam day and they're handing out grace. There's some level of worry that's helpful.

Some of your friends are dumb. Okay. You have something to actually worry about. But then, you begin to add layers on top of that. What if I show up late? What if it still says this, but it's actually a different thing?

What if it changed today and I didn't see anything? What if I get there and it turns out all the stuff I studied isn't on the test? What if I show up to the wrong class? What if I end up taking that exam because I don't notice the wrong class? What if this is the one thing that I fail? What if it turns out that everything I studied, even though I have a decent grade point average Job, and this is what I can make if I fail, if I fail this class, and then I won't graduate, if I don't graduate, I'm going to end up not being able to get a job, I'm going to go live with my parents, and that would be terrible, so I'll run away.

Even though I'm an adult, I'm going to pack a bag and run away. Like, you add on layer after layer after layer after layer of what if, what if, what if, and you have a legitimate thing to be concerned about. Some of you use your children. Some of you use the health of someone you care about. You have a legitimate thing to be concerned about, and you begin adding layer after layer after layer. I think what Paul's going to say in the next section on how we pray helps free us up a little bit.

So he gives us three tools for prayer. Supplication, thanksgiving, and meditation. We're going to go through these, but supplication, thanksgiving, and meditation. So the first one, supplication. So he says this in verse 6.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, lay your request, be made known to God. Okay, so supplication means a humble request. What he's saying is, in the midst of your anxiety, realize that God is both big and good. You know how when you're little, maybe you learn how to pray, God is great, God is good. Great means big. Good means good.

So we also use great to mean good. That's confusing. It means God is big, God is good. That's what supplication is. It's actually, I believe he's big enough, and he cares about me. So when I was little, and I would misbehave with my mom, after a while, she stopped spanking us because it didn't work.

She wasn't good at it. My father was good at it. He had lots of practice, I guess. I don't know. He practiced when my older brother loved me. By the time he came to me, he was a master.

He was an art form. He was spanking. He was amazing. He knew what he was doing. He was a pro. And so my mom would look at us, and she would say, you can sit over there and wait until your dad gets home.

Because she knew when my dad showed up, he could handle it. And some of us, that's what supplication is. We need to look at our worries and say, sit over there and wait until God gets here. See, we're so focused on our worry, our anxiety, that it's as big as a mountain. But yeah, that's a miniscule compared to the God who holds the emotion in his hand.

Some of us need to look at our worry and say, sit over there. And then begin to turn and talk to God and ask him, because he's big and because he's good, to step down in the back. To humble ourselves. To know that we're not the ones who are going to fix this. We're not the ones who are in charge of this. We have no control over this.

Some of you think, if I have control over how my kids turn out, yeah, a little bit. But God has more. I have control over what happens at work. Yeah, a little bit. But God has more.

And so we get to begin to go to him and ask, be at work here. Help me here. I believe that you're big and I believe that you're good and I'm humbling myself to actually help. That's what supplication is. It's a humble request. And he says, make your request known to God.

You see, when he says supplication, thanksgiving, meditation, this is how the Psalms work. If you ever pray through the Psalms, you'll realize they pray some bad theology. I may mess with you a little bit. There are times where the psalmist says things like, God, kill my enemies. And Jesus says, love your enemies. But what he says, this is what I want.

You get to start making requests to God. He may not give them to you. But you get to talk to him. You get to be real. You don't have to clean it up for him. You get to go say, this is what's stressing me out.

This is what's bothering me. This is what's on my mind. And you get to just lay your requests out there. And he'll begin to draw you to himself. And he'll begin to change you. But you get to talk to him.

You get to be honest. You get to humble yourself and make requests. Two, thanksgiving. So he says, do not be anxious about anything, but it's everything by prayer and supplication. So that's humble request.

With thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Here's what thanksgiving does. Thanksgiving is past-oriented or present-oriented. What you're doing in that moment is saying, here's what you've done before. Here's how you've been good before. Here's what's going on in my life right now that I can appreciate.

That I can be thankful for. So for those of you who struggle with worry and anxiety, you start off by praying. You start off by making humble requests. But then you can just start, you can pause that and start saying, God, thank you for how you answered in the past. Thank you for all the times that I've been anxious over something and you actually worked. I'm here.

For some of you who've struggled with anxiety for a long time, you've had years of anxious things and you're here. You made it. God has answered. He has worked. I know you've moved from anxiety to anxiety, but he's answered his words. You get to remember.

You get to recount what he's done. You get to say he answered here and he answered here and he answered here. Some of you that says, God, I thank you that I'm alive. I'm sucking oxygen today. I'm thankful for the cross. You died to rescue me.

I know you have my back. For those of you who are worried and anxious, have you tried praising him? Have you tried thanking him? Have you tried singing and remembering all that he's done, all that he is? Thanks again. So, supplication with thanksgiving.

So, you want to make humble requests, but you also want to be thankful. Seven. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Okay. Okay. Here's how I've heard this talk before, and I think that it is correct, but I think it works two ways.

I've heard it this way. Don't be anxious. Don't be anxious. Pray. And you'll feel great. Don't be anxious.

Pray. And then peace, magical super peace. Peace beyond all understanding. Right? It's this, don't be anxious. Pray.

And then suddenly, you will feel like you are in a cloud. Right? Right? You've heard that. I think that that is true. I think that that can happen.

That God can so wrap you up in a cloud that everything else melts away. But I also think that's not the only way this happens. Here's what it says. A peace, the peace of God. So an eternal, cosmic, massive and glorious peace.

It's God's peace, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. For some of you who struggle with worry and anxiety, I think what Paul is saying is get on your list. Begin to pray and trust that God's peace will guard your heart and your mind. That he will clamp down on you and he'll keep you. And that a year from now, two years from now, it will make no sense that you stayed. No sense that you were faithful.

No sense that you still loved him. It will surpass knowledge, but his peace will have clamped down on you. And kept you in the midst of something that should have torn you apart. It should have ruined your marriage. It should have ruined your family. It should have ruined you.

It should have had you walk away from the faith. And Jesus' peace will guard your heart and your mind. He will protect you in the midst of all the things that attack you. See, we think that, okay, there are many situations that keep going, but I'll feel fine. And I'm not sure that's the case. I think sometimes it means he'll grab ahold of you and you'll make it through.

For some of you, you have in your mind, in times of anxiety, you have all of this that's attacking you and say, Jesus doesn't love me. God isn't real. This isn't okay. I'm not going to make it. I don't know if I believe in the cross anymore. And at that same time, you're going, Jesus, help me.

Help me to believe. Help me to trust in you. If I'm going to have faith, it's going to be you doing it. And I believe that's that moment where the Holy Spirit, on some sort of subterranean level, has reached in and grabbed you and just said, I know you have no faith right now. And I know you have no way that you understand how this is going to work out. But you belong to me.

And I'm going to guard your heart and your mind. And there's going to be a peace that surpasses understanding so that you'll still be mine when this is over. Now, feel free to pray for the cloud. But ask him, let me feel good. But trust in those moments if you're a Christian, that he's going to give you a peace that you won't understand, that you won't be able to see, and he's going to hold you and guard your heart and your mind, and he's going to keep you for himself.

Because it's a God-level peace that's beyond all circumstances. The third tool he gives us. See that? Just verse 7, real quick. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. He keeps you in Christ.

Beyond anybody's ability to understand, he keeps you. Okay. Hey. Third thing he uses is meditation. And I'm going to read this, and then we'll talk about the difference between maybe your picture of meditation and Christian meditation. So, finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Let me read that again. Okay. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Okay, so we talk about meditation. If you're familiar with most forms of meditation, Eastern meditation, it is the clearing of your mind. You want it to empty your mind.

That is not Christian meditation. Christian meditation is you want to fill your mind with the things of God. So, you want to meditate on a passage of Scripture. You want to meditate on what's true and right. You want to sit and just think about the cross. You want to sit and study a section of Scripture and memorize it.

That's Christian meditation. David says, I hide your word in my heart. Meaning, I'm so engulfed in it. I've spent so much time in it that it's inside of me. So, what Paul says is, whatever. Whatever is good.

Whatever is lovely. Whatever is just. Whatever is commendable. If there is anything that is praiseworthy, think about these things. You know that song? I don't know how it is a Christmas song, but you're about to start hearing it on the radio.

The few of my favorite things. When the dog bites with these things. Think about my favorite things. I think it's a Christmas song because it says brown paper package. It's not up the street. I think that's the only thing I can think of.

It's from the sound of music. It's the only thing I can think of. But she says, basically, when I'm feeling bad, think about my stuff. So, Paul says, take a minute in the midst of your worry. And one aspect of this is just think about things that are good. Look, when you're worried and concerned and you're anxious, guess what?

Puppies still exist. They're out there. They're still fuzzy. Beautiful landscapes. The Grand Canyon. Like, you get to sit and think about things that are lovely and good.

Think about cinnamon. It smells great. It makes everything taste better. Think about biscuits. Think about cinnamon biscuits. You get to just think about some things that are good.

Some things that you love, that you appreciate. Anything lovely. Anything praiseworthy. Anything excellent. It also means that for Christians, it is a practice for us. It's something that we regularly do to find the things that stir our affections for Jesus and do those things.

Find the things that help us love Jesus. That's why Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your in-chain. Like, what we're called to do is to love him and focusing on what's pure and just and excellent and lovely includes Jesus. He is the truth. He is what is excellent. He is what is praiseworthy.

And we need to find the things that stir our affections. So for some of you, that's walking in the woods. As you walk in the woods, it's like you come alive to God and his creation and what he's done. You need to praise him. Like, one of the reasons we gather on Sundays to study his word and to sing is because it's reminding us of his good. It's stirring our affections for him.

I leave on Sundays. Sometimes we sing songs and I think that's true. You did die for me. You did rescue me. And it's like it imprints it into my mind. It pushes it down into my heart.

It takes things I know and it makes them real. We've got to find ways to stir our affections. Some of you that's being alone. Some of you that's hanging out with a bunch of church family and just talking about how God's good. That that reminds you of his goodness. It reminds you that you're not by yourself.

Some of you this is singing songs to, what's it, Caleb? On the radio. Find what it is. Some of you, if I asked you right now, what is it that stirs your affections for Jesus? You would have no answer. And if you were a Christian, my suggestion to you is start finding some things.

Serving. Giving away some of your money. That stirs my affections for Jesus. When I have to give up some of my money, it reminds me that Jesus is good and that he matters more than my money. It's painful in the beginning and then it reminds me of the gospel. Being outside.

Sitting in a pure stand. I think about Jesus. Like, find what it is. Reading scripture. Studying scripture. Memorizing scripture.

Focus on those. Meditate. Spend time on them. Okay. Here's the thing when it comes to meditation. Look down at, when it comes to action to all of these.

Prayers, supplication, Thanksgiving, and meditation. Verse 9. Well, you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. So he's saying, look, we actually, you were in life with me. You know what I'm talking about. But you've learned and received and heard and seen in me.

Practice these things and the God of peace will be with you. Okay. Practice these things. I love that he uses the word practice because it means two things. It means you're not going to be great at it and you get to continue to do this forever. It's a practice.

It's a normal part of life for you. So, any of y'all ever tried to learn a sport? Maybe you tried to play ping pong for the first time. Maybe that's low on your scale of sports, but I'm just trying to pick something here. Maybe the first time you ever played cornhole or pin jam or tried to do anything. Maybe some of y'all watched those videos online where people flipped a water bottle.

And you thought, that's easy. And then you tried. Okay. You weren't good at first. For those of you who struggle with anxiety and you think, I prayed, I'm not fixed. That's why it's a practice.

Keep doing it. Keep praying. Keep being thankful. Keep remembering what's good. And do it over and over and over again. You're not going to pray today and have your anxiety going.

You're going to pray today and tomorrow and the next day and all the days. Because it's a practice. It's what you continually have to do to remind yourself. You get to practice. This also means it takes time. The people who do anything well spend a lot of time on it.

There are very few people in the world who just are magically good at things. Most people who are here playing an instrument, you say. Did you practice? They'll look and you respond. Nope. I found the saxophone and I was good at it.

No. It's not what they say. It's not true. They'll say yes. Hours and hours. Hours and hours and hours.

Some of you should know the worry and anxiety. You need to start going to bed later. You need to start getting up earlier. You need to start finding some time. You need to work out something with your spouse. You need to watch kids.

Because you've got to close your computer. Get off of Facebook. Get off of Twitter. You need to have space and time to be unplugged without any kind of screen in your face slashing things at you. You need to take the time to meditate on God's word and his goodness. You need to take the time to pray.

Do you know how anxious our society is? I've tried to reasonably watch. I watched cartoons with my son. This is like one and a half or whatever. This is how cartoons are these days. It's like.

They're just. They're hyper. And then I tried to watch the old Mr. Rogers neighborhood. I almost died. I used to watch that growing up.

It was painful. He just like walks in. He's like. I'm going to take 25 seconds to take my shoes off. It's like. Who paid this cat for this?

Like. He's just stalling. This isn't television. We're so used to everything happening so quickly. We're so used to. If you're scrolling through Facebook.

Look. How many videos do you watch the first 10 seconds of? Like. You just can't. I'm not able to focus. I get on Twitter.

After I get off Twitter. I'm like. Everything is like 150 characters or something. I don't know. It's short. I just flip through.

I do that for 10 or 15 minutes. Afterwards. I'm just like. It's like. I just cranked my ADD up. Like.

We have. Yeah. When was the last time you sat? For 15 minutes. With nothing. Going on.

So we're sure you should have to propose. And it used to be when you waited for a bus. Or you waited in the doctor's office. And the best thing you could have is a magazine. Some of y'all. You're waiting.

Is now you watching Netflix on your phone? And then we wonder why we're hyper. And we have ADD. And we're anxious. We don't ever spend any time. Where it's quiet.

Where our brain gets to rest a little bit. Where we're doing something that's just creative. Or we're. Like. You've got to make time for. Practicing.

Supplication. Thanksgiving. And meditation. You have to have time. Anxiety and worry insert themselves into your life. Prayer and meditation do not.

You ever. You ever been riding to work. And suddenly just. You heard a pop. And now you had to meditate for an hour. No.

But you got a flat tire. You ever been to work. And it turns out someone was sick. So then you had two hours to break. No. But you had someone sick.

So you had to do twice as much work that day. Worry and anxiety are going to show up. Your child is going to run into your room. At two o'clock in the morning. And throw up on the floor. Prayer is not going to run into your room.

At two o'clock in the morning. And you're like. I'll spend some time. It's not going to happen. You have to make time for it. That's the one thing.

Like. In our anxiety. We've got to make some space. Which means you've got to say no to some things in your life. You've got to get your bummed down some. You've got to turn your computer off.

You've got to work out something with your spouse. Some sort of schedule. So that you can rest. So that you can sap it. So that you can have some time.

Because these work. And they'll go to work on us. But we've got to have time. Then you make some promise here at the end. Practice these things. And the God of peace will be with you.

That is the Christian promise. That is the promise we're given and kept in Jesus. Is that God is with us. He joined us. We don't have a God who's always stayed above the frame. We have a God that says I have a baptism to be baptized with.

And I'm distressed until it happens. We have a God that falls on his face before his father. And sweat pours off. And he prays. Lord help me. Take us away if you can.

And if not. Help me to be faithful. Your will be done. Romans 8. 32 says this. He who did not spare his own son.

But gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him. Graciously give us all things. You see. We have the Christian promise. Which is that God is with us.

That he joined us. That he went to the cross. That God gave up his own son. So that we can trust him infinitely. That in the midst of everything. We can lean into him.

And run into him. Because he loves us. If you're a Christian. The Holy Spirit dwells in you. God is actively with you. His peace is actively with you.

Jesus doesn't just say I'm going to send comfort. He says I'm going to send the comfort. I'm not just going to send you help. I'm going to send the helper. For those of us who are in Christ. The Holy Spirit dwells in us.

And works in us. And holds us. And guards us. And keeps us. And in the midst of anything you're going through. The God of peace will be with you.

That is the Christian promise. Confirmed and sealed. And forever ours on the cross. There's an indigent and fruit. There's a risen kingdom on the throne. And a helper and a comfort that dwells inside of us.

To keep us. And carry us on. That's what we have in Christ. So here's what we're going to do. Today's a little different. The band's going to come back up here.

We are going to spend the next bit of time that we have together practicing these practices. Because they're practices. So you have to do them. So rather than just talking about this. Talking about supplication and thanksgiving and meditation and living life. Go home and try to find a place to do that.

We figured you were already here. You'd already cleared your schedule. So let's begin to practice a little bit. Let's begin to go ahead and walk through some of what the opportunity we have is what Paul's called us into. So for the very first thing Paul says is to take your worry and take your anxiety.

Don't be anxious about them. But pray about anything. By supplication. So what we're going to do is we're going to take just a minute right where you are. And we're going to humbly ask God to work. You have things to be anxious over.

You have things to be worried about. We're not going to sit in our worry and our anxiety and have an ambulance. We're going to point it to Jesus in the midst of all the real concerns you have. You begin to just say, God, I need you. I need you to help me here. I need you to be at work here.

I need you to redeem here. I need you to step into this situation. I don't have any control of their health. I don't have any control of this relationship. I can't make them repent. I can't make them come back.

So right now where we are, I want you to just begin to take all the things you're concerned about. All the things you're worried about. Maybe short-term stuff that's happening this week. Stuff that's not going to happen. It's five years away. You can just ask God.

Move here. Work here. Let's do that now.

Whoops! We had some problems recording on Sunday. Unfortunately the best we've got is the recording from our iMac's internal microphone. Sorry for the sneezing!

Condemnation and Criticism

Condemnation and Criticism

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

All right, so we are in our fifth week of our Killjoy series. We've got this week and next week, and we're finishing it up. What we've been doing is we've been looking at there are certain things as Christians that do not have to be true for us, do not have to be normal for us, but that we've gotten used to, that have become normal for us. Today we're going to be talking about self-loathing. You can call that self-condemnation. Sometimes it goes under the name of low self-esteem, which I don't like.

I don't think that's helpful, but people use that term. We use self-loathing, self-condemnation, self-hatred. We're going to just talk a little bit about how that works and how it affects us and how it robs us of joy and what the Bible says about how we can be free from it. So I started playing football when I was like 11, and then I played through elementary school, middle school, high school, and some in college. And my sophomore year of high school, I sublexed my patella, which just means I dislocated my kneecap on my left knee. So I went to – actually, no, it was in my freshman year.

So my freshman year, starting in my freshman year, I got hit. My kneecap came out of place, and then every year after that, I had knee injuries. So over the course of the rest of my career from my freshman year onward, I dislocated this kneecap four times, strained in MCL, strained in LCL, tore fibers, and meniscus. I dislocated this kneecap three times, which I was at a doctor one time, and he goes, how many times have you dislocated? He's a doctor, so he probably said sublexed your patella. And I was like, this is the sixth one.

He goes, you know, it usually only happens to girls, right? I was like, bruh. I did not. I do now. Thank you. He was like, and just kept going.

Just gets to go about his day being a doctor, and I have some sort of girl knees. I don't know. No offense to all the ladies in here, but I took offense at that. But anyway, sublexed this one. Three times, strained in MCL, strained in PCL, strained in LCL, tore in ACL, and tore meniscus and fibers. I've gotten really good at taking naps in MRI machines.

My knees hurt. They started hurting when I was a freshman in high school. They continue to hurt. They still hurt. They make really terrible noises if I walk upstairs or carry things or walk forward. Went to a doctor recently.

I was like, it was just like a normal checkup because I'm getting older, and you have to start going to those. And so I was like, I don't need you to listen to my knees. And so I bent over, and he listened. And I was like, what do you think? And he was like, well, if you don't run a lot, if you don't go jogging or make that a thing. And I was like, doctor, I love you.

I just wanted to say. I always thought running was evil also. He's like, if you don't do that, you might be all right. So I was like, oh, okay. So if I don't make jogging a thing, I won't have to have surgery.

And he goes, oh, no. No, you're going to have to have surgery, but you could push it back by a couple years. I was like, well, great. My knees hurt. They hurt. They hurt.

They have gotten used to it. It's not like a really violent pain. It's a dull pain. They grind. They pop. It's normal for me.

It is normal for my knees to feel this way. So my wife's like, you should go ahead and get surgery. And I'm like, no, because that would feel like out of the normal type pain. Like, that's different. I'm used to this. I'm okay with this.

I want to keep my knees the way they are. Slight pain, but not continual aggressive throbbing pain or surgery pain. And for a lot of us, when it comes to self-loathing, when it comes to this internal dialogue, this internal monologue, we've gotten so used to it. We don't even notice it anymore. I don't pay attention to my knees hurting. That's normal for me.

That's my center of gravity for me. So for a lot of us in the room, you've gotten so used to speaking down to yourself because self-loathing in some ways is a voice. Your voice is somebody else's voice. It's kind of in your head as an internal dialogue. And so normal life looks to you like, I'm ugly. I'm fat.

I'm such an idiot. God, nobody really likes me. I made that conversation awkward. They don't really want to talk to me. These friends aren't really my friends. They just have to hang out with me so they're nice to me because they have to.

I'm going to ruin my marriage. I'm going to mess my kids up. I'm a terrible mother. I'm a terrible father. I'm a failure. I'm an idiot.

I'm horrible. I'm ugly. Nobody really likes me. I don't have any real friends. This is a normal thought process for you. So that when you go to do something and you mess up, you think, of course.

Of course I would mess up. That's what I'd do. When a relationship starts going poorly, you start going, yeah, of course. Because this is how all my relationships work. Because I'm such an idiot. I've been doing this my entire life.

I'm the one who derails everything. I'm the one who ruins everything. This has become a normal, everyday, for some of you it's a, I should just kill myself. I'm worthless. I'm a failure. Everyday.

It's not uncommon for these type of thoughts to be how you speak to yourself, how you think about things. And here's what we're looking at this morning. If you are a Christian, and if the gospel is true, then this internal dialogue, this internal monologue can't be. If the gospel is true, then these things that have begun to be normal in our heads can't be. Can't be true. That's what I want us to see this morning as we go into scripture.

And then I want us to, out of that, begin to know how do we respond. What do we do? So let's go to Colossians 1. We read this earlier. It's on page 638. If your Bible is a blue and white Bible, one of the ones in the rows.

If you don't own a Bible, this is our gift to you. Take it. But we'll be on page 638 looking in Colossians. This is a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to a church in Colossae. Teaching them about Jesus. Teaching them about how Christianity works.

We're going to pick up in verse 15. The first word is he. That's talking about Jesus. And it'll be talking about Jesus throughout. He is the image of the invisible God. Okay, so Jesus, God created the world.

He exists in a spiritual realm. We don't get to see him. But Jesus lets us see him. Jesus is what God would be like if he became a person. So he's the image of the invisible God.

The firstborn of all creation. Now firstborn, when it's used in the Bible, can mean two things. It can mean, in this section, it can be the firstborn of all creation. That can mean that he was created first. But firstborn is also used to mean has preeminence over, is dominant over, because of the way they did lineage.

So he's either created first or he has dominance over. The firstborn of all creation for, so it's explaining this, by him all things were created in heaven and on earth. Okay, it means has dominance over. It doesn't mean he was created first. Jesus has existed since eternity past as part of the Trinity. He was not created.

He has dominance over everything because he created everything. Okay, Jesus created everything. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. So all nations, all countries, all rulers, all thrones, all dominions, visible and invisible.

So spiritual as well. Spiritual dominions and authorities and rulers, all of them were created by Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus. And he is before all things. And in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. I know we don't usually do this, but can somebody say amen or praise Jesus? Isn't that good? That he is massive. He's created everything. Everything exists in him and for him and through him.

And then he went to a cross to reconcile everything back to himself. That's who Jesus is. Okay. 21. And you. And you who were once alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds.

All right. Let's look at those terms real quick. Let's explain them. Especially for the person in here who has that sort of internal dialogue. Alienated. Outcast.

Alone. Alone. Isolated. Unwanted. Unloved. Separated.

That's what alienated means. Alienated. Hostile in mind. Means that you are an enemy. You are far from God. You are against God and God was against you.

And it says in mind, meaning that you are completely laid bare before him. He can see your thoughts. He can see everything you've ever done. That God looks at you and knows exactly what is going on with you. You have nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.

You are laid bare. You are fully exposed in front of him. And it says doing evil deeds. Meaning that we were wicked. Sinful. Failures.

Sick. Twisted. Broken. Horrible. People. That's what that means.

That's what that means. But. It says who once were. That once was. If you are a Christian, that once was true for you. You once were alienated.

Hostile. Now. Wicked. Sinful. Failure. Who's an enemy of God.

You once were. What's it say? 22. He has now. Okay. Because of how English works.

Once were. He has now. This is change. This used to be true about you. You used to be alienated. You used to be hostile in mind.

