She won't. And on this snowpocalypse that we've been through here, we're glad for those that can make it on campus safely, but also thankful to have that connection online for those who might not be able to make it in person for any reason. We don't want to try to lay any guilt trips on anybody. Every situation is different; we've got people living all over in different places that attend our services, and it can be really different from one house to another, neighborhood over in another part. Sometimes the roads aren't cleared up where you are, and we understand that. That's why we're glad to be able to have that online connection as well.
We want to begin today with a word of prayer. We've got a couple of things I want us to mention. I know there are a lot of prayer needs within the church. Jessica Lehman, who is here at the Antioch campus, she's our preschool director, texted us this morning, and she's been really sick and throwing up and all that. So she couldn't come in and open up the preschool area today. But I want to brag. We've got such dedicated staff and volunteers. We had a volunteer this morning that works sometimes back there with the preschoolers, said, "I'll jump in there and do it," so she opened it up for preschoolers this morning. So we're thankful for Maddie doing that.
And I know at both campuses, we have great volunteers that jump in and help out. Our praise teams, they have to get here earlier than everybody else, right? So they came in, those that can make it, came in this morning to get ready and lead us in praise and worship. So let's thank our praise team and all of our volunteers there.
Yeah. A friend asked a gentleman why he had never gotten married. And he said that he had never met the right girl, the perfect girl. He'd been looking all of his life for the perfect girl and never found one. And the guy said, "Well, surely there was one girl somewhere along the way in your life that you thought would be the right one for you." And he said, "Well, there was this one girl. She was just perfect for me in every way. I mean, in every way. I could think I had this list, and she checked all the boxes." And the guy said, "Well, why didn't you marry her?" He said, "Well, she was looking for the perfect guy."
Today we're going to be talking about how we sometimes try to put up this image, this front in our lives that we've got it all together and everything's good. So let's pray together before we go to that.
Father, we thank you that we could come to you with the prayer needs within our church family. Father, we want to lift up the people dealing with the fires in California, the winter storm that went through all the areas, and all the problems that that's caused for people. We thank you that in the middle of all of that, we can look to you and find you to be faithful. You never leave us; you never forsake us. We are reminded that the material things of this world are so fragile, and we are fragile. So temporary can be gone so quickly. We can't put our hope and our trust in those things, but we have you, and we can come to you and put our hope in you. Father, we find everything we need in you and in your son Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Well, we started a new series for the new year called "I Have Decided." We started out with that first message: the most important decision we could ever make for any of us in our lives is, "I have decided to follow Jesus." Now, if you missed that one last week, it's on our YouTube channel; you could go back and catch it there. You've got to start there as getting the life in order that you need to have, getting on track with everything else. You get that right, then everything else begins to line up like it needs to when you understand what it means to follow Jesus.
Now, sometimes we say we're following Jesus when we're not, so you might want to go back and listen to that message because Jesus makes it clear that in order to follow him, we must take up our cross daily and follow him. It's dying to self to go and follow him as the one who leads us in our lives. That's a big step, and sometimes we claim to follow when we're not really following.
Today we're going to be talking about the subject: "I Have Decided to Be Free Indeed." There is an amazing promise that Jesus makes to those who choose to follow him that most of us know the words, we know the language, but maybe we don't understand it in the context of Scripture and what Jesus was telling us.
Let's look in John chapter 8, beginning with verse 31. Jesus himself is teaching here. I don't know if you got your Bibles; open them up there, pull it up on your smartphone or tablet. In many Bibles, they have the words of Jesus in red, right? The red letters. You can tell this is actually Jesus talking; his words are in red here.
And many translations that you might have, to the Jews who had believed in him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you're really my disciples." Alright, remember last week we talked about "I have decided to what? Follow Jesus." Well, here's what that looks like: if you hold to my teaching, that's the evidence that you're really following me. As a follower of a teacher, as a student of a teacher, that you follow after. So here he's saying, here's another identifying mark: if you are following my teaching, if you hold to my teaching, if you embrace it and claim it and live it out, you're really my disciples.
And then he gives us this promise: "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Now that phrase was made very popular during the time of Jesus, and Jesus was the one that was Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and he rightly claimed that as a rallying cry for the civil rights movement because when we know the truth about some things, it will free us. It will free us all and get us in where we need to be in that freedom.
But here Jesus, this is long before the civil rights movement, and Jesus is speaking to a group of Jews who are a little bit offended by what Jesus just said. Listen to their response: "They answered him, 'We’re Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?'"
Now, first of all, what they said is not true. They are Abraham's descendants, but had Abraham's descendants ever been slaves to anyone? Yeah, on more than one occasion. So generally speaking, Abraham's descendants had been slaves before, but they themselves in their lifetime and their generation had not been slaves as Abraham's descendants. So maybe they're talking about just specifically that time period.
