Rick Warren - Why You Need To Stay Hungry—Part Two

Hello, and welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope with Rick Warren.

We are so glad you're here with us.

Today.

We're going to continue our series called The Keys to

a Blessed Life.

Now.

In these messages, Rick walks through Jesus' Sermon on the

Mount and shows us how to live a truly hopeful

and purpose filled life. And now Rick brings you the

final part of why you need to stay hungry.

The Bible says the wages of sin is death. That

means somebody's got to pay for all the things I've

done in life that hurt other people, hurt myself, hurt

God and all you know, all of the things that

I've done wrong in life, Somebody's got to pay for him,

either me or somebody else. And the judge says, I'll

be the Savior, and I'm going to come to earth

in human form, and I'm going to die for your sins, Rick,

So you don't have to go to hell, you don't

have to pay for it. You can be with me forever.

Do you understand? And why the Gospels called good news, Hello,

It means everything you've ever done wrong in life, or

ever will do wrong in life has already been paid

for by Jesus Christ on the cross. He said, it

is finished, not I'm finished. It's finished. What paying for

all the sins of everybody? That's such good news. You see,

this is the difference between Christianity and every other worldview, philosophy,

or religion. Every other religion can be summed up in

one word. It is the word do. And everybody just

has their own to do list. And one religion says

you got to do these things and God will think

you're cool, and another religion says you got to do

these things and God will think you're cool. Christianity is

not summed up in the word do. It's summed up

in the word done. It was done for you twenty

and thirteen years ago on across by Jesus Christ. It

is finished. It has all been done for you. Now

load us. There's a book in the Bible that explains

us in quite detail. It's the Book of Romans, and

there are ten chapters that deal with this very issue.

But Romans chapter three really gives a synopsis. Let me

read you a little bit of it. There on your outline,

for all has sinned, and all falls short of the

God's glorious standard. In other words, we're none perfect. None

of us measure up to God's standard. We don't even

measure up to our own. Okay, now that's not good news.

The fact, it's not even news because we all know

that we're imperfect. Yet it says, here's the good news. Now, God,

in his gracious kindness, that's his grace, declares us not guilty.

Unrighteous becomes righteous. I'm now declared not guilty. He has

done this not because of what I've done. He has

done this through Christ, Jesus, who has freed us by

taking away our sins. For God sends Jesus to take

the punishment for our sins and to satisfy God's anger

against us. We are made right with God. That's righteous.

We're made right with God when we believe that Jesus

shed his blood, sacrificing his life for us. That is

the good news. Jesus gave us two symbols, and he said,

I never want you to forget the sacrifice that I've

done for you, so you can go to heaven. And

he gave us two symbols. One's called baptism and one's

called the Lord's Supper or communion. Baptism is a symbol

of Jesus dying, being buried in the ground and raised again.

That's why in the Bible, every baptism in the Bible

is you're buried underwater and raised again, because it's the

symbol of jesus death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus goes down

to the Jordan River, is baptized by John, and comes

back up. The other symbol is communion, where Jesus takes

bread and wine and says, this is going to represent

my body and my blood. And when he said it,

he hadn't even gone to the cross yet. He said,

this is my body and this is my blood which

is given for you. 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 that doesn'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 or what we've done. All right,

I like that part. I want to say hallelujah to

that part. We can all be saved, nomember 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 that, 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 say 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 character. 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's that I am the way,

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

one comes to the Father but by me. So I

want you to settle this. I want you to have

this assurance and never doubt again. Am I going to

heaven when I die? What do you do? You accept

the good news that we just talked about. So let's

bow our heads right now. You may have been in

church your entire life, for this may be the very

first time you've ever been in a service. I want

you to pray this prayer in your heart. Just say

something like this, Dear God. I know I'm imperfect, and

I know I never can be perfect. I can't be

righteous on my own. And yet I thank you for

loving me in spite of myself. I thank you that

you made me, that you created me. I thank you

that you have a plan and purpose for my life

and you made me to know you. Thank you for

the choice that you've given me to accept or reject,

to love or not love you. And today I humbly

ask you, humbly ask you to save me because of

what Jesus Christ did for me. Not on the basis

of what I have done or haven't done, but because

on the basis of what Jesus came to do. Dear God,

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

know how, I want to put my trust in your son,

Jesus Christ. I want to get to know you. I

want to learn to love you. I want to hunger

and thirst for being right with you the rest of

my life. And so I simply say that I put

my trust not in my works, not in the good

or the bad that I've done. But I put my

trust in your grace and in your forgiveness. Jesus Christ,

I want you to be the lord of my life. Amen.

You know doctors say that a loss of appetite is

a symptom that you're sick. You know that when you're sick,

When you're ill, you don't feel good. The last thing

you think about doing is eating. If you've got a fever,

your stomach's upset. A loss of appetite indicates something's not

right in your life. The same is true spiritually. If

you don't have a hunger to know God. If you're

not thirsty to know God, you're sick spiritually. You're not

healthy spiritually. How do I maintain my spiritual hunger for

God the rest of my life? I mean for the

rest of my life, so that tomorrow I want to

know God better than today. Week I want to be

closer to Him than I am now, and next year

I want to be wiser and closer to God than

I am today. How do I maintain a spiritual appetite?