You used to be doing evil, wicked deeds. You used to be broken and sinful. But because of Jesus. He has now. He has. Jesus has done something now that changes that.

He has now. This is verse 22. So you who once were. 22. He has now. Reconciled in his body of flesh.

By his death. Reconciled means he brought you back. You're not alienated anymore. You're reconciled. That Jesus did that through his death on the cross. That those of you who feel like I'm unwanted.

I'm unloved. Nobody cares about me. Nobody wants me. I ruin everything. Jesus went to the cross. To pursue you.

To reconcile you. To make you his. Because he cares about you. And he loves you. Jesus tells his disciples. There's no greater love than this.

Than that someone would give up their life for their friends. That's what he did. The greatest love with which you've ever been loved. Was shown to you on the cross. When Jesus went to the cross. While you were his enemy.

To make you his. He has now through the cross. Changed. The descriptors for us. Some of you. If we had to ask.

How would you describe yourself. And you were going to write it down. You'd write. Unwanted. Damaged goods. Failure.

Whore. You would. That would be how you would write it. And what this just said was. You once were. But now.

Jesus has. And he changes. Your descriptor. Here's what it says. And now Jesus has reconciled you. I mean he's brought you back.

To himself. In order. To present you. Holy. And blameless. And above reproach.

Before him. He rescued you. Died for you. To present you to himself. To present you. Holy and blameless.

And above reproach. Before him. We're going to come back to those terms. Let's keep reading. Because I want to. Finish this thought.

And then we'll come. We'll define those terms. Spend the. The remainder of our time there. If indeed. It's 23.

If indeed. You continue in the faith. Stable and steadfast. Not shifting from the hope. Of the gospel you heard. Which has been proclaimed.

In all creation. Under heaven. And of which I. Paul. Became a minister. Okay.

So now we have an issue. When we get to the text. He says. You were this. Jesus has now. Made you this.

Holy blameless. And above reproach. If. Okay. So that's a scary word.

If indeed. You remain. Stable and steadfast. And not shifting from the hope. Okay. So that can mean.

One of two things. That if. Can mean one of two things. It can mean. This will be true for you. If.

You keep it together. That if. Can also mean. If this is true for you. This is what will happen. So it can be.

This is true. If you keep it together. Or it can be. If this is true for you. You'll keep this. This is what will happen.

You'll make it to the end. So let me. Explain. Put this in a different category. To maybe help you think about it. All right.

So when I was. Going into my freshman year. Of high school. We were at a. I grew up in the church. I was in a youth group.

We were in a. I was in the youth choir. Anybody else in the youth choir. High quality stuff. We're going to get. We're going to get youth choir started here.

It's going to be awesome. We're going to wear white gloves. We're going to do interpretive dance. I got big plans for you guys. We're bringing handbells back. All right.

So anyway. I was in a youth choir. We went to Florida. To sing a song. To make a CD. Or something.

I don't remember. And there were some guys there. From another youth. Thing. That were. Running their mouths.

And telling people. They were going to fight them. And it. It got to this whole big. Thing. And.

There was a point. Where. These two guys. Were coming towards. Me. And a group of other people.

Telling us. They were going to beat us up. And so I thought. That sounded like a bad idea. Because I don't know. I don't like getting beat up.

So. Ninth grade Chet. Thought. You know. One of the best ways. To not get beat up.

Is to punch someone first. And so. While they were walking this way. I jumped up. And I punched a guy. Who was closest to me.

And there was another guy. Who was bigger. But this guy was closer. Okay. Tracking with the story. All right.

My brother Logan was there. And he's older than me. Now. Now. A good. Older brother.

Regardless of the circumstances. Will defend. Their younger brother. In a fight. I'm making that as a blanket statement. A good older brother.

Will defend. The younger brother. In a fight. Now. I punch this guy. Big guy grabs me.

Older brother. Punches the big guy. It's beautiful. Might actually be. Don't read too much in this. I'm not making theological statements.

At this point. I'm just telling you a story. So. A big guy grabs me. And then. He gets punched.

In the side of the head. Now. We can. Then begin to argue. Because. My brother Logan.

Punched him in the head. He is a good brother. Or. Because he is a good brother. He punched him. In the side of the head.

See how this works. That's the issue. We're facing. In this text. Do you make it. To the end.

Because you are a Christian. Or. If you make it. To the end. You are a Christian. When you take.

The totality. Of the rest. Of the scriptures. Where it's say. That Jesus is the author. And the finisher.

Of our faith. That he who began. A good work in you. Is faithful to complete it. Where Jude says. I commend you to Jesus.

Who's. Who's going to keep. The only person. Who can keep you. From stumbling. What this text means.

Is. Jesus. You used to be. Hostile. And wicked. And evil.

Used to be. A rebellious. You used to be. All these things. And Jesus has now. Through the cross.

Made you. Holy. And blameless. And above reproach. And because he has done that. You will.

Make it to the end. That all of those. Who make it to the end. Were. Rescued. Redeemed.

And made that way. And brought there. By Jesus. Not by themselves. That's very important. Especially for people.

Who struggle with self-loathing. Because you will try to. As best you can. Wiggle your way out of. Jesus being this ultimate hero. Who rescues and redeems you.

And the text means. You make it to the end. If you're a Christian. If this is true for you. You'll make it to the end. And those who don't make it to the end.

Weren't actually ever saved. That's. And we can talk more about that. But I just had to cover that. As we went through this real quick. So what I'm saying is.

Because my brother was a good brother. He punched the guy on the side of the head. All right. You can ask him about that later. He's one of our group leaders. Pray for him.

He's got anger issues. All right. Let's go back. You once were. He has now. Let's look at these phrases.

He has now. Reconciled in his body of flesh. By his death. In order to present you. Holy. Blameless.

And above reproach. What do those words mean? Holy means. Set apart. For God. Cleaned.

Lifted up. And set apart for God. Some of you think you are separated from God. What this actually says is. No. You are separated.

For God. That he separated you from everything else. For him. That he brought you to himself. He made you. Holy.

That they were. Consecrated. Set aside. Utensils. They used to use in the temple. They were consecrated.

Set aside. Holy places. And that because of Jesus. We've been made. Holy. Meaning we've been consecrated.

We've been set aside. We've been brought to him. Holy and blameless. You're not at fault. If you are in Christ. You have no blame.

If you went before a judge. They would have nothing against you. You are blameless. Now think about that for a second. How many of us does that actually get to be true for? On our own.

Raise your hand. We're going to punch you. If that's true for you on your own. Because you're a liar. Okay. None of us.

None of us. None of us get to be blameless. Jesus makes us blameless. And then it says. Above reproach. I want to read you all the definition of a reproach.

It says to address someone. In such a way as to express. Disapproval. And disappointment. Disappointment. Or.

An expression. Of disapproval. And disappointment. That's what. That's what reproach means. And we're above.

Reproach. Meaning there is no. Disapproval. There is no. Disappointment. For those who are in Christ.

You cannot be. An idiot. A failure. You cannot be. All these names you. Label yourself with.

Or that other people. Label you with. You can't be. Not if you're in Christ. You're above that. There is no disapproval.

There is no disappointment. You have not fallen short. You have not failed. You have not let people down. Like not in Christ. You're above reproach.

Nothing bad. Can be said about you. Romans 15. Three. Says it this way. For Christ did not please himself.

But as it is written. The reproaches of those who reproached you. Fell on me. Now that's a. Kind of a clunky sentence. But here's what it means.

Everything bad. If you were a Christian. Everything bad. That could be said about you. Lands on Jesus. That's what happened at the cross.

That's why Jesus died on the cross. He did not deserve to die on the cross. He deserved to be exalted. And worshipped. And held high. And loved.

And respected. And welcomed. And cared for. But he traded all of that in. To swap places with us. So that everything bad.

That anyone could possibly say. About us. Lands on Jesus. And Jesus takes it to the cross. We could line up. Every Christian in this room.

And we could walk up this ramp. And you could walk up to a microphone. And you could say out loud. Every bad thing. That you could think to say about yourself. That someone else could think to say about you.

That someone could drag out of your past. And if you are a Christian. None of that would stick to you. Because it all. Went to Jesus. And he took it to the cross.

All the things that could be said bad about you. Became true of Jesus. And all of his righteousness and holiness. Became true of us. So that in Christ.

We are holy and blameless. And above reproach. Remember when you were a little kid. And you'd be arguing with somebody. And you'd call them a name. And they'd be like.

I'm rubber. And you're glue. Everything you say. Bounce off me. And sticks on you. Maybe you don't remember that.

That's a thing. They got the people wrong. If you're a Christian. You're rubber. Jesus is glue. That's how that works.

Everything that could be said bad about you. Everything that could be levied against you. As a complaint. As disapproval. As disappointment. Bounces off of you.

And sticks on Jesus. That's the good news of the cross. That's the gospel. So if you follow yourself around. With an internal dialogue of. I'm terrible.

I'm the worst. I'm going to mess my children up. I'm going to fail. I'm going to ruin my marriage. I'm the one who did this. I'll never be clean.

I'll never be washed. I've always. Have this in my past. I'll never be. Any of the things I've set out to be. I'm always going to be a failure.

I'm always going to fall short. I'm always going to be an idiot. If that's you. All of that. If you are in Christ. Bounces off of you.

And sticks to Jesus. Because the reproaches. The complaints. The disapproval. The disappointment. That would have come to you.

Go to Jesus. And then Jesus took him to the cross. And all of his holiness. And blamelessness. And everything that made him above reproach. So that no one can say anything bad about Jesus.

Comes to you. That's the gospel. And that's why. If you. If the gospel is true for you. None of this other stuff can be.

If the gospel is true. If you've placed your faith in Jesus. And he's died for you. And reconciled you. And made you holy. And blameless.

And above reproach. To present to himself. None of this other stuff can be true. One of the reasons we read. Verses 15 through 20. To show you how massive Jesus is.

And how much in control he is. And how sovereign and eternal he is. Is because I want you to know. That if Jesus says you're holy. And blameless. And above reproach.

You are. And you don't have an option on that. If you've placed your faith in Jesus. And he says. I've made you holy. And blameless.

And above reproach. You are. And secondly. If that is seated in Christ. If it's wedged in him. If it belongs to him.

If he's the one who keeps it together. It's not going anywhere. If it was up to you. To keep together. To be holy. And blameless.

And above reproach. You'd have a problem. But because it's based in Jesus. It's eternal. If you've placed your faith in Jesus. You will forever be holy.

And blameless. And above reproach. Because of what Jesus has done for you. And that's good news. Okay. So where does this come from?

How do we begin to be free from it? Well we said when we started off this series. That we were going to talk about your three enemies. As we went through. We haven't spent much time on them in the past couple weeks. But we're bringing them back up today.

You've got three enemies. The flesh. The world. And the devil. So I'm going to give a brief explanation of these.

And then we'll talk about how they work. But the flesh is you. You choose to sin. You actively pursue sin. So it's possible.

In this scenario. That this is your own internal dialogue. Where you're beating yourself up constantly. Maybe you think it'll help. There's some reasons why you might do it. Some of you are trying to motivate yourself.

So you say things to yourself. Like don't be lazy. Don't be an idiot. If you don't figure this out. You'll be a failure your whole life. You're trying to motivate yourself.

By giving yourself some tough love. Some of you are trying to keep yourself from being disappointed. So you apply for a job. And then you. She's more qualified than I am. She'll get the job.

They don't even really like me. I should just be happy if I don't get fired. No one likes you. You're not going to get invited to the prom anyway. Everybody thinks you're ugly. You should just be happy if people let you come.

And if anybody will dance with you. You just set yourself up to not be disappointed. Some of you. You're always surprised if something good happens. And it's because you have an internal dialogue. That's consistently telling yourself.

Everything's going to fail. Everything's going to be terrible. Everything's the worst. I'm going to break it. So when anything good happens.

You get surprised. Some of you. You can see it because you apologize for everything. Somebody gets angry. Somebody gets sad around you. You apologize to them.

Because obviously it had to be your fault. Feeling gets tense or awkward. I'm sorry. People are consistently looking at you going. What are you sorry about? I just.

I am. Sorry. I'm sorry that I'm here. Don't stop looking at me. There's this need to. Because you've already conditioned yourself to feel like such a failure.

Some of you spend a lot of time being focused on the things you did wrong. The mistakes you made. Rather than things you got right. Some of you spend all your time comparing your bad qualities to the good qualities of others. It's possible that if you struggle with this. It is just a fleshly.

You have gotten in the pattern personally of beating yourself up. Of using this as a tool to manage your life. To motivate yourself or to keep you from being disappointed. But if you're a Christian. Those things you're saying can't be true. They're true of Jesus.

Can't be true of you. The world. So we said the flesh, the world, the devil. The world could be any kind of outside force. Any kind of outside anything. So some of you.

The internal self-loathing, self-hatred, self-condemnation voice. Is your dad's. Or it's your mom's. Some of you. Have a jury of middle schoolers that follow you around. You got out of middle school 20 years ago.

And you're still whipping yourself with stuff that 13 year olds said. Some of you it's your ex-spouse. Why are you such a screw up? You'll never be able to. You'll always. You mess everything up.

You're the reason this is broken. You're the reason this is wrong. For you a lot of the stuff you say to yourself isn't I. It's you. It's some other voice coming into your head. It's your dad saying something to you.

It's your mom saying something to you. You've been conditioned. It's gotten so normal to you. This is the way you grew up. And so since you've been. Six.

Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten years old. This is how you talk to yourself. You're an idiot.

You're a disappointment. You're a failure. You're a failure. Not if you're in Christ. You were. But he has now made you holy and blameless and above reproach.

Some of you today in the name of Jesus get to evict a chorus of 12 year olds from your head. That's good news. 12 year olds. 12 year olds are the worst. No offense. If there are 12 year olds in here.

You'll get better. The third one. And this one's weirder for us. But we've got to spend some time talking about it. The flesh. The world.

The devil. We actually have a spiritual enemy. The Bible is clear that spiritual reality exists. That there's a God who's good. Who has angels that are good. And that there are evil angels or rebellious angels.

That are called demons or evil spirits. That actually exist. That actually cause harm. If you just read through the New Testament. And I know as Westerners we're prone to just kind of gloss over those passages. But Jesus interacts with demons.

It's weird. I get that. Here's the thing. The Bible is clear. Demons exist. They are real.

They do affect people. They can harm you. Mentally, physically. Like we see that in the Bible. The Bible is never demon focused or evil spirit focused. It is always fully and forever Jesus focused.

But we have to as Christians be aware. That this is a reality. And take that into consideration. So there is a possibility. That if you have some sort of a negative voice in your head. That it is demonic.

That it's actually the accuser. So the Bible calls Satan the accuser. That he accuses us. That he attacks us. That he comes and condemns. He says you're a failure.

You're terrible. He points out your sin. But then he uses it to say. This is why you're unlovable. This is why you're wicked. This is why you'll never be forgiven.

This is why God can't save you. He keeps bringing up what you've done. Let me show you a couple of verses. And then we'll talk about a little more about how this works. But Ephesians 6.12 says this.

For we do not wrestle. And that word wrestle in the Greek means hand to hand combat to the death. Sitting friendly wrestling. This is you ran out of weapons. And now you're in a ditch with somebody. And one of you is coming out.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. But against the rulers. Against the authorities. Against the cosmic powers over this present darkness. Against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. That as Christians our main battle is not against political parties or nation states.

It's against spiritual forces of evil. At work in the world. Because there is a real eternity with a real heaven and a real hell. There is a reality beyond what we can see. Now for people who have grown up in the west.

Where we approach everything through reason, logic and science. Which there's nothing bad about any of those. All of those belong to God. Everything was created for him and through him. Reason, logic and science have their place. But there is something beyond what we can see.

The Bible is clear on that. And what it's saying is that a lot of our battle isn't against just flesh and blood. It isn't against our flesh or the flesh of others. There's actually spiritual reality going on. Now that's kind of terrifying.

To be honest with you. That you're in a hand-to-hand combat to the death with spiritual forces. And that would be absolutely cripplingly terrifying. If the Bible didn't say other things. So let's go back to Colossians 1.

It's going to be on the screen. Just to remind you. For by him, that's Jesus. All things were created in heaven and on earth. Visible and invisible. Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

So it's specifically saying visible ones and spiritual ones. Keep going Colossians 2. So it's saying he created all spiritual things. For in him, that's Jesus. The whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Meaning he's fully God.

And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority. So Jesus is seated over every cosmic power. And you've been filled up by him. And keeps going in Colossians and says this. God made. He's talking about you.

He says, God made alive together with him. Having forgiven us all our trespasses. By canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside. Nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities.

And put them to open shame. By trumping over them in him. The thing that rulers and authorities. That the enemy has against you is your sin. He accuses you of your sin. When Jesus paid for your sin.

And when he nailed it to the cross. The enemy has been disarmed. He has nothing to accuse you of anymore. He can come back and remind you of it. He can say, here's how you failed. Here's how you're evil.

Here's how you're twisted. Here's how you're broken. But guess what happens? All of those reproaches fall on Jesus. They're not true for you anymore. But it is possible for some of us.

Who have this internal dialogue. For it to be some sort of demonic thing. Now. I'm fully want us to continue to talk about this. I want to give you a few more ways to think about this. And then we're open for any kind of questions.

I'll just hang out afterwards. If you have more specific questions about this. But we don't want to spend all our time on it this morning. But a couple of things to maybe help you think about this. Now. Accusation and condemnation come from Satan.

Some of you think. You struggle with this feeling of guilt and shame. And you think. I can't. I can't go to God. I can't go to church.

There's this idea that if you go to God or go to church. He's just going to make it worse. All God's going to do is say. Yeah. Here's how you failed. Here's how you're terrible.

Here's how you're an idiot. And judge you and condemn you. But biblically. That's not God that does that. That's not Jesus that does that. That's Satan.

You just describe Satan. When somebody says. All God's going to do is condemn you. It's like no you just describe Satan. That's what the Bible says he does. He accuses and condemns.

God convicts. Which points out your sin. And then he goes to the cross for it. And offers you forgiveness and reconciliation and love. So the Holy Spirit in you.

If you are a Christian. Is going to convict. But the Holy Spirit uses a scalpel. Not a sledgehammer. So the Holy Spirit.

If you're a Christian. And you're convicted. He comes and says. You said this. You shouldn't talk to your spouse that way. You did this.

Like he. He goes right to the issue. He cuts it out like a cancer. And he leads you. Through. Through surgery.

Which is painful. Through conviction and repentance. Which is painful. To life and freedom. Satan doesn't do that. He hits you with a hammer.

Or he throws a blanket over you. It's just. You're an idiot. You're a failure. He points to your sin. But he doesn't.

He doesn't call for hope. He calls for condemnation. Some. Some of you. In your life. Have had.

And some of you have. Terrible friends. Some of you are sitting next to your terrible friend. Don't look at them. You've had terrible friends. They followed you around.

They. They made you feel bad about yourself. They called you names. They made you feel uncomfortable. They. They tore you down.

Some of you had friends that. That they could talk you into doing really dumb things. And eventually. Some of you grew up. And you got rid of these terrible friends. You moved on.

You were like. No. I can't. I can't hang out with you anymore. Because you make me feel terrible about myself. You.

You beat me down. And then you talk me into dumb things. Like all I ever do with you is get in trouble. Like this is. This is not a good friendship. This is not a healthy place.

Some of you. Potentially. If this is you. Who have. Struggled with self-loathing. May have.

Some sort of a demonic thing going on. That actually functions. Just like a terrible friend. That you don't realize is following you around. So you don't get rid of it.

All it does. Call you names. Give you bad advice. Bad suggestions. And because you don't realize. That this.

Maybe just be demonic. You don't tell it to leave. Now again. That may be super weird. But what Ephesians 6 just said was.

We don't wrestle with flesh and blood. But with. Spiritual forces. So let me tell you. If you are a Christian. If you're not a Christian.

I fully expect. All of this just weirded you out. We believe other weird things. We believe that God became a person. Died on a cross for our sin. Was laid in a grave.

Three days later. He rose again. And eventually. He's coming back on a horse. It gets way weirder. We believe all that.

Now. I'd love to talk to you about it. It's. It's. It's good news. It may come across as weird to us.

Now. For Christians in the room. Who aren't weirded out yet. You got to realize. We are actually at war. With spiritual forces.

Let me explain to you. What happens. When Christians go. Wait a second. Spiritual forces. Whoa.

And get really terrified. It is like. You were drafted. Went to boot camp. Went to training. Got sent down field.

Down range. So you are. You go on your first patrol. In Iraq. Or Afghanistan. You come back.

You go. I need to speak to the commanding officer. Why? I need to speak to the commanding officer. Right now. And for some reason.

They are not mean to you. And they let you do it. And you walk into the commanding officer's. Office. And you say. They are shooting at us.

They hate us out there. And your commanding officer goes. What? Get out of my office. Before I shoot at you. That's what.

When Christians go. Hold on a second. We are at a war. There is an enemy. Yes. The Bible is so clear on that.

We have just Americanized it out. Absolutely. The enemy wants to tear you down. And mess up your marriage. And keep you from following Jesus. Some of you.

When you open the Bible. And you start reading scripture. You hear things like. Jesus is an idiot. Like. You hear swear words.

I wasn't going to say them. But I was going to use a letter. But I feel like that might be inappropriate from up here. You hear. You hear swear words. Of.

This is. This is nonsense. This is garbage. Some of you right now in your head are saying. This is dumb. This is a waste of time.

I shouldn't be here. Some of you. Every time you try to read the Bible. You're overwhelmed by. Condemnation. And conviction.

And you can't even. We have an enemy. That does not want you to find freedom. And joy in Jesus. Does not want you to be active. And sharing your faith.

Does not want you to have life. And hope in him. A real enemy. And. We have a real king. Who's disarmed our enemy.

By taking our sin. To the cross. And by having everything bad. That you could ever say about me. Falls on Jesus. So we're free.

So what do we do? If this is you. What do you do? How do we find freedom here? First thing. You need to preach a better sermon.

For those of you who don't know. This is a sermon. We open the Bible. We say things about Jesus. Some of you. You.

Just so you know. Not some of you. All of you. You preach to yourself more than anybody else does. You preach to yourself more than anybody else does. You tell yourself more about what is true about life.

What's true about you. What's true about Jesus. Than anybody else does. And some of you who are Christians. Are preaching. Very terrible sermons to yourself.

All the time. Y'all know our sermons don't get good on Sunday. Until we get to Jesus. It's not a good sermon. Until we get to the point. Where Jesus shows up.

And saves all of us. Where Jesus is the hero. Where Jesus sets us free. But some of you are following yourself around. And preaching sermons. That I would get fired for.

And rightfully so. Your sermon just covers the first half. You're a failure. You're a sinner. You're terrible. You're an idiot.

Let's pray. That's a terrible sermon. Get to Jesus. If that's. If you were preaching a sermon. If you were.

Like you're following yourself around. Telling yourself theological truths about yourself. And if you are a Christian. You've got to get to Jesus. I was terrible. I was a failure.

My sin did Mark me. It did own me. But. Jesus died for me. And I'm free. And I'm holy.

And I'm blameless. And I'm above reproach. Everybody say that with me right now. If you're a Christian. I'm holy. Who.

That's enthusiasm. Let's go. I'm holy. I'm blameless. And I'm above reproach. That's true.

If you're in Christ. And that's a good sermon. That's real. Some of you need to get some passages of scripture. And begin to repeat them to yourself. You need to wake up in the morning.

And the first thing you do is you pray. And you thank Jesus. And then you start reading some scripture. And you start saying. I'm holy. And blameless.

And above reproach. That he who knew no sin. Became sin for me. So that I could become the righteousness of God. And I'm the righteousness of God. I'm clothed in Jesus.

I'm free forever. When I stand before the king. I will be welcomed. And loved. None of my sin will follow me anywhere. My sin will forever Mark Jesus.

And I will forever celebrate and praise him. Because I've been set free. And I'm a child of the king. Some of you need to begin to preach better sermons. And you legitimately. You really need to make a list of Bible verses.

Or truths about the gospel. We have some we can give you. To help you begin to know what is true. Because you from the age. Maybe some of you who grew up in homes. That were verbally abusive.

From the age of. I don't know. Three. Two. Whenever you started understanding language. Till you got out of the house.

You've heard verbally. Over and over again. You're an idiot. You're a failure. Look at you. No one could love you.

No one could want you. Like this is what's been beat into your head. And you need to begin to say out loud. Some things that are true. About the God of the universe. Who loves you.

And died for you. And came to rescue you. We need to preach better sermons. You need a better savior. Here's the best thing our culture can give you. The best thing they can give you.

Is you need to love yourself more. You need. A higher self esteem. You need to know that you're special. You're a snowflake. You're a magical rainbow pony.

You are. Repeat that after me. Magical rainbow pony. Like this is the best they can give you. You need to have self esteem. You need to know that you're special.

