Rick Warren - Helping Others Like Jesus—Part One

Hey, everybody, this is Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, the Bible

Teaching Ministry of Rick Warren, and today we're launching a

powerful series called the Jesus Model. In these lessons, Rick's

gonna walk you step by step through the process of

true Biblical discipleship. He's going to give you practical tools

to grow spiritually, experience God's peace, live with greater purpose,

and become more like Jesus in every area of your life.

And now here's part one of a message called helping

Others like Jesus.

If you'll take out your message notes, I'm starting a

new series today that I'm calling the Jesus Model. And

in the last series that we did, we talked about

how God puts you on this planet to do five

things he wants you to practice on earth what you're

gonna do forever in eternity. One of those things that

God wants you to do is learn how to serve

Him by serving other people, and that's called ministry. Now,

in the five things that God wants you to do

here on Earth, and we're going to look at ministry today,

he didn't just tell.

Us what to do.

Jesus gave us a model and he said, I'm going

to send you a personal coach called the Holy Spirit

who will live inside of you.

So I'm not just telling you what to do. I'm

going to model it for you, and I'm going to

do it through you.

Now, the background of the text that we're looking at

today is that Jesus Christ was obviously was born at

Christmas time and at thirty years of age he began

his public ministry. Now he did that by being baptized.

That's how he started. Now, he had already as a child,

been dedicated or confirmed in the temple. When he was

just a baby, he was taken to the temple by

his parents and dedicated and confirmed. We do baby dedications

here at saddleback. How many of you have been confirmed

or dedicated? Can I see your hand? Many of you were,

and that's a good thing. But then when Jesus became

an adult at thirty years of age, he was publicly baptized.

Now why did he do that, Well, he wanted to

set a model for us. And he's saying, it's no

longer my parents' faith. When I was a baby, that

was their faith. Now as an adult, this is my faith.

That's why we baptize adults here at Saddleback Church. Even

if you've been confirmed or dedicated as a child, it's

because now it's your public statement saying I am a

follower of Jesus Christ. So Jesus modeled baptism. Then he

went out into the desert. He was tempted for forty days,

and then he came back and he went to an

area for about a year called the area of Galilee.

Now Galilee is a part of Israel that's about the

size of Orange County, and at that time it had

the population of Orange County. According to Josephus the historian,

there were about three million people lived in Galilee during

Jesus day, so it was a very populated area like

Orange County. And for about a year, Jesus goes around healing,

doing miracles, teaching, and he's doing his ministry for about

a year. And after about a year in Galilee, he

goes to his hometown Nazareth.

And this is a big event.

It's like local boy makes good and he's coming home

to his hometown.

Everybody's heard about this guy.

He's been to Jerusalem, he's cleansed the temple, he's done

miracles and everybody knows this is Jesus, and he's coming

back home to his hometown, and he's going to go

to his own synagogue, his own church.

And that's where we pick up the story. In Luke

chapter four.

It says Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of

the spirit, and the news about him spread through the

whole countryside, and he taught in their synagogues and everybody

praised him. He was immensely popular at this point in

his ministry. And he went to Nazareth, where he had

been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went

into the synagogue. As was his custom. Jesus went to

church every week. Now, folks, if there's anybody who didn't

need to go to church, it was Jesus. But Jesus

made a custom of going to worship every week. And

you need to go to worship every week.

I know a lot.

I'll be like, well, you know, if I go on

Mother's Day or once a month or whatever, that's enough. No,

the Bible tells us that God wants you to have

connection with him on the first day of every week.

So he said, the first part of each week begins

to you.

