Lent: Absence of Condemnation and Fullness of Delight

You may be seated.

Well, welcome.

Good morning.

Glad you're here.

What we love to say every week, we've been saying it for 10 years, is we are more broken than we originally thought.

But we are more loved by God and Jesus than we ever dare to dream.

That's what we rest in, that's what we grow in as Christians.

And we're excited to say that again this week.

That's our forever heart of our church.

This Sunday we are trying to have a shorter service, perhaps a shorter sermon as well, is the goal.

And the goal is to have some time at the end of the service for us to talk some about the future and the direction of our church.

So let's skip my amazing opening illustration about Adedazalea, and we're just going to jump right in to the passage that Ali just read for us about this man, Nicodemus, coming to Jesus, and Jesus answering him there in John 3 verse 3.

John 3:3

Jesus answered him and said, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he's old?

Can he enter a second time in his mother's womb and be born?

And Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

So we're born physically, and we need to be born spiritually.

Verse 7, do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes, so it is with everyone who's born of spirit.

So our first point is this we are not machines producing in the world.

We're not machines producing.

It's not who we are.

We are beloved children radically loved.

We are not machines producing, we are beloved children radically loved.

By God's grace, we come alive to our true selves even once we have already physically been born.

We come alive to his love for us, that we are his children.

That's the fight of our lives.

That's our faith walk.

To remember who we really are, who we truly are as his children.

I love the imagery given to us in verses 5 and 6.

In verse 5, we have the imagery of water, that word meaning procreation, a new life.

And then verse 6: that which is born of spirit is spirit.

So our spirit needs to be reborn.

Jesus is saying we have life in our spirit by God granting it to us by his spirit.

That's the core of who you are.

That's the you inside of you, the you behind all the defense mechanisms and the different roles we play, all that exhaustion of life that we can use to self-justify, the you underneath.

We can have life there in our spirit, the very core of who we are.

This Nicodemus is just, he's hoping for the next list, the next obedience, the next amount of things to do.

If I can get all this list together, and then I perform it, please God, I'll be welcomed by God, I'll be a whole person.

And Jesus says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

New life, a wholeness of heart, is by a relationship with the Heavenly Father, and it's by God's lavish love to us.

Spirit to spirit.

Back in 2018, do you remember the soccer team in Thailand?

That horrible story they got stuck in the cave.

Do you remember this?

Twelve soccer players.

There's one of the kids' birthdays, and the team and the coach, they go down in a cave.

You know, mistake number one, they go down in a cave, down in the tunnels, and then it starts raining, and the tunnels fill up, and they they get stuck.

For 10 days, they're stuck eating birthday snacks, drinking water from the the cave roof.

They're wondering if the oxygen's gonna run out, they're gonna die.

This is the you know, this is the birth, happy birthday.

Right?

This is their birthday, but you thought sparkles was bad.

Yeah, the sparkles.

You thought that wouldn't end.

Well, ten days in a cave.

I mean, a Sunday after the sparkles feels like ten days in a cave.

It's about the same, it's the same experience.

That's real, though.

Them in the cave, wondering if they're gonna die.

They have to be rescued.

They can't get themselves out.

They just have to wait for the divers to come for them.

And the divers eventually come for them, right?

And we know that glory story, and eventually they're rescued, right?

The team made it, everybody made it.

They were rescued, they had to be rescued.

We can do some things.

Like, you can do some things.

Like, we can declutter the kitchen junk drawer, you could do that.

You've been meaning to do that.

You can get fit, you can earn money, you can buy a beach house, you can invite me to the beach house.

You, but you can't cause, you can't cause your heart to come alive.

We try, it's called self-justification.

We try a lot, but it's by God's Spirit to us that we come alive.

We are made to come alive to God.

Some things we earn in this world, but the things of the heart have to be received from God by his grace.

We're stuck in a cave.

Martin Luther would say our will is bound.

Reformed theology would say, depravity, total depravity.

We're bound in a mess.

We're bound in disappointment, we're bound in sin, and we're stuck, and we need a breakthrough from outside.

And it's his lavish love to us where we receive it.

Nicodemus has to pick up on this because he wants a list, just another list.

And he has to pick up on this.

Uh, verse 9.

Nicodemus said to him, back to Jesus, how can these things be true?

