Pieces of Me - Week 2

All right, all right, let's go to Judges chapter six. Judges chapter

six. We're gonna continue in our series Pieces of Me this morning, Judges

chapter six. We're gonna start in verse fourteen. Judges six fourteen. If

you're there, say hey, man, Henny Omas, everybody just read along

on the screens. Judges, chapter six, Verse fourteen, and says,

Then the Lord turned to him and said, go in this might of yours,

and you shall save Israel from the hand of the media Nights. Have

I not sent you? So he said to him, Oh, my Lord,

how can I save Israel? Indeed, my clan is the weakest and

Manassa, and I am the least in my father's house. And the Lord

said to him, surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat

the media Nights. As one man, Father, we thank you for your

word. It is the only change agent on the face of the planet.

And I pray that today, Lord, for one, maybe not everybody,

but just one, because I don't think you sent me to day to speak

to everybody, but just to one. I pray that they would begin to

view themselves the way you view them, that they would shake off Lord,

these preformed ideas about their identity and that they would find it in you.

In Jesus name, Amen, this passage of scripture, this man that the

Angel of the Lord is speaking to, his name's Gideon. Gideon is a

fairly popular character in scripture. A lot of people know the story of Gideon.

And what's happening here is God is getting ready to use Gideon the Judge

to defeat the media nights and deliver the people of Israel from the hard hand

of bondage that they're in. He is he is going to use this man

who finds himself hiding in a barn threshing wheat because he was afraid that the

media nights would see him threshing the wheat and come and take it from him.

So he was hiding because he didn't even want to fight for a morsel

of bread to feed his family. And he had come to the place because

of all of the pressure around him and the society and what society has said

about him. Well, first of all, Manassa, the least of the

tribes was his ideology, and that his family was the least clan inside that

tribe, and that he was the weakest in his family. He said,

I'm the I'm the smallest of the small of the small, and the Angel

of the Lord shows up. And when the Angel of the Lord shows up,

that's not the way the Angel of the Lord greeted him. Well,

the Angel showed up, he said, Gideon, you mighty man of Valor.

Now I want you to just get this image in your mind. This

dude is hiding in a barn threshing wheat so that he could have enough to

eat. And his thought is, I'm the smallest of the small of the

small. And God shows up. God sends his messenger and he looks at

this man who is hiding, and he says, get in, you,

mighty man of Valor. What a contradiction of realities, What a what a

vast discrepancy between the way God thought of him and the way he thought of

himself. See, the reality is that most of us see ourselves very broken,

and we only see a piece of ourselves. And the enemy does a

good job of making us see the worst part of ourselves. Come on,

somebody. The enemy makes us think not about the things that we do well,

but the things that we don't do well, Not the things that we

have mastery off, but the ones that we mess up every single time we

try. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You know,

when when Angie and I got married, we love biscuits and gravy. Come

on, we're like one hundred percent, you know racial you like biscuits and

gravy. It's just like, you know, you're not American if you don't

like biscuits and gravy. Amen, you may not even be part of the

kingdom. If you don't like biscuits and gravy. I don't know. You

have to take that up with the Lord. But we decided one morning that

we wanted biscuits and gravy. We we hadn't been married very long, and

so so Angie got up and she decided to make biscuits. Acre she started

making biscuits and gravy. And there were these noises coming out of the kitchen,

just this frustration coming out of the kitchen, and I could tell.

So I was, come on, I mean, I'm the hero, right,

So I'm gonna go in the kitchen and I'm gonna save the day,

and I'm gonna make biscuits. And she's throwing stuff down in us. I

mean, she's throwing stuff in the trash can, and you know she's she's

scowling, and I said, baby, just let me do it, just

just just let me make I want you to know I've come a long way

since then, all right, I said, just let me do it.

And she took that pen and she said, as she said, do it

then. So I start making biscuits and grave and what I kept making was

this big oozy biscuit. Come on, somebody, because I didn't know the

flower to all ratio, Come on now, and this thing just started bubbalo.