You need to. You need to forgive yourself. You need to learn to love yourself. Boo. No thank you. Part of the problem is that we're only looking at ourselves anyway.

And you're correct. When you look at yourself. And you come to the conclusion. That I'm terrible. That I'm a sinner. That I'm broken.

That I failed. Yes. The Bible will agree with you. But then it's going to say. But. But Jesus.

Some of you have been so focused on yourself. You need to get to. But Jesus. You need a better savior. You need the God that shows up. Not you.

Not more self esteem. Not more love for yourself. You need a God who gives you his esteem. Who forgives you. You don't need to forgive yourself. You need to be forgiven by Jesus.

You need to be redeemed by Jesus. Made much of by Jesus. You need to humble yourself before him. And then be given the confidence that the cross can give. That you're holy and blameless and above reproach. Not because of you.

But because of Jesus. And because it's because of Jesus. You can't mess it up. Every time you feel like I've failed. Yes. But Jesus.

We have a better savior than you. And your self esteem. And the way you feel about yourself. You get to have a self esteem that doesn't come from you. That comes from him. And it's a God esteem.

Where he lifts you up. Where he exalts you. Where he goes to work for you. Because he was humbled for you. We need a better savior. Galatians 2.20-21 says this.

I have it on the screen. I got it right here. I have been crucified with Christ. Meaning when I died. When Christ died. I died with him.

It's no longer I who live. But Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God. Who loved me. And gave himself for me.

See Paul is writing this. And he knows I was loved by God. And he gave himself up for me. He loved me. Then he says I do not nullify.

Which means treat like it doesn't exist. The grace of God. For if righteousness were through the law. Meaning rules. If righteousness. If I could be made right.

Be okay. Through the law. Then Christ died for no reason. When we're following ourselves around. And saying these mean things to ourselves. These hateful things to ourselves.

We're holding ourselves up against the law. I should look like this. I should be like this. I should be smart like this. I should have handled this better. You're holding yourself up to a standard.

And what he's saying is. If the standard could save you. Jesus died for no reason. But because Jesus died. We don't nullify. Or act like grace doesn't exist.

We trust Jesus. And let him live through us. That we died with him. All our sin died with him. And that he's alive in us. His righteousness is alive in us.

That we believe in grace. Which means we get all the benefits. Without any of the work. That we get to be holy. And blameless. And above reproach.

Even though we didn't deserve it. Because Jesus worked on our behalf. Thirdly. You need a better way to pray. Okay. So Jesus says this.

In the model prayer. In Matthew 6. So he says. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts. Or forgive us our sins.

Or forgive us our trespasses. Depending on your version. Forgive us our sins. That's what he's talking about. As we have forgiven our debtors. So help us.

Forgive us of our sins. As we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation. And deliver us from evil. So he specifically says.

It's a normal daily way to pray. To pray about the flesh. The world. And the devil. That's forgive me my sins. That's the flesh.

Lead me not into temptation. That's the world. And deliver us from evil. That's the devil. That's a normal daily way to pray. Some of you.

Only blame things on the devil. And you need to spend some time. Repenting of your own sin. Some of you. Most of us. Know that we sin.

Try to repent of our sin. But never get to the point. Where we say. And deliver us from evil. If the enemy's involved. He doesn't get to be.

Because you're the head of all rule and authority. And I'm free in you. And in the name of Jesus. Any enemy involvement has to go. So here's what we're going to do today.

We're going to actually pray through those three things. This morning. If you're not a Christian. If you don't pray. I would invite you to pray. I would invite you to begin to pray.

And ask Jesus to reveal himself to you. But also. If you're not going to pray. That's cool. You're welcome to hang out. With us at any point.

And be someone who's just checking this thing out. Who's even a little bit antagonistic to it. You're not going to offend us. You can ask us any questions you want. But I would ask that right now.

As we pray through some of this. You just be quiet and respectful. We're going to pray a little bit. For those Christians in the room. Who specifically struggle with this self-loathing. If we've been talking to you this morning.

We're going to spend more time talking about it in our groups. And for some of you may not know. You have this. There's a list we have in our Killjoy book. To help you identify it. We're going to pray about those three things.

The flesh. The world. And the devil. And here's how we're going to do this. Let's pray about the flesh first.

In just a second. We're going to pray. And you get to repent. For actively any participation you've had. In telling yourself lies. In preaching a false gospel to yourself.

You get to repent for unbelief. And then you get to remind yourself in prayer. Of what's true. That you're holy. And blameless. And above reproach.

That you're free. Some of us in our prayer lives. Need to get to the point. Where all we do is talk about ourselves. We talk about our friends and family. We need to start talking about Jesus.

In our prayer. Thank you Jesus. That you saved me. That you redeemed me. That you're king. And that I'm free.

So we're going to pray about the flesh. So just for a minute. I want you to take a second. And I want you to. If this is you. I want you to take a moment.

And ask the Holy Spirit to help you. To actually repent of. Any participation you've had in. Applying this to yourself. Lying to yourself. And then I want you to take a minute.

To just celebrate that Jesus. Frees you. Okay can we do that now? O Amen. Amen. Amen.

Now we're going to take a second to pray. Where he says, deliver us from temptation. Keep us from temptation. We're going to pray about where we're tempted to believe more about what the world says about us than what Jesus says about us. Some of you believe what your dad said about you more than you believe what Jesus says about you. Some of you believe what middle schoolers or your mom or some sort of a jury you've made up in your mind.

What they say about you, what you think people would say about you more than what Jesus says, which is your holy, blameless, and above reproach. We're just going to take a minute to pray that through the Holy Spirit he would let us not believe that. We would trust him more. That he would deliver us from the temptation. Keep us from the temptation to believe what the world says. That he would send unto you a gospel.

They would then satu liaby. And I believe what the Lord says. Those fruits and понимаю. Amen. Amen. Now in this third one, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to specifically pray that in the name of Jesus, if there's anything that's messing with your thought pattern, affecting how you think about yourself, that in the name of Jesus, it would have to leave. That the enemy does not get to speak into what's true about you or have any dominion in your brain in the way you think that you're free. You don't have to be, it's not, this authority isn't based off of you, it's based off of Jesus, his work on the cross, what he's already accomplished, what's already true. So you just get to right now saying in the name of Jesus, and Jesus, I pray that in the name of Jesus, that anything that is affecting my thoughts, that's not me or the Holy Spirit has to go.

Has no place in my thinking anymore. Take a second and do that. Amen. Amen. We said when we started this series that we were going to treat it a little bit the way we treat counseling, that I wish that we could have done this across the table. And here's what we always say when we get to this point when we're talking with people through this.

And just so you know, there have been many people in our church family who have struggled with this. And specifically when they got to the point where they got to tell something to just leave them alone in the name of Jesus, they felt free and clear. And it's not weird. We have an enemy that hates us, that wants to lie to us. You get to have freedom. Some of you in the room right now may have just thought when we got to that point where we were going to tell something to leave in the name of Jesus, you may have just gotten frustrated, fearful.

You may have begun to think, this is dumb. This is a waste of time. I'm not going to do this. That's not the Holy Spirit. It's not the Holy Spirit talking. It may be you.

And if it's you right now getting really frustrated, you can repent. But it's possible that you're being continually pressed to not tell something to leave in the name of Jesus. And I just want to encourage you, do. Because the Holy Spirit doesn't mind you saying that. He's active and at work to set you free. So we're going to take one more second to just pray and say in the name of Jesus, everybody in the room, in the name of Jesus, nothing gets to mess with me.

I'm free. Because I'm holy and blameless and above reproach because of the cross. Nothing gets to mess with my thinking. So let's continue to pray that just for a second. Amen. Amen.

Jesus, we thank you that you're good. Amen. That you who were holy and blameless and above reproach took everything that could ever be said bad about us onto yourself. That you became our sin. You became the worst of all of us. You became everything we could ever be accused of that would be true.

Everything we've ever tried to hide, you became it. And you were nailed to a cross and laid in a grave. And that you rose again conquering it. That we died with you and we get to rise with you. That it's you alive in us. So that we are now holy and blameless and above reproach forever.

Because you've accomplished that on our behalf. And that we get to be reconciled to you and presented to you. That one day we will be presented before your throne as holy and blameless and above reproach. And it will be a beautiful testament to your work on our behalf. That it will be a moment where you receive so much glory because you saved such sinners. And we'll be overwhelmed and tears will shrink down our face and we'll praise you, our God, for eternity.

Because you became our sin. So that we can be free. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Some of you, you need to go home.

You need to make a list. Bible passages. We can help you with that. You can talk to your community group leader about it. Some of you are going to need to do some follow-up with your community group leader. You have some questions.

Some of you, maybe we need to do some pastoral follow-up. That's kind of outlined in the beginning of our Killjoy books. Some of you are just going to need to be real honest with your group this week. One of the reasons we get to confess out loud is because everything we can say out loud bad about ourselves goes to Jesus. And we're above reproach. We're above reproach.

Lust

Lust

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Well, good morning. We'll be in Proverbs chapter 5. That'll be on page 341. If your Bible looks like this, go ahead and get over to Proverbs chapter 5. We've got a good bit of work to do today. We're going to be talking about lust in our Killjoy series and about how our approach to sexuality and our approach to lust has begun to rob us of our ability to have joy, to have peace, to rest in God.

And so we've got a good bit to go through. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to hop in. God, we thank you that you're good. Lord, we thank you, Lord, that your word speaks about topics that we need to learn. That you don't leave us on our own to figure it out, but that you speak to us, that you lead us, that you give us wisdom that we would not have on our own. And so, God, we praise you.

We pray that we'd listen and we'd follow. In Jesus' name, amen. Verse 1 and 2, I love how this starts. It says, My son, be attentive to my wisdom. Incline your ear to my understanding, that you may keep discretion and your lips may guard knowledge. First little thing I just want to throw out there for us as we get started this morning.

This starts off, it's Solomon writing. So he was a king and he was very wise and he's writing to his son. Later he says, sons, for the parents in the room, you need to have some conversations about sex that start off with my son, my daughter. You've got to talk to your children about sex. I came across some statistics this week I want to share with you. This is from the National Center of Biotechnical Information.

I don't expect you to know what that is. I don't know what it is. It had a.gov website, so it's important. They do good things, I guess. They basically took television shows and it says they coded them. They tried to see what kind of material was in them.

So, for example, a recent content analysis found, this is a quote, that 82% of episodes coded contained sexual content. However, only 2.9% of episodes with sex, so 2.9% of that 82%, contained messages about sexual patience and 5.2% had messages about taking sexual precautions. So 82% of the episodes they looked at talked about sex and only a very small portion of those talked about any sort of waiting or at least taking precautions. It says the American youth, and I don't know what age group that is, it just says youth, see 14,000 references to sex per year. 14,000. That's like 38 a day.

One source I saw said that about 156 of those, so right at about 1%, will actually be references to sex inside of marriage. So 14,000 references to sex, the average age that an American youth engages with pornography for the first time is 11. That's sixth grade. That's the average age that someone first sees pornography. Parents, you've got to talk to your kids about sex. You've got to talk to them about sex the way that Solomon does, which is both here's what's dangerous about it and here's what's good about it.

And I do want to give you some encouragement. The number one impact that they've studied, children growing up or whatever, the number one thing that has impacted them is parental conversations. That has the biggest impact. It's the biggest assigning factor on how they're going to view sex. They are hearing about sex. They are learning about sex.

It's not like you can wait until they're older and then be like, oh, let me explain this to you. They already know. At this point, they might know things you don't know. Like, I don't know. I mean, they're handing out iPads to sixth graders. Praise Jesus they never handed me an iPad when I was in sixth grade and told me to do all my schoolwork on it.

Like, we've got to start having some conversations, but parental conversations actually impact them, have an effect. Now, is it going to be awkward? Certainly. If it's not awkward, you didn't do it right. Like, of course, talking to your kids about sex is going to be awkward. I remember my parents sat me and my two brothers down, and I was in the middle.

So one was older than me. One was younger than me. I was pretty young. I don't know how young I was. I mean, like, eight or ten or something. And they're like, all right, you're hearing about sex.

Let's talk about this. And so it was my mom and my dad. They drew pictures. Not stick with me. My mom was a nurse. So they drew, like, what happens inside.

So, like, there's nothing that takes the mystique out of sex like phrases like fallopian tube. But, like, they talked to us about how everything worked. And then when it got a little more intimate, I don't know. Like, my dad just, he was like, he took the back half of the conversation. He was like, let me explain how this works. And I remember he's telling us, like, this is how, you know, you learn the science.

Let me explain what it's going to, you know, you're not going to be thinking about fallopian tubes. Let me talk about, you know, the other stuff that happens. And he got done talking to his three sons, and I went, no, that can't be right. Like, that is not correct. And my older brother, Logan, who is one of our community group leaders, hit me and said, shut up. He knows what he's talking about.

He's done this three times. Here's the thing. I grew up in the United States. My parents did not do a whole lot of governing what we watched on television. I'm one of the people who has seen 14,000 references to sex a year, if not more. And I remember very distinctly the four or five conversations that my parents had with me about sex.

Parents, we've got to start having some conversations that start off with my son, my daughter. We need to talk about something. Sure, it'll be awkward, but it's going to be very, very good. Secondly, as we get started, I love that it starts off with my son. This is God who cares about us through the Holy Spirit authoring this, and this is the conversation he's having with us. He's saying, my son, my daughter, listen to me.

I care about you. He's not bringing the hammer down. He's not mad at you. He's sitting us down and saying, let's talk. Let's have a conversation about this.

Now, in our Killjoy series, we're going to approach this a little bit differently. Our culture, every time we talk about sex, we have to say so much because our culture has already said so much. When we start talking about, in a couple weeks, when we talk about worry and anxiety, and we're like, hey, worry and anxiety are bad. Like, we need to work on this. Everybody in the room is going. When we stand up and say, hey, sex outside of marriage is bad, we're like, hmm, I don't know.

Seems kind of great. We just have to do more. We have to say more to help explain what we're talking about here. So we did a series at the beginning of the year called The Theology of Sex. I would really encourage you to go back and listen to it if you have questions about where we stand on things. We talked about masculinity, femininity, gender, homosexuality.

Like, we tried to do as best we could for seven weeks. Open the Bible. Here's what it says. Today, specifically, we're going to do a little bit of work to just say, here's what the Bible says about sex, and here's how we as Christians who are trying to follow this can find some freedom and some joy in what God's called us to. So before we jump in, I think we've got to take just a second to talk about what the Bible says is the framework for sex, what the Bible says positively about sex.

So the Old Testament sex ethic and the New Testament sex ethic are the same, and here's how it works. No sex of any kind outside of a covenant, period. All right? Let's talk. What's a covenant? Do we have a modern equivalent word for that?

No. Here's how a covenant works. A covenant is a relationship with a commitment. So it's a relationship with a legal commitment so that the relationship is actually better, made stronger by the legal commitment. What we're most used to are relationships and contractual consumer relationships where both of them are based off of what am I getting out of this. A covenant is the opposite.

A covenant is where I say, here's what I'm going to do, period. It doesn't matter what you do. Here's what I'm going to do regardless of how you respond, how you act. That's what a marriage covenant is. It's where a man and a woman say, I covenant with you to give myself to you, everything I have to you forever. That is where sex belongs.

In the Bible, sex is a covenant good, meaning that sex only happens inside of a marriage covenant. Now, that sounds crazy to our culture. And for us who've grown up and even like we've listened to the 14,000 messages a year, we're going, yeah, okay, I know that the Bible says that. Let me tell you a few things really quickly just about us as a church and why we open this every week and spend so much time talking out of it. This has authority over us. If we come to this and we get to pick and choose what we like and what we don't like and what's in date and what's out of date, we're in charge.

This isn't. And let me explain something to you. If we get to do that, if I get to approach the Bible with I'm in charge, let me say what I like and let me skip what I don't like, what we're doing right now is a waste of time. If we get to be in charge of the Bible, studying it is a waste of time. If the Bible is in charge of us, then it's absolutely valuable, although sometimes frustrating and difficult. Okay?

Is that fair? We believe that Jesus is in charge, so we spend a lot of time studying his word. What the Bible says about sex makes us seem crazy. Now, if you're a Christian and you actually believe the Bible and you're trying to follow it, I have good news for you. Christians have always seemed crazy when it came to sex. Does that make you feel better?

That's how it started. The original Christian sex ethic seemed crazy to their culture. We actually have a letter that was written where somebody was trying to explain, okay, let me try to help you understand Christians because they're a phenomenon now. They're all over the place now. The whole Roman Empire is crawling with these people. Let me start explaining to you why they're weird.

One of the quotes from that is he says, one of the things that's weird about Christians is they have a common table but not a common bed, meaning they'll share their table with anybody. You can go over to their house. You can eat a meal, which was completely opposite from culture because eating a meal meant you and I are on the same level. And they said, but they don't have a common bed, meaning that they only sleep with the person they're married to. Isn't that weird? That was the point he was making because in their culture it was the opposite.

You could sleep with whomever, but you didn't share your table with everybody. And Christians showed up and said, no, anybody can come to my house. Anybody can eat with me. We're on the same plane with everybody, but you leave my bed alone. So I hope it makes you feel better.

We've been weird for thousands of years. Let's, as a church, continue that and find out what it's supposed to look like. Here's the thing. We're used to consumer relationships, meaning that whatever I get out of this relationship matters. My needs matter more than the relationship. So some of you iPhone people, we have iPhone people in here.

Like raise your hand. You can participate. You got iPhone people. Okay. Any Motorola. What is it?

Nokia. What is it? What's the other one? Android. Not Nokia. Android.

Man, I miss my Nokia phone, y'all. It's like a brick that made phone calls. It was amazing. Android people. Okay. So some of you, you had an iPhone.

They keep updating it. Eventually, they made a new one that bends when you put it in your pocket and doesn't have a headphone jack. Now, you weren't like, no, I'm committed to iPhone. I've got to stick with it. Some of y'all realize that Androids have that little thing where you don't have to pick up your thumb when you're texting. Have you seen Android users' text where they just go, and it's like magic, and your iPhone keeps auto-correcting words to nonsense so it doesn't make any sense?

And so you were like, I'm going to get an Android. I'm going to get a Samsung Galaxy. And then it turns out that those are flammable. You bought an expensive Molotov cocktail. You didn't stick with Samsung anymore. Like you went and traded that one in.

You were like, good, y'all fix it. This one isn't going to catch on fire. And they were like, well, eh. And that one's still calling fire. And so you moved back. You went to a different one.

Some of you saw the commercials where you were with Verizon, but with Sprint you can cut your bill in half. And we've moved because our needs matter more than the relationship. None of us are committed to Samsung so much that even though they're recalling their phones and their washing machines, you're like, I'm sticking with it, even though it's going to set my house on fire and somehow harm my children. Like you're not doing that. We're used to consumer relationships where whatever I want, whatever I'm getting out of this matters more than the relationship. And that is not a covenant.

A covenant is the relationship, the commitment matters more than what I get out of it. And that biblically is where sex was designed to take place. In the Bible, the guardrails for sex are high and narrow. But once you're on that road, it's the Audubon. Go for it. That's the biblical approach.

That's why later in this chapter it's going to get a little intense. So let's read a little bit about what this says here. Jump to verse 15 because I still want to show us the biblical picture for picture for where sex is supposed to happen. And then we'll walk back through and talk more about lust. So 15 drink water from your own cistern.

Flowing water from your own well. So this is in the context of sex. What he's saying is be married. He's going to later say the wife of your youth. He says be married, have a husband, have a wife. And that's where you drink water.

Flowing water. Morning water. Evening water. Afternoon water. Drink some water. Should your springs be scattered abroad?

Streams of water in the street. That's a rhetorical question. The answer is no. Your water at your own place. Not out in the streets. Let them be for yourself alone.

Not for strangers with you. So, is this person my spouse? This is my husband. Is this my wife? That's the sexual question. If this is your spouse, then yes.

Go for it. Any other people. Any other strangers. Any other anything. Isn't allowed in there. It's just you.

Sex was designed by God to be a sacrament in some ways. A sacrament is a physical act that reminds us of a spiritual reality. When we take communion, that's a sacrament. It's a physical act that reminds us of the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus. When we have baptism, that's a sacrament. That's a physical act that reminds us that we were buried with Jesus.

We rose again. When you have sex, it's meant to be a sacrament for your marriage. Which is a physical act that says, I give everything to you. My whole life. My finances. My economics.

My social standing. Everything. We share everything. I'm completely vulnerable with you. Everything I have. Everything I'll ever be.

Everything I ever was. I'm giving to you. I'm committing to you. That's what sex inside of a marriage was meant to be. A covenant renewal. All of me belongs to all of you.

C.S. Lewis says that sex outside of marriage is like chewing food and then spitting it out. Sex outside of a covenant is kind of like bulimia. In bulimia, you eat food, but then you make yourself throw up. So what you want is the flavor.

What you want is the taste. But you're not committed. You don't want the calories. You don't want the trans fat. That's sex outside of marriage. When somebody wants to sleep with you, but not commit to you, what they're saying is I want your flavor, but none of your baggage.

I don't want any of your trans fat. A philosopher, Immanuel Kant, he's a central figure in modern philosophy. He said it this way. Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite. As soon as the appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. But that was never meant to be how sex worked because sex is in the Bible a covenant good, not a consumer good.

It exists inside of a covenant, not a consumer relationship. Keep reading verse 18. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely dear, a graceful doe. I love that he says that. He says the wife of your youth, the person you married a long time ago, that's your wife forever. That's your husband forever.

Let me explain to you. If you're married, let me answer a few questions for you. A lot of times in our culture we ask the question, is this person the one? Are you married to them? They're the one. You found them.

Good Job, you guys. So proud of you. If you're married to them, that's the one. That's your one. Stick with them. That's it.

You got the one. You don't have to keep asking that question. And what's your type? Well, are you married? That's your type. When you started, your type was athletic.

Now your type watches sports. That's your type. Your type's gotten bigger. You like bigger. Your type went bald. You love bald.

You're into bald. Your type got old. Your type got wrinkly. Your type changes its hair color every month. You change your type every month. Sometimes you got to check.

I don't know. I might be in the blondes. I hadn't seen her. She went to the thing. I don't know what I'm going to be into when she gets home. But when she gets home, I'm going to be into something.

Mom, that's how that works. You enjoy the wife of your youth, the husband of your youth forever. Verse 19. A lovely dear, a graceful doe, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always in her love. People give Christians a hard time and they'll periodically say, you take the Bible literally, sometimes it has its benefits.

Here's what it's saying. Nowhere else. Nowhere else do you enjoy sexual relationships. Nowhere else do you go to find any sort of sexual fulfillment in the covenant relationship with a real person that you've committed your life to. A real person that you've committed everything you have to them. The person that still like cries at every sappy movie even if they've seen it a hundred times.

The person that's still secretly into 90s boy bands. The person who has road rage issues. The person who at the end of a hard day sits next to you and knows exactly what to say. Or always knows how to make you laugh. Or the person that consistently sticks their foot in their mouth. That real person that's going to change throughout your life, that's the person you're committed to sexually forever.

A real person that you know that you've committed everything to. There's a John Legend song that says, Because all of me loves all of you. Love your curves and all your edges. All your perfect imperfections. Give your all to me. I'll give my all to you.

I don't know if he had covenant marriage in mind. That's what he just described. Everything I have belongs to you. And sex out of that context is saying, I want your flavor. I want some of you. But I'm keeping me back.

I don't belong to you. You don't really belong to me. I don't want any of your baggage. I just want to physically enjoy some of this. And it's holding back. It's not giving.

It's not free. 20. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? So as we go back through this, we're going to start back up in verse 3. We're going to talk about the forbidden woman. And here's the forbidden woman biblically.

Here's what lust is. It is a desire sexually for anyone who is not your spouse. A desire sexually for anyone. A covetous desire sexually for anyone who is not your spouse. So the New Testament is going to use the term porneia, which is translated a lot as sexual immorality.

It just means all sexual anything outside of covenant marriage. Jesus is going to say, don't look at another woman lustfully who is not your spouse. So it means any sort of desire sexually for someone you're not married to. That is the line that the Bible draws. Sex is supposed to be, I do forever, not you'll do for now. That's the Bible's approach.

Now our culture wants it to be a consumer good. It wants it to be just a physical appetite. That's what we're told over and over again. Go to verse 3. We're going to start talking about our culture a little bit. Try to understand where we are.

What we've been told, for the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil. Okay, that's imagery. That's a picture. Do her lips actually drip honey? No. Does she actually squirt oil out of her mouth when she's talking?

No. He's giving imagery. He's saying this is what it seems like. What he's saying is the forbidden woman, the person that you're not married to, seems amazing, sweet, healthy, enjoyable. She drips honey. Have you ever wondered why all the other husbands are not idiots?