Alright, but they're a little bit offended. Why? Why would you even tell us we need to be free? We've never been a slave to anybody. And see, we don't understand sometimes what it means to be a slave. You don't have to be enslaved by another group of people or another country to be living in slavery. We can enslave ourselves, and that's part of what Jesus is going to be talking about here.
Okay, Jesus replied, "Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin." Oh, maybe there's a different kind of slavery, something that we don't think about when we talk about slavery, especially in our country with the civil rights movement and all that. We would automatically think of that kind of freedom and slavery, but here Jesus is saying it's a broader thing I'm teaching you here because all of us are slaves to another group of people. We can enslave ourselves, and that's part of what it means to continue living in a sinful lifestyle. We are then what? Slaves to sin.
Now, there's a distinction between stumbling and falling as a Christ follower and choosing to continue in sin. He's talking about this lifestyle of continuing to choose to live in sin, and it enslaves us when we do that.
Okay, so here's the difference between stumbling and falling as a Christ follower. He says, "Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever." So if we choose to go on sinning, do we have a permanent place in God's family? No, we do not. That's what Jesus is teaching us here.
But he says, "A son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." Now he's talking about a freedom that is promised to anyone who chooses to be a disciple of Jesus, a freedom that is freedom from sin and the wages of sin and the control of sin in our lives.
The reason I bring that up is because we're talking about making a decision to be free indeed. At the first of the year, and New Year's every year, a lot of people make decisions about some things in their life that they're going to stop doing and some things they're going to start doing, right? But when we say we're going to stop doing what? You know what one of the most common ones is? "I'm going to stop smoking." That's one of the most common ones. "I'm going to stop eating unhealthy." And now you can look at it on the side here: "I'm going to start eating healthy." Right? Either way, "I'm going to lose weight this year."
We make these resolutions, we call them, and what Jesus calls us to is more than just a resolution that we make in the New Year. What he calls us to is revolution. It's transformation, not resolution.
So what we want to look at today is this: the resolution side of things. All the studies show this. It's kind of... you know what the second Friday of January is now called? Quitter's Day. The second Friday of January is now called Quitter's Day. How would you like to have that? You know, Quitter's Day. What are you going to celebrate? "I'm a quitter." Right?
The reason it's called Quitter's Day is because most studies show that by the second Friday of January, a majority of people have already broken their resolutions. They've already not kept the resolutions they made, and by Valentine's Day, the studies show that 88% of people who made resolutions have already not kept those resolutions. 88%. Doesn't sound very effective, does it?
Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't make resolutions, that it's a bad thing. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that just saying, "I'm going to do better," doesn't really get the job done. And when it comes to following Jesus, the same thing is true. Many of those who follow Jesus are still having an ongoing battle. In fact, all of us do, in one level of life or another, with a sin that keeps lingering, a temptation, and a struggle with sin that we won't have victory over, but it keeps coming up again. It's one of those things that seems to be just a constant battle in our lives.
Even the great Apostle Paul said it this way: "The good things that I want to do, I find myself not doing, and the bad things I don't want to do, I find myself doing those very things." And he said, "What a wretched man am I!" You see, he knew the reality of that ongoing battle even after deciding to follow Jesus.
I think sometimes we misrepresent what's going to happen to us when we make that decision and we profess our faith and we're buried with Christ in baptism. We rise up to that new life, and it is a new life, and we have a new thing to do. But it doesn't mean that Satan's going to leave us alone then, and it doesn't mean that the old habits and routines and ways we've done life for so many years are just going to disappear all of a sudden. It does not.
In fact, when the Bible talks about our transformation as followers of Jesus, it talks about it in a sense of an ongoing process, not a one-and-done deal where everything just gets taken care of and our battle with sin automatically disappears. You see, there's this process of learning to change in the ways that will give us victory and freedom from those temptations and those sins that we battle with in our lives.
So I want to share several areas here of life that we tend to do in a way that sometimes keeps us from the freedom God wants us to have, and that's how we can get past that and do better with that.
Okay, so I want us to learn. And now, as your pastor, when I teach you these things, it's because I love you, and I deal with these things too. We all need some help with this, but I can't make you do anything. I can't even make you make a decision to do anything. That's up to you. But I want to bring you to that point where you have the information to make the decision that you need to make for your life to have this freedom that Jesus is talking about.
Because Jesus promised this freedom to his followers, and so many times we don't experience the freedom he's talking about because what we do most of the time with this habitual sin in our lives is we just try to learn to manage it. Because we have not had victory over it, we just try to minimize it. We just try to manage it the best that we can, and that's not the freedom that Jesus is talking about here. He wants to set us completely free from these things.
