Rick Warren - Why Money, Success, and Pleasure Aren't Enough (Part 2)

There's a book in the Bible called Romans, and the

first ten chapters explain the concept of grace in great detail.

Chapter three gives kind of a summary of it, and

it says this Romans three twenty three, for all of

sin and all falls short of God's glorious standard. Now,

as I said, that's not news. It's certainly not good news.

But it's not even news. We all know I don't

measure up to my own standards, but us God's perfect standard.

We've all sinned, We've all fall short of God's glorious standard.

Yet here's the good news.

Now, God, in his gracious kindness, that's grace, declares us

not guilty. You might circle that that's righteousness. He declares

us not guilty.

Am I guilty? Yes? Do I deserve to be punished? Yes?

Am I not guilt? Does God declare me not guilty? Yes?

He has done this through Christ, Jesus, who has freed

us by taking away our sins. For God's sent Jesus

to take the punishment for our sin, the scapegoat, the

sacrificial lamb, the punishment for our sins, and to satisfy

God's anger against us. We are made right with God.

When we believe that Jesus shed his blood sacrificing his

life for us.

This is atonement.

Now in the church, we believe that God gave us

two symbols to remember this important truth that I have

made mistakes. I have blown it our sin. There's no

way I could repay it.

You know.

The Bible says, well, you know this. When you break

man's laws, you pay man's penalty. You have speed, you

get a ticket. When you break God's laws, you pay

God's penalty. And the Bible says in scripture an Old

Testament says the soul that sineth, it shall die. The

Bible says, the wage of the sin is death. So

somebody's got to pay for my sin, either me or

somebody else. And this is where the judge becomes a

savior and he says, I love you and I am

going to do this for you. See, this is the

difference between a lot of other systems and the Gospel

of Grace. Other systems can say do, do, do, do,

do do all these things to make God love you.

Gospel of Grace says done done, It was done for you.

That's grace. And we have two symbols of this baptism

and communion.

And baptism we.

Take a person, we put them under the water and

bring them back up, which is a symbol of a death,

a burial, and a resurrection.

Okay, and then communion.

Jesus took bread and wine and said, this is going

to represent my sacrifice for you, my body and my blood,

atoning for your sin as foretold for centuries. Let me

show you a couple of other verses. Two Corinthians, chapter

five says this verse twenty one. God made Christ, who

never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so

that we could be made right with God through Christ.

And in the Old.

Testament there's an entire sacrificial system of the scapegoat and

the sacrificial lamb who take the sins of the nation.

It's the symbol of what Jesus would do for us

one day. Look at this verse on the screen Titus three,

verse five. God saves us not because of righteous things

we've done. In other words, Wow, I'm really impressed with that.

God doesn't save us because of what we've done, but

because of his mercy. So this is the good news. First,

I can't make myself righteous, I can't make myself. There's

not a snowballs chance in hell. You're getting into heaven

on your own effort because you're not good enough, and.

Neither am I. But good news.

God sent Jesus to pay for my sins. Now here's

the third part of the gospel. Write this down. I

accept by faith what God did for me. I accept

by faith what God did for me. That's all you

have to do. That's all I'm required to do. I simply,

all I do is accept God's grace, his mercy. I

accept God's forgiveness. And I say, I believe that what

Jesus did on the cross paid for my sins. So

I can go and be a part of God's family.

I can live the way he wants me to live now,

and I'm going to have an eternity that is righteousness.

Let me show you a couple verses Romans chapter three.

We are made right in God's sight. That's righteousness when

we do a whole bunch of good things. And I

didn't say that we're made right in God's sight when

we trust in Jesus Christ to take away our sins.

And I love this part. And here's the cool part.

We can all be saved. That's everybody in the same way,

no matter who we are, what we've done.

All right. I like that part.

I want to say hallelujah to that part. We can

all be saved. Remember who we are, what we've done,

who we've done it with, how long we've done it.

All be saved now. I don't care what religious background

you are. Your background may be Catholic, your background may

be Baptist or Buddhist. Your background may be Muslim or Methodist,

or Mormon or Pentecostal or Presbyterian. You and background may

be atheist or agnostic or secularist, or no faith at all,

or mix up of everything. I really couldn't care less

about that because religion, no religion, can get you to heaven.

Only God's grace can get you to heaven. No amount

of works can make you righteous. Whether it's this guy's

list or this guy's list or that guy's list, None

of those religious lists can get you to heaven because

you can't be righteous enough. It's just simply a relationship

to God, to his son Jesus.

And here's what the Bible says Romans chapter ten.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord.

In other words, he is who he claimed to be.

He's the Son of God, the savior of the world.

