Embracing True Faith: Surrender and Sacrifice

The Jesus I accept and know walks into situations, walks into cultural issues and wraps his arms around people who don't look like us. Wraps his arms around people who don't live like us. Doesn't demoralize them or degrade them. Doesn't make fun of them or laugh at them but speaks hope and life into them. We, on the other hand, have this position that while we're speaking hope in life, if they reject us, then we get mad and we get upset and we get frustrated. But I don't remember Jesus getting mad, getting frustrated, and upset with those who were not like him and didn't agree with him. [00:47:45]

Humble yourselves. We are not anything. It is an I that does anything. It is Jesus Christ formed in me who accomplishes anything through me. It is never me. It is never you. It has always been him. And we must die out so much so that our attitudes, our speech, everything that we do reflects Jesus Christ. Even as a child, as he wanders away from his parents and his parents find him in the temple, what does Jesus respond with them? Well, you should have known I would have been about my father's business. [00:49:07]

The sad part is when we in the church start wondering, "We're not about the father's business." It'd be great if you wondered a few weeks from church so that you were out ministering to the world and to those around you, but we wander into everything else, a despair, a depression. We wonder in, uh, God's not meeting my need, so why go to church? What I hear that more than anything, what's the point in going? What do you mean what's the point in going? God didn't answer my prayers. [00:50:00]

The point is that it doesn't matter if he ever answers your prayers again. The point is he already answered the greatest prayer you could have ever prayed: save me, deliver me. And he does that for every one of us. Let me tell you, if you don't know Jesus Christ this morning and you're questioning your salvation and in any place, understand that none of us deserved it and none of us are any better or none of us are in a place where we have obtained some holiness or some betterment than anybody else. [00:50:34]

Every single one of us from the top to the bottom, all on a level playing field, we are all saved by grace. Sinners. Get us a bunch of name tags next Sunday. You know, they put no names on it. Just simply says sinner. That's what we are. We try to perfect ourselves. We try to build our own castles because of what we need. We do this in our own agendas every day, every week. We're trying to get somewhere in our careers and in society that we can be somebody that we can obtain something. [00:51:00]

In the early church, it was a tradition to burn the palm branches from the previous year's Palm Sunday and use the ashes for Ash Wednesday. And some of you may recognize that you have seen people in public who have taken the ashes of those palm branches and you have seen how they have most likely marked their foreheads with a cross as a reminder. A tradition we don't follow, an Ash Wednesday tradition, but it's a powerful reversal of what was once praise becomes a reminder of our frailty and a need for grace. [00:52:00]

The ashes of our misplaced expectations can become the soil where true surrender takes root. Malachi 3:2-3 tells us that God is like a refiner's fire and he doesn't burn us to destroy us. He burns us to purify us. But who can endure the day of his coming? He is like a refiner's fire and like a fuller soap. The fire is not about judgment but about formation. So that we are formed in fire, not in comfort. [00:52:54]

Change only comes when there is pain and great pain to force change. And so oftentimes in our churches, we don't see change in our churches until there is a pain that forces us to change. We don't change our ways and our actions until we're forced to change. We can look at it on the financial side of things. You know, we don't create budgets and change our financial ways until we have experienced great pain. [00:54:09]

We don't change our health and our condition until we experience great pain. And I, for myself, great pain last January was enough to force that something had to be done, something had to change. So great pain forces us. I don't want to deal with that again. You see what I'm saying? You go through heart procedure and oftentimes we go through great pain and we tell ourselves that we're not going to go back that way. [00:54:45]

There will be great pain you will endure in this life. There will be pain. There will be suffering. But my, how that pain and suffering so much easier to deal with when we know Jesus Christ. He helps us. He undergirds us. He comforts us. We run to him in good times and bad times. And boy, if we're running to him in the good times, we'll know who to run to in the bad times. [00:56:17]

At what point do we as Christians decide that I'm not just here because I have to be here or this is just the thing that we have to do? At what point does our prayers quit being a monotonous routine and it just becomes the thing that we do because we're in love with the one we're talking to? When does our worship just quit being because brother Darl or Lindy decided they were going to lead us in these three songs? [00:56:48]

When does our worship change that it doesn't require them to lead us into worship? When does our giving change that we don't have to be coaxed or persuaded to give in offerings but we do because we're in love with God and we know that he is the one who has given? And so we give because we know that he is worthy of our offerings, not just monetary. There has to be a change in our relationship because you're missing everything. [00:57:48]