So years ago, in fact, it was back in 1955, there were these two psychologists that came up with what they called the Johari Window. They did it for business; they were talking about how people work in the business world, how they interact with each other, how their relationships work. But the principles really apply to what Jesus is talking about here.
So I want to help us make that connection because he's talking about how we live our lives, and if we understand this the right way, we will come to a place where we know what we need to do to have this freedom that Jesus is talking about.
Okay, so the first area he talks about in that study, these two psychologists talk about, is what they call life in the arena. So the arena is the first area. Now, in the arena, it's the way we live life where I know and you know those things about me that I put out there in the arena.
Okay, now today, since 1955, a lot of things have changed, right? With technology and all of that. Part of what's happened is we now have social media, so we put our lives out there. Now we go to events and things like that; people see us there in person, but we also put ourselves out there on social media.
Now, how many people do you think really, when they put posts on social media, might pick and choose certain ones to put out there to make it look the best they can? Now, most people do that. I think we all do that to some degree. How many of you will have a friend take a picture, and they say, "Before you post that picture, let me look at it"? Right?
Now, it may be the reality of what you look like when they took that picture, but that's not what you want to present in the arena. So you put a filter on it, or you get another picture done, and you make sure everything's right for that next picture. And you look at it, and you say, "Well, that one's okay; you could put that one out there." Why? Because we are so driven by other people's opinion of us.
And friends, when you get to a place where that controls you, you are a slave to it. It's exhausting to have to do that all the time. There are celebrities who make sure they hire people who manage their arena. They manage their public appearances, manage what's out there on the internet and on social media, and all of that so that they aren't embarrassed by anything that goes out to the arena.
And what we're seeing in the arena is just the outside. There's no way you can see the inside, the real person on the inside. In the arena, it doesn't expose the inside; it only exposes the outside appearance of the person or the life or the situation that we put out there.
You see, we can't, according to Jesus, as a disciple of Jesus, we cannot just worry about how we look on the outside. That will enslave us. If we're living our lives just worried about how we look on the outside, now there's nothing wrong with looking good on the outside; that's not an evil thing. But you can look really good on the outside and be rotten to the core on the inside.
And Jesus spoke to that directly in Matthew 23. He's speaking to a group of religious leaders in his day, the Pharisees in particular and teachers of the law. Matthew 23, beginning with verse 25, he says, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!" You hypocrites! That word hypocrite is not a complimentary word, right? A hypocrite is someone who tries to appear to be one thing while in fact they're another thing in reality.
"Woe to you, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence." How do they look on the outside? Cleaned up nice. I know a lot of times on Sundays, alright, at a wedding or something, somebody will come dressed up more than usual, and we say, "Oh, you clean up good!" Right?
Because we can, with what we have to work with, there are limitations, but within those limitations, we can clean ourselves up to look the best that we can look on the outside. And he says, "You can do that; that's not evil. But what's bad is on the inside you're full of greed and self-indulgence."
And then he says in verse 26, "Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and dish; then the outside also will be clean." Ah, so the real person is on the inside. No matter how the outside looks, but if you get the inside where it needs to be, what happens to the outside? It looks better too.
Okay, so here he goes on: "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but what's inside? A tomb. On the inside, they're full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside, you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside, you're full of hypocrisy and wickedness."
Alright, so that's the first area: the arena of our lives. Some people, even Christ followers, are living your lives way too concerned about what people out there in the arena think about you. So all you're doing is focusing on how you appear to them and making sure you have the right appearance to the people out there in the arena where they think well of you, where they're impressed by you, where they think you are a good person or a successful person or whatever it is that drives or motivates you.
Well, there's another area that talks about in this study, and that's what he calls the mask. The mask could be said this way: I know, but you don't know some things about my life. All of us, no matter what we put out there in the arena, have some other things in our lives that we know aren't what they ought to be. Even if we're not honest about it, deep down we know it. We know there's some things that just aren't where they need to be.
We struggle with those things, and we'd like to get rid of them, but we don't want other people to find out about them, so we wear a mask. So in our interactions with other people, we put this mask on so that people don't find out about those things that we don't want them to know about us.
So we go through life with this mask on, and again, when you are living like that, friends, it is exhausting to have to wear a mask all the time. How many of you remember in COVID having to wear that mask all the time? It drove me crazy. I wear glasses, so every time I wore a mask, what happened to my glasses? Right? They fogged up. It's aggravating, right? I don't like having to wear a mask. I did it if I had to, but I certainly didn't like it.
And it's exhausting to have to do that. You get out of the car to go in somewhere, and what did you forget? You already got to the front door where you got to go, now back to the car to get them out. You got to put the mask on, right? Now we did that, but we realized how exhausting that was while the physical wearing a mask.
