The Five Pillars of Effort | Let's Be Honest | Menlo Church Live Stream

Jul 05, 2026

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33s
#gospelconfidence
“``If you're a follower of Jesus and you understand the gospel the way that we just communicated it, this isn't arrogance. It's humble awareness. It's Psalm one thirty saying, god, if you kept a record of wrongs, who could stand? No one. And so by grace, through faith, in Christ, if you're a follower of Jesus and you were to stand before god today, scale of one to 10, how confident are you that you get to eternity? If you understand the gospel, the answer is 10. It could never be below 10 because it isn't based on you. It's based on him.”
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51s
#graceNotPerformance
“Jesus says, I am the way. He's not saying he's the manual. He's not saying he's the checklist. He's saying a personal relationship with God himself is our means of salvation. That someone who has already lived the life that we can't, already satisfied the judgment that we can never measure up, has already been made available to us. Jesus is saying, your record, it actually doesn't it doesn't matter as a final report card. Because Jesus his his was perfect, and it's the only one that we can actually be qualified for eternity for a restored relationship with god now and forever because of. Jesus actually takes your and my failing report card or or at best, your incomplete report card and trades it for his perfect and permanent report card.”
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76s
#identityByAdoption
“Because that's what a birth certificate does. No matter how you spell it, it actually determines the name of your family of origin, the name that we carry, who we actually are. Christianity does something like that. You don't become a Christian when you perform well. You become a child of God when you acknowledge your inability to perform well enough for a holy God, and that in his love for you, Jesus offers his righteousness in your place. You live surrendered in a way different way when the stakes aren't whether or not you are welcome into the family, but when your standing is secure, when your place in the family is guaranteed forever, all of a sudden submission, looks way different. Without that submission, it leaves you wondering where you stand. But surrendering to Jesus, it can give you certainty for eternity. It doesn't mean that we just do whatever we want. Either that gets covered a lot in the New Testament because that's not how a family works. It means that when we know we are loved, that we belong, our motivation for obedience completely changes. You're not trying to earn a place that you've already been given. You get to live from an identity of acceptance.”
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44s
#reportCardVsBirthCert
“Now I wanna start by highlighting a difference. There is a really big difference between this and that. There's a big difference between a report card and a birth certificate. And and you may not think about these because you don't interact with them every day, but a report card, it keeps score. It it evaluates your progress. It tells you whether or not you have performed well or not on that exam, how you did that quarter or that semester in class, whether you passed or failed. It's a constant evaluation and an assessment that is being calculated before you ever see the final result. But you can feel the examination all the time.”
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65s
#bornNotEarned
“Every red mark on the page is a judgment about your effort, about your performance. And the deeper message that you can feel underneath the grade, underneath the number, underneath the letter is, are you enough? Have you done enough? Will you be enough? A birth certificate is way different. A birth certificate actually doesn't keep score. It reveals a status that is secured and inalterable. It's a document that says, this is your family of origin, and it gives you your original birth name. It it declares, in human terms, the most base original identity. You didn't achieve it. You just received it. You didn't earn the name that's on your birth certificate. You didn't perform your way into your last name. You were born into it. You were given it. Now here's what's really important about this distinction. A report card, it tells you how you did. A birth certificate tells you who you are.”
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58s
#MuslimQuestionOfEternity
“Now if you're Muslim and you're listening to this, I really do see the weight that you carry. I think about that man that I was on a panel with all the time. I think about the millions of people like him who are doing everything they can to demonstrate their devotion in hopes that with trying so hard, pressing in, that God will see what they're doing, and it will be enough for eternity. But here's the question I wanna leave you with. If you were to stand before God today and you call yourself a Muslim, how confident are you that you would enter paradise on a scale of one to 10? And if you said, well, you know, nobody I don't know. Pretty perfect, I guess. Maybe 10. If you would say 10, you've ranked yourself ahead of Muhammad. Because even he who said, I'm not totally sure. What's that number for you?”
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88s
#scaleOfDeeds
“Honestly, I respect the clarity that this system offers. You know what's expected. You know what you're going to get graded on. The road map is clear. But there is a tension in this report card for every person who follows Islam. You can do all of this and still not know if it's enough. On the day of judgment, God is going to put your deeds on a scale. Good works on one side and your bad works on the other side. And at that moment, if the good outweighs the bad, then you'll go to paradise. But if the bad outweighs the good, you'll face judgment. But here's the part that every Muslim has to kinda grapple with in their own journey of faith within Islam. They don't know how the scales will tip until that day. There's no central report card. Even Mohammed, in his own writing, describes the reality that he's not sure what the day of judgment will look like for him, their prophet. The Quran, their most holy book, is clear that ultimately salvation is Allah, which is the Arabic name for God. There are even Christian Arabs who refer to God as Allah. They would say salvation is Allah's choice alone. You can be devoted. You can pray five times a day. You can fast. You can give. You can go on your pilgrimage. And at the end of your life that you have dedicated to this pursuit, you still don't know, not fully, if you're in.”