So I'd pour it out and i'd start again. I'd pour it out

and listen, we're screaming at each other. We're scream She got up to

make me breakfast in bed, biscuits and gravy. Right, she got up

and sacrificed to be an incredible wife to provide me with a gift something I

didn't ask for, but she just wanted to go out of her way to

serve me. And instead we're screaming at each other about biscuits and gravy.

Come on, somebody, And you know, the end of me got involved

in that situation. And what he did is he pointed out the things we

couldn't do. He pointed out the object of the frustration, rather the intent

in Angie's heart, and we got so frustrated that it ended up in a

huge fight. And isn't that what the enemy always does, That he can

take biscuits and gravy and make it feel like the worst thing on earth.

I remember, after about a forty five minutes of yelling and throwing away half

cooked flour, saying I don't like biscuits and gravy anyway, completely discouraged and

gave up. That's what the enemy does to you every day. He brings

you to the place where you're hiding, afraid to step into God's provision because

you're afraid somebody else is going to respond negatively to it. So you hide

yourself away, and you've convinced yourself that you're the least of the least of

the least, you know, And it's not just getting Israel, the entire

nation came to the same place just before they were going to walk into the

Promised Land the first time they had come to the Jordan River, and Moses

sent spies across to scope out the land to make sure that it was okay

for them to go and take the land. And two people came back,

Joshua and Caleb. And Joshua and Caleb had a positive report. Man,

they were they were upbeat, they were ready to go. They said,

listen, that's a landflowing with milk and honey. They got the biggest grapes

and bananas I've ever seen. We've got to go right now. Everybody get

your swimsuit on. We crossing the river. And then ten people came back

and they didn't see the same thing. So two josh and Caleb, how

many have you ever heard of Joshua and Caleb before? Raise your hand?

Can anybody name one of the other ten? Because if you live in fear

and doubt, you never accomplish enough for anybody to remember who you are.

And this is what they said. They said, listen, we are grasshoppers

in the sight of the inhabitants of the land, and so we're grasshoppers in

our own site. They made a self determination about who they were based on

how they thought other people viewed them. Come on, somebody, But the

reality is forty years later, when they crossed over and they went into the

land, the spies that went into the land went to Rayhab's house. And

this is what Rayhab said. Rahab said, listen, when you came here,

the people's hearts melted with fear because we had heard what you had done

to the kings of the land. The enemy convinced them they were grasshoppers because

they thought other people saw them as grasshoppers, but other people saw them as

world beaters. And because of their own opinion of who they were, they

waited forty years before they got what God had already given them all because of

a misunderstanding of their own identity. And you know this, uh, this

whole thing, it's it's embedded in our cultural language. Everything in our cultural

language, we talk about our identity, and we attached that to something that

we have done or something that we have failed at doing. Come on,

now, everything. I remember for a long time, every time I would

introduce myself, I would introduce myself and I walk up and saying, hey,

I'm Steve, I'm the pastor of And I remember just walking up one

day and doing that and shaking this person's hand in a holy spirit, speaking

to me and saying, is that all you are? And I thought,

well, I can tell this is going to be a lengthy conversation. God,

So let me get rid of this person so that we can go have

this conversation. And the Lord said, what happens if I take that from

you? Who are you then? If that's your identity? And I begin

to think, well, you know what, I'm not just that. I'm

I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a son, I'm a brother,

I'm a lot of other things. I'm a decent cook. Now,

I wann't back then during the gravy story, but I was at that time.

I got a lot of other skills. So why do I just pick

one and identify myself with it? Because that's the one that I chose to

identify with, because it's the one that I liked the most. And do

you realize that most people don't identify with the thing they like the most.

They identify with their dysfunction. That the reality is, when we think about

ourselves, we don't shoot for the top. We shoot for the bottom.

We think of the things that we did, the things that we used to

be, the failures in our lives. I mean, isn't our language littered

with that? Even when we come to scripture, don't we do that?

Don't even the writers of scripture do that, the people that label the stories.