Belongs to you, Lord, I start the first day of

every week with you, and Jesus went there and he

has he stands up to read the scriptures, and you know,

he's the guest speaker that week, and the scroll of

the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah's a book in the Old Testament,

was handed to him unrolling it. You know, in those

days there weren't books. There were no such things as

turning books of pages. Everything was written on scrolls. So

he had to unroll the and he specifically finds a

passage in Isaiah. It's actually chapter sixty, verse one and two,

where is a prophecy saying the Messiah, the savior of

the world, is coming one day. It had been written

hundreds and hundreds of years earlier. And Jesus unrolls the

scroll to that specific spot and to his hometown crowd,

he reads this out of the old part of the Bible.

The spirit of the Lord is on me, and he

has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to

proclaim freedom for the prisoner, to recover the side of

the blind, to release the oppressed, and proclaim the year

of the Lord's favor. Now he says, the Messiah is

coming to do five things. And he says, then he

rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the.

Attendant, and he sat down.

Now why did he sat down, Because in those days

the teachers sat down and everybody in worship stood while

he taught. I think we should go back to this tradition.

I think it's a very good idea. However, if I

sat when I taught and you stood, my sermons would

be even longer.

So it's probably a.

Good idea that I stand so that eventually I get tired.

Which, by the way, you know why I preach so long.

It's because what I do is every week I get

up and I put a seerts in my mouth, and

I put it in the corner of my mouth, and

when that melts away, then I figure it's time to quit,

and I sit down there. Last week, what happened is

I thought I put a seartch in my mouth. It

was a button. So I just kept on going. You know,

what can I say? Now, Jesus rolls up the scroll,

he sits down, and it says the eyes.

Of everyone are fastened on him.

I mean, this is a moment and he begins teaching

them by saying to them, today this scripture is fulfilled

in your hearing. Now, it's hard for us to understand

the high drama of this moment because it's two thousand

years ago in Jesus' hometown. But Jesus gets up and

he reads the most famous popular passage about the coming

of the Savior of the world, God's son, and he

finishes it, and he sits down in front of everybody

in his hometown and says, and folks, you're looking at.

Him, I'm it. You can imagine the shock. Oh yeah,

I know.

Jesus is doing all these miracles, and he's a great teacher,

and he's a great leader, and he's actually healing people.

But this is the guy I grew up with. We

played in the streets. It's Mary and Joseph's kid. We

all went to school together. And now, at age thirty one,

he's coming back after a year of ministry to his

hometown and says, and folks, you know the part about

the Savior of the world, the Messiah's coming. I'm it.

It sent shockwaves to everybody. Now, as I said, Jesus

was actually quoting reading Isaiah chapter sixty. Some of the

manuscripts leave out a phrase, but Jesus actually adds in

a phrase from Isaiah fifty eight. But the point I

want to point out is this, he'd already been doing

this for a year. What we like to do is

we stand up and we make an announcement of what

we're going to do, and then we go do it.

Jesus did the exact opposite.

He went out and did it for a year and

came back and said, by the way, this is why

I'm doing it. You've heard of the phrase practice what

you preach, Well, Jesus did the exact opposite. He preached

what he was already practicing. He was already doing these

five things where he says, I came to preach the

good news the poor, heal the broken hearted, proclaim freedom,

to the prisoner's recovery of sight, to the blind release.

He said, I'm already doing these things.

Now.

What I want to do this weekend, as we start

this series on the Jesus model, is I want us

to look at first who Jesus came to help, and

then I want us to look at how he came

to help them, what he came to do In other words,

we're going to look at the groups he came for,

and we're going to look at the goals of his ministry.

We're going to look at the target that he had

for his ministry, and we're going to look at the

tactics he used. Why because you'll see in just a

minute everything Jesus did when he's here on earth. He says,

I want you to do. I want you to do

it with the hurting people in your life.

In your life, I want you to help them.

So first, let's look at the focus of a christ

like ministry. Let's look at who Jesus came to help.

And he's very clear. He said I came to Earth

for five different types of people. Later on, he says,

a doctor doesn't come to help the healthy. A doctor

comes to help the sick. And he says there's six

kinds of people, six general categories of people who are hurting.