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46s
#JesusInvitesIdentity
“And I'm telling you, if if if you are Muslim, I'm not saying that as like a I'm not trying to own anybody. I'm not trying to score points. I'm just saying I believe that there's a better way. And I don't think that Jesus is asking you to give up who you are. I think he's asking you to live into who you really are, who he's made you to be, that he has done the work to adopt you, to bring you into the family. And as someone that god has done that work in my life for, it's not because I'm smart enough. It's not because I'm good enough. It's because god is great, and his love has extended to me. And I hope that today it will extend to you.”
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49s
#listenToTheirStory
“And so because of that, we just need to we need to approach these conversations in a way that recognizes that each person we talk to if you've met one Muslim, how many Muslims do you know? Yeah. Wasn't a trick question. Just one, you know? And so being able to recognize, what does it look like for me to have a great conversation with my Muslim neighbor, my Muslim coworker, my Muslim friend? Here's the question that will help you understand where they are in their paradigm of faith. How do you practice your faith? They're gonna probably talk through some of the ways that those five pillars show up in their life. They're gonna talk about their story, their family, their heritage, maybe their country of origin. And it can open up a powerful conversation of story and relationship to really move the needle forward.”
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56s
#inclusiveExclusiveFaith
“Maybe you've heard me say this before. Christianity, its central truth claim is that it is the most inclusive, exclusive faith in the world. It's the only way, and it's available to everyone every day. It's a scandal to people who believe that all religions are the same, and it's a challenge to works based religions like Islam. Islam is about submitting to the will of God through these five pillars in hopes that your lifetime obedience, that these scales will tip, that your eternal report card will be enough for God's favor. Muslims, they revere Jesus. Actually, they believe that he is the only one who was without sin. They just reject his divinity. They reject his resurrection, the very means by which you and I believe that he was saved if you're a follower of Jesus. The very things that would change the report card paradigm for each and every one of us.”
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67s
#costOfConversion
“Now I really do respect the people who have found Islam to be a system that offers clarity for their life and for their faith community. And if you are yourself Muslim, I understand that considering a different view of faith, certainly Christianity, it is not just something that challenges the way you think about faith. It's actually something that challenges the way you think about family and community because oftentimes those doors will close for you if you make a change. I'm not ignorant to that cost for you. This kind of clarity, this this path toward God, I get that it can feel like a gift if it's the gift that you've been given or the one that you've chosen. In my experience, many Muslims are thoughtful, devoted people who are striving to honor God with their whole lives. The issue is not their intellect or their sincerity. It's ultimately about what they're trusting for their eternal standing before god. Islam teaches the concept of the report card, and I just think it can feel so heavy if you really examine the inner life and go, do I measure up to a holy god?”
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38s
#faithCoreMessages
“This group right here, if you're thinking, that's a lot of them. Why are there so many? I would just say, like, be cool because we have denominations. Like, this isn't that different. Right? We all have these different ways that we're thinking about our faith around this core idea. What is the core message of a particular faith? And for the Islamic world, their core message is this idea of scales. It's a report card for eternity. Your core message, if you're a follower of Jesus or you're thinking about becoming one, is that there's a birth certificate available in the person and work of Jesus. They disagree on some stuff. They emphasize some different things, and that's okay.”
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60s
#rejectStereotypes
“I wanna say this as someone committed to faith, a Christian. I would not want someone judging me or my faith by the worst, most extreme, most hateful version of it that they could find. Because in 2026, that would be pretty easy to find. The vast majority of the 1,800,000,000 Muslims in the world condemn terrorism and violence. According to Pew Research, less than 5% of Muslims globally have favorable views towards groups like Al Qaeda. That's still a big number. I get it. But please, please, please, do not assume that every person you're talking to who is a follower of Islam is in that 5%. When we take the actions of a fraction and we say that that's Islam, we're doing the same thing that we'd hate it if someone judged your Christianity by the Westboro Baptist Church or abortion clinic bombers. That's not intellectually honest. It's a caricature.”
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49s
#ChristiansAlsoKeepScore
“Now if you're a Christian, I wanna caution you before you judge your Muslim neighbor or coworker too quickly, because here's what's more true than we often wanna admit. This scales concept that I just described, a lot of us live underneath the same system without ever calling it that. We feel that same pressure to perform. We're like, well, yeah, yeah, my Christianity, Jesus is really important, but really it's about do my good works outweigh my bad works in my life? And I hope you're describing this idea, and it is far more Islamic than it is Christian. We're keeping score. We're wondering if we're enough. We're just doing it within a Christian framework rather than in an Islamic one. This is kind of a universal human problem because we wanna get to it on our own. We wanna figure out, can I do this on my own? The bible speaks to it directly.”