But friends, we can wear a mask without it being a physical thing at all. There are things in our lives that we want to be sure to stay hidden from the people who are in our lives around us, and it's usually something that causes some shame or some guilt, some embarrassment if it were to come out, if people were to find out about it.
Now, I was talking about Christ followers here. We know that people that don't follow Jesus, they're out there living in opposition to God's will in a lot of ways. But even Christ followers, Jesus is teaching us this year, even Christ followers battle with the stuff on the inside that we don't want to get exposed on the outside.
It's some of those lingering habits and sins and things in our lives that we haven't really taken care of like we need to. And if we think, especially our family and friends, even our Christian family, our church family, knew these things about us, if they got exposed, they would not think as much of us anymore. It would cause shame and embarrassment for those things to get out.
There are a lot of recovery groups out there now, and I'm so thankful for them all. We partnered with one here called Sober Living America, and there's AA, and there's lots of other organizations like that, some more Christian-focused than others, and there's some really good ones out there. But most of them adopt this phrase that AA adopted many, many years ago, but others have adopted it as well. It says this: "We will always stay as sick as our secrets."
We will always stay as sick as our secrets. You can't be healed from anything that you're not willing to expose, to get out there, to deal with. You'll stay sick until you acknowledge it. The first step in AA, right? "Hi, I'm Randy, and I am an alcoholic." You have to get it out there. Until you do that, you can't heal.
And so whatever it is that we've got in there that shouldn't be in there, it is exhausting, and it wears us out to keep trying to cover that up and keep it from being exposed. And what Jesus is telling us here is we can't let past experiences or fear of what others will think keep us from the healing and the freedom that he wants us to have.
He wants to give us the freedom to heal, and he wants to give us the freedom to heal from those things instead of being enslaved by them the rest of our lives. And we can't have that freedom unless we get this out and deal with it like we need to.
The psalmist says in Psalm 32, beginning with verse 3, and we know David has had sin in his life, and here's what he says: "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer."
Man, when you keep trying to hold on to it and hide it, it will just eat you up from the inside out. David's acknowledging, "Man, when I was trying to hide this stuff, it was literally killing me to try to hold it in and hide it."
There are a lot of medical studies that show too that stress has a great effect on our health, physical health, and there's nothing more stressful than being afraid you're going to be found out all the time, that your secrets are going to be exposed. Man, that'll just eat you up, and it will begin to affect your physical health.
But it also hurts our spiritual health because here we are trying to hide it and act like it's not there when who already knows all the details anyway? God does. We haven't hidden anything from him. It's like when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. What did they try to do first? Hide from God.
Good luck with that one! I don't care how gifted you are at hiding your sin from other people, hiding that struggle or that pain in your life, that failure from other people, you can never be good at hiding it from God. It doesn't work that way.
And so we're just wearing ourselves out praying, playing, and pretending like God doesn't even know about that in our lives, and that enslaves us, and it brings terrible consequences.
So here's what the psalmist says next in verse 5: "Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave me the guilt of my sin."
So if we want to have freedom, we've got to stop playing and hiding and acting like we can keep these things even from God. We've got to get real with the struggles that we have in our lives. We've got to be honest about it and stop being ashamed by it to the point that we're not willing to deal with it.
Now, there's nothing wrong with feeling shame and guilt for sin; in fact, that's supposed to happen. We're made that way. But what we're supposed to do with the shame and the guilt is know where to go with it so that we can be relieved of it, so that we can be set free from it.
And the first step in that process is to go to God with it. Stop pretending, stop hiding, and be real with God with this struggle that we have.
Now, the good news is he already knew. He still loves us. He hasn't left us. He doesn't love us any less when we tell him these things. That's the thing we have the hardest time grasping about the love of God. It's when we tell God about these secrets we've been holding on to, his love for us does not change one iota.
How do we know that? Because that's the very thing he sent Jesus here to die on the cross for us. We already know that in his love for us, he wants to help us be free from those things, and he's already taken steps to free us from those things and the guilt and the shame of those things.
And so we first go to God, but here's something else God has done for us that I love here, and it's revealed all through Scripture, and that's this: we need to start with going to God, but I want to encourage you to do this too. It's a step that we see in Scripture over and over again, and that is that you develop some true Christian friendships in your life where you have somebody in flesh and blood in your life that you know you can trust as a friend to talk to about these things and to help you with these things and to encourage you in your battle with these things that you're battling with.
Now, some of you, I know I've had this happen, have been burned by people that I thought I could trust with some of those things. And so when that happens, our response to that is to shut it down completely and never talk to anybody about these things for fear that they're going to use it against us.