That I came to help the poor, the broken hearted,

the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. Now let's look

at them, and I want to give you a modern

day term for each of these groups. First, Jesus said,

I came for the poor to preach good news to

the poor, and these are who I call the havenots.

You might write that down, the havenots of life. And

there are times in your life that you don't have

what you need. You need more and more money, you

need more energy, you need more time, you need more health,

you need more connections. There are times in your life

that you are lacking. Jesus says, I came to help

the poor. Now, there are actually three different types of poverty.

You might write these down. First is material poverty. Material

parties when you're out of money, and of course that

is a major problem in our world.

Today. Half the world is very poor.

You may not realize this, but of the six billion

people in the world today, half of the world, over

three billion people live on less than two dollars a day.

I'd like to see you try that. I'd like to

see you try to live on two dollars a day.

The poorest of the poor in America are filthy rich

compared to the rest of the world. Most of the

world lives on less than two dollars a day.

The world is a poor world.

In fact, over one billion people in the world live

on less than one dollar day.

That's extreme poverty.

And we're working sadleback churches working in countries through the

Peace Plan like Rwanda, where the average income is sixty.

Eight cents a day. Now, think about this.

They grow coffee in Rwanda and they sell it to Starbucks. Now,

the average coffee farmer in Rwanda doesn't make enough in

one day to buy a cup of coffee. There's something

wrong with that. That's called injustice inequity. So there is

physical poverty in world, and Jesus cares about the poor,

and we care about the poor. But there's other kinds

of poverty to do. Second, there's moral poverty. And moral

poverty is when you have a lack of integrity. It's

when you have a lack of the knowledge of right

and wrong. It's when you have lost your moral conscience.

You don't have any desire to do the good thing,

the right thing. You just want to do what's easy

for you, what's best for you. And there are many

people who have moral poverty. They have no morals at all,

They don't know the difference between right and wrong. And

the third kind of poverty is spiritual poverty. And spiritual

poverty is when you don't know all that God planned

for your life. Now, while half the world is materially poor,

most of the world is spiritually poor. They don't know

the good news. They don't know that they are not

an accident, that God made them for a purpose, that

they were made to last forever. They don't know that

Jesus Christ came to die for their sins so that

they could go to heaven. They don't know that through

Christ can have their past forgiven, a purpose for living,

and a home in heaven.

Most people don't know that they are.

Infinitely loved by God and that He has a plan

and direction for every area of their lives. That's spiritual poverty.

Jesus said, I came for the have nots. You know,

Mother Teresa was once asked what's the greatest poverty. She said,

it's not physical poverty, it's spiritual poverty. It's the poverty

of being unloved. It's the poverty of loneliness. And he

says that kind of love has to start at home.

Now.

The second group Jesus said he came for is the

broken hearted. He said, I came to heal the broken hearted,

and I call these people the let down. We've all

been let down in life. We've all had our broken hearts.

This phrase a broken heart, Do you know where it

came from? It came from the Bible. When people say, oh,

I broke his heart, that's actually a Bible phrase. It's

thousands of years old. It's in Psalms sixty nine, verse twenty,

where David says this, indults have broken my heart. That's

the first use of the idea broken heart. It comes

from the Bible. When anybody talks about it, I had

a broken art. It's from the Bible, and it's an

idea of having Do you know that there's actually a

broken heart syndrome. You can look this up in any

medical textbook broken art syndrome. Doctors say that when people

go through a traumatic event that your brain releases chemicals

to deal with that event. But part of those chemicals

actually weaken the tissue of the heart. So that's why

it's not good for you to go through constant traumatic

event after traumatic event africament. It actually does weaken your heart.

It's called broken heart syndrome. Now, what causes broken hearts,

well a lot of different things, but let me just

give you three things. You might write these down. First

is disappointment. You can have a broken heart. You can

be broken by disappointment when things don't turn out the

way you planned, and you're going to have many disappointments

in life. Second, you can be broken by rejection. Now

that's one that hurts more than almost anything. When you

feel rejected by somebody who loved you or you thought

loved you, that just breaks your heart. Disappointment, rejection. A

third thing is resentment. Resentment can break your heart when

you hold on to the way people have hurt you.