You ever wondered why they do such a good job parenting? Have you ever wondered why they treat their wife so well? Have you ever wondered why this guy seems so great? It's because it's a lie. You ever wondered why their wives never talk to them like this? You ever been up until 2 o'clock in the morning arguing?

You got mascara running down your face and then at some point you get on Facebook and you see these pictures of people on vacation and you see, look at how magic that is. It's a lie. Nobody's taking a selfie at 2 a.m. after an argument. Hashtag exhausted. Hashtag 2 a.m. life. Hashtag depressed.

Nobody's doing that. The person you're not with, the person you're not married to, the person, and if you're not married, anybody you're not married to, they drip honey. Smoother than oil. The way they talk is like Barry White. Hey, baby. Like it's smooth, seems great, but it's a lie.

That's the point he's making. It seems wonderful. See, we're told that sex is just physical, but that's not why we go to it. It's not why we chase after it. See, we're pursuing sex to be free, to be loved, to not be alone anymore. I'm not alone, at least not right now.

I'm wanted. I'm desired. I'm approved of. I'm cared about. You don't go back to porn over and over again just for some sort of physical pleasure. You've got to be comforted.

You've got to be in control. You've got to have someone desire you and long for you. See, we're on a soul-level pursuit when it comes to sex. That's why Fifty Shades of Grey was the fastest book ever to sell a million copies. How many people read that book or went to that movie with this question? Am I missing something?

Am I missing out? What am I missing? Because we've begun to believe that sex gives life, fulfillment, satisfaction, and that we have to have it. But it keeps going. Verse 3. For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil.

But in the end, she's bitter as wormwood. Wormwood is just a plant, a spice that's very bitter. Sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death. Her steps follow the path to Sheol. That's the Old Testament word for the pit or the place of the dead.

So it's hell. He's saying her path goes to hell. She does not ponder the path of life. Her ways wander, and she does not know it. And I would argue that this is us in our culture when it comes to sexuality. We've been promised life.

We've been promised fulfillment. We've been promised honey and oil. And we're wandering off the path of life towards hell, and we don't even know it. We've been promised satisfaction and freedom. And we've wandered off, and we don't even realize it. There was a quote from a lady.

It's an article that went viral for a little while. It said her name is Jamie Varon. The article is called This Is How We Date Now. It starts off this way. They've always said there are so many fish in the sea, but never before has the sea of fish been right at our fingertips. On OkCupid, Tinder, Grindr, Dash, take your pick, we can order up a human being the same way we order up Pad Thai.

Those are dating websites or apps. I'm not saying those are wrong, but I am saying that our approach to dating has changed. That's the point she's making here, that we've begun to approach it as approaching a buffet. She says, if we commit, we are still one eye wandering at the options. We want the beautiful kind of filet mignon, but we're too busy eyeing the mediocre buffet because of choice. Our choices are killing us.

We think choice means something. We think opportunity is good. We think the more chances we have, the better, but it makes everything watered down. Never mind actually feeling satisfied. We don't even understand what satisfaction looks like, sounds like, feels like. We're one foot out the door because outside that door is more, more, more.

We don't see who's right in front of our eyes asking to be loved because no one is asking to be loved. We long for something that we still want to believe exists, yet we're looking for the next thrill, the next jolt of excitement, and the next instant gratification. Sex has offered us an endless buffet of satisfaction, and it's robbed us the ability to ever actually be satisfied because we've got one foot out the door, one eye on our options, and we've forgotten how to covenant. And we've taken sex out of a covenant relationship, put it in a consumer relationship, and it was never meant to be there.

The New York Times actually ran an article entitled The Downside of Cohabitating Before Marriage. They did some research, and they found that 20-somethings, half of 20-somethings agreed that they would not ever get married unless they had lived with someone first to see if they were compatible. And about two-thirds said that they believed moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce. And then the New York Times article goes on, and it's walking through this pretty well and trying to not get too far. It's New York Times. They've got to kind of thread the needle here.

But basically their point is that's not actually true. Cohabitating before marriage increases your negative statistics, increases the chance of divorce. And so they're basically looking at it and saying, okay, we know we have the cohabitating effect. That's what they call it. And they're like, why? What is living together before marriage?

How does that affect things? And here's one thing. This is a quote. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse. And that's because they're consumers. They've got one foot out the door, one eye on their options.

The lady interviewed said this, I felt like I was on this multi-year, never-ending audition to be his wife. They end the article with, a life built on top of maybe you'll do simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the we do commitment of marriage. See, sex in that kind of a relationship is marketing. It's a desire to keep someone focused on you. At best, it's you holding back while trying to take, but also trying to have enough sex so that you're on an audition. Sex has promised us security and love, and what it's given us is year-long auditions.

It's given us years of insecurity trying to keep someone when it was never meant to be in that relationship in the first place. Sex has promised us freedom. It drips. Honey, it's smoother than oil. It promises us freedom. But more and more scientists and neurosurgeons have come out, and they're looking at neuroscience, which is the study of the brain, and they've begun to understand about neuroplasticity, which means that your brain can change.

It can physically change. This is what happens in addiction. Your brain physically rewires itself throughout your life. One of the ways that it was explained in an article I read was if every time you hang out with your uncle, the first thing he does is give you a hug, and then he hands you an ice cream cone, and pretty soon your brain is going to rewire around my uncle is awesome. Because when you get a hug, your brain releases oxytocin. When you get ice cream, your brain releases dopamine, and your brain begins to set up, based on the circumstances, what caused this feeling, what caused this emotion.

When you have sex, your brain releases dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphins, and it begins to rewire your brain. Oxytocin is a bonding chemical. Here's what that means. Here's what they're saying. Sex rewires your brain to be addicted. It works like a drug.

If you're in a covenant relationship, that's beautiful. That God designed sex to make you more and more addicted to your spouse. More and more addicted to them so that your brain actually rewires to where that's the person that I'm hooked on. That's beautiful. But if you take sex out of a covenant relationship, that's terrifying.

They actually said that sex becomes like taking a piece of duct tape and wrapping it around the hairy arm of a large man and then peeling it off. You get a lot of hair. You get a lot of skin flakes. Because sex was meant to bond. So it's like duct tape.

It's sticky. And then they said if you take it and wrap it around someone else's arm and then peel that off. This is in the book Hooked. It was written in 2008 by some neurosurgeons who were studying this. They said if you keep doing that, eventually the duct tape loses its stickiness. What they were arguing for is that brain science says – they're not Christians.

They're not arguing. They're just saying brain science says that sex with multiple partners actually makes you less sticky, makes sex work less the way it was supposed to. This is actually why pornography is so addictive. There's a website now called Fight the New Drug. They have a lot of really good statistics. Basically, pornography addiction works like a heroin addiction.

It changes your brain's chemistry so that pornography becomes the thing you're absolutely addicted to. It works with the same reward loops and the same addiction centers. Basically, what happens is your body during pornography and during sex releases a bunch of dopamine. So your dopamine receptors are overloaded. Eventually, if you keep doing this, your body takes away dopamine receptors. So you need more and different to continue to feel the same feeling.

That's how heroin works. That's how pornography works. You need more and different. And because your body has less dopamine receptors, your brain has less dopamine receptors, other things don't seem as good anymore. That's why pornography has become such a crippling issue. I saw a statistic that said one survey said that 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women reported feeling addicted to porn.

I want to say this. Pornography is not just a man problem. One of the issues we have in the church is that we have females who are addicted to pornography and they feel this extra layer of shame that I can't tell anybody because this is a man's issue. It's not. It's a human issue. It's a sin issue.

And Jesus saves sinners. We need to begin being able to talk about these things. Here's the thing. Sex was meant to be addicting. And inside of a covenant relationship, praise Jesus, that's beautiful. But when we move it from the right context to the wrong context, it breaks down and doesn't work the way it was supposed to.

We were promised freedom. And it's enslaved us. One of the articles I read, it was absolutely devastating because sex has promised so much for us. It's promised security and love and connection. One of the articles I read is called Sex Before Kissing. They interviewed 600 females from the age of 15 to 19.

This was from Australia. They're asking these females from age 15 to 19, what's it like living in a world where all the guys are addicted to porn? That's the question. How does this affect relationships? How does this affect dating? 15 to 19-year-old girls.

This is a quote. Some see sex only in terms of performance, where what counts most is the boy enjoying it. I asked a 15-year-old about her first sexual experience. She replied, I think my body looked okay. He seemed to enjoy it. Many girls seem cut off from their own sense of pleasure or intimacy.

The main market of a good sexual encounter is only if he enjoyed it. Girls and women are under a lot of pressure to give boys and men what they want, to become a real-life embodiment of what the boys have watched in porn, adopting exaggerated roles and behaviors and providing their bodies as mere sex aids. Growing up in today's porn culture, girls quickly learned that they are service stations for male gratification and pleasure. We're wandering towards hell. We've left life and joy and fulfillment and satisfaction and security and love. We're not there anymore.

We've started wandering towards hell and we don't even realize it. What was supposed to be freedom? What was supposed to be so good? What was supposed to end repression? Seventh-grade girls are asking questions about bondage and S&M. Many of them have seen Fifty Shades of Grey and wonder, if a boy wants to hit me, tie me up, and stalk me, does that mean he loves me?

Girls are tolerating demeaning and disrespectful behaviors and thereby internalizing pornography's message about their submissive role. Sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy, and authentic human connection. Young people are not learning about intimacy, friendship, and love, but about cruelty and humiliation. One of the arguments for pornography is that it teaches sex education, and I would argue that it does, but it's a bad education. It teaches about aggression, dominance, and bad sex. No intimacy, no love, no kissing, no talking, no friendship.

Teens who have had sex, this is a different article, are three times more likely to be depressed than teens who haven't. Female teens are three times more likely to commit suicide, this is in the U.S. Males are eight times more likely. That's not causation, that may be correlation, but we've got to start asking some questions. We were promised love, we were promised security, we were promised freedom, and we've gotten everything but, because we've left the path of life and we've started wandering towards hell. That's what the Bible says about sex, that it was meant to be beautiful and addicting and good.

You can't argue that the Bible is anti-sex. You cannot make that argument. It begins with a God who creates a man and a woman naked, brings them to each other. The man begins to sing or just make up some poetry, which seems like an appropriate response. God brings a naked man, a naked woman, brings them together, and the first thing he says to him is, be fruitful and multiply. And that's just how the Bible starts.

There are sections in the Song of Solomon, which is about the enjoyment of married sex, that every time translators get to it, they kind of shy away because they're given some imagery that's really graphic. And so they tone it down as best they can. But if you can read Greek, which I can't, but I've been told, it makes people blush. But we've been lied to. We aren't secure. We've got one foot out the door.

We keep having to sell other people on our benefits. We're not satisfied. One of the pictures that the New Testament gives for hell is a place of unending thirst. And that's where we are in the U.S. when it comes to our sexual desires. We have an unending, eternal, unsatisfied thirst. One of the things, if you look at magazine covers, they used to say you need to be having more sex.

Now what do they say? You need to be having better sex. Why? They sold us on more sex. Are we satisfied? No, we must be doing it wrong.

Sex hasn't led us to heaven. It's led us towards an unending, unsatisfied thirst and longing, which the Bible says that's hell. We're not free. We've been enslaved. We aren't loved. We're used.

We aren't known. We're sucked to dry and thrown away. Chewed up and spit out. Our progressive, free, enlightened approach to sex has not delivered. It's dripping honey, but it's as bitter as wormwood. It promised life.

It's leading us towards death. It promised heaven. It's led us towards hell. My wife, when she was in high school, the first time she ever filled up her car, she had a big Ford Explorer, and the first time she ever filled it up, it was on E. She was all excited. She was going to fill it up.

She filled it up. She drove across the street, and her engine stalled out and died. So her dad had to come, and they were like, does it have gas? Yes. Is it overheating? Like, it took them forever to realize she had filled it up with diesel.

Ford's floors are big. They're not that big. The reason it didn't work was because she put diesel in a gasoline engine. That's what we've done with sex. We've taken a covenant good and put it in a consumer setup, and it's not going to work. It's not going to provide.

It's not going to do everything it promised. So what do we do? How do we respond? If we're caught up in lust, if we're caught up in pursuing the person we're not married to, if we've already done this, if we're addicted to pornography, some people in the church have been addicted to pornography for decades. Began when you were 15, 13. It's been decades of lust.

Decades of, well, this is normal. This is the way guys are supposed to be. Or this is, every woman does this. Or this is how it works. And we've been told over and over again, 14,000 messages a year about how sex is supposed to work. It's robbing us of joy.

It's not freedom. It's slavery. There's a pastor in New York. His name's Tim Keller. He says that whenever someone comes to him and they say, a young person unmarried, and they come to him and say, I'm not a Christian anymore. I'm leaving the church.

He says his first question is, who have you been sleeping with? Immediately they're like, what? What does that have to do with anything? And his response is, nine times out of ten, the reason they're leaving the church is because they've been caught up in sex, and willful disobedience to the Bible makes God's presence unnoticeable, imperceivable. Some of us would say, I am a Christian. I follow the Bible, but when it comes to sex, we've bought in hook, line, and sinker to every message we've heard in our culture.

The Bible's repressive. The Bible's outdated. I follow it in these areas, but not this one. And it makes following Jesus joyless and difficult. So what do we do?

Solomon gives us some help. Verse seven. First thing we've got to do. Listen to what the Bible says about sex. Verse seven. And now, O sons, listen to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth.

A lot of churches don't talk about sex. We've talked about sex a decent amount this year. We've devoted eight sermons to it, but you'll hear 38 messages on sex today. Eight isn't a lot. It seems like we talk about it a good bit, but our culture is pounding us with the ideas of sex and how we ought to think about it. It's aggressively telling us what we've got to believe, and we've got to start opening our Bibles and reading and meditating on what God says about sex because otherwise we're going to believe what our culture is telling us.

He says, listen, don't depart. That sounds crazy. It sounds prudish. It sounds restrictive. Yes. Yes.

But true freedom is found inside the bounds of healthy restrictions. That's how that works. Birds can fly because they're restricted by little body weight and thin little bones and wings. Fish are most good and okay in underwater. They're restricted by that, but that's where they find freedom. That's how it works.

Great pianist has only become that by practicing hours a day. They become free on a piano because they've completely restricted themselves. That's how sex is supposed to work. We've got some restrictions, but that's what leads to freedom. Verse 8. First thing we've got to do is listen to what the Bible says about sex, which means some of us need to open our Bibles and begin reading, trying to find out.

Verse 8. Keep your way far from her and do not go near the door of her house. We've got to take drastic steps. We've got to take drastic steps. Don't go near the door of her house. Keep far away from her.

The way Paul's going to say this in 1 Corinthians 6 is flee. The way Jesus says it, he says if you lust, pluck your eyeball out. That's crazy. He says cut your hand off. That sounds crazy, but he says it's better to have life and be maimed. It's better to have life and only one eye than to be led astray towards death and hell.

We have to take some drastic steps. Martin Luther says if your head's made of butter, stay away from the fire. We got a lot of butter heads in our church that are just sitting next to a fire and we need to make some good decisions here. Some of you, next week when you show up, you need to be showing off your new flip phone. Some of you need to save $9 a month and get rid of Netflix. When I counsel some of the guys in our church and they're struggling with pornography, one of the questions I've asked before is how many times, you got roommates?

Yeah. How many times have you looked at porn at your kitchen table? Zero. Good. That's where your computer stays from now on. On your kitchen table.

Some of you, your biggest temptations at night with your smartphone, put it out, put it out in the hall, sit on the table. Well, yeah, but I use it as an alarm clock. Walmart sells ones that just have red lights on them and they sound like this in the morning. Eh, eh, eh, eh. That will wake you up. Some of us need to take some drastic steps.

Some of you are in relationships. You need to break up. You need to move out. You need to leave their house at 8 o'clock at night. I heard one pastor say that he's got daughters and he tells them, don't believe anything a guy says after 8 that he doesn't say during the day. If he says it after 8 p.m. but he doesn't say it the rest of the day that it's not true.

Some of us just need to leave the house sitting up, watching a terrible show on Netflix until 2 o'clock in the morning that you're not really interested in next to your boo isn't staying far away from the door. Let me take some drastic steps. Now, that's not going to change your heart, but it can let you catch your breath enough to start trying to pursue Jesus. A couple of other drastic steps that need to be taken. Some of you, for the first time, need to tell your community group. You need to have someone in your group, some ladies in your group, some guys in your group that you say, I'm struggling with this.

You need to be honest. Sexual sin is sin, but it's just sin. And Jesus saves sinners. There's hope for us. 1 John 1, 6-9, we'll have it on the screen. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth, but if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

That we can bring things into the light. Sin grows in the dark, so what you've been told over and over again is you can't tell anybody this. You've got to win it on your own. You've got to fight this on your own. What if they find out? What if they know?

Bring it into the light so that we can have fellowship with each other and then Jesus can cleanse us of all sin. There's not a single thing that you can bring into the light that He can't handle. There's not a single thing, groups, when y'all get together this week and somebody confesses this, don't look at them like a lobster just crawled out of their mouth. We're together because Jesus saves sinners. sinners. Yeah. People in your community group struggle with lust.

Absolutely. In our culture, if you don't struggle with lust, it's amazingly difficult and you're special if this isn't one of your issues. Praise Jesus, but we've been bombarded with message after message about sex and sexuality and lust. And we need freedom, but Jesus saves sinners. Keep going. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Some of us need to have conversations, bring some things into the light and find some freedom. Quickly, and we've got to keep moving. Some of you need some friends. Not just friends you confess your sin to. You need that.

Some of you need some friends of the opposite sex. C.S. Lewis says one of the quickest ways to get rid of lust is to get to know a person. It's hard to lust after a person you actually know. Some of you need some friends of the opposite sex. Now, there's some wisdom to be applied here.

I don't do counseling with females alone. There's some things that you need to be aware of, but one of the teachings that has happened at least throughout my life growing up in the church is guys, you can't be near girls. Can't be friends with them. Sex. Girls, stay away from guys. Can't be friends with them.

Okay. If one of our problems is that we treat the opposite sex like an object, running away from them and being absolutely afraid of them because if we get alone with them, sex will magically happen is a pornographic fantasy and it is also still treating them like an object. We need brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. That's how Paul says to treat people in the church. If they're older than you, they're a mother. If they're older than you, they're a father.

If they're younger than you, brother or sister. You know what's beautiful about those relationships? Sex is completely off the table. If you are not married to them, they are a brother, a sister, a mother, or father. Dating relationships. If you are not married, brother or sister, mother or father.

If you need to know how that practically applies to your dating relationship, I'd love to talk with you about it. I'm serious. We can talk about it. We need some actual friends. We need some actual friendships with people of the opposite sex that we treat like a brother or a sister. brother. He keeps going.

He's going to say throughout 10 through 14, he keeps going back into, so he gives some advice, seven and eight, and then he keeps going back into some issues and struggles you're going to have. Get back to 15. We read this a minute ago. Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Third thing we need is we need a better well. We need a better well.

Tim Keller, I quoted him a second ago. He says this about covenantal marriage. He says that in covenantal marriage you're given three things that you can't find in any other type of relationship. One is you're given a zone of security. You do not have to continue to perform. If you actually have a covenantal relationship, you are not performing to keep somebody.

Two, when you've committed to someone beyond your feelings, deeper feelings grow. The only other relationship we have like this is parents to children. You know how this works, right? Like you have children. They bring nothing to the table. They're kind of the worst.

I've heard comedians say that having a child and a really drunk roommate is the same thing. That's pretty true. Then they keep getting older and they keep getting older and you keep sacrificing and you keep giving and you keep loving them regardless of your needs being met. They aren't meeting your needs as like the most special amazing children. You're not getting anything out of this relationship. You're giving and you're giving and you're giving and you're giving and then when they turn 14 you tell them a rule and you say you can't do this and you know what they say?

You hate me and I hate you and you've never done anything for me. And so you choke them but you keep giving and giving and giving and sacrificing and sacrificing and sacrificing and it's one of the most beautiful pictures of unending sacrificial love that we have because when you are in a relationship beyond what your needs are deeper feelings grow and that gets to happen in a covenant marriage and in having children and that's it. When you commit to someone regardless of what you're getting out of it and you say I'm here no matter whether you're sick or healthy, poor, or rich, nice, fun, not fun, mean, I'm here you actually get deeper feelings that get to grow. The third one he says he says if you're you actually get freedom in a covenant relationship because in all other relationships you're a slave you're a slave to your feelings.

You have to feel it to stay. And he says that makes you a slave because you're not in control of your feelings. Sleep habits what you've eaten your body chemistry your physiology have a lot to do with your feelings. He says if you want to be free from your feelings make a promise and you can actually be free. That happens inside of a covenant relationship. Married couples you need a better well meaning that the Bible's going to say repeatedly that married couples should have sex.

They should enjoy sex. They should continue to have sex. They should have conversations with each other be open about it. Some of the married couples in this room the way to apply this sermon is to go home have a conversation be open and honest with each other repent of sin and selfishness repent of fantasies and lust and then have sex. That is a good way to apply this message. You're welcome.

That's what the Bible says. We need a better well. Healthy marriages is not just a gift to the people inside of them. It is a gift to the church. We need healthy marriages of people that love one another serve one another are committed to one another in a covenant relationship and that help the single people in our church see what that's supposed to look like and know what how to walk in one of those in the future. It doesn't mean you need to be real graphic or open about your sex life.

I'm not saying that. You don't need to be talking bad about sex. You don't need to be mistreating your spouse. You need to be open and honest and inviting single people and dating couples into your home to share a meal have an open table have conversations and help them begin to see what marriage is supposed to look like because our culture is telling them a whole lot and we as a church have to begin to model what this is supposed to look like. But all of us need an even better well.

We can't I don't know if y'all know this we can't talk about sex without talking about Jesus. If you've been a part of our church for a while you knew that was true. If you're here for the first time surprise Jesus is better than sex. Sex is just a poor representation of what we can ultimately find in Jesus. Jeremiah 2.13 says this for my people have committed two evils they've forsaken me the fountain of living water and they've honed out cisterns broken cisterns that don't hold water. A cistern's a big well that catches rain water and what he says is I'm a fountain where all of life and fulfillment and joy and satisfaction come from and you've dug a hole and you're trying to drink out of it and it can't give you water.

Here's what we've done culturally as Americans we've said sex is the good life. It's where joy and satisfaction and freedom and hope and life come from and we've been told that over and over and over and over again. It's how you know a relationship is good. It's how you know your life is good. You're missing out if you're not having this. We've been told this over and over and over again and we haven't quenched our thirst yet.

We're continuing to drink from a cistern that will never satisfy us because it was never meant to. Jesus is better than sex and ultimate freedom is only found in him. He is a fountain of living water that fills us up. The Bible steps in and says something to us that I think is so helpful for us as a culture. You can have a full fulfilling and complete life and never have sex and never masturbate and never be addicted to porn. You can have a full fulfilling and complete life without sex.

You can have a full fulfilling and complete life and never have sex. The Bible tells us that repeatedly because fulfillment comes from Jesus. The only thing we can ever look at and say I have to have you to be okay is Jesus. Everything else is optional. Romance, relationships, sex, money, everything else is optional. The one thing we can look at and say I have to have you to be okay and to be fulfilled is Jesus.

As we've been talking this morning some of you have had shame and guilt welling up inside of you. When we talked about the duct tape analogy you began to ask is that me? When we talked about pornography you begin to feel overwhelmed and enslaved. Sometimes when you talk about sex people begin to ask the question am I lovable now? Am I damaged goods? Am I broken?

There's so much pain that goes along with sexual sin and here's the answer to that question. Yes you are loved. Yes you are wanted. Jesus loves you and desires you so much so that he went to a cross to die for you. To cleanse you and to make you his. That Jesus is the fountain that both cleanses us and satisfies us.

There's a song we sing periodically that says this. There's a fountain. This was written in the 1700s. It says there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins and sinners plunge beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. Jesus is the fountain that pays for our sins that sets us free and that satisfies us completely. But until we're satisfied in Jesus we will forever be stuck trying to quench our thirst in sexual sin.

You can learn all the rules. You can take all the drastic steps you want. You can get all the blockers on your computer that you want. Until you're satisfied in Jesus you'll continue to be addicted. Until you begin to realize that Jesus is the only one that can set you free. The only one that can give you hope.

The only one who loved you so much that he died for you. That he was buried in a grave and that when he rose again he conquered your sin on your behalf. You are loved. You are wanted. You are pursued. You just need a better well.

You are not going to find in sex what was only ever meant to be found in Jesus. I've got one more quote because why not? I've had a thousand today. John Dunn wrote this poem. I think it's helpful. But I'm betrothed unto your enemies.

He's talking to Jesus. Divorce me. Untie or break that knot again. Break up this relationship. I'm chasing after your enemy. I'm running after sex and lust.