Let me show you how many of you have heard of old blind bardemss

Guess what he could see? He wasn't blind. He was healed. What

about the woman with the issue of blood? She was healed, but she's

still the woman with the issue of blood? What about the lame man at

the gate beautiful? He was healed. We don't call him the dude that

got healed at the gate. We don't call him the man that jumped into

church because he was so excited because now he could walk. We call him

the lame man at the gate beautiful. We call him the gatterin Demdiac,

that man from Cadera who was vexed with evil spirits and possessed, but God

delivered him. But it's easy for us to attach identity to dysfunction, because

most of us live that as our greatest trait, and if anybody ever says

it about us, it's over. Let me, let let me. Let

Let me just post a couple of questions to you. Have you ever gotten

ready? And you get to work or wherever you're going, and somebody says

something as innocent as where'd you get that shirt. Or this happened with my

daughter on the phone just the other day. I made the mistake of asking

her, I said, are you about to get ready to go to dinner?

And she said, I'm ready. I didn't mean anything by that.

What I actually meant by that was I'm ready to get off the phone.

Come on, somebody. What I meant was I am wore out from talking.

I'm going to let you go. And I said, so she went

and read in her hair and change shirts. Because there was an impression from

the outside, and she grabbed hold of that identity and it began to affect

the way she thought and the way she acted and the way she was going

to interact. Because the way and we think about ourselves and the identity that

we have on the inside dictates everything that goes out from us. I have

felt terrible for the last couple of days, got this whole sinus infection thing

going on. I mean, it's just like my face feels like it's like

this big. This morning, I got up and I said I feel good.

I didn't. I said I feel good. I got ready and I

said, as hard as I could breathe, And I thought, it's clearing

up today is going to be a great day. And I got here.

How are you, Pastor I'm great, I'm doing great, fantastic today.

And you know what, right now, I feel probably as good as I

felt in the last few days. But here's the thing you need to understand.

Sometimes it's easier to act your way into feeling rather than feel your way

into acting. After all, isn't that where faith starts hope? It isn't

that the basis of all of our faith is that we have hope that God's

word is true, and that if we believe God's word, it affects us

because faith begins to swell, and then we begin to become that thing that

we have faith for If Philippians Chapter three, verse eight, it says,

Yet, indeed, I also count all things loss for the excellence of the

knowledge of Christ, Jesus my Lord, for whom I've suffered the loss of

all things, and I count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ.

Here's the key right here, and be found in Him. Not found in

my dysfunction, not found in my sickness, not found in my label,

not found in my job, not found in my success, but found in

Him that I might be found in him, not having my own righteousness,

which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ,

the righteousness which is from God. By faith, he says, the key

to adjusting our identity to taking those us that don't necessarily look so nice,

but the ones that we are just fixated on. I want to ask.

I want to ask an honest question here. Okay, how many of you

you've ever watched a NASCAR race? Raise your hand. Okay, Now this

is the honest part. How many of you watched that race and the cars

going around in circles is boring? You watched the race because you thought somebody

was gonna crash. The crashing man, that's why we watched the race.

I watch ice hockey. I don't understand what's going on, but boy,

when they throw each other down and pull their shirts over and start hitting each

other, I mean that's just like, Yeah, I become a hockey fan

then, right, Because we're all drawn to the kati astrophe. We're all

drawn to that, to that thing, that calamity. We that's the thing

we fixate on. That's the thing that we look for and we look forward

in our own lives. Listen, some of you live in so much drama

that you should get paid from Hollywood. But the reason you live in drama

is because you fixate on those dramatic things and it fuels your identity of dysfunction.

Every time drama begins to happen in your life and it makes you feel

alive, so you create it. You look at who you think you are,

and if everything is calm and status quo, you do something to stir

the hornet's nest. I won't expect a much shout, and during this part

we're almost through it. So just hang on you you you. You don't

feel comfortable because your brokenness becomes evident to you and you look around and you

start to say crazy things like I don't even know if I'm needed, I

don't know if I'm important, I don't know if I belong because you have

attached your identity to the immense dysfunction that surrounds you. Let me let you

in on a little secret. If you're found in Christ, you live a

full throttled, exciting life but wrapped in the peace of God. So there's

all of the fulfillment, and there's all of the hope and the vision,

but without all of the drama, eightest life that anybody has ever lived.

My life is the greatest. And that's not preaching. I have this conversation

all the time. My life is the greatest life I could ever imagine.