It's true; some people might do that. But what I have learned through a lot of relationships with my beautiful bride, Suanne, I can talk to her about anything with her, with people in a ministry group that I'm a part of. There are some other pastors in that group that I know I can talk to about anything, and they can talk to me about anything.
And there is this promise of confidence that it's never going to be used against us in any way, that we can share these things. I got to tell you, it helps to have flesh and blood you can talk to as well as the Father in prayer. It helps to have both, and God gave us both of those things to help us.
Now, the problem is you can't have that if you're not willing to allow yourself to be vulnerable at least to a certain degree, where you enter into relationships with people that would allow that to happen. And if you're playing this game of only living life for your public presentation, then you'll never ever allow yourself to have a relationship that gets any deeper than that.
And when that happens, you stay a slave to that thing that you've got that you know you shouldn't have in your life. It will have its hold on you forever as long as you're more concerned about what others think than you are about taking care and having this freedom that God wants you to have.
And so there's got to be this other step. C.S. Lewis, I love C.S. Lewis, a great Christian writer and theologian, he said this: "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'"
Isn't it great when you've been so afraid to talk to somebody about something like this, and they come back with something like, "Man, I know what you mean. I've struggled with that too," or "I've got a family member that's struggled with that too. It's been a hard thing for them."
It helps to have somebody in your life, a brother or sister in Christ. I want to give you a word of caution because what happens here is when we start confiding in people, sometimes they don't have your best interest at heart, and they're not the people.
Here's what you need to know: is that person someone who defends you even when you're not in the room? That's one of the key markers. Even when you're not in the room, if other people are tearing you down or criticizing you, do they stand up for you when you're not there? You need some people like that in your life, and in the body of Christ, we are supposed to be that way for each other.
Now, it doesn't mean you get up in front of the whole church and tell everything. You know, every week you're up there confessing everything. That's not what we see in Scripture. What we see in Scripture is within a smaller group, there's some key people that you connect with that you develop a deeper relationship with.
You can't do that in a large arena; it has to be in a smaller group. That's why we have life groups at Lakeshore. That's why they're so valuable. That's where real friendships develop. Within a larger church, you can't do that in the big arena; it has to be broken down so that there's more personal contact and trust built with certain people.
Here's what you need to know: it is practically impossible to have more than two or three really close friends. I'm talking about really close friends that you can really confide in on a deep level because it takes so much time and effort to develop that. You can't do that with hundreds of people; you just can't.
So you have to focus on something. I want to give you another word of caution. Guys, you don't need to be doing this with a female that you're not married to, and ladies, you don't need to be doing this with a male that you're not married to. Because this, if it works right, it gets very intimate and very detailed and very deep, and Satan loves to use those things to get you to cross lines that you shouldn't cross in those relationships.
And I know the world makes fun of that when you draw lines like that and put up boundaries like that. I'm going to let the world joke about me all they want. I have some boundaries that I will not break as a husband, as a father, and as a pastor. I'm going to keep those boundaries in place.
It's not that I'm perfect at it; I know I'm not. That's why I need the boundaries, right? That's the same reason you need the boundaries in your life because too many times, Satan uses those relationships and gets you to cross lines that you shouldn't cross.
You see, it's a lot easier for someone who doesn't have to live with you all the time to show you great compassion and care than it is for the people who have to live with you all the time. And sometimes you take that as so flattering that you end up getting too involved with someone in the wrong way that you shouldn't be involved with in that way.
So make sure you keep some boundaries in place to protect your relationships the way you need to. I love what Paul said to the Colossian church in Colossians 4:12. He mentions someone for them that he says, "Epaphras, who is one of you and a servant of Christ Jesus, sends greetings."
And listen to how he describes his relationship with Epaphras and the Colossians: "He's always wrestling in prayer for you that you may stand firm in all the will of God, mature and fully assured." You need to get you a friend or a spouse like that who will do that for you.
Now, if your spouse is not like that, the spouse that you have now, it doesn't mean you get rid of that one and get another one. Don't take that the wrong way. What I'm saying is that that's what we should choose to do as a spouse for the person we're married to, to know that we are praying for you. We want to encourage you. We want you to stay strong and firm in the will of God for your life.
We are that person for them, and we need some of that for us too in our lives. But we've got that friend doing that for us too. So if we're wearing a mask, we need to have those relationships where we can take the mask off, certainly starting with God, confess to him.
But the Bible says many times, "Confess your sins to one another." And again, he doesn't mean everybody; he means those people you have that kind of relationship with where you can do that in that relationship.
The third area is what he calls blind spots in that study, these psychologists. And that's, "I don't know, but you know." Other people looking at our lives from the outside can sometimes see things about us and our decisions and our actions that we don't see in ourselves.