It's like taken fire in your chest and it's going

to burn you up. It's going to eat you alive.

Resentment is worse than cancer. It's a poison. And God says, no, no, no,

don't take resentment in your heart because it's it will

break up your heart. These are the let down, let

down by rejection, by resentment, by disappointment. Jesus said, I

came for people who are broken hearted. In fact, the

Bible says God is close to the broken hearted. The

third group that Jesus came for is the imprisoned. He said,

I came to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and I

call this group of people the locked up. Locked up

have not let downs, and the locked up and the

locked up are the people who are shut out are

locked up in life.

They are imprisoned in some way.

Now, Jesus actually does care about the prisoners in physical prisons,

and the Bible tells us that as believers, we are

to visit the prisons. We are to pray for people

in prison. We have a prison ministry here at saddle

Back Church. It's why our Celebrate Recovery is actually an

official program in seventeen state prison systems that was developed

here at saddle Back Church. Why, because we care about prisoners.

Jesus said, we're to care about them. Did you know

that in America two and a half million Americans are

behind bars? Two and a half million Americans are behind

bars today, and millions more around the world. But there's

a lot of other kinds of being in prison too.

The Bible tells about the kinds of prison that we

put ourselves in. In fact, let me give you three or

four things that cause people to get imprisoned personally.

One of them is addictions.

Addictions and compulsions imprison us. When people say I feel trapped,

when they use that word I feel trapped, they're talking

about being imprisoned Jesus, I want to give them release.

So I want to give them freedom. And a lot

of people are trapped by an addiction. And you can

be addicted to a substance. You can be addicted to

a person, you can be addicted to an event, you

can be addicted to pornography, you can be addicted to

a circumstance. There are a relationship, there's all kinds of compulsions,

things you'd like to change, but you can't. Those imprison

your life. Another thing that imprisons you are secrets. When

you have family secrets that you don't feel, you can tell.

When you have personal secrets that you don't feel you

can share. Those lock you up in a prison and

you hold it inside you. And that's why the Bible

tells us in James that we're to confess. It's not

just a God. We're to confess to each other. Yeah,

God says, don't just confess to God. Now, you don't

have to confess to everybody. But find one person that

you trust and that's good to get. That's why we

do small groups is to build that trust relationship. So

you'll have one person in your life you can say

I just got to get this off my chest because

you weren't meant to hold it inside. And the Bible

teaches over and over revealing your feeling is the beginning

of healing. It's the way to freedom. When people out

on the patio tell me, pastor Rick, I've never told

this to anybody I know, they're getting ready to experience freedom.

They're getting ready to walk out of a self imposed prison,

prisoned by imprisoned by addictions, imprisoned by secrets. Another thing

is ignorance, lack of education. When a person doesn't have

access to the education they need, it puts them in

a prison. Now, you don't realize that's because we live

in one of the most educated areas in the world.

Half of the world cannot read or write. Let me

say that again, half of the world cannot read or write.

How are they going to make it successfully in the

twenty first century.

They're not. They're stuck in poverty.

And even if we wired the world for global wireless internet,

if you can't read or write, you don't have any

access and you are stuck in a prison of ignorance.

That's why the Bible talks about the importance of education

and that Jesus was a teacher, and we believe in education,

and almost every school, the first school in almost every

country of the world were started by Christian missionaries, along

with the first hospital in almost every country the world.

Why because our faith is a preaching, teaching, and healing faith.

And so education. Lack of education imprisoned us.

But the number one thing that imprisons people today, and

it's imprisoned you, is fear.

Fear.

Our fears put us in prisons that keep us from

becoming all God wants us to be. There are all

kinds of potentials that you have that you've never done

because you're afraid. And the bigger your fear gets, the

more afraid you become, and the more you back away

from it, the bigger it gets.