Five things? Number one remind myself how much God loves me.

And you need to do this every day you get

up in the morning, say Lord, help me to remember

how much you love me, because the more you understand

how much God loves you, the more you're going to

love him. I was talking to a guy one time

and he said, I don't really feel close to God.

But here's the problem, Pastor, I don't feel like I

want to be close to God. And he said, I

guess my problem is I just don't love Jesus enough.

And I told him, I said, no, that's not your problem.

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

Your problem is you don't understand how much He loves you,

because if you did, you couldn't help but love him.

You want to hang out with somebody who's head over

heels in love with you. The Bible says this. Ephesians three,

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 this love of Christ, though it's so

great you're never going to fully understand it, he says,

Then then you're going to be filled with the fullness

of life and the power that comes from God, hunger

and thirst, righteousness, you'll be filled. First, you got to

know how much God loves you. Remind yourself, God, help

me to feel how much you love me. Number two

second key to having a spiritual appetite. Stop filling up

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

You're a spiritual being with a God shaped hole in you,

and only God can fill that hole in your heart.

And when you try to fill it with salary or

status or success or sex or passion, possession in position, power, prestige,

or anything other than God, it's not going to be fulfilling.

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

of yourself, it's the truth or something else. And when

you're full of yourself or full of something else, you're

obviously not going to have a hunger for God. Proverbs

fourteen fifteen fourteen says a wise person is hungry for truth,

while the fool feeds on what. Sure, maybe you need

to take some trash out of your life now. If

you're always thinking about something else instead of God, you're

not gonna have any time for God. If I'm always

thinking about my sport or my favorite team. I don't

have any hunger for God. If I'm always thinking about politics,

I don't have any hunger for God. If I'm always

thinking about work or making money or anything, I don't

have any hunger for God because I'm feeding on other things.

I'm filling my mind with other things. Okay, and I

have this old routine every Thanksgiving. She says, No, honey,

don't fill up on the appetizers before the big meal.

You know what I'm talking about. You ever done that?

You fill up on the appetizer in the big banquet

and you're not even hungry for the banquet because you

filled up on the little sausages or something. You've gone, really,

I eat carrot sticks instead of this. You've done this

in a restaurant where you fill up on you know,

chips and salsa or bread and butter before the real

meal gets there, and then you're not hungry. You got

to stop feeding yourself, filling yourself on junk food. I

love this Isaiah fifty five. God says this, all of

you who are thirsty, come to me. Notice you didn't

say come to religion, come to rules, regulations, Riche says,

come to me. If you're thirsty, Come to me and

drink God says those of you don't have any money

to buy food, Come and eat free. Why do you

spend your money on something that isn't real food and

doesn't really satisfy you. Why are you wasting all your

life on that. Come to me and eat what is good,

and your soul will enjoy the stuff that really satisfies.

When I see that phrase, most of the time, we're

not eating real food. I read an article recently about

how people are starving to death eating worthless food, and

it gave it several illustrations. One of them was in China,

in the Great Famine of China, there was no food

and people were starving to death, and so they actually

used a kind of edible soil. It was actually dirt,

an edible kind of soil that they began to make

bread out of and they would bake it and they

would eat it, and it filled them up and they

feel temporarily satisfied. Only it had no nutritional value to it,

no vitamins, no mennerals, no carbohydrates, no proteins, no fats,

and so it had no value. It filled them up,

but they were still starving to death. Same thing happened

in Australia when they had a great depression there and

people had no food, and they went out to the

they started making porridge out of the spores of navoo ferns.

Now navoo ferns are very common, They're all over Australia.

And they would take these pods or these spores and

the nardoux plant, they would take it and make porridge

out of it. The only problem was it had again

no nutritional value, no fats, no carbohydrates, no proteins, no minerals,

no vitamins, and so people were dying of starvation with

full stomachs. Friends. That is a metaphor for America today.

We are a nation of full stomachs and people are

spiritually starving to death because they're eating junk food spiritually

and has no nutritional value. And their stomachs may be

full and they may be temporarily satisfied, but they're starving

to death and they're gonna die. Number three. And by

the way, you know this real food thing. Kay and

I have this ritual. My Monday's my day off, so

we like to go out to lunch or dinner on

Monday and we play this game every week. It's the

ritual of what are you hungry for? You ever had

this ritual? Let's go out to eat. Okay, what are

you hungry for? Mexican, Chinese food? You know, Indian food, tie,

you know, Mediterranean? You know, you know you're hungry, but

you don't know what you want. I want to ask

you that question right now, what are you hungry for?