Are their challenges Yeah, yeah, I mean I could name a few right

now, But the reality is they're just parts of the larger picture. They're

just parts of this incredible journey that the Lord, that the Lord has anointed

me to live. That the actions that I get to walk out the journey

that I'm on. And I could pick out those pieces, and I could

look at those pieces and focus on those pieces and get very discouraged, but

it's just a piece, and I choose to focus on the whole rather than

the piece, because if I start focusing on the pieces of me, I

missed the fullness of Him to be found in Him. In Galatians chapter two,

verse twenty, it says I've been crucified with Christ. Now this is

next level. I want you to understand that that discipleship is a journey sanctification.

It's a big fancy word that just means I just want to look more

like Him, That's all it means. It's a journey. It's progressive and

this is like, this is like next level spiritual maturity right here. Okay,

this is this is taking a step up. How many of you want

your you're ready to take a step up? Raise your hand. I'm ready

to go somewhere. All right. I've been crucified with Christ. It's no

longer I who live, huh. But Christ lives in me. And the

life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the

Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. He says,

it's not me that list. I'm not even viewing my life as if

it was mine. I'm not even going to view my life in such a

way that I worry about those things because it's no longer me who lives,

but Christ in me. That the life that's in me is greater than the

life that's on me. Come on, somebody, and that life is so

much bigger than anything I could imagine. And if it's his life, he's

responsible to bring provision, he's responsible to take care of it because it's his,

it's not mine. And now I live in the flesh. The life

I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God

who loved me and gave himself for me. Now, let's talk about this.

Jesus is the most precious being in all creation. If you could bottle

Jesus, come on, somebody, If you could bottle Jesus and sell him,

you could name your price. I could sell a bottle of Jesus for

a billion dollars to somebody that had a billion dollars, but I could name

my price because he's the most precious thing. There's healing there, there's freedom,

there, there's peace there. That everything is in that bottle of Jesus.

And if I could just put him in bottles and sell him, I

would never have to worry about taking another offer. And come on, somebody,

And that thing that is priceless, that man that is priceless, that

being who is priceless. He traded himself for your dysfunction. He took his

immeasurable worth, and he said, I'm going to give my immeasurable worth for

you. And if he is willing to trade himself of im measurable worth for

you, that must be That must mean you're worth more than you think you

are. There must be some intrinsic value in you, that that failure wasn't

final, that that mistake doesn't define you, That the thing that you can't

do you just can't do it right now, But one day you'll be able

to see the reality is Jesus looks at us differently than we look at ourselves.

When we look at a piece. He looks at the whole. He

looks at the brokenness, and he sees how to arrange those pieces into a

beautiful mosaic, a work of art that the world looks at and sees beauty

in. He says, crazy. Listen, he says crazy things about you.

And remember a couple of weeks ago, I said, imagine having the

response onstability. That everything you said became truth, everything that Jesus says,

everything that the Father says, becomes truth. And this is what he says

about you. He says you're the head and not the tail. He says

you're above and not beneath. He says that you are more than a conqueror,

that greater is he who is in you than he who is in the

world. He says that when the enemy comes in like a flood against you,

he'll lift up a standard against it. He says that by your strip

by his stripes, you are healed, that you're the healed of the Lord,

that you are the righteousness of God, that you are the Kingdom of

God, that you are a special people, that you are a holy priesthood,

that you once were not a people. Now you're the people of God.

That's what he says about you. And if he says it, it

has to be true. And if you don't see yourself that way, then

you are a liar. Who you are expecting that to come and out?

Then all that encouragement were you Because truth is truth. I watched a watched

a this I don't even know what it was, then interview with a person.

It wasn't a Ted Talkers interview with the person, and it was a

mathematician, and this is what they said. They said, two plus two

by definition, that the conclusion to two plus two equals four is is racist

and anti feminine. That was my exact reaction when I saw the video.

It was also the interview. I said, okay, and the interviewer lesson,

Now, now I know not what I know what you're saying. I

mean, I know you're not saying that that two plus two could could actually

equal five, and the person said, oh, no, that's exactly what

I'm saying. For some people, two plus two could equal five. And

the interviewer said, but yeah, but yeah, but but but two plus

two equals four. And first I said, no, no, no,

no, in our advanced society, advanced society, two plus two can't just

equal four anymore. The first thing I thought is, I want to hire

that lady to do my paycheck, right, I want her doing the math.