He came to die for you. If you confess with

your mouth, yeah, I believe Jesus's Lord, and you believe

in your heart that God raised him from the dead.

That's what Easter is all about. You will be saved

for you believe him. For you believe with your heart,

resulting in righteousness, and you confess with your mouth, resulting

in salvation. Now, I want you to settle this issue

this morning, as your friend, as somebody cares about you,

as your pastor. I don't want you to ever doubt, ever, ever, ever,

ever again that you're going to heaven when you die.

I don't want you to worry about it. I don't

want you to be concerned about it. I don't want

you to have any doubts about it. So we're gonna

do what Romans tends says to do. Confess with your

mouth and believe in your heart. You will be saved.

Would God lie? Know why? Because God cannot lie. People

haven't ask me is there anything God can do? There

are a lot of things God can't do. One of

them is he can't deny his characters, so it means

God cannot lie. God can only tell the truth, and

what's true is always true, and what's false is always false.

If truth wasn't always true, the universe wouldn't work. If

law of gravity was only true on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

that would be a problem. The universe operates because some

things are always true and some things are always untrue.

The moon is not made of cheese. You might want

to think that, but it's not true. And so the

Bible says, I am true. She said, I am the Way,

I am the Truth, and I am the life. No

one comes to the Father but by me. I want

you to be absolutely certain you've settled this issue in

your life. On what basis do you know you're going

to heaven? On a what basis of scripture? Do you

know that you're going to heaven? And so I'm going

to pray a simple prayer. Honestly, it doesn't even matter

the words you pray. What matters is the humility of

your heart when you say God, God is God, and

I'm not and God, there's not a snowball's chance in

hell of me earning perfection. I need somebody. I can't

swim to Hawaii. I gotta get on a boat. I

need a savior. I need an arc to save me

in the flood. So that's bower Heads. And right now,

just in your own heart, why don't you tell God

you love him? To say God, I love you, or

maybe you can say God, I want to learn to

love you, and then just say these words. Dear God,

thank you for creating me. Thank you for having a

plan and purpose for my life. Thank you for loving

me even when I didn't know you. Thank you for

your plan of grace, something I could never earn or deserve.

I don't understand it all, Dear God, but as much

as I know how, I want to accept your grace,

your forgiveness and the atonement for my sins.

I hunger and.

Thirst for you and for your righteousness, and so Jesus Christ,

as much as I know how, I open my life

to you. I want to learn to love you and

trust you. I want to learn to get to know

you the rest of my life. And I humbly make

this request admitting that I need you God in my life.

In your name, I pray Amen.

Now if you just prayed with me, just now to

receive Jesus Christ. I want to say, that's the smartest

decision you've ever made in your life. And congratulations. Did

you know that? In Luke chapter fifteen, it says the

angels are throwing a party in heaven right now for you.

Every time one person steps across the line, they have

a party in heaven. So I'd like to celebrate with

you too, and I'd like to send you some free

materials to help you understand the spiritual journey that you've

just taken. The first step. All you need to do

is email me. Let me know, say Rick, I prayed

that prayer open my life to Christ. We'll get you

some minew materials, We'll pray with you, and we'll celebrate you. Congratulations.

So the fourth key to being blessed by God is

to have a spiritual hunger for the rest of your life.

God blesses those who are hunger, hungry, and thirsty for

righteous They will be filled. Now, doctors tell it that

the symptom of illness.

Is you lose your appetite. You know this.

When you're sick, you got a fever, you don't feel good.

You have as food is the last thing on your mind.

A loss of appetite says you're sick, and a loss

of appetite for gods. I don't really care about God.

I don't really care about knowing him. Knowing his word,

doing his ways indicates you are spiritually sick.

You're not healthy. You got to get your appetite back.

So how do I stay spiritually hungry the rest of

my life?

Because this is a good thing.

How do I make sure I maintain an appetite for

God the rest of my life? Write these down quickly,

five things. I'm not going to spend a lot of

time describing them. I just want you to write them down.

You can think about them at home. Number one, the

first key to a spiritual appetite is remind myself how

much God loves me. Remind myself how much God loves me.

When you get up in the morning, before you put

your feet down inside of it and said, God, help

me the sense how much you love me.

I had a guy tell me one time.

He said, you know, Rick, I don't really have any

hunger for God.

I don't have.

Any desire to know God. He said, I guess the

real problem with me is I don't love God enough.

I said, friend, that's not your problem. Your problem is

not that you don't love God enough. The problem is

you don't know how much he loves you, because if

you did, you can't help fall in love with a

God who loves you that much. When Jesus dies on

the cross, he says, this is how much I love you.

I love you this much. I love you so much

it hurts. I love you so much. I'd rather die

than live without you. You cannot make God stop loving you.