It happens all the time. I now have a car; I didn't for years, but I've got a car, and it's not very new, but it's new enough that it's got the blind spot warning indicators on it. I love it! To me, it's one of the best safety features they ever came up with, especially out on the expressway.
If I'm wanting to change lanes in both side mirrors, you're going to have blind spots. It's those spots that a car can be in, and your mirror is not going to pick it up that they're there. And so there's a little light that comes on on the side there where my mirror is. If I'm thinking about going over to that lane, that little light will come on if there's a car.
And if I hit my blinker or start going that way, it'll start beeping, and it'll even try to keep me from turning that way. I love that! I know that the cost of cars keeps going up because we keep adding all these safety features, but to me, that's a great safety feature to have in a car.
You know where it's more important to have it? In your everyday life. Somebody that will help point out your blind spots. Somebody that knows things about us that aren't good, but they love us enough to tell us about it anyway.
It's like when you're sitting there eating lunch with that person, you're about to go back to work, and you had spinach salad. Some of you have never eaten one, but if you had a spinach salad, some of you will never eat spinach, but I like it—spinach salad—and you got spinach all in your teeth, and you're about to go back to work. A good friend is going to do what? "Spinach in your teeth!" They'll point it out to you because they care about you.
They really want what's best for you, and they're willing to be honest with you about things that are hard to talk about sometimes. I love what it says in Proverbs 27: "Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses."
You see, fake friends don't mind you being embarrassed by spinach in your teeth. They don't mind seeing you fall in your career or fall in your family life if they're fake friends. And so if you're getting out there crossing some lines you shouldn't be crossing, they're not going to tell you about that. They're going to sit back and watch the show when you self-destruct.
There are plenty of people like that out there in the world, but a real friend is going to warn you about those blind spots that you don't see in your own life. They're going to be willing to be honest with us and tell us the things we can't see about ourselves.
If they see something going on in a relationship that's getting out of line, that's not appropriate, they're going to talk to you about it. They're not going to just turn a blind eye to it, and sometimes it will hurt the person that you have to say those honest things to. But better that hurt than the hurt of the next steps into sin that will destroy a lot of people or destroy them.
You see, we need to be willing to be honest. You need some friends who will tell you the truth in love because they care about you. They will bring up your blind spots and expose them to you.
When I was in Bible college training to be a pastor, I was still just 19 years old at this point. We had this class, a homiletics class, where we had to preach sermons in front of the class, and they would videotape. Back then, we had those big bulky video cameras, and they would video that, and they would take that big old tape out, and we'd plug it into a VCR, and we would all watch that sermon that that student preached that day in class.
And the idea was to evaluate it and pick out things that were good, but also things that were not so good. And believe me, a 19-year-old preacher has a lot of things in their sermon to pick apart. A preacher my age that's been preaching for this many years, there's always stuff you can bring out and pick apart. That never goes away.
So here in that class, at first, we would kind of jokingly do that. We were all afraid to just tell the truth because we didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings in class. But we had this wonderful homiletics professor, Dr. Olin Hay, who had been preaching for years.
One of the most valuable tools you're going to have as a preacher is maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's a close friend. You've got some people who will tell you, "Hey, you say 'huh' all the time," or "You're putting your hand in your pocket all the time." My wife has to warn me about that all the time.
I like to put my hand in my pocket when I'm teaching, and different things that we do all the time, we form these tics and these habits that can be distracting and keep us from being as effective in teaching the word. You're going to have somebody who will help you look at those things, expose those things, and then correct those things because they want you to be the best that you can be.
Well, that's what a blind spot person will do for you. I love what it says in Hebrews 3:12 and 13: "See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." But here's what he says to do instead: "That you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness."
We all have some blind spots where sin is deceiving us into thinking what we're doing and saying and acting like is okay, even when it's not. We all have some of those blind spots. And so having somebody in your life that loves you enough to say, "Hey, you know, you might want to rethink that. Let's talk about it. There's a lot of potential here for some bad things that go down that path."
You need some people in your life that will do that for you, and it's supposed to be within the family of God that you have that within the church and with your own earthly family if you have a Christian family.
So we see that we can't live for the arena. We need to take the mask off. We need to have honesty with the blind spots that we're dealing with in our lives. If we want to have freedom, we've got to deal with these things.
But it leads to the last thing I want to mention today, and that is our potential. The potential is, "I don't know, and you don't know what God's doing in my life and what plans He has for me or for you." I have a general idea; I know He wants what's good for you. I know He only wants what's best for you, but I don't know all the potential that God sees in you.
Remember when they were looking for a king, and they went to see Jesse's sons, and they brought them out one by one and said, "Which one is God picking to be the king?" And they brought out the oldest and the tallest and all that, the people they thought from the outside that would obviously be the king.