Break that up. Take me to you. Imprison me. For I except you enthrall me never shall be free nor ever chased. That means sexually pure. Except you ravish me.

He's talking to Jesus and he says unless I'm so overwhelmed by your love, unless I'm so engulfed in you, imprisoned by you, enthralled by you, I will forever believe this lie. Matt and Raz are going to come back up and here's what we're going to take just a second to pray together. We're going to pray that we'll begin to believe that what the Bible says about sex is true and that we'll be so overwhelmed by the genuine love of Jesus and his death on the cross for our behalf that we won't chase after anything else. We'll be so satisfied in him that we can actually begin to truly in our hearts believe that we can have a life without sex and be okay.

Let's pray. God, we thank you that you save sinners. God, we hate sexual sin, but we thank you that it's still sin and that your blood cleanses us from all sin, that we can be free. God, I pray that we would be a church that you bless with healthy marriages and people that believe what you say about sex, that it's good. It's just not ultimate. It won't satisfy.

It won't fix us. God, I pray that we would see the cross and the empty tomb and your glorious throne in such a way that we'd be satisfied in you. We'd be enthralled with you, imprisoned by you, overwhelmed by your love for us, your death on our behalf. God, I pray that you'd help us to, in our groups this week, be open, honest, bring some things in the light and find some freedom. Confess, have fellowship with one another, genuine, true love and connection based off of truth and not hiding, based off of knowing someone and caring about them. God, I pray that you'd help us to find freedom from our lust and that we as a church would begin to tell a better story about sex than our culture has to offer.

We love you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guilt and Shame

Guilt and Shame

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are going to be in Genesis chapter 2 today. We're going to start out there. So if you want to go ahead and grab your Bibles, we'll be in Genesis chapter 2.

If you're in a blue and white Bible, that's going to be on page 2. So you won't have to go very far. And if you don't own a Bible, take one of these blue and white Bibles with you. That's our gift to you. If you see a nice leather one laying around and you want to grab that one, that's cool. But that will be somebody else's, but you can have it.

We forgive you. We're going to jump right in this morning, and then we're going to talk a little bit about, after we read a little bit and kind of set up what we're doing today, we'll talk a little more about the series we're in and kind of how we're thinking about and approaching this. But we're going to be in Genesis chapter 2. We're going to start in verse 22. And what we're picking up on is God has created man, and he's now creating woman, and then he's going to kind of bring them together, and we're going to get to see this picture at the beginning of the Bible. So 22.

And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and she should be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Okay, so if you will, this is the first marriage in the Bible. God's created Adam and Eve, and he brings them together, and he brings them to each other, and they kind of have a marriage ceremony where this is, you belong to her and she belongs to you.

And what it says right there at the end of that chapter is that the man and the woman were both naked and not ashamed. And what that is, is a picture of perfect unity, perfect transparency, perfect openness, that neither one of them had anything to be afraid of. Anything that the other one would find out about them. Anything that they had to try to hide or cover up. That they could be completely themselves. That they were fully known and fully loved.

They didn't have anything to be worried that the other one would eventually discover. Nothing to be concerned about. Can you imagine that? Perfect and complete transparency. No amount of hesitation when it comes to, yeah, I'm an open book. Can you imagine?

Anybody can go home, talk to your parents, interview them, ask any question they like, and you have no concern. Anybody can flip through all your old yearbooks. Anybody can take your phone right now and flip through all the pictures in your phone. Some of you, you hand somebody your phone and you're like, hey, look at this picture of my dog. And then you see they start swiping and immediately your blood pressure is like, and you're trying to think like, maybe you don't usually take inappropriate pictures or anything, but you're immediately like, did I? Did I?

Could you imagine? Not having anything to hide. Not having anything to be concerned about. Anybody could go talk to any of your old relationships. Ask them any question they like and you wouldn't have any amount of hesitation, tension. They were completely, fully known, fully loved.

That's the picture we're given here this morning with Adam and Eve when they first come together. And what we're going to be talking about today is we're in our third week of our Killjoy series. What we've been spending our time on is basically talking about there's some things going on in the church, some things that we've gotten used to. Struggles and sins that have become normal. That it's just like, yeah, like some of us have begun to believe that this is just how life works for me. You've just learned to accept it.

Yeah, it's not great, but I'm used to it. It's kind of like after a while you don't notice the smell in your own house. Your friend comes over, they walk in. I mean, I think they do a whole series of commercials on this now, but this is a real thing. You can walk in someone's house and you're like, oh, y'all can't smell that anymore. I think the commercials call that nose blind.

And there's some of us who've become that with certain sins and certain struggles that we have. We've just accepted it. It's become a part of us. It's become so normal for us that we've just gotten used to it. And it's actually robbing us of joy. It's robbing us of the benefits of the genuine relationship that we have with Jesus as he's redeemed us and made us his.

And so what we're doing in this series, we've actually made some books where we're just trying to walk through and as best we can dig into that and then take it to Jesus to redeem it. So when we have in our books, if you hadn't grabbed one yet and we're walking through this with our community groups, I would encourage you to grab one of our Killjoy books, hop in a group. There's going to be inventories in there, something we stole from a recovery program. And then we've made some ourselves. But basically for the purposes of not just looking into our hearts and seeing what's there, but looking in and then taking it to Jesus to have him change us and make us new and go to work on us.

And so that's what we're doing in this series. Today specifically we're talking about guilt and shame. Guilt and shame. And for those of us who have just grown used to this, hopefully today we'll see how Jesus steps in and begins to interact with our guilt and shame and set us free. All right, so let's keep reading.

We're going to jump to chapter 3. God had told Adam and Eve a very specific tree not to eat from. It was the one rule he gave them. And they ate from it. And the moment they ate from it, sin entered the world and brought with it all of the evil and brokenness that's ever happened throughout humanity and brought with it guilt and shame. And so we're going to pick up on what it tells us here in verse 7.

So this is right after they've eaten the fruit. It says, Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. So this moment that they ate of the fruit that they weren't supposed to eat of, it says their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked. It was that moment in your dream where you're given the presentation at work or you're up in front of class and suddenly you realize that you're naked. That shame and that fear washes over you.

It had to be terrifying for them because they'd never experienced it. This moment of overwhelming shame. And they feel so exposed. That's what shame does. That's what guilt does. You feel so exposed.

You feel so out in the open. You feel like you want to, you have those moments in life where you just want to disappear. If you could just disappear, that would be for the best. I remember in, I was in fifth grade. My teacher was up in front of the class, teaching, I guess is probably what she was doing. She was talking to all of us.

She was standing near my desk and so I was on the front row. Now, I don't know why I was on the front row. I don't know if that was, like she chose that or if I chose that. I don't really think it has much to do with the story, so just try to pay attention. But I was on the front row.

How I got there, irrelevant. I'm on the front row. She's talking and I dropped my pencil. Complete accident. Just dropped my pencil. Innocent thing.

I bent over to get it. Now, you have to know something about me. You know, middle school, fifth grade. I was, I was portly. If, you know, like, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't like huge, but I did have to, I shopped, like all my pants said husky on them. Like some of you, some of you know about husky pants.

I was in that section. And so I bent over to pick up my pencil. And when I did, I passed gas. Loudly. And there was this moment where I just froze. Like I was bent over getting my pencil.

She's standing right here by my desk. And I just freeze. And you know, you're thinking like, maybe I'm the only one who heard that. There's a moment of dead silence, which, which just made it worse. And then the entire room just, I mean, erupted in laughter. And then, so like, I wanted, like, if I could have disappeared, that would have been for the best.

I was pretty sure, like, if I had been able to cut off the lights, I would have blown in the dark at that moment. Like, it was, it was terrible. And she, then the teacher, because she's going to be really helpful, starts talking about how that's natural. And everybody passes gas. And like, it was, it made it way worse. But guys, I feel uncomfortable just having told you this story.

So fifth grade me was mortified. Like, but that's what happened to Adam and Eve in this moment. They bit into this apple and heart rate starts racing and blood rushes to their face and they, they want to disappear. They immediately feel absolutely exposed. And the story I just told, and some of you have similar stories, that's embarrassment. That's, that is so far down on the scale of shame and guilt that they were overwhelmed.

So what'd they do? It says they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Do you know how long it took to sew leaves together? First of all, they're inventing clothes at this point. So they don't really have much to go off of.

They're sewing leaves together. Do you know how long that took? Do you know how difficult that was? Me either. But probably difficult in a long time.

Like, this was a very intentional process. And here, here's what happens throughout the rest of history. All of humanity has lined up behind Adam and Eve in sin. All of humanity has lined up behind Adam and Eve with the guilt and the shame that comes along with the brokenness in this world. And all of us have lined up behind Adam and Eve trying to sew together fig leaves. Trying to do whatever we can to cover our shame.

To bury it. To hide it. To mask it. To misdirect. Like, if you've got shame over here, you want to be really good over here, you want to have everybody look this direction. We've come up with a lot of different methods, but it's all sewing together fig leaves to try to hide our shame.

To try to hide, to mask, to cover what's broken, what's wrong, what's messed up. Let's keep reading. So verse 7 ends with, they made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord called to the man and said to him, where are you?

And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. So, quick question. Adam and Eve naked? Adam says he is. He says, I was naked so I hid myself. But verse 7 said they made clothes.

I think one of the things that's showing us, and I think we all know to be true, is that any amount of work we do to cover up our shame ultimately doesn't work. That as soon as God showed up, they had to hide because they were like, I'm still exposed. You could see right through me. And this shame and this guilt has worked already in this perfect garden where there was a perfect relationship between a man and his wife and there was a perfect relationship between humanity and God and what it's done is it's worked to alienate. The man and his wife are no longer naked and unashamed but they're covering themselves because of their shame and they're hiding from God.

And all of us are like them. Some of us in here have spent years sewing together fig leaves. You've gotten really good at it. You have a very ornate fig leaf facade. But like Adam and Eve, let me ask you, do you feel comfortable?

Are you free? Because as soon as God showed up, they immediately felt exposed again. And for some of us, you've worked at it for years but it still feels so fragile, so fleeting and like it could easily fall apart at any point. I want to read a few definitions to help us understand guilt and shame a little better to help us picture this in our minds and then we'll spend some time looking at different passages in the Bible and trying to understand how God interacts with our guilt and shame and how we can ultimately be free from it. Guilt and shame are overlapping issues. So let's talk about guilt first.

Guilt is the condition. It can be one, the condition of having broken the law, not lived up to the standard or hurt someone. So it's the, I'm condemned for something that I did. I'm guilty for something that I did, for some behavior that I had. It can also be too, guilt can be the feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, transgression or harm that you've caused. And so what that means is it can be a state of being, you're actually guilty, you've actually broken the law, you've actually harmed someone, you've actually done something.

It can also be the feeling of remorse, of regret. So here's how that works. It means that you can be actually guilty and not feel guilty. Or you can be both. You can be actually guilty and feel guilty. Or you can just feel guilty, feel remorseful, feel like something is wrong but not have any real thing that you can point to to say this is exactly why I feel like this.

You can be haunted by something. And some of us in this room are haunted by guilt, crushed by it, followed around by it. Shame is the lingering sense that something is wrong with me because of something I did or something done to me or something I'm associated with. I'm unacceptable because of this. So some of you feel shame because of your family background.

Some of you feel shame because of things that have happened to you or things that have been said to you. Some of you have spent years just trying to get over things that your parents said to you, that people said to you, did to you. And you feel like there's something wrong with me now. There's something broken about me now. There's something marked now. I'm a failure.

I'm a reject. I'm damaged goods. I'm worthless. This idea that you carry around in yourself some form of Mark or scar. It can be broad and vague. It can be very specific.

Some of you, maybe you just feel like I'm just trying to get a win. Like I just, at this point, I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to get a win. And I heard one pastor say that that's shame at work. When you feel like I just gotta get a win. I just gotta, I just need to have something to show. Like I, I'm a South Carolina fan.

We beat Tennessee. That's the only game I wanna talk about for the rest of the season. Because I felt like I just want us to get a win. And the reason was I'm pretty ashamed of everything else. And some of you, that's what life looks like right now. It's a, I'm just trying to get a win.

I just need something that I can point to to say that I have value. I just need something that I can point to and say, this is working right now. And it shows up all over the place. Shame shows up for me when I, when I talk to a mechanic. Because I don't know anything about cars. Like if the car's broken down and the little, you know, the little things on E and that light's on, I'm like, I got this.

But otherwise, I don't, I don't, I can't do much. I can change the oil. I can call somebody in our church who knows something about cars. But when I talk to a mechanic, like shame shows up when I begin to pretend like I know what they're talking about. This mechanic can come out and be like, alright, look here. We had to retorque the TIG whistle on your chassis plate.

And I would be like, yeah, retorque that sucker. Shame is what immediately makes me want to tell y'all right now, I'm pretty sure a TIG whistle isn't a real thing. Like, I know enough about cars to say that. But, like, shame goes to work all over the place. For some of us, shame is at work when, it's the reason why you can't lose at a game. It's the reason why you care more about winning the game than the person you're playing with.

It's the reason why you throw fits over a game of spades or Monopoly. Monopoly's terrible, but other games. You can't lose. You have to prove that you're the best. For some of you, this is why you can't lose an argument. You can't.

You can't show weakness. You can't admit that you're wrong. You're arguing with somebody and they make a really good point and you just blow past it. You don't say, oh no, that's a good point. You got me there. Why?

Because you've got to prove that you have value. You've got to prove that you have work. You're trying to work away from where you're ashamed. This is why you pretend like you know stuff you don't know. This is why you wait in the conversations and just act like you have information you don't have. This is why, for some of you, if someone points out sin in you, your immediate response is, oh yeah?

Well, you did this. You can't just listen to what they say. You've got to point out how they're wrong. That's shame. See, we're all hiding. We're all sowing fig leaves.

We're all trying to mask what's going on. This is why we have, in our groups, we have like halfway confession. So we're talking about like we're going to confess some sin and people will be like, yeah, I just need y'all to be praying for me. You know how I got some anger stuff and I just have really been struggling. Or you see him later and you ask, hey, you told us to ask you about that. How's that going?

Yeah, it's been a struggle but I'm alright. That doesn't mean anything. You've said no words that mean anything. What's been a struggle? How are you alright? Yeah, I'm good.

This is halfway confess. We want to get as close to as close to being in the light without actually having to expose ourselves. Without actually having to let anybody see, I'm not okay. that's shame. That's guilt at work in us. It's that we feel not lovable as we are, not welcomed as we are, that we cannot be fully known and fully loved. We've begun to believe the lie that this is normal.

That this is how life is going to work. Some of you have been repeating to yourself over and over again, they can be known, they can be loved, they can be honest, but I can't. They can be real about who they are. They can confess. They can say how their marriage is going. They can say how their relationships have been.

They can tell their story about what's happened in their past, but I can't. I'm going to always feel like this. My life is always going to work like this because of what I've done or what's been done to me. And for some of us in this room, there's an overwhelming, crippling sense of guilt and shame and your life has been you working to overcome that. Every day feels like an uphill battle to fix something that you feel like is broken in you or to hide something that you feel like is going on in your life or something that's happened to you. There's a story and it's an intense, heartbreaking story from 2 Samuel and we're going to look at a quote on the screen here in a minute, but I just want to set it up for us.

King David has a bunch of children. He's king at the time and he's got a son and a daughter and they're both his children but he's got them for two different wives so they're half brother and sister to one another. And the text tells us that the son falls in love with his sister or his half sister and so he devises a plan with one of his friends on how he can rape his half sister, how he can take her to himself. And so he decides to get her to, he pretends to be sick and gets her to make food for himself so that he can take her and make her his. When she comes to feed him he's going to ask her to cook and when she comes to feed him then he'll have his opportunity and there's this passage where it tells us what happens when he comes to her.

And 2 Samuel 13, 11-13 says this, But when she brought them near, that's the food she'd made, near him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, come lie with me my sister. She answered him, no my brother, do not violate me for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not do this outrageous thing. As for me, where can I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the outrageous fools in Israel. She looks at him and she says, where would I take my shame?

Where would I carry my shame? If this happened to me, what would I do with the shame? And she says, and if you did this, you'd be an outrageous fool. And for those in the church who feel the way she felt, what am I going to do with my shame? I want to say a few things. First, I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry that what happened to you, that you feel like you've been marked or scarred. God, I want you to know that that was not God's original intent and plan for humanity, that he hates sin, that he's sovereign and good, but he hates sin, so much so that he was willing to die for it. And you are not to blame for the sins of others. But the question still is there, what do I do with my shame? Where do I carry it? And for those of you who feel guilt for something that you've done, and she says you'll be an outrageous fool.

Some of you maybe think, yeah, that's me. Maybe you wouldn't use those words. Maybe you'd say I'm a terrible person. I'm a complete idiot. I'm absolutely worthless. What do we do?

What's the Bible's answer to this? How does God respond to Adam and Eve in the midst of their guilt and shame? And then how does he respond to us when we say I have nowhere to carry this? I don't know what to do with this overwhelming guilt. I don't know what to do with this shame. The beginning of the answer is found in Genesis and how God responds.

And we're going to move from this point, we're going to spend a little bit of time in Genesis and then we're going to move through a couple of different passages in scripture to help us get a complete answer to how God responds to our guilt and our shame. And before we do that, I want to take a second to just pray for us. So let's do that now. God, I pray that in the time that remains, that your Holy Spirit would be at work to help us to see how you respond to us when all we want to do is hide. how you responded to us when the best plan we could come up with was to cover ourselves and run. And I pray that through your Holy Spirit you would make your response more real, more palpable to us than it has ever been.

And you would cement in our hearts and minds today your overwhelming love for us in the midst of our guilt and shame. In Jesus' name, amen. Back to Genesis. We already read some of this in Genesis chapter 3. It says, they heard, this is verse 8, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees in the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said, where are you? The first thing God does to us in the midst of our guilt and our shame is that he pursues us. Because our guilt and our shame makes us want to hide. Some of you feel like there's no way I could talk to God right now. There's no way I could pray right now. There's no way I could be brought in front of him right now.

There's no way I could even talk to people in the church or talk to people in our community group. There's no way. And God's immediate response is to pursue. It's God that seeks out the first contact with the man and the woman. And then verse 21, God talks to them about the effects of their sin and the issues that are going to follow this. And then he sums it up with this in verse 21.

And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. He made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them. Okay. Skin is not just lying around. Fig leaves are. Fig leaves are what we have access to.

But skin has to come from somewhere. And what we see in this text is that God kills an animal to make a better covering for Adam and Eve. His response is not, no, no, no, don't worry, this isn't a big deal. No, no, no, no, you can be completely uncovered. No, no, no, don't worry about the shame that you're feeling. His response is, no, you do need a covering, but I'm going to give you a better one.

That's how he responds to Adam and Eve, and ultimately throughout time turn to Isaiah 61. We're going to read, this is what we read earlier. Isaiah 61, it's on page 401. As we continue to see how God responds to us in the midst of our guilt and our shame. Guilt for what we've done, sense of having failed, shame for what's been done to us, or the fact that we can't be lovable as we are. This passage, I love this passage from Isaiah because it's what Jesus, when he comes to one of the synagogues in the book of Luke, he takes this out, he opens this scroll, he reads the first section, he sits down and says, that's been fulfilled in your hearing, meaning I've come here to accomplish what I just read.

So what we're reading is when Jesus steps in, he says this prophecy that was made by the prophet Isaiah, I've actually come to fulfill this, I've come to accomplish this, and this is how he responds to guilt and shame. The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, so this is Jesus, this is fulfilled in him, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Jesus says, I've come first and foremost to take those who are broken, those who are hurt, who feel like they can't ever love again, or be loved again, and to bind them up.

To fix their hearts and to set them free from the guilt and the shame and the sin that's been marking them and holding them captive, that's been keeping them in a prison, all the walls they've built to hide, I'm going to bring freedom and liberty, and I'm going to work in those that are broken hearted. So for you, if you say my heart's broken, it'll never love again, it'll never work again, I've been harmed, I've been hurt, he says I'm here for you. And I'm here for your heart. Verse 2, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn. I'm here to sit with you while you weep, I'm here to sit with you while you hurt, I'm here to put my arm around you, every person who is broken and hurting, I'm here.

To grant those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes. When they mourned, they would take ashes and they would put them on their head. And what he says is no, no, no, no, you're not wearing the clothes of someone who's lost someone, you're not wearing the clothes of someone who's failed, I'm going to give you a headdress, which is what they wore on a wedding day. He says instead of a widow's garment, I'm giving you a bride's address. I've come to take away your guilt and your shame and what you think your mourning is lost, forever gone, never to be recovered, and I'm making it new and I'm covering you with a wedding dress.

The oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planning of the Lord that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. He says what do you think has been devastated? What do you think has been ruined? What's a total loss for you? It's going to be rebuilt.

I'm going to work for what you think has completely been destroyed. The parts of your soul, the parts of your heart, the parts of your past, I'm redeeming them and fixing them and rebuilding them. That's what Jesus has come to do for humanity and it's what he's come to do for us in the midst of our guilt and our shame. move to verse 7. We won't have time to walk through this whole thing. Verse 7, Instead of your shame, there should be a double portion. Instead of this honor, they shall rejoice in their lot.

Therefore, in their land, they shall possess a double portion. They shall have everlasting joy. You know the shame that follows you around? You know the shame that's overwhelming you? He says I'm giving you a second helping of my goodness and my grace. There's going to be everlasting joy.

Instead of shame, you get a double portion. Verse 8, For I the Lord love justice, hate robbery, and wrong. I will faithfully give them their recompense and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Move to verse 10. This is the response. So the first is what God's going to do, what Jesus is going to do.

And this section in verse 10 is how we get to begin to respond. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall exult in my God, for he has closed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. You see, Genesis began with this man and woman brought together who were fully known and fully loved.

And Isaiah says that's how we get to respond to Jesus. Jesus. That he wants us like a groom wants his bride. That he desires us. That he loves us. And that Jesus knows everything about us but he's gone to work to cover us, to clothe us with his righteousness and to make us his.

Jesus loves you, pursues you, desires you, and wants to make you his the same way that a groom wants to take his bride and have her belong to him and have her to cherish. That's Jesus' response to the church. How? How does he do that? How does he get to respond to us in the midst of our brokenness, in the midst of our filth and our dirtiness and in the midst of all the things that have happened to me and all the things that I've done? How does he respond to me that way?

The answer is the cross. And on the cross he does two things that counteract and go to work on our guilt and our shame. The first one we're going to look at is because we have to ask how does he handle my guilt? 2 Corinthians 5.21 We're going to have the verse up here. For our sake he, that's God, made him, that's Jesus. So for our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is the same thing Isaiah just said. He clothes us with righteousness. God took your sin and placed it on Jesus. Jesus became your sin. For those of you who have harmed somebody who have abused somebody who have still feel the lingering guilt about how you've treated your children and how you spoke to people and what you did in high school and college and what you did to your first wife what you did like those of you who have this lingering over you he became that and went to the cross. He became our sin.

The worst in all of us was placed on Jesus and he became our sin was nailed to a cross and when he did that we became his righteousness. He clothed us with all that was good in himself. All the love that he deserves all the grace that he deserves he's clothed us with. Yeah but what about what happened to me? I know he I know he pays for guilt I know he forgives sin but what about what's happened to me? What about the shame that I have?

What about even though I'm forgiven what about this shame that I carry around? This embarrassment this feeling of being exposed. We're going to turn to Ephesians 5. Paul in Ephesians 5 is writing a letter to a church and he's explaining to husbands and wives how to love one another specifically in the section we're going to read he's talking to husbands and the way he does it is he points to Jesus and he points to the church and he says this is how Jesus has treated us and he says husbands this is how you ought to treat your spouse. So I just want us to look and see how Jesus treats us.

Ephesians 5 we'll pick up in verse 25 husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Christ is Jesus the church is all of those who he's redeemed who he's saved who've placed their faith in him. So if you are a follower of Jesus if you are a follower of Christ you are in the church. So what he says is husbands love your wife the way that Christ modeled for us and so we're going to take a minute to look at what Christ did. He says Christ loved the church so much that he gave himself up for her meaning that Jesus came on a specific rescue mission for those he was redeeming for those he was saving for those he loved and he died to redeem us to make the church his.