And how can these things be?

And then verse 10, Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel?

And yet you do not understand these things?

Because Nicodemus was a religious teacher.

Verse 11, truly, truly I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.

If I had told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

No one has ascended into heaven except he who has descended from heaven, the Son of Man.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in him, so by belief, not by merit, whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

And we can all go put it on a sign at a sporting event.

The word life is the word Zoe.

It meaning your state, the state of your being, the core of who you are.

Become vital and whole and animated by God through the Holy Spirit because of Christ Jesus.

You come alive on the inside.

You're born physically and we're born spiritually.

Now, point number two is that our temptation is to provide our own justification.

We did this before we're Christians, and sadly we still do it as we're Christians.

Our temptation is to provide our own justification rather than resting in Jesus for it.

That is also all of our exhaustion and our condemnation.

I'm not someone as I justify myself with my job or my income or my social status or my body or you know, trying to hold on to the hair I still have.

That's not what makes me someone.

What makes me someone is that I am God's beloved.

Now that's a lot more secure than my hair, right?

That's a lot more secure than your income or your job.

That's the promise we have.

Verse 14, Jesus tells Nicodemus a strange story from Numbers in the Old Testament.

It's a weird story.

The Israelites are attacked by poisonous serpents.

A lot of people died.

And God commands Moses, make a bronze serpent.

This is what Jesus is referring to here in this John 3 passage.

God commands Moses, make a bronze serpent, set it on a pole.

And then tell anybody who's bit, go and look on the pole.

Go look at the bronze serpent.

That's a weird story.

Old Testament has all these strange stories, but what God is giving us through all these strange ancient stories is picture after picture after picture in Israel's history of what Christ would come to do.

It's a strange story just to say we're rescued as we look to Him.

We're bitten and we need to look to Him.

Now remember, Nicodemus is this religious teacher.

He teaches the law, he lives by the law, so all those rules of the Old Testament, and the eating and the drinking, and doing all the right things and getting them all right and doing them all enough, then maybe God will accept me and have me.

Then maybe I'll be whole in some way.

Then this is this differentiation that we like to make between the way of religion and the way of gospel.

The way of religion is obey, and then you are accepted once you obey.

And obey enough.

The way of the gospel is you are already accepted in Jesus.

Therefore, obey.

Man, that's a world of difference.

Religion is the way of slavery and exhaustion.

And the gospel is a way of freedom, and it's a way of growth.

Point number three is this A performance-oriented life is condemnation.

But life in Christ is relationship and relief.

Romans 4, 15 through 17, Paul says this.

For the law brings wrath.

But where there's no law, there's no transgression.

So he's saying that the law is holy and good.

We know that.

What we should be, what we should do, how we should live.

That's holy and good.

And yet when we come up before it, we fall short, therefore it brings wrath upon us in condemnation.

Verse 16, that is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, not only to the inheritance of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, I have made you the father of many nations, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead.

That was going to tie in so good to my Zalea illustration that we had to skip it.

It was going to be fascinating.

And calls into existence the things that do not exist.

So the law brings wrath, holy as it is, condemnation to us because of us, not because of it.

Because we're not perfect.

It shows us our need.

We always come up short of the standards of God, even our own standards, standards of the world.

But verse 16.

That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace.

Back to John 3, verse 17.

John 3:17

Listen to this good news.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world.

And you could personalize that.

God did not send Jesus to condemn you.

But in order that the world might be saved through him.

This week I started and finished Jack Ryan season three.

Anybody been through that journey?

Few of you.

It's on Amazon Prime if you want to pick that up.

Is Jack gonna be okay?

I don't know.

It was it was it was a tolling week.

It was very difficult.

I was consumed.

It was not healthy.

Will Jack save us from the rogue Russian terrorist group?

This was the big question of Thursday night for me so much that it was a great idea, Thursday night in all of my Christian maturity, to just keep pressing next episode, next episode.

I had to have it finished.

And of course, Friday I felt horrible, felt awful, just awful.

But Jack was okay because I saw that Thursday night.

But also Thursday night, I couldn't go to sleep because I was so pumped up about Jack saving the world.

It was amazing.

Just got consumed with it.

We do that, right?

And we call it binging, right?

Like we binge on that.

We binge on that with our time and with our heart.