And they go through all the sons, and none of them, and God says to Samuel, "There are none of those." And then finally, they call for young David to come from the field where he's working. They didn't even have him show up for the meeting that day. They didn't consider him as one at all that had that potential to be the one God would choose to be king.
But they brought David there, and God says through the prophet, "He's the one!" They saw the potential; they saw a young shepherd boy, and God saw in him a king that was going to rule his people.
You see, only God sees that potential. I don't know, and you don't know, but God—listen to me—no matter what failures, no matter what past we've come from, no matter what struggles we've had, God is in the creation, transformation, and reconciliation business. That's what He does best.
So He can take anybody from anywhere and put His Spirit in us and bring His teaching into our lives and transform us completely into who He planned for us to be to accomplish the good work He prepared in advance for us to do. We need to know that God gives us the ability to be set free from anything in our past.
Even this morning, even while you've been sitting there today not paying attention, He can still take us and transform us and use us in powerful ways. When I was a young boy growing up, not a single person ever looked at me and said, "I know God's going to use you as a pastor." Not a single person spoke that into my life.
They did speak a lot of other things into my life: "You should be an athlete; you're good at that. You're really funny; you should do that." Different things, but nobody said, "You should be a pastor." It wasn't until I started dating Suanne, and her dad, who was a pastor, started speaking that into me.
Now, he couldn't possibly see what God's plan was exactly, but God could take us from anywhere to the place He wants us to be to do what He wants us to do. I love what it says in 2 Corinthians 5: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come; the old is gone, and the new is here."
God can make you new, transform you, free you from those things that you think would hold you back, that would be too shameful or embarrassing for God to use you. I love what it says in 1 John 1:8 and 9: "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, He will purify us from all unrighteousness."
When it says purify there, it's talking about an ongoing purification process. It doesn't mean when you go from here to following Jesus that everything is cleaned up and it won't ever get dirty again. It means He continuously purifies us to be used and set apart for the work of His kingdom.
In Acts 3:19, he says, "Repent then and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, and here's the result: the times of refreshing may come from the Lord." That's the freedom he's talking about—the refreshing freedom of knowing that God is purifying us and using us, cleaning up our messes, restoring us to that place where He will use us and bless us in our lives.
I don't want you to leave today without knowing this: you're not alone in your battles and in temptation. There's not a person on the earth that is free from that. Even those who are closely following Jesus are still being tempted and tried all along the way.
So don't ever be so afraid that anybody might find out about that, that you don't deal with it according to Scripture, that you don't go to God with it, you don't ask for some help from others in dealing with it that you know you can trust to win those battles, to have freedom from those things that want to hold on to us and keep us from being what God wants us to be.
Don't ever think you're alone in that struggle or that battle. The other thing is this: even when you've failed—and I have failed—even if we have failed over and over again, we are not disqualified from the cleansing, transforming power of God taking us, cleaning us up, and using us for his purposes.
There's nothing you have done in your past that has separated you from the love of God. There's nothing you will do today or in the days ahead that will ever separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing!
Don't ever let Satan lie to you and shame you into breaking off the close fellowship with the Father that he wants you to have because that's what the cross was all about. It was paying that price, providing that cleansing power so that no matter what failures, we could be reconciled to him and have that relationship with him that he wants to have.
You've probably seen these before. I want to close with this; it's pretty common. There are different versions of it out there, but when you start thinking you've messed up too bad, listen to this: Noah got drunk. Abraham was too old. Jacob was a liar. David was too young. David had an affair and was a murderer. Job had serious health problems and went bankrupt. Peter denied Christ. Elijah suffered with depression. Martha was worried about everything. Zacchaeus was short—bless his heart—and Lazarus, he was dead.
And God still used every one of them, and he can use you too.
Let's pray together. Father, we thank you. Let's show some of our wonderful ways. Let's... to... to... to... O... O... O... O... O... for everyone hearing this message today, that we would open up the inside to you to clean up and restore. Help us, help us, Father, to be the men and the women not only that we need to be, but that we need to be for others too. Help us to be their encouragers, their true friends, their ones who won't use anything against them from their past, but will help them see what God could do.
Help them realize that there's great potential in the plan of God for their lives if they would open up to it and be real with the Father. I pray that there's anyone today who needs to take a step of repentance and confession before God that even today, they wouldn't let another day go by without it because the freedom that comes with that is such a blessing.
Father, thank you that we can be free indeed through Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.
We're going to stand and sing today. We offer this invitation. If you have a decision you need to make, if you're listening online and you're thinking about a decision, email us, message us there online. We'll follow up with you and respond to you there. But if you're in the building and you have a decision to make, as we sing, just come right up front while we're standing and singing, and we'll lead you in those steps that you need to take.