Redeeming for those he was saving for those he loved and he died to redeem us to make the church his. He died to make you his. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her verse 26 that he might sanctify her that means clean and set apart make her special is a way to say that that he might sanctify her having cleansed her

By the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and blameless and without blemish. Jesus died on the cross to take the church and to present her to himself spotless without wrinkle without blemish that if you are in the church you stand

Before God before Christ completely covered completely free without spot or blemish or wrinkle or anything like it he says or any such thing you name it it doesn't make it there you name what you think it would be that would come with you and it doesn't make it there there is no spot or blemish

Or wrinkle he's redeemed you to present you to him as a husband presents a bride to himself that he's covered you completely now I know you well enough and I've been a pastor long enough it's not been real long but it's been long enough to know that some of you who know enough theology are trying to argue with me and so let's argue you're saying in your head yeah yeah yeah but that's that's the church

That's big C church that's not me specifically yes I'm a Christian but that's what he's saying is he did that to the entire church what he he did that to all of those who belong to him that the whole church gets to be presented and to himself and what happens is you try to push it off on the church and act like it doesn't somehow apply to yourself and so it somehow doesn't count

To you that yes he I get like swept up with the church but I'm I'm on the tail end I'm on the fringes I'm kind of loved because Jesus loves all of them and I can hang out with them and he loves me but here's what you're saying just so you know when you're making that argument you're saying yeah yeah he does it to the whole church

But in the midst of the whole church I'm a spot wrinkle blemish no such thing no such thing not in the church not because of Jesus not because of what he's done for us that Jesus the God of the universe has died to present the entire church without a spot without a wrinkle without a blemish that we stand before him completely clothed in white that's how

That's how Revelation pictures this for us it shows the throne of God and it shows all of the saints all of the church all of those who've been saved by him dressed in white before God that when we stand before God we're clothed in the righteousness of Jesus that if God right now said okay church it's time to take you to task okay I'm calling you in front of me present yourself

You get to walk in front of him blameless because of Jesus righteous because of Jesus because you've been clothed by Jesus some of you are saying yeah but I I can't get rid of this I don't I don't know how to get rid of this scar I don't know how to get rid of this Mark I'm stained by this Jesus dies he goes to the cross he goes to the grave he rises again he's glorified at this point he's back to being healthy

He's back to being alive he rose from the grave then he meets Thomas and Thomas says I won't believe unless I see holes in his hands a scar on his side and Jesus still has holes in his hands and a scar on his side and he shows him to Thomas and in the book of Revelation it says look the lion of the tribe of Judah and John's writing this down and he says I look to see the lion of the tribe of Judah which would be Jesus and he says I didn't see a lion I saw a lamb

That looked like it had been slain the marks of your guilt and your shame exist into eternity they're not on you they're on Jesus the marks of what I've done the marks of what have been done to me exist forever in eternity on the lamb that was slain but I get to wear white you get to wear white what was said to you what was done to you Jesus has washed you he's clothed you

He's wrapped you in a garment of righteousness and he's presented you to himself as without a blemish or a wrinkle or a spot because he took all of our wrinkles and our stains and our spots and our blemishes and our sin and our shame on himself the answer to the question in 2 Samuel where do I carry my shame is I carry it as far as I can to get to Jesus and once it's at Jesus he carries it on his back up a hill

Onto a cross into a tomb and he carries it into eternity and he's sitting right now this very moment on a throne next to the creator of the universe where he holds the marks of our shame where he holds the marks of our guilt on himself and everyone who belongs to the church is covered in a robe of righteousness and Jesus sits next to the father where he makes intercession forever and he says you can't blame them

They have no shame they have no guilt it's right here if you are in the church your guilt and your shame have been nailed to a cross have been laid in the grave have risen again and sit next to the throne of God and when we walk in front of that throne the marks of our guilt and shame are there and we're covered in righteousness and then we'll spend eternity praising the lamb who was slain because we didn't

Have to be because our shame doesn't have to follow us around because our guilt has no hold over us anymore because we have a God who loved us so much that he clothed us in righteousness and made us his Bianca's going to come back up here's how we're going to respond here's how we get to respond believe that believe what the Bible says is true take your shame and your guilt

To Jesus and believe that he pays for it trust him the way you begin to do that is you get to start praying specifically over the things that haunt you and you get to say Jesus I don't have shame for this anymore when they said this it's not true anymore when I did this this guilt is gone you get to start naming it specifically

As you pray to him and you praise him that he's paid for it that he's covered it you get to read these passages and remind yourself I wear white I'm clothed in righteousness the way we respond is not to do something not to earn something because Jesus has already done it and he's already earned it the way we respond is we get to take it to him and say you've covered it you've paid for this I've been made new because of you secondly you get to respond as you walk through

The killjoy books by showing up to your group and maybe being honest for the very first time you get to walk into your community group this week and you get to lay your fig leaves down because they don't make you righteous they have no power to save they have no ability to cover you but Jesus has made you righteous he's clothed you in a garment of salvation he's wrapped you in a robe of righteousness and you get to say hey this would have

Crushed me this would have destroyed me I should have been destroyed by this but Jesus has paid for it Jesus has covered me and I'm celebrating the righteousness I have by being able to be honest and not ashamed open but not smothered by guilt and then your community group gets to respond by saying yes isn't Jesus amazing that he stands before God and he intercedes for us that he went to the cross

For us and that we're all covered that you don't have to feel shame for that you don't have to feel guilt for that that we get to respond by believing the gospel and being set free that he really does set captives free and right now this morning we get to respond by taking communion where the church celebrates by partaking in the broken body of Jesus and his spilled blood and reminding ourselves

That that is what makes us okay not our ability to hide not our ability to put on a mask not our ability to be good to go back in time and fix something or to do so many good things now that we can pay for it but that Jesus' death on the cross his resurrection saves us clothes us makes us his and so that's for the church if you're a Christian you get to celebrate that way

If you're not a Christian here this morning there is no answer for 2 Samuel for you you have nowhere to carry your shame you have no way to not be an outrageous fool outside of Jesus only Jesus can take your guilt can take your shame and can set you free only Jesus you're not going to find that anywhere else you're not going to find that in any other religion you're not going to find that anywhere but Christ and anywhere but the cross and anywhere but the empty tomb

So I'd invite you to place your faith in Jesus today and take communion for the very first time let's pray God we're righteous we wear white because you took our sin and you took our shame because you were stripped bare and nailed to a cross we get to be clothed because you died we get to have life God we praise you we thank you that we get to be the people that celebrate forever with everlasting joy clothed in righteousness dressed like we're going to a wedding to celebrate forever

Your goodness and your grace and I pray specifically for those in our church family who struggle with shame and guilt that they would find so much freedom so much joy in the cross they begin to be honest with their groups they begin to live a life as if they're clothed in righteousness as if they're dressed for a wedding in Jesus name we pray Amen

Oct 30

Anger

Anger

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Anger is a big issue. For many of us, it's devastatingly bad. It's not good for us. You're sitting in traffic. On your way home, you're in traffic. It's bumper to bumper.

No one's going anywhere. You don't know if it's a wreck. You don't know if it's construction. You don't know if it was construction that caused a wreck. You don't know. How are you doing?

How's your little heart doing right now? Some of you are like, I'm fine. So there's a side area here. And somebody behind you thinks nobody's using that lane that isn't a road. I'll give it a shot. And so they just take off.

And you're like, okay, no. Rules? We can't do that? And then they get up to the front there. And you know what they do? They put on their blinker.

And do you know what that idiot does that's right there next to on the blinker? They're like, oh, come on over. You accidentally got on the part of the road that wasn't road? Hop on in here. And then 1,700 people behind you see that. And they're like, ah, new lane.

You know, how you doing? How's your steering wheel doing? Like, okay, you're in your fourth hour of Monopoly. And you've been losing money for the last hour and a half to your smug uncle. How's it going? How's the rest of family vacation going to go?

Like, how are you doing? How's your heart? How are you responding? You're in the hallway at school and find out that someone's been telling things about you that aren't true. And they're all up in your business when they shouldn't be. And they have a lot to say about you when they shouldn't have a lot to say about you.

How are you doing? How do you handle that? How do you approach that? You're in a business meeting at work. And your boss just derides you. Just takes a shot at you.

Just because he's in a position of authority and he can get away with it. He just calls you out on something. How do you respond? So are you the type of person, do you yell? Do you fight back? Do you throw punches?

Is that you? Like, is that how you respond to those situations? Are you the person that's likely for you to throw a thing and yell? Like, are you a words person? So you're consistently in arguments and you watch words fly out of your mouth that you're like, I mean, we're like heat-seeking missiles.

And sometimes, depending on the relationship you have with the person, you're going, oh, get back in my mouth. Like, but is that how you respond? Are you a note writer? Do you blast off emails? Yelp? Are you yelping people?

Like, is that you? Are you no external response whatsoever? You nod, you smile, and you mentally eviscerate someone. And the best part about that is you'll get in a conversation with someone you don't like. And they'll be talking to you. And the whole time you go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And, I mean, you're destroying them. And then when they walk away, you know what you say to yourself? That person's so fake. Yeah. But what about, are you the person who five hours later is like, oh, that's what I should have said.

God, when I flipped over the Monopoly board, I should have said, at least I'm not going bald, Uncle Carl. Like, is that you? Are you internally processing anger all the time when you get mad? Does it mess you up for the rest of the day? You losing sleep at night? You messed up for a week?

You're the type of person who's like, I've been mad at the same person since third grade. Yeah. Yeah. I know how to hold a grudge. Like, is that you? Like, when you get angry, it's forever?

See, anger is an issue. And here's the thing. Everybody gets angry. Everybody gets angry. The question is, are you processing externally or are you processing internally? Because if you're an external anger processor, you know, and the people around you know.

If you, if you're a, if you verbally or physically process your anger, if you're the person who's likely to kick whatever is near you, you know, and the people around you know. And you're in here going, yeah, okay. I'm kind of mad right now that we're talking about this, but all right, this is me. See, some of you internal anger processor people, no one around you knows, and there's potential that you don't even know. You think because you don't act out on your anger that somehow it's not the same, but you are acting out on your anger. You're avoiding conversations.

You're not responding to phone calls. You're treating people differently. You're mentally going through how you're going to harm them or what you should have said to them or you're rehearsing murder in your head. Like you, like you have a mental list of who's on your top 10 if we decide to do the purge. Like that's, that's you. And that's destroying you.

The one psychologist said that internally processing anger is like having a trash can catch on fire at your house. So you stick it in a closet. That's, it's going to cause problems later. That didn't solve it. So are you internally or externally processing anger?

Because you have anger, you're going to get angry. Everybody gets angry. What are we doing with it? You see, in this series, our goal is that we believe that Jesus has set us free. That he has given us joy. That he has made us new.

And that we, for so many of us, have gotten used to sins that we've acted like have become normal or okay. So that if you, if you talk to your group and you text and say, yeah, I'm really struggling with anger. It's like, yeah, we'll pray for you. And it's become an acceptable thing. And it's robbing you of joy. And it's harming your relationship with Jesus.

And we've just gotten used to it. So our goal in this series is to, to engage with our sin, our struggle, the things we've grown used to that are robbing us of joy. And actually begin to process. The point isn't, let's just talk about anger. And I'm going to give you five steps on how to take deep breaths and say things like, in with the butterflies, out with the bees. Like, we're not doing that.

We're not, this isn't count to ten stuff or go punch a pillow. We actually want Jesus to change us. We want him to go to work in our hearts. That's the goal of this series. That's the point of this series. Because anger is an issue.

I've got a couple of Proverbs. I'm going to show you Proverbs is just wisdom literature. We're going to spend most of our time in James. So we're going to run through a few Proverbs just to try to help us see how the Bible talks about anger. A man of quick temper, this is Proverbs 14, 17. A man of quick temper Acts foolishly.

And a man of evil devices is hated. Proverbs 14, 29. Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding. But he who has a hasty temper exalts folly. Exalts means you lift up. Folly means foolishness.

Have you ever gotten mad and then later in the day when you calmed down a little bit, you were like, man, I acted like a fool earlier. Yes, that's because you were a fool earlier. Your anger took control of you and you exalted folly. You said, hey, you want to see some nonsense? And then lost it on people around you. Proverbs 29, 22 says, a man of wrath stirs up strife.

And one given to anger causes much transgression. If anger is a normal pattern for you, transgression means sin. Which means that your anger on a regular basis is leading you to sin. Proverbs 29, 11. A fool gives full vent to his spirit. But a wise man quietly holds it back.

We kind of have in psychology, there's this, oh, you just need to vent your anger. You just need to, if you get angry, you just got to find a way to vent it, to let it out. If you got a little bit of fire, just add a bunch of oxygen to it. No. That's what fools do. We actually, we don't want to just learn some little techniques for causing it to be a little bit okay.

The goal isn't to manage our anger issues. The goal is to get rid of them. And for those of you who are internal processors, who, nobody knows you're angry. Proverbs at one point says that bitterness is only known to the soul. Meaning that if you're bitter, you may be the only person who knows. Hebrews 12 says that bitterness is like a bitter root that defiles everything, that makes everything, poisons everything else around it.

So you can have a pool of water, and if there's a bitter root going in, it can make the water undrinkable. And it's saying that's what bitterness is doing in your soul. Anger is an issue. It's a problem. But luckily, Jesus helps.

So I'm going to pray for our time this morning, for our week ahead as we and our community groups walk through this. And then we'll turn to James. God, we thank you that anger does not have to destroy us. That we do not have to be controlled by our internal tendencies. We don't have to be controlled by our family heritage. That we don't have to be controlled by our past bad decisions.

We thank you that you went to work on all of those in the cross. We pray, Lord, that you'd help us repent. You'd help us to see our anger. See the root of our anger. And find freedom in you. We ask that in Jesus' name.

Amen. Turn to James chapter 4. We'll have a few times where we'll show another verse on Scripture, but the rest of the day will be in James chapter 4. It's on page 655 if you have a blue and white Bible. If you don't own a Bible, take this one with you. We want you to own a Bible.

We want you to read it. Everything we do comes from this. So we want you reading this as much as possible. We are pro-Bible around here. James chapter 4, verse 1. What causes quarrels?

It's arguments. And what causes fights among you? Okay, so here's how James starts. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What's up? What's causing the problem?

Why is there a hole in your drywall? What has made you foster a bad attitude and bitterness towards someone for the past three months? What's at work there? That's what he's starting off with. He's run into his kids beating the snot out of each other. He's jerked them apart and said, okay, what started this?

What's the problem here? That's what he's doing for the church. He's saying, okay, what's causing y'all to get in fights? Y'all to be in arguments? What's at work here? Now, I love his answer.

Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? It's asked a question, but he's giving us the answer there. It's one of those questions where you don't have to answer. Here's why I love that. If I went to your house and said, why is there a hole in the drywall? Or if we were friends or we're in the same community group and I said, why are you, why have you not talked to this person for two months?

Why are you consistently running through your head how terrible they are? Why are you building up this bitterness in your soul? Why are you in the fight? Why are you in this argument? Why did you do this to your steering wheel? Why are you cussing at people that you don't know in traffic?

If I ask those questions, you know what our answer is? Well, they did this. They said that. You would not believe how my boss treats me. You don't even understand what's happened in class. You have no clue what my coach is like.

You don't know what my spouse is like. If you had my children, do you know what your answer is? Do you know what James says? Isn't the issue you? Now, if we have anger issues, let's all just take a second and be really mad at James. Because he just said, isn't the problem you?

Isn't the issue in your heart? Isn't it your passions? Aren't you the issue? We said last week that we have three enemies and that we're going to talk through as we walk through all of these different lusts and anxiety and self-loathing that we always at play are three enemies. And we said the main one is the flesh. That's us.

That's what James starts off with. Aren't you the problem? Okay. Let's keep going. Let's figure out what he's talking about here.

Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. Okay. The word passions in the Bible is most often used. So we talk about like, oh, I'm passionate and I have a passion for animals.

And that's why I give money to PETA. And I have a passion for turtles or I have passion for cars. Like we use it as like this, like good thing. The Bible doesn't use it that way. The Bible uses it as inordinate love. Love, desire that's been set loose.

So what he's starting off by saying is the issue with your anger is your love. That's the issue. That's the problem. You see, the Bible does not flat out say that anger by itself is a problem. It does not treat anger that way. So maybe you've been in a church before where it was taught you should never get angry.

And if you at any point get angry, you're wrong. The problem with that is, is that God gets angry. You see, the goal of anger, Christian anger, the Christian ethic towards anger is not stoicism. It's not to be completely disconnected from our attitudes and our passions. It's actually to have slow anger. So Proverbs 16, 32 says this.

Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty. And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. So the point of anger is not to vent it out. And the point of anger is to not ever get angry. The point, the goal for anger is that you'd be really slow to get angry. But there should be times that you get angry.

Should be. It is appropriate to get angry. Anger is the appropriate response to certain things. God gets angry at sin. God gets angry at wickedness. When we hear about sex trafficking, when we see the injustice in the United States, when we see children neglected or abused, we should get angry.

That's an appropriate response. We should have sorrow. We should have sadness in the midst of that. But anger is an appropriate response. God has righteous anger towards sin. And completely never having anger is actually inappropriate.

It means that we're apathetic or we're indifferent to the things that God loves. Now, I want to push you in two areas on this. One, if you're the type of person who says, I never get angry. That's not Christ-like. Jesus gets angry towards sin and injustice, and it propels him to action. The Bible uses the term zeal for that.

It's like an anger, a righteous anger that leads to correct action. So I want to push you a little bit. If you're like, I never get angry, it actually means that you don't love some of the things that you should love. Anger is the appropriate response when something we love is attacked. Like, if you tried to assault my family, my appropriate response would not be, hey, you're hurting them. Take it easy.

That would not be appropriate. That would be bad husbanding and fathering. The appropriate response would be to do what I did when I was little, which is punch you and then figure it out from there. I don't, maybe not, don't quote me on that. The appropriate response would be to stop you from harming my family. Let's go with that.

I want to retract what I just said because sometimes I say things that I probably shouldn't. So, I should get angry. You should, if someone, you should hate cancer. If it's actively at work destroying people in your family, you should hate the tumor that's growing in your grandfather's brain. You should hate it and want to do something about it. We should hate injustice.

Being apathetic allows evil to grow. Allows it to fester. This is an indifference towards what is unjust is the issue that the white church had in the South during the Jim Crow South era, during the segregation, during the civil rights movement, where many of us just sat by and said, let's just, let's wait it out. It should be an anger towards injustice, a desire to fix what is wrong. So, I want to push you a little bit. If you're never angry, you should be.

Sometimes. Now, most of us, that's not our problem. It was not righteous anger that made you say that to your children. It was not righteous anger that put a hole in your drywall. It is not righteous anger that is keeping you from talking to someone you should have had a conversation with two months ago. That's not our issue.

So, don't right now begin to try to hide your anger in the righteous category. Don't do that. You're incorrect. We should be angry about appropriate things that lead us to, but the issue is our love is disordered. That's what he's saying. He says, your passions are at war within you.

Augustine, who was an African pastor in about 300 AD, so a couple hundred years after Jesus, he says that our major issue is that we have disordered love. Which means that what we care about is all out of order. When we're supposed to love God as supreme, we're supposed to trust him and love him and find all of the good things from him. We put something else in his place. That we love money more. We love our fame more.

We love our popularity more. We love being in control more. And we love having a good schedule more. We love having comfort more. And what happens is that we take bad things we shouldn't love and we love them. But the bigger issue is that we take, and what happens more often, is that we take good things and love them too much.

There's nothing wrong with comfort. There's nothing wrong with popularity. But we've shifted it and we love it too much. You see, we are reacting in anger when something attacks what we love. Our passions are at war within us and our response when things are threatened is to be angry. This is why.

You can hear about starvation across the globe. You can hear about the issues that are happening in Aleppo right now. You can hear about sex trafficking across the globe. And you can think, man, that's terrible. That's terrible. You can be angry.

You can be upset. But if a friend forgets to invite you to a party, or someone says something disrespectful about you, or you get a poor work review from a boss who's an idiot, you lose sleep at night. This is why when someone snubs us, we are a hundred times more angry than we are about global injustice. Because our love is out of whack. What we care about is disordered. You tracking with him so far?

The reason we're fighting is because our passions are all out of order. We love things that we shouldn't love too much. Okay. So that's the point he's making. That we've begun to love something that we shouldn't love. We're building our life on things and because we love them, we're defending them.

And that's what's causing our anger. You can actually, you can, if you had a rope tied to your anger, most of what we've been trying to say is like you should control the anger. But actually what he's saying is follow the other end of the rope and see what it is you love. Follow the rope down and see what you love. See what it is you're defending. See what it is you're protecting.

All right. Let's keep going. Let's pick back up in verse two. You desire and do not have so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.

Okay. So what he just said was some of you, the things you're pursuing, you hadn't even prayed about. Like you don't have them because you never asked for them. You never prayed about them. And so immediately a lot of us just went jackpot. Sweet.

I didn't realize I could just ask for this stuff. Like I thought I had to get out there and get on my grind and my hustle and I had to I had to make this work. But like I didn't realize I could just pray about it. Sweet. All right.

Let's keep going because he's he's got a caveat to that. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people. He said, OK, some of you have been praying about this a lot and you haven't gotten it. And some of you right now, maybe you're in that situation. You've been praying about something.

You've been praying about something. You've been praying about something. You've been asking for health. You've been asking for your finances to work out. You've been asking for this promotion. You've been asking for that husband.

You've been asking for that wife. You've been asking for your kids to work out. You've been asking for. And you're going, I don't know. I don't know if he's going to answer. I don't know if prayer works.

I'm thinking about giving up this whole thing. And what he just said was, no, the reason you're asking is because you love that too much. And then he says, you adulterous people. That felt a little harsh. That took a cheap shot. It's not.

Here's why he brings up adultery. You're supposed to love God primarily above all else. See, it'd be like if I came to my wife and I said, you know, when we got married and we said, it'd just be us and that I would do everything I could to honor you and to love you and to please you and that you would do the same for me. And that we're supposed to find our enjoyment in each other sexually. Well, here's what I was thinking. One of the ways that you can help me enjoy myself sexually is to talk to your friend and convince her to have sex with me.

James just said that's some of your prayer life. Jesus, I need you to go to work for what I really care about. I need you to get out there and give me what I really desire. I need you to get out there and get for me what I really want, what will actually fill me up, what will actually make me happy. And if you're not willing to do that, I'm not sure you love me. You adulterous people, that's what James says.

You love things you shouldn't love, your hearts are out of order, and you're mad because you're not getting the things you shouldn't get anyway. See, our anger has to do with what we love. Our love is defending. Our anger is defending what we actually care about. Let's keep going.

You adulterous people, it's verse 4, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Okay, so what he just said was, you remember we said we had three enemies? The flesh, the world, and the devil. Those are the three enemies we have. So he's already gotten us to the second one.

He said, okay, the biggest issue is that you love things you shouldn't love. And then he says, what you love is out there in the world. So what you're praying about is the perfect Job, the perfect spouse, the perfect amount of wealth, this amount of money in the bank, this type of health, this type of situation, to have this kind of popularity, to have this kind of recognition, to have this kind of fame, to have this type of comfort, this kind of control over your situation. And what he's saying is you've fallen in love with a bunch of things that aren't worth loving. Not as much as you love them.

When you fall in love with the world, you put God as your enemy. Verse 5. Or do you suppose it is for no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the spirit he has made to dwell in us? So he says, okay, you realize that that was in there on purpose, right? When he says he yearns jealously for the spirit he's made to dwell in us. What he's talking about is, so this trips people up sometimes, that God would be jealous of you, and he's not.

He's jealous for you. So I told you I had anger issues, and when I get upset I can't talk. So let me explain one of the ways this has played out. My wife and I started dating when we were in high school. We had a class together. And we were, for some reason, like we had to go to an assembly or something, and so we're sitting in the gym.

There's a bunch of people around, and there was a guy in our class who was very popular, very well-liked, and was very flirty. And so he was talking to Anna, who was my girlfriend. We'd only been dating for like two months or something. And while they're talking, like, they're talking. He's being hilarious and charming and funny. And, like, I'm becoming increasingly displeased with how this is playing out, but it's like, whatever.

Sitting that big a deal. I'm sitting next to her, so it's like this cat, you know, I go so far with this. Like, I mean, while they're talking, he reaches up and does the, like, movie brush your hair back thing on her. I don't think I said anything. Mostly what I did, because I remember I said I would hit people and not think about it. Mostly what I did, and I had been growing in this, mostly what I did was control myself.

Which means I think I got really twitchy. Like, he touched her, and my response was, and, like, I just looked at him. All I remember is that everyone who was near him slid away on the bleachers. Now, let me explain to you. I was not jealous of her. I did not think I want him to touch my hair.

God is not jealous of you. He's not sitting in heaven saying, I wish I was wrapped up in thinking that sex was the best thing on earth. He's not up in heaven saying, I wish I was super caring about wealth. I wish I had gotten my whole self wrapped up in popularity and how much people like me. He's not jealous of you. He's jealous for you.

You see, we'd only been dating about two months, but when he touched her, I thought I should strangle him. Because I'm jealous for her. I care about her. I love her. And if anybody else wants to try to take her from me, that's going to be a problem. And see, Jesus cares about you.