Because whatever you're hungry for is determining the destined of

your life. If you're just hungry to go play golf,

it's not a big enough hunger to satisfy you. If

you're just hungry to go make another deal, that's not

enough to satisfy you. Go ask Solomon. You need to

hunger and thirst after God to be right with God

and to live right with God. Number three, make knowing

God my number one goal. This is how you maintain

a spiritual hunger. You make knowing God your number one

goal in life. Not success, not happiness. You seek God,

not those things. Those are the byproducts. Happiness is a

byproduct of knowing God. And you go read the Psalms,

how David says God, I really got to know you,

and how passionate David is about knowing God. He says,

I long for you God. I thirst for you. God.

I hunger for you, God. I beg I plead, I

cry out. I must have you God, Psalm sixty three.

Oh God, I earn it, 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.

He wrote this in the Desert of Judah. Some of

you are going through a desert right now. You're in

a desert. In your marriage, it's all dried up. You're

in a desert. In your career, it's all dried up.

You're in a desert in a relationship. You're in a desert. Financially,

it's all dried up. What do you do when you're

in the desert. You hunger and thirst for God because

he can fill you. Matthew six thirty three. Jesus said,

the thing that you should want most is God's kingdom

and doing what God wants, then all these other things

you need will be given to you as well. Make

knowing God my number one goal. Number four. Get into

God's word every day. Get into God's word every day.

This book, the Bible is your soul food. It's food

for your soul. The Bible calls itself bread. The Word

of God is milk. The Word of God is meat.

The Word of God is food. The Word of God

is honey. The Bible uses metaphors saying, you can't live

without man shall not live by bread of loan, but

by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Jesus said first Peter two, you must crave the pure

spiritual milk of the Word so you can grow into

the fullness of your salvation. Cry out for this nourishment

like a baby cries for milk. When we did the

series on forty days in the Word, I showed you

this verse. Second Timothy says, this all scripture is God

breed that is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and notice,

training in righteousness, hunger and thirst righteous. How do you

learn righteous by getting into this book? Now, I noticed

I said get into the book every day. I didn't

say read it every day. Some of you don't like

to read, Fine, listen to it. You can listen to

it every day. You can get it on CD or

MP three, or you can get daily. Hope that I'm

teaching the Word of God every day. You can hear

it on the radio, you can listen on the web

every day. You can download the podcast on iTunes or

for Android. Are you subscribed to Daily devotional so you're

getting into the Word every day. Eating a meal once

a week won't keep you healthy. You need to feed

on the truth every day. Now, here's the last thing

I want to say, and we'll close of this. Appetite

is influenced by association. For instance, you get a bunch

of kids together and one kid says, I'm hungry. What

are all the kids say I'm hungry? Yeah? You know.

If I say to you man, I'm really hungry for

and I say a sinnabon, some of you get hungry

for a Cinnabonka. Appetite is influenced by association. So if

you want to keep a spiritual appetite for God the

rest of your life, here's the last thing. Join a

small group for support. Join a small group for support,

because whoever you get around with is what you're going

to be hungry for. Proverbs two twenty. Join the company

of good men and women who will keep you on

the path of the righteous. Now, if you hang out

with people who All they care about is politics. That's

all you're going to care about. If you hang out

with people all they care about is sports, that's what

you're going to care about. If you hang out with

people all they care about is a stock market, that's

what you're going to care about. But if you hang

out with people who are hungry to know God, that's

what you're going to care about. You need to get

in a small group that's power heads. And let's close

with a simple prayer. It simply says this, God, I

want you, I need you, and I must have you

in my life. Would you say that God, I want you,

I need you, and I must have you in my life. Father,

this week, I pray a blessing on everyone here that

we would sense your closeness, that would realize how much

you love us, that we would make knowing you the

number one goal of our lives. That we would stop

feeding on junk food. Help us to get into God's

word every day, help us to get around people who

put us on the path of righteousness rather than distracting

and deterring us. And I pray this blessing in Jesus' name. Amen.

You know if you just prayed that prayer for the

very first time, or you just recommitted your life to

Jesus again today, would you let me know about it.

There's something real about sharing your commitment. So write me

Rick at pastor Rick dot com and say, Rick, I

prayed that prayer of commitment, I gave my life to Christ.

And I'll send you some material that will help you

on your journey with Jesus, and I'll also pray for you.

God bless you.

Hey, thanks so much for being with us today and

listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. I hope that you

were just as blessed as I was. From today's broadcast.

Right now, here's Pastor Rick with a special message.

You know, when I started Saddleback Church over forty years ago,

just a handful of people in our living room, I

also began writing a simple devotional just for the people

in our church to help them start each day with

hope and with truth and with peace that comes from

Jesus Christ. Well, you know, that little devotional grew and

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you know, in a world that's more distracted and uncertain

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centered on what never changes. And what never changes is

a God's love, his unconditional love for you, and his

promises to you. You know, if you'll just spend just

a few minutes a day in the morning with the Lord,

it can bring so much more clarity, more purpose, more

peace to everything that happens in your day. Particularly, a

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