You can try, but you'll fail. God's love is based

on who he is, not who you are. So he

loves you on your good days and bad days, and

you need your remind yourself of that. And that creates

a hunger for you to know him. You want to

know anybody who loves you that much. If somebody died

for you, wouldn't.

You want to know him? Yes, you would.

The Bible says this pray that you have the power

to understand how wide, how long, how high, and how

deep God's love really is. May you experience the love

of Christ, though it's so great you'll never ever fully

understand it, But he says, then you will be filled

with the fullness of life and the power that comes

from God. That's where fulfilled life, satisfying life comes from.

You got to understand how much God loves you. Number

two second key to staying hungry spiritually. Stop filling up

on junk food. Stop filling up on junk food. Stop

trying to fill your mind and your life with other

things that you think are going to satisfy you, when

really what you're looking for and longing for is God. Now,

when God made you, he put a physical hunger and

a spiritual hunger inside you. We all know how to

take care of the physical hunger, eat, but we often

don't know how to take care of the spiritual hunger,

and we don't know how to deal with it. But

there's this hole in you, this God shaped hole that

only God could fill. And so you need to stop

filling up on junk food. Now, let me just tell

you this. If you're not hungry for God, it's because

you're full of something else, and you may be full

of yourself. A lot of people are not hungry for

God because they're so full of themselves and they have

no hunger.

Look at this verse on the screen.

I love this book verse out of Proverbs and the

New living translation, a wise person is hungry for truth,

while the fool feeds on trash. Maybe you need to

take some trash out of your life. If you're filling

your mind with all these movies and all of these

books and novels and all of these gossip magazines, it's

no longer you have no hunger for God. And if

you're filling your mind with all of the things about politics,

that about everything, it is no wonder you're having a

hunger for God. You're full on other things. Isaiah fifty five.

The prophet says this. The Lord says, all you who

are thirsty, come to me and drink. And those of

you don't have any money to buy food, come to

me and eat for free. And then he says, why

do you spend your money on something that isn't real

food and doesn't really satisfy you.

Come to me.

Notice you didn't say come to religion and then say

come to rules, regulations, rituals. He says, come to me

a person, Come to me, and you'll eat what is good,

and your soul will enjoy the stuff that really satisfies.

You know, when I read that verse and I saw

that food, said some of you are eating stuff that

isn't real food. I read an article this week about

how people are starving to death by eating worthless food,

and it gave a couple of examples that in the

Great Famine of China, there was no food for millions

and millions and millions of people, and there was nothing

to eat, and so the Chinese actually started making a

kind of bread out of an edible soil.

It was dirt, literally, it was dirt.

And it was an edible soil that they would make

this fake bread and then they would eat it and

it would fill them up temporarily and their stomach pains

and pangs would go away. The problem with it is

it had no nutritional value, no vitamins, no minerals, no fats,

no carbohydrates, no protein, and so they were filling up

and starving to death at the same time they were

temporarily satisfied. It had no nutrition in it. Similar thing

happened in Australia during their Great Depression. During that Great Depression,

and there was a really like a famine and people

didn't have any money for food. And there is a

fern in Australia called the navou nardu plant. It's an

our new fern. They're all literally all over Australia, and

they would take the spores of the Nardu fern and

they would make a porridge out of it. And people

were eating this porridge. The only problem was again no

nutritional value, no fats, no carbohydrates, no minerals, no protein,

no vitamins, and so people were dying of starvation with

their stomachs full. Friends, that is an accurate description of

the United States of America right now. Our nation is

gorging itself to death on spiritual junk food, thinking that

pleasure and passion and popularity and privilege and prestige and

power and possessions are going to satisfy. But they could

have read thousands of year ago, Solomon said that one

doesn't work. That one doesn't work. And we have people

in America with full bellies and empty souls and they're

starving to death spiritually.

You need to stop eating junk food.

Number three. Here's the third key. By the way, you know,

Kay and I have another ritual that we do. It's

every Monday. Monday is my day off, so we like

to go out for lunch or for dinner on Mondays

and we play this game every week.

What are you hungry for?

Anybody vaguely familiar with this game?

What are you hungry for? Mexican?

Chinese food and Mediterranean food?

Italian?

You know you're hungry, but you don't know what you want.

Let me ask you this question, what are you most

hungry for? Because your hunger will determine your happiness. If

you're hungry for your sports and your favorite team and

that's all you think about, you're going to be left empty.

If you're hungry for fame or fortune, you're going to

be left empty. You got to be hungry and thirsty

for righteousness for then you'll be filled. Number three, make

knowing God my number one goal. Make it my number

one goal in life. You don't seek happiness, You seek God.