He loves you. And when you start chasing after all these other things and you start defending them with your anger, he's jealous for you. He wants to step in and he wants to rescue and redeem. And he wants to snatch the garbage out of your hand that you think will satisfy you. And he wants to give you what actually will, which is himself. Jesus is so jealous for you that the cross stands as the centerpiece of history.

That he was unwilling to let us, he was unwilling to stand by while we chased for things that would never fix us or satisfy us. So much so that he left eternity, left heaven, and came to take on suffering and sorrow and death on our behalf so that we can have what actually matters. See, our anger betrays in us that we love something far more than we ought to. And Jesus loves you enough to go to work on your anger. And to go to work on your rampant passions. And to set you free.

Verse 5, we just read it. Or you suppose it is for no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the spirit that he's made to dwell in us. 6, but he gives more grace. Grace just is unmerited favor. That what Jesus accomplishes for us was not earned by us. But he gives more grace.

Therefore, it says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Okay. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

It feels like that just came out of nowhere. It's like we're talking about anger. Why did the devil just show up? James has, in this passage, clearly identified our three enemies. He says, isn't the problem you? Isn't the problem that you love things you shouldn't love?

And isn't the devil involved in this? That's how anger works. That's how, like, all three are involved. Paul does the same thing when he's talking about anger. He says this in Ephesians chapter 26, 27. No, not chapter 26.

Chapter 4, verses 26 and 27. Paul says this. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. So Paul says be angry.

Like, you're going to be angry sometimes and there are some things you should be angry about. Don't sin. Don't act on your anger. And then he says don't let the sun go down on your anger. Don't let the sun set on your anger. Give no opportunity to the devil.

Some versions will say give no foothold. So if it says foothold, if I'm trying to scale a mountain, all I need is a foothold. Just somewhere to put the tip of my toe. And then I need to find somewhere to get my hand. And then I can scale an entire mountain if I can find enough footholds. What he's saying is that when you let your anger fester, the devil gets to go to work.

He gets to, when you don't quickly get rid of your anger, when you don't quickly repent, when you don't quickly reconcile with people, you're giving opportunity for the devil to hop in and go to work on your anger. So here are things he does. He comes along and says stuff like, they're the ones who's wrong. You don't need to talk to them. They need to come talk to you. They need to call you.

And then when they call, it's like you don't even pick up right now. They don't need to talk to them. They need to fix this. He goes to work in fostering bitterness. When we let anger stay overnight with us, we've given a foothold to the enemy. And so really what he's saying is realize the enemy is involved in your anger and be quick to not allow him to be.

Resist him. He'll flee from you. Which means you don't have to be amazing. You don't have to be awesome. But you just get to realize that he's at work and you can stand firm.

And you don't get to have a place in my anger. You don't get to be a part of it. So here's what we're going to do. Coming out of the back end of this, I'm actually going to go back up. I just want us to see three things that we need to do to process through our anger that James gives us. Three steps that we need to take.

And then we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about what actually makes that work. Because if you just take these steps, it's not going to do anything. But you've got to take these steps and then actually we'll talk about what catalyzes that, what makes it effective. Okay? So that's what we're doing.

First thing is, go back to verse, it's just one verse up from where we just were. Seven. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Okay, so that's the first thing you have to do is submit to God. This really means two things when it comes to anger. You need to admit you're angry.

You see, angry by its very nature wants to hide. It wants to blame it on someone else. It wants to act like, no, no, no, I'm just passionate. Yeah, that's what James says. Are you passionate about things you shouldn't be? Or I just speak my mind.

Or I'm just Italian. I had somebody say that one time. Like, I'm Italian so I yell. It's like, what? That's not how that works. Be a Christian and repent.

How about that? Like, submit yourself. Admit you're angry. Admit that the hole in your drywall didn't get there magically. Admit that the two-month-long attitude you've had towards somebody has been growing. Admit that you're angry.

Admit that this is an issue for you. Submit to him. What it basically means is turn yourself in. Go to God and say, I can't. Like, you've got to help me. I can't fix this on my own.

Counting to 10 has not stopped working. I started counting to 20. And then I got to 100. And like, I need you to go to work in my anger. The second thing that you're doing when you submit to God is this. You're submitting the results to God.

Meaning that for many of us, you're saying, I can't let go of my anger. They actually stole from me. They actually took from me. You don't know what they did to me. You don't know what growing up in my house was like. You don't understand.

You don't understand how they've treated us. You don't understand how he speaks to me. Yeah. Yeah, don't. Many people might not. You might be the person in this room who's coming from the absolute worst situation.

But I know two things. God knows your situation. And God joined you in it when he went to the cross. And God takes up the sword. He says that vengeance is his. You have to submit the outcome to him.

Because some of you are angry because it's what keeps you protected. It's what makes you feel safe. Some of you are angry because you've got to bring justice and vengeance on those who've harmed you. And no, it's not yours. It's not yours to do. It's Jesus's.

God has righteous wrath towards sin. Those who have harmed you. Those who have sinned against you. Those who abused you. Those who have mistreated you. Those who have spoke evil to you.

Those who have taken from you. Yes, God has righteous wrath towards sin. The cross makes that clear. Sinners do not get to go free. Sin will be dealt with and paid for. But here's what the cross does.

It means that either Jesus will pay for our sin. Or we will pay for our sin. But sin will be dealt with. And one of the things you have to do if you're angry. And you're angry for some correct reasons. People have actually harmed you.

You've got to submit that to God and say, I'm angry. And I won't be free until I can trust that you'll go to work. That you'll either give them grace, which they don't deserve, which I don't deserve. Or you'll punish them for their sin. But I trust that you're going to be the one who takes up the sword.

If there was no judgment at the back of this book. If Jesus did not show up and make people pay for sin. Then we would have to make people pay for sin. But because he is the righteous judge over the universe, we don't get to be. First thing we have to do is submit. To lay it all down, you have to admit you're angry.

And you have to understand that he gets to work out the results. This is verse 7. Submit yourself. 8. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners.

2. You need to repent of sin. Here's what I mean. Being angry. If you just get angry about something. You can be angry and not sin.

You can be angry and be slow to anger. You can be angry and like what Paul says. Be angry and don't sin. You can do that. But when you've been angry and you have sinned, we need to cleanse our hands.

Meaning we need to make restitution. We need to have some conversations. We need to apologize and repent to those in our family. Some of you are going to need to sit down with your spouse and say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the stuff I've said to you. I'm angry.

I need Jesus to change me, but I'm sorry. Some of you have said some things to your children, to your spouse, to your friends. It's going to be very difficult for them to forget. Very difficult for them to continue with. And you're going to need to repent. Some of you have physically harmed someone.

Some of you have been not answering a phone call or avoiding someone. Or when you see them, maybe even here in your community group, you just don't talk to them. Or you keep it real short, but you're tearing them up in your head. You need to repent. You need to go to them and say, I'm wrong. I'm sorry.

I've been treating you poorly. I need your forgiveness. We need to cleanse our hands. Thirdly, we need to examine our hearts. So he says, cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Rather than trying to control our anger, we need to follow the rope the other way. We need to figure out what it is we love. Psalm 4 says this, and we'll have it on screen. It's what Paul quotes earlier. Be angry and do not sin. Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent.

Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord. We need to do what the psalmist says. We need to do what James says, which is actually look at our hearts and begin to ask, what is it I love too much? That's what our inventories are this week for our anger series. There's the Killjoy books that are out in the hall. If you haven't gotten one yet, you need to grab one on your way out.

We're going to walk through those in our community groups. But the goal of his inventories is just to begin to ask, what is it I love? What is my anger defending? Is there a pattern here? You ever been with someone and they completely lose their mind over something or get really angry over something, and you're like, I have no clue why they're mad. Like you went with them to a Jiffy Lube, and the guy behind the counter was just kind of curt and like, not like his name was curt, but he was short with them and rude.

And you're like, man, this guy's kind of rude. And then you walk outside and they go, can you believe that guy? I'm about ready to go back in there. It's like, what? Steve. Was that his name?

Yeah. At least I'm getting on Yelp. I'm doing it. Like, and you're going, what is wrong with you? You ever been with somebody at a restaurant? And the waiter or waitress is slow, and you actually watch someone lose their mind?

You ever done this? Like you're trying to have a conversation and they're like, they saw me. Like, what? Who saw you? I was just, I tried to make a, they turned around. They know I'm, they saw him out of tea.

I said, bro, you can have some of my tea. I don't want to, no, uh-uh. This is, this is about the principle. Is it? Is that what it's about? You see, like, do you, do you only get angry if someone disrespects you?

Maybe you really need people to think you're great. And so, maybe you love being honored and praised and people thinking highly of you. So if someone disrespects you, you can't have that. Maybe if all the categories where you're getting angry are because someone's messing with your schedule. Maybe you love your schedule too much. Maybe if all the times you're getting angry is when someone takes something that was going to be comfortable and nice away from you.

Maybe you love comfort too much. Maybe your passions are at war within you. Maybe you like your popularity too much. Maybe the only time you're getting angry is when anything involves money. So when, can you believe they asked for money?

That's, that's so rude. So, that's, and it's like, I don't know. Like, maybe you love something too much. We need to, to examine our hearts and begin to see what it is that we're pursuing. We need to submit to God, we need to admit we're angry. Give control to Him over how the situation is going to play out.

We need to repent of sin. Begin to apologize to people, repent to people. Christian, Christian people, when you apologize to somebody in our church family or in your, in your family, use the word repent. It puts it into the right category. So if, if my wife comes to me and say, hey, I just want to tell you I'm sorry.

Well, like, she could be sorry for spilling something on my shoes. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, sorry doesn't necessarily, like, she, if she comes to me and says, hey, I need to repent. I need you to forgive me. It's already pushed it into the right category for me. It's like, okay, yes.

Repentance, forgiveness, these are things Jesus works in us. So use the term, I need to repent. You need to repent of sin? We need to examine our hearts. But if we just do those things, three things, nothing really happens.

If that's all that happens, if it's just those all by themselves, nothing really happens. We actually need something else to take place. And James gets there. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Verse 9. Be wretched.

Mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. We actually need Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to break us over our sin. We need to hate our anger. We need to be broken over it. We don't need to, the goal is not to manage it.

It's to be made different. The goal is not to, okay, yeah, I have anger outbursts and I need to get to where I don't so that my situation, my life will be better, my marriage will be better. No, the goal is to realize that your sin is heinous, that you, an adulterer before God, and to be broken over our sin. To hate it. To weep. To be wretched.

To mourn. Not to say a little prayer and be like, okay, cool, I reckon that's done. To actually see it in our lives and to see how much it means that we've chased after something that won't satisfy us, that won't fix us. We've been so mad about something that happened in our past because we felt like God should have promised us a happy childhood. And so I can't be okay. I can never let go of the anger because then it's like I let them go free.

And we need to be broken over our sin. And the only way that happens, the only way that happens, verse 10, humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. The first thing we have to do is see that that happened, that Jesus first humbled himself. And Jesus first was exalted. And that we get to, because Jesus led the way, do the same thing.

You see, Jesus sat on a throne from eternity past, holding the world in his hands. Colossians 1 says that all things were created through him and for him. This existed for him and for his joy and for his glory and for his name and for his pleasure. And it rebelled against him. And when he could have been angry and just said, I have wrath for you, I'll destroy you. No, he joins us.

He humbles himself to the point of death, even death on the cross. He laid everything down for us and he took our unrighteous anger on himself. When we mocked him and spit on him and beat him and nailed him to a cross, he took all of our unrighteous anger that was aimed at him. But he didn't just do that. He took God's righteous anger as well. So that we can be set free.

He was humbled and he's been exalted to the right hand of God, to the place of glory forever. And that we get to, because Jesus humbled himself, humble ourselves and come to God and say, I need you to change me. I need you to go to work in my heart. And there's a promise in here that I think is so beautiful. When we humble ourselves, God lifts us up. When you lay down and say, I can't do this anymore.

God's the one who wraps you up and lifts you up. And I love what James says here in verse 6. This is a little bit up from what we just read a minute ago. But he gives more grace. How angry have you been? How much harm have you caused?

How much have people hurt you? Do you know how much grace he gives? More. He gives more. How many times have you failed? He gives more.

How many times have you messed this up? He gives more. How many times have you promised you would do better? He gives more. See, on the cross, Jesus took care of everything for us. And when we see him dying for our sins, dying in the midst of our anger and taking God's anger on our behalf, it melts our heart to run to him, to humble ourselves and to receive more grace.

To be set free. From our anger to fall in love with him above all else. It's the only way our love will get reordered is if we see him on a cross dying for those who hated him, dying for those who were angry at him, and taking God's wrath on our place so that we could be free. And so that we could receive more grace. The band's going to come back up. This week in our groups, we need to take the time before you get together with your group to walk through your inventories.

As we said last week, the more you put into this, the more you'll get out of it. We need to begin to submit our anger to God. We need to begin to repent to those we've harmed, even if they don't know it. We need to begin to investigate and examine our hearts to find out what it is we love so much. But ultimately, we need Jesus.

We need more grace. We need a God who loves us in the midst of our anger and our bitterness and our resentment, who loves us so much that he'll die for us, taking our anger onto himself, into himself, into his body, to the point of death, to where he was wrapped up in claws and laid in a tomb. We need the God who three days later walked out of that tomb and conquered our anger on our behalf. We need Jesus. We need to humble ourselves so that he will exalt us, that he'll lift us up, and that he'll give us a place and love us and welcome us and bring joy back in the midst of our brokenness. So my prayer for us is that we would begin to genuinely ask Jesus to help us hate our sin, to break us, to let us actually mourn, to let us actually have our joy be turned into gloom, to humble ourselves so that we can be free.

Let's pray. God, we thank you. Thank you for the cross, and we thank you that that is the promise, that you give more grace, that we cannot out-sin you, that we cannot out-run you, that there is no time when we will have done so much that you cut us loose, but that you give more grace. God, we ask that we would be free from anger, that all of the unrighteous anger and all of the love for the wrong things and all of the rampant passions that we have, that you would set us free to love you above all else so that everything else gets to be in its right place. We ask through the power of your Holy Spirit that you would author that in us.

God, I pray that there would be weeping, that we would mourn, that there would be gloom, just as there was at the cross and the tomb, that there would be humility, just as there was at the cross and the tomb, so that there can be actual exaltation, just as there is with a crown and a throne, that God, we would walk through that process to be free. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Y'all stand, let's sing.

Our Enemies and Our Hero

Our Enemies and Our Hero

Chet Phillips

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You want to be happy. Now I know you weren't ready for us to start this whole new series off with such a brain bomb. You weren't prepared for that. No, you want to be happy. Like it's innate in us. It's hardwired in us, this desire, this longing for happiness.

We've bought into it. We believe in it. There's something in us that consistently thinks about it, worries about it, has it in mind when we're making decisions, when we're deciding where to live and where to work and even what we want to do today. There's this undercurrent of our own personal happiness. What do I like? What do I enjoy?

And even we'll make decisions about things that we aren't going to enjoy because we ultimately believe that it will lead to future, better, more long-lasting happiness. It's the reason some of you went to school. It's the reason you didn't enjoy that, but you knew this ultimately leads to happiness. But there's something in us that longs for, believes in, and desires and pursues our own personal happiness. There's a French mathematician and philosopher named Blaise Pascal. You maybe have heard about Pascal's triangle.

It's just a convenient tabular representation of binomial coefficients. I just memorized that. I don't know what those words mean. I just wanted three seconds of sounding really smart. But he says this.

He's a French philosopher. He says this about happiness. He says, All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and of others avoiding it is the same desire in both, attended to different views.

The will, meaning your inward desires, the will never takes a least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action, of every man, even those who hang themselves. See, Blaise Pascal says everybody is pursuing happiness. The U.S. bought into this. We encoded it in the Declaration of Independence that it's an inalienable right of a human to pursue happiness. We even got Will Smith to make a movie about it, so it's real, you guys.

We pursue happiness. And I hear Pascal say that, and there's just something in me that goes, Yeah, no, I get that. Like, I believe that. I don't want to argue with him. There's something that makes me go, Yeah, no, I understand that. I see that at work in me.

I see that at work in other people. Like, there's something in my life when I'm sad, the times that I've felt physical pain or emotional pain or the times I've cried, there's been this, like, this isn't how this is supposed to be. This isn't, this is broken. This is not how I'm supposed to exist. And on the flip side of that, every time I've been happy, there's just part of me that goes, This is what life was supposed to be like. This is how I'm supposed to exist.

It fits. There's something about it that fits us. And here's the truth biblically. We had deep, abiding happiness when we were created. Humanity was designed to exist in a joy and happiness in relation to their creator. And we lost it.

We rebelled against God and that happiness was broken. And so sorrow and pain and hurt entered the world. And all of us since then have been chasing after the happiness. Chasing after what we think will fill us up, will make us happy. And here's the issue. God is ultimately the only thing that can fill that up in us.

You see, God actually wants joy for us. He desires joy for you. That's the end that he desires for you. Now, joy is the deep, abiding, real version of happiness. Happiness, short-lived, circumstantial. So God's desire for humanity is to have a deep, abiding joy in the midst of sorrow and pain.

That is set above the horizon. That is beyond circumstances. The reason we pursue happiness is because it's the cheap, knockoff version of what we were meant for. There's something meant for joy in our souls because we were meant to find that only in God. And once, everything else was supposed to be just a signpost to how good he was. You were supposed to eat a delicious meal and not have your enjoyment terminate on the meal, but actually roll up in praise to the God who invented flavor, who made bacon.

Like you were supposed to roll up in praise to him. You were supposed to ride a roller coaster or go enjoy scenery somewhere, stand breathless at the edge of the Grand Canyon and not have your enjoyment terminate on the Grand Canyon, but actually roll up in praise to the God who carved it out. But once our relationship with God was broken, we began to pursue by any means necessary, whatever we believed would fill us up and make us happy. And ultimately, they all are dead ends because none of them were meant to be an end in themselves, but all were meant to point to the one place we could actually find joy.

But repeatedly in the Bible, God is calling us to joy, wants joy for you, desires joy for you, because anytime he calls for joy in you, what he's saying is, I want me for you. Because ultimately, joy and pleasure are with me. I want that for you. So he fights actively for our joy. Jesus goes to the cross for our joy, to bring us to God, to return us to the state we were meant to be in, and to actually remove all that would keep us from him. And so every time the Bible says praise or rejoice, it's calling us to God, that we were meant for it.

I want to continue to explain this and show you a few things here. So the Bible is bathed in commands. It's covered in commands to praise, to rejoice. And since we use the ESV, they use the word exult a lot. And I read the ESV on a regular basis. So I want to explain those terms to us because we don't really use those words a lot.

We use the word praise. And there's really only like two times or two types of praise. And really one of them is not even actually praise. So there are two times that we praise something. Praise just means to speak highly of, to say this is nice or this is good. And the first kind of type is not actually genuine.

So you could praise something to not hurt someone's feelings. Somebody bakes you a cake and it's really dry and not good. And you eat it and it sucks all the moisture out of your mouth. And they're standing there looking at you like, well, what do you think? And you're going, hmm, this cake of all the cakes, this cake is cake. Some of the cake is cake.

This, hmm, is this icing frosting on top? Yeah. Like you're doing your best to try to say, no, this is good. Like they're waiting for you to say, and you finally just, you give in and look at their face in line. You should repent that you say, no, this is good. I like this.

Maybe next time for my birthday, just give me a gift card. But this is great. Like you, there's, there's praise that's to avoid hurting someone's feelings. There's also a praise that's manipulative. The purpose is to get something out of a person. So that's flattery.

It's ultimately not genuine praise, but you're just saying nice things because maybe they'll give you something or they'll respond in kind. Like that's, so I don't think that's what the Bible is talking about when it commands us to praise God. I don't think the Bible is like, Hey, say nice stuff to God or his feelings are going to get hurt. I don't think that's the point. I don't think it's like, you better, like he's really sensitive. You guys, he's going to need you to say nice stuff.

I don't, I don't think that's it. Like just at some point, just tell him trees are good. He made them. Tell him they're good. I don't think it's flattery. I don't think the point of the Bible is, Hey, you really got to get God on your good side.

And one way to do that is to facetiously and sarcastically and lyingly tell him you like him. I think, I mean, I can pick up on flattery at times. I can tell somebody is not genuinely praising something. I'm pretty sure God who can, you know, read your thoughts and look into your heart can tell. And I don't think he's moved by it. It's actually when the Bible says praise, what it means is genuine praise.

And here's how genuine praise works. And here's why this is actually beautiful that God calls us to this. You only genuinely pray something when you actually enjoy it. Genuine praise comes out of the actual enjoyment of something. Genuine praise actually shows up when we're really enjoying. This is why when you have a boyfriend or girlfriend or fiance or something, you just naturally just say nice things about them because there's enjoyment there.

It just bubbles over. This is why when your mom cooked a meal, she'd let you chew for about 30 seconds. And then she'd be like, ain't nobody going to say anything about the food? Because she knew if you actually enjoyed the food, it would, you would automatically just be like, this biscuit is amazing. And then stick it like you. It naturally happens.

I was at the zoo the other day. I was thinking about this and there was about four, I think probably, they were in college. So 18 to 22 or something like that. They were at the new sea lion exhibit thing and they're looking in the glass and it's gotten murky because I think of all the rain. I was kind of green in there. Zoo really needs to step it up and clean that thing out, but whatever.

And they're trying to see like a sea lion. And while they're doing that, there had been one just hanging out at the top of the water and it was hanging out upside down, just laying in water. I didn't know they could do that. And it just floated down and was like looking at them upside down. So they're trying to see it and all of a sudden it floated down.

It was like, what's up you guys? Like that's really, and immediately one of the guys goes, this is awesome. Because that's the natural thing that happens when you're enjoying something. So you've seen a car before and been like, this car is beautiful. Or you've stood next to the Grand Canyon or seen a sunset and your natural response is to hit the person next to you and be like, look at that. Isn't that beautiful?

Isn't that amazing? So when God says praise repeatedly in the Bible, what he's saying is notice me so much, enjoy me so much that the natural overflow response is that you'll, you'll point it out. You'll talk about it. That's part of how we actually enjoy it. There's something about looking at something and enjoying it with someone else that if you don't say anything about it, it kind of cuts down on it. There's actually, it makes it complete for you to point it out.

So he says praise. It also says rejoice and exult a lot. Now exult is not like, we don't really use the word rejoice. Maybe every once in a while we just sing a song with it, but it's a Bible word. So church people use it more often, but we don't use it in normal life.

Exult, like if you said exult around me, I would just think you were weird. And I recently up until like, I don't know, a couple of months ago, didn't even know what exult meant. It's spelled E-X-U-L-T. I just assumed because it was one letter different from the word exult that they meant similar things. So exult is E-X-A-L-T.

And I just thought they're probably the same thing. And then as I kept reading, I thought that's actually kind of dumb. Why would they have two words that meant the same thing with just one letter difference? I might should actually look this up. So I looked up exult and it doesn't mean what exult means.

Exult means to lift high, to praise, to lift up. Exult actually means show or feel elation or jubilation. Also two words we don't use. There's something about us dumbing our language down that lets us miss out on some depth here. It says, especially as a result of a success, it just means to be overwhelmed with joy to the point of celebrating. Rejoice is similar.

Rejoice says feel or show great joy or delight. But we don't use these words. So yesterday, I just assumed because South Carolina had a bye week that I would have a Saturday where I didn't get all worked up about football and sad in my heart. And I was looking forward to that because I have a problem and South Carolina is not good. So they're not really feeding my idolatry and letting me feel good about myself vicariously through them.

So I have to watch them and then I get depressed and there's all these issues. I'm working through it, you guys. But I thought, South Carolina's not playing, I'll be fine. And then I accidentally started watching the Clemson-NC State game in the fourth quarter. So Clemson and NC State are playing and it is tied.

Clemson is ranked number three in the nation. NC State is not ranked in the top 25. So if they win, bye-bye all hopes and dreams, Clemson fans. And I was so excited. So it's fourth quarter.

NC State's playing really well. I ran into the other room. I said, Anna, come, come, rejoice with me. Join me, my bride, as we exult over NC State. Like, I was like, you've got to take part in this and we're watching. And I mean, Clemson Booster Club better send NC State's kicker a gift basket because that cat, they would have won the game.

It comes down two seconds left. All he's got to do is kick a field goal and he misses far right. And it's a Clemson home game and the stands burst forth in exultation. That's what those words mean. We don't use those words. That's what they mean.

The people hugging and crying and kissing strangers and you can't tell what's sweat and what's tears. Like that group of people in the stands, that's exultation. And the Bible consistently says this is the response of Christians to the glory of the cross and to the glory of our King. That we should be overwhelmed, subjectively, experientially enjoying Jesus. That's a normal pattern of life for Christians, that we would experience and enjoy Jesus. Now, it's joy, which means it's in the midst of sorrow and pain.