Thank you.
Father, we thank you that we can boldly approach your throne of grace through your son, Jesus, to find the help that we need. We thank you that in these situations, whether it's uncertainty or anticipation of grief and loss, we don't have to go through any of that alone. You're right there with us.
Help us to rest assured that we can count on your presence and your power and your provision, no matter what we face in the days ahead. And to know that you're not caught off guard and you've already got a plan, and it's already been prepared, that even in the things that scare us or break us uneasy, you can work all things together for the good of these who love you, who've been called according to your purpose.
You've got a plan. It's a good plan. It's for your glory, and it's for our good. Help us to trust your plan more fully. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.
God bless you. Thank you.
This time, Hugh is going to come and lead us in a time around the Lord's table. If you want to go ahead and get your communion kits out. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
We want to thank you again for being here with us today. I know the road conditions weren't great everywhere, but I'm thankful. I want to thank TDOT crews and Metro, everybody that got out there and helped get these roads cleared up like they did. They did a great job there, and they're continuing to work on that even now.
And the sunshine out there today is going to help a lot. I'm so thankful to see the sunshine out there today. If you'd like to continue worshiping through the giving of an offering, we have offering boxes available. There's one in the back of the auditorium mounted on a post there, one in the hallway as you exit the auditorium mounted on a post there. You could drop your offerings in the top slot of those boxes.
You can also give online at lakeshorechristian.com; just click on that give tab there. You can give online, and you can scan the QR code in your bulletin shell. It'll take you to that page as well to be able to give an offering there. And you can mail in your offerings to the church office. You can mail in your offerings to the church office.
Either way you do it, do it as an act of worship, showing that you're putting God first and that you want to support the work in the ministry of the kingdom of God. The church is the kingdom of God on earth right now, and he works through that to accomplish his will. So thank you for your support for that each week.
In the bulletin, we give you this insert. It's got a sermon outline on one side that you can follow along with. By the way, we also post these outlines on the YouVersion Bible app so that you can follow along there too. You can log on there; it has the outline and notes there, but you have this in the description, and you can find it on the YouVersion Bible app.
So that you can follow along there too, you can find it on the YouVersion Bible app in your bulletin as well. But on the other side is announcements of activities that are coming up. We want you to have that; you can take it with you if you need to add things to your calendar.
I want to mention a couple of things real quick before we go. One is we have a welcome lunch coming up Sunday, January the 26th. It'll be immediately following our 11 a.m. service here at this campus, and we have one at the Smyrna campus as well after their 10 a.m. service. It is free lunch, but we need you to register in advance, and we also have childcare available, but you need to let us know if you need childcare when you attend the conference.
We're going to be attending that lunch. It's a great time to learn more about Lakeshore, get to know some of our staff, and we get to know you better. We make it a fun time together, so I hope you can sign up for that and attend it if you haven't attended one before.
We also have a baby dedication Sunday set up for Sunday, February the 16th. If you've had a recent addition to your family and want to do that dedication, we'd love for you to be part of that. And again, you need to register in advance for that so we'll be prepared for you to participate in that.
We're collecting winter items here at the Antioch campus. We've got a place out in the middle of the state. We're collecting winter items here at the Antioch campus. We've got a place out in the lobby for that for helping those who might be experiencing homelessness.
So we've got things like socks, hats, scarves, gloves, hand warmers, anything like that to help them through these cold months. We appreciate you donating those items there. And if you're interested in joining a life group, please be sure to let us know. You can do that through the kiosk in the lobby or also on our website. Just click on that life group graphic and go to that page to give us your information.
We'll have someone follow up with you to help you connect with a life group. Thanks again for being here today. If you are a first-time guest with us, stop by the information counter before you leave. We've got a gift that we'd love to give you.
Let's stand together and close with a word of prayer. Oh, one more thing real quick. You know how my mind works; it just hit me right before I walked out. Walter Rouse is an excellent teacher here at Lakeshore, and he's starting another class, a Christian doctrine class, starting the first Sunday in February.
We don't have the sign-up registration yet set up, but we're going to be doing that next week, and we're going to have the sign-up, but it will be set up for next Sunday. If you've never been through his Christian doctrine class, I would encourage you to sign up for that and attend that. It's an excellent class, and he does a great job teaching that.
Alright, let's close with prayer. Father, we thank you. This is always such an encouraging time when we assemble together as your people. We spend some time singing praises to you together. We spend time praying together. We're in your word together, studying, learning, and growing.
Help us now to take it in and not just worry about how we look on the outside, but to let you transform us from the inside out so that we can live out these teachings and be true disciples of Jesus and experience the freedom that only Jesus can give us. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.
on Jan 12, 2025