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61s
#childhoodReportCardPain
“I grew up understanding something about report cards. My childhood was probably not what you assume if you've never met before. It wasn't stable. It wasn't safe. And on top of that, I was battling a learning disability, a reading disability, severe dyslexia, and a debilitating stutter. And so report cards, they were these regular reminders, no matter how hard I tried, that I was just falling further behind. And so I dreaded getting them in the mail because I knew even as a kid it was not going to be good enough for my dad. And so on days that I thought the report card might arrive, I would wait by the mailbox because I knew that the mailman was coming. He was wise. He knew exactly what I was doing. He's like, hey. You're looking for this one. Right? I tried to intercept it before anybody else got to see it. And it wasn't because I thought I could hide it forever. I was just trying to buy time before the inevitable judgment would come. I was trying as hard as I could, and I knew that my best effort was never going to be enough.”
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56s
#progressiveRevelationExplained
“In Islam, there is a concept called progressive revelation that they have sort of a unique idea around. The idea for them is that God has revealed himself in stages, and with each stage, God is refining, defining, and correcting what came before it. And so for the idea within Islam, they can look at all the different aspects of what it means to know God and follow God. And they can look at something like the Torah, and they can say, okay. That's definitely God's word. I see that. They can look at the other what they would refer to as prophets and see the value that they bring, but it's it's quite different. Even if they would describe it as god's word, they're incomplete. They're inaccurate. They've been corrupted. But the problem is for them, they would say the Koran is the last and perfect revelation of god.”
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54s
#differentScriptureLenses
“Christians, they read Genesis and they see Abraham willing to sacrifice his son as a foreshadowing of God the father sacrificing his son Jesus. It's the same father. It's the same story, but it is a completely different interpretation. They believe that they are the actual right people of faith connected to the story of Abraham. So do the Jewish people. So do Christians. And it's not because Muslims are refusing to see something. They're reading their sacred scriptures through the lens of their progressive revelation view of God. In their view, God has now clarified who he is and what he wants. To them, the earlier version is incomplete and inaccurate. And it's all wrapped up in what each person brings as assumptions or what's sometimes called presuppositions to the study of scripture and to the study of their faith.”
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61s
#historicalTextConfidence
“Now they argue that because at the time when this was being argued, there wasn't a bunch of textual criticism. We didn't have evidence. Is what we're reading really corrupted? Now, today, thousands of years later, we have greater historic confidence. Even secular archaeologists and scholars would tell you that when you and I pick up a bible today, the old and new testament, they are unbelievably, I would argue, supernaturally consistent with what was originally written on those pages. Nevertheless, for Islam, that is a core tenet of the way they understand the difference between what the Christian bible or the Jewish scriptures would look like and what the Quran is. Or take Abraham. Muslims see Abraham as the father of their religion, and they would say that every time we think about Abraham sacrificing Isaac, actually, it should have been him sacrificing Ishmael, like it was distorted.”
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71s
#sharedHumanFear
“And I could tell that the Muslim who was on the panel was trying really difficult to navigate that tension. He was kind. He was thoughtful. He was educated. He was clearly a person of profound personal faith. And afterwards, he and I struck up a conversation in the hallway, and I could tell he was carrying a ton of weight in his life. And I just asked him how he was doing in this moment in the midst of so much confusion and judgment right now. And he shared that he was basically scared all the time, that he was really scared when he was on an airplane, that he was scared when he was at a store. He was scared because he knew that there were strangers around him who were afraid of him while he was afraid of them. His fear, sadly, it it didn't really surprise me too much, but his kindness did. With all the weight that he was carrying, with all the judgment that he was feeling, he was still willing to be caring and still willing to be respectful in a setting like the one we just shared together. We listened, and we hoped for understanding with one another that we could find something in common.”
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53s
#quranVsBibleView
“This came the last, so they would say it's the most accurate. It's also very different. So these, what you would describe as the bible, these all show up in a way that God inspires human authors to write with their personality. So they're writing as themselves inspired by god. The Quran is believed, within Islam to be recited by Muhammad, and it is the direct words of Allah, the direct words of god. And it is their main scripture. It comes final. Therefore, it is complete and accurate, and it corrects everything else. It's pure revelation within their religion. It's not simply adding to what came before. It's overriding it. It's correcting it. It's superseding it. God is doing something progressively more accurate and as it reveals himself more accurately.”
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