This is why Paul and Silas can be singing in a prison. This is why Christians in the midst of a cancer ward can have joy because it's beyond the horizon. It's beyond our circumstances, but the normal experience for Christians should be in a subjective, experiential joy in the presence of God and in the glory of the cross. See, I always just kind of thought it was supposed to be objective. God's glorious. He's big.

He's good. And we're supposed to objectively notice that and objectively praise. So that when we came here this morning and we're singing a song, we're supposed to sing because God is good and deserves to be sung to. But we don't have to feel it. We don't have to really participate in it. It's mostly just we've got to go through the act and because he's objectively good, we should partake in that.

And here's the issue with that. I know that taxes are objectively good. I know that. I will argue with you if you're like, no, we shouldn't have taxes. I would start off with something like, no, stupid. We should.

Do you appreciate roads? Being able to read. School was helpful, right? Like, do you like ambulances showing up at your house when you set yourself on fire? Like, yeah. Taxes.

Now, we could discuss how much taxes and where they go, but taxes are objectively good. I know this. I have never subjectively enjoyed taxes. I've never experientially been excited when I saw my paycheck and looked at little FICA down there. Been like, yeah, taxes. Take some more.

Like, I never did that. I've never walked into an H&R block, lifted a lady wearing way too much lipstick and been like, Tammy, let's do this. You ready to exalt over some forms? 1099? Like, you ready to do that? Like, never done that.

Never happened. And I felt like that's maybe what we were supposed to do with God. We were supposed to objectively notice he was good, but it wasn't supposed to sweep us up. It wasn't supposed to overwhelm us. It wasn't supposed to engulf us. But that's not the truth.

The Bible calls repeatedly for Christians to be overwhelmed, engulfed by God's glory and his goodness to the point of an experiential joy. So here's what we're about to do. I got a couple of pages of Bible verses that I'm going to read through quickly to show us, to illustrate to us, how much the Bible talks about this. How much it calls us to joy, to exaltation. We'll see that word a lot, exalt. How much it calls us to rejoice.

Now, sometimes on Sundays, and just in Bible study in general, you treat Bible study like a wine tasting. We get together. We're going to look at a verse. We're going to look at two verses. We're going to just barely pour them out. We're going to swish them around, stare at them, see what they do to the glass.

We're going to smell them. Taking every little bit of syntax and word and verb structure and what's being said here. And look at the commas and see where it says, therefore, we're going to do that. We're going to zoom in and really take it all in. We're going to swish it around. We're going to spit it out.

We're going to drink a little bit. Like we're going to, it's a wine tasting of scripture. We do that sometimes. That is not what this is. If you try to do that, this will be bad for you. This is jumping in a cold lake on a hot day.

We're just going to be overwhelmed by one thing. This is really cold. We're going to be overwhelmed by, the Bible talks about joy. Okay? That's the point. I'm going to run through this really quickly.

If you really want this list later, I can give it to you. At some point, I may not even be giving references anymore, but it comes from the Bible. So I'll try to stay focused and move here. All right. Are we ready? Cold lake, hot day?

Okay. First Chronicles 16, 27. Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and joy are in his place. So there are Bible verses that talk specifically about joy exists with God.

Like it is part of who he is, where he is. So this is the character of God has joy. So splendor and joy, strength and joy are in his place. Psalm 4. You have put more joy in my heart than when their grain and wine abound. He's saying circumstantially, they have to have stuff to have joy.

I get more joy just from you. Psalm 9. I will be glad and exult in you. I will sing praise to you, your name, O Most High. Psalm 5. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice.

Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. The Bible consistently in the Old Testament also talks about that there will be joy in the future salvation of God. So they're pointing forward to the cross.

The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among mankind shall exult in the Holy One of Israel. That's Isaiah 29. He says fresh joy. Not that old joy. Not joy you had last week. Not stale joy.

Joy that's fresh because the gospel is true that Jesus is going to show up and give the meek fresh joy in the Lord. Isaiah 49. Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth. Break forth, O mountains, into singing. For the Lord has comforted his people and will have compassion on his afflicted. Isaiah 61.

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and a bride adorns herself with her jewels. He says I'm giddy like a bride on her wedding day because of the glory of God and the joy that's with him. Zephaniah 3.

Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O Israel. Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away the judgments against you. He's cleared away your enemies. He says the judgments against you are gone.

It's like you went to trial and you probably should have been convicted, but then you get to walk out free. And that first breath of air that fills your lungs and you know it's over. I'm not going to jail. He says the judgments against you are cleared. That's the joy that we have with the Lord. Psalm 68.

But the righteous shall be glad. They shall exult before God. They shall be jubilant with joy. Isaiah 35. And the ransomed of the Lord. That means those bought out of slavery shall return and come to Zion with singing.

Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads and they shall obtain gladness and joy and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. He said it's like when you got released from prison. That first moment of freedom and knowing that you paid your time, that you were set free from slavery. That's the joy that we have in the Lord. And then in the New Testament, they talk about we have joy because of Jesus and the work he's already done. For the kingdom of God, this is Romans 14, is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. That's Romans 15. 2 Corinthians 13. Finally, brothers, rejoice. He just says, I'm ending my letter.

Rejoice. Be happy. Celebrate. Because of the gospel. First Thessalonians. Rejoice always.

Philippians 2. Be glad and rejoice with me. Philippians 3. Rejoice in the Lord. Philippians 4. Rejoice in the Lord always.

And again, I will say rejoice. This is the posture of a Christian. This is the normal response that we would have. Joy. John 16. Jesus says this.

So you have sorrow now, but I'll see you again. And your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you. Because the joy that Christians have is anchored in the resurrection of Jesus. It can't be taken from us. Revelation 19. This is the last one.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory. For the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride, that's the church, has made herself ready. It was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure. You see, we're commanded as Christians to have joy. We're designed to celebrate the cross subjectively. To have it experientially in our lives.

That we would be overwhelmed with it at times. So here's the point of our series. And why we've named it Killjoy. We as Christians, if you've placed your faith in Jesus, you have subjective joy because of an objective reality. We get to experience joy because Jesus went to the cross on our behalf for our sins so that we can have freedom in life. That's the life of a Christian.

So, that's how we ought to live. What we're going to read here in a minute in Ephesians 2, and Jordan already read it to us this morning, is Paul's writing to the church and he's saying, this is what your life used to look like. This is who you used to be prior to Jesus. And then he, in the middle, says, but God. And he says, here's what's true for you now. Here's who you are now.

And see, for a lot of us, we have been, because of Jesus, made to live here. We've been set free from who we used to be. Set free from sin. Set free from this sorrow and this pain that comes along with our rebellion. And brought over to be with God and to experience a deep, abiding joy that's beyond circumstance. But for many of us in the church, we've gotten used to certain sins, certain struggles, and we're trying to act like, no, this is normal.

No, this is regular. This is what this looks like. And what Paul's saying is, no, that's what used to be true. No, this is your new normal. Freedom and joy and hope and rest in the gospel are your new normal because of Jesus, because of an objective reality of Jesus going to the cross and saving you. So we're going to walk through, and what we're going to do as we walk through this section is look at what our enemies are.

In Ephesians 2, what he's saying used to be true for us, what used to have dominion over us, and then we'll talk about how, as a series, we're going to get to spend time in freedom. So turn to Ephesians 2. It'll be on page 634 if you're in a blue and white Bible. Now, in this series, what our goal is is just to pastor through some issues in the church, some issues for Christians that we've gotten used to, that we started acting like they're acceptable. Here's what I mean. If you text your community group this week on your group me, or maybe y'all have a Facebook group, or you just got all their Numbers, so you text them and you say, hey guys, really struggling this week.

I just blew all of my savings on cocaine and prostitutes. Your phone's going to blow up. People are going to show up at your house. Like, your group will rally around you. They will be there. They'll be like, hey, let's walk through this.

Like, we need to help you. And they should. That should be the response. But you could text in week after week, hey guys, really struggling with anger. And you're going to get back praying for you. Yeah, me too.

Maybe somebody will give you a little bit of like, here's how the gospel applies to anger. Hopefully so. That's one of the things we're shooting for as a church. But there's not going to be the same type of reaction. You could text and say, guys, still struggling with guilt and shame. Still struggling with lust.

And you're going to get some, yeah, praying for you. Yeah, me too. And so as pastors, we've on a regular basis in our church family got to sit down with people. In our homes, grabbing a cup of coffee. And just talk through some of the issues we're going to talk through in the next couple of weeks. And honestly, wish we could do that with everybody.

Wish we could just, that this could be done in a setting where we're sitting across from a table from each other. But we just got to realizing, man, these are some issues that our church family just needs us to talk about. We just need to walk through a little bit and begin to realize how Jesus has been at work in this. To set us free from this. To give us hope in this. And so for the next several weeks, we're going to spend time walking through that.

And we'll talk more about how we're going to go about that in a minute. So Ephesians 2, we're going to look at our three enemies. Because as we walk through talking about anger, lust, guilt and shame, self-loathing. As we spend time for the next six weeks talking about these specific issues. All three of these are going to be at play. All three of these enemies are going to be at work.

And we're going to, as we address anger, we're going to address it on these three fronts. As we address lust, we're going to address it on these three fronts as Paul's talking in here. So that's what we'll spend our time doing today. All right. And you were dead in the trespasses of sins and sins in which you once walked. That's chapter 2, verse 1.

Following the course of this world. Following the prince and the power of the air. The spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. And we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

Okay. So the first enemy we have as Christians is the flesh. Paul talks about it when he says, In which you once walked. At the beginning of verse 2. And then verse 3 where he says, Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.

What he's saying is, You have inside of you a desire for sin. When the fall happened. When Adam and Eve originally rebelled. We just lined up behind and joined in. And there's something in us. Innately hardwired in us.

To sin. To rebel against God. To chase after whatever we think will make us happy. Regardless of the consequences. That we carry out the desires of the body and the mind. Meaning you actively choose to sin.

That's why Paul in Romans 7 says, I don't understand myself. The things I know are good. That God wants. That I actually want to do. I don't do. And the things I know that are bad.

That are rebellious. I end up doing those. And I feel like there's a war going on inside of me. So as we walk through this series. We're going to specifically address. You.

You're a sinner. You're consistently talking yourself into stupid things. Did you know that? Jeremiah says, Your heart is desperately sick. It's a. It.

It's. It lies to you. That more often than not. When you've pursued something. That ended up being terrible. You know who tricked you into it?

You. You should be really mad at yourself. Right now. Like. There's something in us. That wants to sin.

There's this. Fleshly desire for sin. And so as we walk through this series. As we talk about anger. As we talk about lust. As we talk about self-loathing.

We're going to talk about. How are you involved in this? How are you actively choosing to sin? How do we need to repent? The second enemy that we have. We'll spend most of our time on the flesh.

Because you're your biggest enemy. Luckily. All of what Paul is saying here. Is that this used to be true for you. So Jesus has set us free.

But we're kind of going back to this. We end up living like this is our normal. And it's not. The second enemy you have is the world. So he says.

Verse 2. In which you once walked. Following the course of this world. You have. Your second enemy as a Christian is the world. And that doesn't mean all the people that exist in the world.

The Bible uses the world in two different senses. One is. All the humans. So that's where it says. For God so loved the world. That he gave his only son.

That whoever believes in him. Might not perish. But have everlasting life. That world is all the humans in it. But it also uses the world as.

The systems at place in the world. That help you sin. Because sinful people. Help design these systems. And so we have systems at place. That help you sin.

So. You. You. Desire to look at pornography. You. Fleshly desire.

Desire of the body. To lust. And guess what? The internet exists. And there are people actively at work. To develop more pornography.

To help you sin. There's a worldly system that helps you sin. And not only does the internet exist with pornography. But then there are TV shows. That just glorify it. So that.

We act like our culture just Acts like it's normal. We have shows like Hardcore Pawn. porn. And Pawn Stars. And food porn. Because we've normalized this. You watch television shows.

And they just act like of course you're watching porn. Of course that's normal. That's okay. Even though statistically we know that. Pornography use is one of the leading causes of divorce. Every sitcom you watch is going to act like.

Yeah of course the husband watches porn. Of course the wife partakes some. That's the world lying to you. This is also the systems of belief in the world that we have. That come alongside you and just help feed what you're thinking. So.

When the Bible disagrees with you. And tells you you need to repent. And then our culture says whoa. The Bible doesn't get to tell you what to do. You look inside of you. Look in your heart.

And whatever you find in there. That's the real you. That's what needs to be cultivated. That's what needs to be brought out. Whatever you find inside of you is the real you. And you have to be true to yourself.

Now doesn't that sound beautiful? The Bible says that's nonsense. That being true to yourself leads to destruction. That God loves you enough. That when he is after your joy. That means sometimes he's not after your happiness.

Because we'll say things like. I know God just wants me to be happy. Which means God just wants me to do. Whatever the heck I think would be best in this moment. No he doesn't. He wants you to be actually happy.

I've got a two year old. He's not two yet. He'll be two at some point. I want him to be actually happy. I want him to be actually happy. Like I care about his joy.

Which means that yesterday. I took a knife from him. I was cleaning out the dishes. And he grabbed a knife. And tried to take off running. Because he knew he wasn't supposed to have it.

And so he figured. I better escape with this. I did not know. That before my son was two years old. I was going to have to disarm him at some point. I haven't taken that class.

So I just kicked him. No I didn't. But I had to quickly get a knife from him. He's losing his mind. Because I've just stolen the best toy he's ever had from him. And then when I pick him up.

He hits me. I don't know why I have an aggressive son. I don't know where that came from. I have probably his mama. He hits me. So I have to spank him.

I have to hold him while he's trying to fight with me. He ends up getting spanked again. Like there's this whole big long process. Because I actually care about his real happiness. Which does not involve him running around with a knife. At some point he'll be really mad at me.

Because he can't eat candy. And stay up till two o'clock in the morning. Because I care more about his real happiness. So when we say things like. And our culture says. Well God just wants you to be happy.

Yeah. He actually wants you to be happy. Real long term. Abiding joy happiness. So much so that he went to the cross for you.

But a lot of times that means he steps in. Takes something out of your hand. And says that's really dumb. You need to move on. So we're going to talk specifically as we walk through this series.

The world. What it is that the culture is telling us. What it is that lies that we believe. What it is that's helping tempt us. And figuring out how to. How do we avoid that.

How do we replace that with truth. How do we set up something to help guard us against temptation. We'll spend some time talking about the world. Not a whole lot of time. We'll mostly talk about you. But we'll spend some time talking about the world.

The third one. Your third enemy. Is right after the world. So he says. Following the course of this world. This is verse two.

Following the prince of the power of the air. The spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. He's referring to the devil. To Satan. And our third enemy is the devil. So we as Christians believe that God is a good God who created everything.

And that he created spiritual beings. Angels. And that some of those angels rebelled. And that they are at work. The Bible refers to them as demons. They are at work led by Satan or the devil.

To disrupt God's good design for creation. And God's good design for humanity. And rob us of joy. And keep us from him. The best way they can harm God is to attack people. We believe that.

We believe the Bible is pretty clear on that. I know that that's weird for us as Westerners. But we believe that that is true. And that Satan is actually active. And at work. In the lives of people.

Even in the United States. I know. It's crazy. He doesn't have to go through border patrol. I think that as we talk about this through this series. Because we will spend time each week talking about how can the enemy be involved.

How can Satan be involved. I think for some of us it will be weird but helpful. Good for you to continually get to see that he is at work. And just kind of uncomfortable. We can talk more about what the Bible says. The Bible doesn't give us all the answers we want.

But it does give us enough. I think for some of you it will be massively helpful. Because you may actually have been being affected by demonic things. And just didn't have a category for it. So you weren't paying any attention to it.

The devil does. The Bible calls him a murderer. It says he's been a murderer since the beginning. He's actively seeking to destroy and to harm and to kill. And I think he does that in four primary ways. He does it in a lot of ways.

But we're just going to kind of categorize him this morning for us. Four primary ways that we'll spend some time talking about. One is the Bible calls him an accuser. I found the reference for that. Revelation 12 refers to him as the accuser. Which means that he comes along and he accuses.

He says you're terrible. You're the worst. You're going to ruin your marriage. You're garbage. You're sinful. God can't love you.

God couldn't save you. Jesus loves everybody else but you. Jesus only loves you on a technicality. He actually cares about other people. But he accuses.

He says you did this in your past. You could never be okay. You did this to your children so you'll never be savable. Like he accuses. John 8. Jesus calls him a liar and says he's the father of lies.

One of the ways that he works is by lying. He says something that's remotely believable. And if you believe it, even as a Christian when he has no authority over you, if you believe lies, it affects how you live. For example, if I came running in here and I said there's a winged tiger in the other room, the only person running out of this room is the person who believed me. Probably no one. If I brought it down a little bit and said there's a tiger in the other room, still probably no one.

If I pulled the fire alarm and said there's a fire down there, there's a good chance everybody's walking out of the building. Because I said a believable lie. Now, is there a fire? No. But did y'all live like there was one?

Yes. Y'all walk out of the building. Now, at some point when you figure out it was a lie, you can return to your normal life. I have authority over you as long as you're believing my lie. Satan has the same situation going for him. If he lies to you and you believe it, he has authority just as long as you believe it.

So we're going to spend some time talking about what are the lies we're believing, how is that at work here, how can we repent of that, how can we replace that with truth. 1 Peter 5 says this, that he prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. And I think he does both of us. I think he prowls and he roars. For most of us, we do not think about Satan much. Probably good.

If you thought about Satan a lot, that'd be weird, I guess. We'd talk about it. But for a lot of us, there is no place. Maybe if you're a Christian, you're saying, yeah, I realize Satan's real. I realize the Bible says he's real. But then it's like, okay, does he actively mess with people?

No, not really. Very rarely. And if he ever does, it's well away from me. I think that's Satan in his prowling stance, which is just, you don't run from lions if you don't see him. And as long as he can be at work and you not know he's there, that's fine. But for the people who do think about Satan, notice Satan, I think the next stage is roaring, which is just to be as scary as possible.

If he can have you very afraid of him, he has more authority and control. He doesn't actually have authority and control. Jesus has set you free from him if you're a Christian. But if he can scare you, keep you up at night, make you very afraid of him, I think he can be at work. That may be all weird. I'd love to talk to you more about it when we get done this morning.

But we will spend some time talking about all three of our enemies as we go through this series. In Matthew 6, Jesus teaches them the model prayer. Most of us have this memorized or we've heard it a lot, probably on Friday Night Lights or something, where we say, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, because we all learned it in the King James. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. So it's a daily prayer.

Forgive us our sins. That's the flesh. Jesus says on a daily basis, you need to be praying about your flesh. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation. That's the world.

He says on a daily basis, you need to be praying about not being led into temptation, not believing all this stuff, the propaganda that's out there. And the third one, deliver us from evil or deliver us from the evil one. It is a normal thing for Christians to be aware that you have three enemies, to approach life that way, to pray that way, and we want to normalize that in our church family. So as we're addressing situations, we're addressing you as a whole person who is an active sinner, who needs grace from Jesus, who lives in a culture that is affecting how you think, and that has an actual spiritual enemy that is at work to cause problems.

We believe Jesus when he said, this is how we ought to pray. So that's how we're going to approach this series. Okay. Let's say you're hanging out with me at my house, and we're sitting in my backyard near my fire pit, because I love my fire pit, and we're drinking some coffee, because I love coffee, and let's say the wind starts to blow, and those stupid purple berries off of that ridiculous tree that is in my backyard, I don't know, some sort of cherry tree, it's nonsense, start blowing off and hitting us, because of course, why wouldn't they? And then start making everything purple, because of course, why wouldn't they?

And so let's say that, as calm and rational as I am, let's say I snap, and so we're talking, and these berries hit me in the face, and I just go, you know what? Just hold on a second. And then I run, and I get a baseball bat, and I come back, and you watch a grown man have a complete psychotic fit for about 30 minutes, where I beat as best I can that stupid tree, and I hit every limb, and you hear a lot of swear words you didn't know I knew, and really colorful ways to use them, and I sit there, and I beat this tree for 30 minutes, and I'm just losing my mind, and you're doing, you're thinking like, should I leave? Should I help him?

Someone should help him. Like you're thinking through all these things, do I call somebody? And I'm just losing, and I get all, finally, there's no, I mean some limbs have fallen and stuff, there's no more berries on that tree, I throw my bat down, I walk over, I'm sweating profusely, because that happens, I sit down next to you, I'm panting, I'm sweating to the point that you're uncomfortable, and I then look at you and say, finally, that tree will never cause me any problems again. So you were saying about the stock market, like, and you, now you're no tree scientist, you might bravely pluck up the courage enough to venture to say, hey buddy, I just want to time you out, I don't mean to, to mess you up, you do realize, next year, those berries are coming back, right?

Like, you know how fruit works, right? I mean, I can leave, I don't, stay away from your bat, but like, you might point that out to me, you might say to me something along the lines of, you're actually going to need to cut that tree down, if you don't want your backyard to be purple, and even then, it's going to be a little while, but that'll start springing back up into new trees, unless you grind that stump out, and get rid of those roots. We, we have a book that we have made for this series, they're all on the counter out there, we want you to take them with you, because our goal in this series, is not to modify your behavior. Our goal is to not beat the fool out of some fruit, so that you look a little better, and it comes back somewhere else, or it comes back in six months.

Our goal is to, as best we can, look inside and see where the roots are, so that we can actually uproot, and dig out, and grind away some stumps, and get rid of these areas in our life, that maybe have been digging roots for a really long time, but because of Jesus, don't have to be normal for us anymore. That's the goal. Ephesians 2, let's see how he finishes it up. We'll start, in verse, we'll just read the whole thing again. First one. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins, in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work, and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived, in the passion of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body, and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind, but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him, in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.

He says, God loved you so much, that in the midst of this being your normal, in the midst of being dead, in the midst of your brokenness and sin, Jesus came, and died on a cross, and when he died, and went into the grave, your sin went with him, and he raised us up with him. When Jesus walked out of the grave, we now, as Christians, can be made alive. We can have a new hope, and a new life, and a new normal, because of Jesus. Because God is rich in mercy, and he loves us with a great love. Verse 7. He did this so that, in the coming ages, he might show, the immeasurable riches of his grace, in kindness toward us, in Christ Jesus.

Jesus stepped into our situation, when we deserved nothing but destruction, nothing but wrath, and rescued us, and died for us, so that he could show us, his immeasurable greatness, and we could enjoy it. We could be engulfed by, and overwhelmed by, God's greatness. That's the hope we have in Jesus. That's the call we have in Jesus, that he saved you, to show you, how magnificent he is, and to bring you to himself. That's what we get together, to celebrate on Sundays. That's why we're doing this series.

If the best we could hope for, was some ways to count to 10, and some nice little phrases, to repeat to yourself, if we didn't have an objective truth, that Jesus saves and redeems, and is at work in us, and his Holy Spirit, this would be the saddest series, we've ever embarked on. But what we're about to do, is get to dig deeply, into the mess of our hearts, because Jesus has rescued us. We get to die to that, and rise again to a new life. That's the hope we have. In your books, there are charts, that go along with each week. There are diagnostics, we've borrowed stuff, from a recovery program, at Midtown Fellowship, which is a church, that we partner with.

The more you put into this series, the more you'll get out of it. There'll be things, that you didn't realize, you had an issue with, that these charts, will help you figure out, oh I've got this going on, I didn't think about it. There'll be some things, that you know, you have an issue with, so when you look at the chart, you go, I don't want to fill this out. It'll be helpful. Fill it out. Be prepared to hang out, with your community group, and talk openly, about what you've got going on, and walk in family together, as we pursue Jesus, and the hope that we have in him.

If you are not in a community group, today is a great day, to get into a community group. Grab one of those books, you know where we're going, you get to walk through this, together with other humans, struggling to follow Jesus, you want to get in a group. And if you're like, I'm not sure about groups, and I think y'all are kind of weird, here's my suggestion to you. Join a group for five weeks. If at the end of five weeks, you've processed through some mess, and you think, okay, I'm good, I'm not really going to be a sinner, in the future anymore, and I can go do this on my own, that's great.

Blessings to you, we're excited for you. If at the end of five weeks, you're getting to go, okay, no, it's good to walk through some mess with people, I would just encourage you, to hop in for this series, walk with a group, be in life with some people, and actually process through some of this, as we celebrate the fact, that we have freedom and joy in Jesus. Let's pray. God, we thank you for your goodness. We thank you that it is an objective truth, that you have saved us, and that we get to have a new normal. That we don't have to live lives, defeated by sin, by our flesh, by the world, by Satan.

That God, you are the conquering king, and we've been freed, from all that would have destroyed us. I pray, Lord, that through your Holy Spirit, you'd be at work in this series, to bring back some joy, to set us free from sin, to let us walk together as family, celebrating that the gospel, is good news, for life, right now. In Jesus name, Amen.

Oct 16