3 Circles - October 27, 2024

It is my privilege to invite you to today's sermon podcast.

I have made the Apostle Paul's prayer request my own.

When he states in Ephesians 6, 19, Pray also for me, that whenever I open my

mouth, the words may be given to me, so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.

May today's sermon come alive to you and aid you in your understanding of God's plan for your life.

This morning, as we look to the Word, we're going to, I want to share something

with you that you may have heard before.

And today might be the first time you ever heard it.

Maybe the first time you've ever heard it in this way. And I just want to thank

Pastor Scroggins from Family Church all the way out in Florida.

He's developed this way of sharing the good news of Jesus.

And I just pray that you'll receive it this way. If you're looking for a new

way in which to share the good news, this might be one of the ways that you can do that.

And it just has to do with three circles.

How about that? to share the good news of God's plan and good news of all that

God has done with just three simple circles this morning.

We see a beautiful family like this, and we see also a world around us that's

broken, that just seems ugly at times.

Sometimes we get a little confused

because we go out on a beautiful crisp autumn morning like today, and.

We see a little bit of clouds. We see the sun start to come up and peek through.

And I don't know if you saw the sunset last night, but we were on the way headed

home and you see this great desert sunset as the sun setting over the Oregon

Hills over there. And just the beauty of that.

You know, that's why I love about sunsets.

I'm a sunset kind of guy because I'm not always up first thing in the morning

or I'm not where I can always see the sunrise.

And so the sunsets are perfect. And I've never seen two sunsets that are exactly alike.

God is the master artiste in the way that he paints with light.

And it's a one-shot kind of deal. And how even in the moments of a sunset,

the scene changes so much.

And we just thank God at those times for who he is and for what he has done.

And when we think of all the ugliness in the world, and it seems increasing

to me as I get older, And maybe it's just because I become more knowledgeable

of the way that mankind is mean to mankind.

People are mean to other people or just the way that life happens sometimes.

And realize the brokenness of all that. But in the midst of that,

we also can see some beautiful moments.

Beautiful moments when a brand new baby is born and a new family is formed.

And as that family grows and there's those firsts that happen,

you know, the first tooth that comes in all the way to where the first tooth is lost.

I mean, you have all these beautiful things in the moment. And at the time,

it's kind of stressful, you know, when you're trying to pull that kid's tooth

because they won't let it fall out.

And it's stressful to say, let's pull that dude out. I've got a string.

I've got a door. Let's give it a shot.

When they won't let you stick your big fingers in their mouth to pull that thing.

And kids soon realize the brokenness of everything, the brokenness of these

teeth that grow in and then they fall out.

And even as an adult, when your teeth are still there and then they're not there

anymore, you have all this combination of brokenness and beauty all around the same time.

But it's in this that we tend to reflect back on God's design,

on God's purpose for everything.

And we know from our Scripture that God has a plan for each of us in every single aspect of life.

As a matter of fact, Genesis 1.31, going all the way back to the beginning,

Scripture says, God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning, and there was the sixth day.

And we know from the creation account back in Genesis that God created the world,

everything in it, in six days, and then on the seventh day, He rested.

And we know that He created everything good, everything perfect right there.

And so we think about God's design, that God has created everything to be that

way, to operate in that way.

We know that from Psalm 19.1, that the heavens declare the glory of God,

and the skies proclaim the works of his hands.

Did anyone see the comets this past couple weeks? Did you see that comet out there?

I went out a few times to try to see it, but it must have been too late by the time I got out there.

But other people had these fantastic photos of not Halley's comet,

but another comet that was coming through.

And if you're into stargazing, you've ever looked through a telescope,

this scripture just should declare and just pound in your head because you see

how God has created everything, the beauty of that.

The immense beauty of His creation, of God's design.

But we know that when we depart from God's design, we leave that perfect circle.

And we know that when we leave that, Scripture calls that sin.

When you depart from the way that God had planned things to operate and planned

things to work, it doesn't work so well anymore.

Things break down. Things fall down. People,

and the relationships fall apart when we leave the design that God has made

for all of creation, but specifically for you and I as human beings,

for you and I as the crown of God's creation.

And we know that this sin, it wreaks havoc, but we know that we're all guilty of it.

We're all a part of it ever since the first human beings who left God's design

to pursue their own interests, to pursue their own desires.

As a matter of fact, Romans 3.23 says, For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

All have sinned, every single one of us have sinned and fallen short of what God expects.

Now, the term in this verse, of course, you know, because I've said it before if you've been here,

that is, it's an old archery term that we've all taken our bow and our arrow,

and we've aimed for the target that God has placed, and drawing back and then

letting that arrow go, we've completely missed the target.

If any of you were to take me bow hunting, that would be my shot.