That's that's that's what I want. But the reality is, there always

has been, and there there's an even greater attack on truth. And if

there is a track, if there is an attack on the basic foundations of

two plus two equal four, you know that the enemy is attacking you about

who you really are and the truth about who you really are, because he

wants you broken, busted and disgusted. He wants you giving up on any

hope that there can ever be anything more and that you can actually obtain Christ.

He wants you to give up on that because when you give up on

that, your dysfunction leads to depression and anxiety and fear. It leads to

self medication of perversion in all different kinds of ways. It leads to alcoholism,

it leads to drug abuse, that leads to mis gendered identities, and

all of those things that we now live in because there is an attack against

truth. And you're not who you think you are. You're not who they

say you are. You're who God says you are. The band can come

and get ready. I'm going to close with this right if you'll get ready

to be baptized right now. If you need to change or whatever you need

to do, it doesn't matter to me. If you want to go,

and that will go, and that I'm going In this Second Corinthians, chapter

five, verse seventeen, we read this, but we don't hear this.

We read this, but we don't ever really let this drop deep down into

the fabric of our being. Therefore, you know, Pastor Gary taught me

that anywhere you read therefore in scripture, you need to look and see what

it's there. For. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the apostle

apost say that I may be found in Him. I just want to be

found in Him. I want to be I want to be in Christ.

How do we how do we find ourselves in Christ? We repent of our

sins. The biggest perversion of the Gospel in the American Church is that we

bring you to the altar and we tell you to ask God to forgive you

of your sins. That's not the path to siwa. The path to salvation

is that you repent of your sins. And the difference is forgiveness is I'm

sorry repenting as I turn and go in the opposite direction. You repent of

your sins, and you make Him the Lord of your life, and He

is faithful to forgive you of your sins and wash your sins with his blood.

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. You're not

who you were before you got saved. You're not the liar, cheater,

swindler, You're not the good for nothing broke. Every day, I thank

God that he found me, and my second and almost immediate thought as I

thank God that he didn't tell anybody where he found me. He just made

me. A new creation says that you are a new creation, and old

things have passed away, all of those habits and those those things that are

in our minds that we allow to continue to define us. Some of you

are still struggling with guilt from things you did years ago. Some of you

are still struggling with a vic them mentality because of something that was done to

you years ago. And the enemy wants you to think you are that.

But you are not a victim. I don't care if you clap. You

were not. You're not the object of that hate. You're not that.

You're a brand new creation. You're resurrected out of those ashes, and all

things have become new, all things. That thing that you struggle with,

it's you. It's over, it's broken. It can't have power over you

anymore unless you allow it. Tom And you know, they may still say

it about you, and it may be true. You may have done those

things, but you're not those things anymore. You're not those things anymore.

You're not somebody's ex. You're not a former. You are a child of

God. And everybody stand with me all over the building. If you're here

today and you're struggling with guilt, you feel beaten down. You don't feel

like you're good enough, good enough to what, good enough to do whatever

you get to fill in both blanks that you just feel hindered from becoming all

that you know Christ says you can be. Today is your Day of Freedom.

We're going to ask our altar team to come one more time. Unless

you're planning on responding to the altar call, then you can stay where you

are. But if you're here today to say I'm coming to him to be

made new, I'm coming to him because I want those old things to pass

away. I want a new path I want I want to truly and finally

see myself the way the Lord sees me. I want to be reconciled with

him. I want to be put back together with him so that I can

see myself the way he sees me. Or if you're here and you would

say I want to repent of my sins, I feel the Lord drawing me,

and I want to repent of my sins, and I want to turn

my life over to Jesus today I want to be saved. Either one of

those things. I want to be saved or I want to be restored.

I want to see myself the way God sees me, and I want to

lay down this brokenness and this guilt and this hurt and this pain and all

of this dysfunction. Be the one of those is you. I want you

to step out on the count of three,