It becomes a narrative that we just sort of take in.

And we all binge on something.

And sadly, condemnation can be the binge.

Like a feast that I'm not enough, and there's no way this will be okay, and I'm never gonna measure up.

I'll never be, you know, there's no way I can be known and loved.

All that sort of condemnation.

And Jesus says in John 3, that's not coming from God.

My mentor Scotty Smith says this the gospel isn't merely the absence of all condemnation.

I mean, that's pretty amazing in and of itself, right there, right?

The gospel isn't merely the absence of all condemnation, it's also the fullness of God's delight lavished on us in Christ.

We come alive to God's love by Spirit to us, and that is a healing of the heart.

There's so much of our self-justification and exhaustion, the ways we're bound in different sin that it would be totally unhelpful to our lives, unhealthy, destructive.

So we're healed and we're healing.

And we're growing in this very lavishness of the secure identity we have as the children of God by means of application of two questions for our hearts this morning.

Basically asking the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, would you please, as we ask these questions, would you reveal to us something that would be helpful for our growth in grace?

Number one is this, Abba Father.

What does it, what does my heart binge on?

What does my heart binge on?

Condemnation that I am not enough or acceptance and worth in Christ?

And the second question, Abba Father, what would it mean for me to walk with the Spirit and the fullness of your delight lavished on me?

What does that change in your heart?

What does that change in your life?

Two weeks ago we went out of town with some friends, and the first evening we got there, Christy and the wife of the other set of friends, they went to Trader Joe's for some groceries, and that evening I walked through the kitchen and I saw on the counter something I'd never seen before.

Maybe you know about this.

I don't know.

I'd been stuck in, you knew I like my Reese's thin, dark chocolate thins.

Y'all know about that a little bit.

But I saw this for the first time.

The does anybody know this yet?

I don't know if you want to know it.

It's amazing.

Trader Joe's dark chocolate bark with pretzel and sea salt and almonds, which means it's health food.

It's wonderful.

And I grabbed a piece of it, and as I I just as I just walk it, I just grabbed a piece of it.

I didn't think it was gonna be that big of a deal.

I grabbed a piece of it, put it in my mouth, and it was spirit to spirit, a rebirth.

Found a church, walked an aisle, signed a card, all that.

And you know what happened?

I mean, it's really good.

I just need to just tell you.

No royalties.

No, I'm getting no royalties off that.

It's just so good.

And you know what happened the next morning, like after breakfast, like when nobody's looking?

I I had more.

At lunchtime, when everybody's outside.

Yep.

Just swinging back through that kitchen.

It wasn't even our back.

It was their back.

Technically, I think I was stealing.

It was amazing.

I was just feasting on it like over and over and over again, right?

Like to feast is to overindulge.

That's what a feast is.

Just to overindulge over and over again.

Now, here's what I love.

Sundays through Lent are known as feast days historically, because we're in that season of Lent, moving towards Good Friday and Easter.

And a lot of times in Lent, historically, people give something up.

As a way of trying to take the moments of sacrifice to remember Christ's sacrifice for us and what we have in him.

And so a lot of people give up coffee or chocolate or maybe Instagram.

I don't know, something.

People give something up.

And then on Sundays in Lent, they would feast.

Feast days.

As a way to say that we feast on the gospel.

That's why we gather, that's why we have a church.

That's what our lives are really about.

To feast on the lavish acceptance and love of God to our weary hearts.

We are born physically.

And then we are born again spiritually.

Psalm 18, 17 through 19 says this.

Just by word of encouragement, if you're feeling stuck or in a cave or disappointed or just burdened, beat down, weary.

For they were too mighty for me.

They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support.

He brought me out into a broad place.

He rescued me.

Because he delighted in me.

Let's pray together.

God, we thank you for your grace and your mercy.

Thank you that not only do we have the absence of condemnation from you to us, but we have your delight lavished on us in Christ Jesus, that all of our sin is put upon him, all of our guilt and all of our shame.

And in Christ, imputed upon our souls is the full righteousness of Jesus.

And that you love us like you love Him.

And you can't love us anymore.

God, would all the dead places in our hearts come alive?

May we be asking, what would it mean to walk in your delight?

What would it mean to remember we're not just physical beings and we're certainly not machines, but we are your children.

Born into your family dearly loved.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.