And fears grow in your life.

They don't shrink unless you use the biblical strategy for

getting rid of them. Jesus said, I care about these people,

the people in prison, those of you who are in prisoned

by your fears, or by your secrets, or by your addictions.

Jesus says, I care about you number four, the fourth

kind of people. Jesus came forwards. He said, I came

for the blind. I came to recover the sight of

the blind. And I call these people the shutout, the

shutout because when you're blind, you're shut out of life.

You're always running into walls. You don't get to experience

things that other people experience. You don't get to see

things that other people see. Now right now in the world,

there are fifty million people, over fifty million people in

the world who are physically blind right now, and God

cares about those people. But there's more than just physical blindness.

There are many types of blindness. The first is physical,

and you might write that one down, and it's important

for us to care about people who are blind. Jesus

cared about people who had lost their sight. And there's

many types of blindness. There's night blindness, some of you

have that. There's color blindness, some of you have that.

There's motion blindness. There are many kinds of blindness physically,

but there's also other kinds of blindness you've never realized.

There is relational blindness. What is relational blindness. Relational blindness

is when you don't see how you're messing up the relationship.

Relational blindness is when you don't see your self defeating

behavior and why every time you get in a relationship,

it ends that's relational blindness. And you go from relationship

to relationship to relationship to relationship, and they all keep crumbling,

and you keep saying, what's the problem, And the answer

is you are what's the common denominator and all those

failed relationships you.

But you don't see it.

You just don't get it. Now, you see, women are

wired more relationally.

They get it.

They instinctively get relationships in a way that guys don't.

Men are wired for achievement. Men are wired for action.

Men are wired for accomplishment. We get something done. Women

are primarily first and foremost wired for relationships. And so

when it comes to relationships, guys, as a general rule,

we're clueless. Would any woman like to say, amen, there

you go? Okay, I rest my case. So guys, as

husbands and as dads, we're often clueless. We don't get

how what we say and do or don't say and

don't do messes.

Up the relationship. We are relationally blind. Here's the good

news Jesus that I came for you.

What a special message from Pastor Rick. And now let's

hear how lives are changing through daily hope here's Rick

with a letter from one of our listeners.

Hi, everybody today, I want to read part of a

letter that I received from June, who is a prisoner

that was given a second chance by God. He wrote this,

I'm a prisoner here in the National Penitentiary serving my sentence.

I came to know the Lord inside myself thirteen years ago,

and now I'm serving the Lord as an inmate. Pastor Rick,

I always use your daily hope, preaching and devotionals in

sharing the words of God to my fellow prisoners, and

I see people come to the Lord in many many ways.

You know, before I was in prison and I came

to know the Lord, I was a high ranking police

officer and I was about to commit suicide because of

the numerous charges filed against me. But when God saved

me physically and spiritually, my journey in prison became the

most wonderful vessel used by God to manifest his love

to me. He never leaves me, nor forsakes me, and

may his name always be glorified. Thank you, Pastor Rick,

You're an inspiration and encouragement to all of us. Well, June,

it's amazing to know your story and to hear that

you're using the Daily Hope messages to teach your fellow

inmates about Jesus Christ. That is fantastic. I couldn't be

more happy.

They need to hear that God gives second chances. They

need to.

Hear that He still has a plan and purpose for

their lives even though they're in prison. Your story is

a great reminder that any one of us can use

what we learn through Daily Hope podcast devotionals and we

can take these things and teach others about God's grace

and forgiveness and unconditional love. Keep it up, my friend,

God bless you.

You know you can share the good news of Jesus

by sharing Daily Hope. Just go to pastorick dot com,

click on the listen tab and you'll find buttons where

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media or WhatsApp. Just go to pastorick dot com. Be

sure to join us us next time as we look

into God's word for our Daily hope. This program is

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