You don't seek success, You seek God. And if you

want a good example, this is just go read the Psalms.

David is the pro at hungering and thirsty for righteousness,

and David over and over says, I long for you God.

I thirst for you, God as a deer pants for water.

God. I've got to have you. I cry out to God.

I plead with you, God.

I beg you, God, I seek you God, I cry

out to you, God, I am longing for you. God,

look at this verse on the screen. The Bible says

in Psalm sixty three, Oh God, I earnestly seek you.

My soul thirst for you, my body longs for you

as I travel through this parched and weary desert where

there's no water. David wrote this psalm as he was

going through the desert of Judea. But you're going through

some deserts right now. To some of you, your marriage

is a desert. It's all dried up. Some of you

are in a financial desert. Your money is all dried up.

Some of you are ha did your dream turn into

a desert? It's all dried up. Or a relationship or

a friendship or a career, it's all dried up. What

do you do when you're going through the desert? You

do what David did. God, I'm thirsty for you. I

gotta have you. It's the number one goal of my life.

Jesus said it like this, Matthew six thirty three. The

thing you should want most is God's kingdom and doing

what God wants us, and then all these other things

you need will be given to you. Seek first, the

Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things

will be added to you. Number four, Get into God's

Word every day. Get into God's Word every day. Now,

this book, the Bible, is God's soul food for you.

It's food for your soul. In scriptures, God's Word is

called meat, it's called bread, it's called honey, it's called milk.

Lots of metaphors. This is spiritual food. If you don't

eat spiritual food, you're going to dry up. You got

to get into God's Word every day. Look at a

couple verses here verse Peter two. You must crave the

pure spiritual milk of the Word so that you can

grow into the fullness of your salvation. Cry out for

this nourishment like a baby cries for milk. You know,

during forty days in the Word, I showed you this verse.

Look at the two Timothy Iree. All scripture is God breathed, inspired,

and it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.

You want to be trained in righteous You need to

get into this book more and more and more. Now

let me just close with this. Studies have shown that

appetite is influenced by association. In other words, who you

hang out with has a strong influence on what you eat.

Associations influence appetite. You get a bunch of little kids

together and have one kid.

Say hey, I'm hungry. What happens everybody's hungry.

If I said, right now, man, I would like a

good in and out burger, fifty percent, just start salivating.

Association influences your appetite. So you want to hang out

with people who are hungry for God. If you hang

out with people who are just hungry for politics, you're

going to become that. If you're hung if you hang

out with people who are only hungry for sports, that's

what you're going to become.

Here's the last thing. Join a small group for support.

Join a small group for support to keep you spiritually hungry.

Proverbs chapter two, verse twenty. Join the company of good

men and women who will keep you.

On the path of the righteous. Let's vow for prayer. Father.

I want to thank you for each person that's here today,

and I thank you how you satisfy us when we

seek you. Not your blessing, not happiness, not pleasure, passion,

or possession, or any of those other things, but when

we seek you, you said we will be filled. And

so I pray a blessing on every person here this week.

And I pray that this week that will accept by

faith what you did for us, That we will remind

ourselves how much you love us, that will stop filling

up on junk food, that will make knowing you the

number one goal of our life. Help us to get

into the Word every day if we can't read it,

to listen to it on the radio or in MP

three's or whatever. And help us to have a group

that supports us to keep us spiritually hungry. I pray

this blessing on every person in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Today, I want to invite you to join me in

something that's very close to my heart, fulfilling the great

commission of Jesus Christ. Sharing the good news is the

most important thing we do when we work together. There's

nothing that God cannot do to us. When we're unified

through daily hope. The message of Jesus Christ is now

reaching nearly every country in the world. That's one hundred

and ninety seven nations. We're going to even places where

it's difficult or dangerous or illegal to talk about Christ openly.

We're sharing the certain hope of Jesus and it's changing

life every single day. Right now, we have an incredible opportunity.

That's why I'm saying this to you personally. There's some

very generous friends that have offered to match every single

gift given to Daily.

Hope dollar for dollar.

That means whatever you give today is going to be

doubled in impact.

So I'm asking you.

I want to encourage you to give as God leads

you today, and I want you to pray this prayer, God,

what do you want to give through me?

Not say God, what should I give? Say God? What

do you want to give through me?

That's called giving by faith, giving by revelation, and your

gift will go twice as far to share the certain

hope of Jesus Christ and make disciples all around the world.

God bless you.

You know when you give a gift to Daily Hope,

you're helping share the hope of Jesus with people everywhere,

and right now your gift will be doubled by the

fifty thousand dollars matching grant. Just scan the QR code

or go to dailyhopetv dot com