Hopefully you were behind me and not in front of me, because it's been a long

time since I've taken up archery.

But it's the fact that all of us, every single one of us, including myself,

we've all strived for God's perfect standard.

We've strived to hit that target, to live out God's design.

But because of that little three-letter word, sin, we've been unable to.

We might start out with good intentions, but pretty soon those intentions turn wayward.

When we think about this verse, all of us have sinned, then what hope is there?

Man, why doesn't God just do what he did to Noah, the world at Noah's time,

I should say, and just flood the whole world and be done with it?

Well, we have this other verse in Romans 6.23, for the wages of sin is death.

Yeah, we know that. if we continue in sin, continue outside God's perfect design,

it does lead to that death and that eternal separation from God.

But that's not all the verse, as you can see it on the screen,

because it says, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So we know that God's still got a perfect design.

He's still got a perfect plan for you, a perfect plan for me,

a perfect plan for everyone outside of this church building.

The gift of God is for everybody. The plan of God is for everybody to have eternal

life, to have that life that you're not struggling, to have that life to where

you're not steeped in sin, where you're not tripped up by sin every time you

try to do something good.

The kind of life that blesses others, the kind of life eternally that follows

God's plan, God's design.

Isn't that awesome? that God still loves us, even if we step out of that circle

of God's perfect design, that God still beckons us to come back.

Come on, come back to the perfect design that I have for you.

We think what happens when we depart from God's design, from God's plan for

our life, we end up in this other place, and it's this place of brokenness.

Now, we've perhaps all been there at one time or another.

When we leave God's design, it's not like you're nowhere. You are somewhere,

but you're in another circle.

You're in this place of brokenness, and brokenness manifests itself in different ways.

For some people, this brokenness feels like emptiness.

It's just like there's nothing there.

I don't know. I haven't heard too many tummies rumbling this morning except

my own, and you've probably heard it too because I'm all mic'd up,

but I know there's some good chili waiting for us.

There's something good that's going to fill our bellies. I saw some cornbread.

I know there's some cheese in the refrigerator because we brought some cheese

this morning. So there's some good stuff that's ready to fill the emptiness of our gut.

But when it comes to life, there's this emptiness there. What do we fill it with?

Because just like our empty belly, we need to put something in there to stop the rumbling.

And in life, we do that the same thing. Sometimes we fill the emptiness of our

life with all kinds of relationships, and sometimes they're not always that good.

We try to get to know as many people to feel the loneliness that comes from

emptiness, to fill that void that's there.

Other times we might feel a little guilt because we know that God has a standard

for us that we just can't seem to meet up, and we try a wrong way and it just blows up in our face.

And we have all this guilt from the way we've treated other people.

We've got all this guilt from not being able to live up to who God expects us to be.

We've tried and we've just failed and we've blown it because we've tried with selfish motives.

Maybe we've felt rejection before, and that's how the brokenness manifests itself.

We just feel like in those relationships that we've tried to fill our life with,

the rejection just seems to come. No one will accept me as I am.

No one will accept me for who I am. We think about the shame that follows that

and the regret that we might have.

Folks, this place of brokenness is ugly.

This place of brokenness is not the place we want to be.

And sometimes, as the Scripture says from Romans 1, they exchanged the truth

of God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.

We try to mitigate or we try to escape our brokenness. And I don't know if you

can see the little squiggly lines coming off of brokenness.

That's our attempts to escape the brokenness.

Like I said, we try to escape it with relationships because we know relationally

there's something missing.

I need another person. I need someone else in my life to fill this void,

and we try that with a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, a wife,

a best friend, an acquaintance, but the relationship never seems to satisfy

what is deep down and broken within us.

We try it in other ways, as I alluded to earlier, with alcohol and illegal illicit

substances to kind of dull the pain, to ease the pain, just to make us numb

to it because we're tired of those feelings that come.

Sometimes it's the pursuit of just more and more, more stuff to fill the hole,

more money to fill the brokenness.

And we try and we try that way, and it just doesn't work. And,

you know, there's also people that just try to be more religious.

The more good I do, the more God will overlook the brokenness,

we think, because look at all this good that I've done.

And we try and we try and we try to be on our own more and more good,

more and more religious, more and more like the Bible says, so that God will accept me.

And some people just want to cover the spread and they've tried every religion

out there just to make sure that something will satisfy God,

but it still doesn't resolve their brokenness.

I know some very, very religious people, some very, very nice people,

some people that you would consider to be Christian people.

But inside there's still that brokenness that exists. And maybe some of you feel like that today.

I'm trying all this good stuff, but it just doesn't heal up the brokenness that

I feel, the brokenness that I've experienced and that I am experiencing.

You see, we try to escape that brokenness. As a matter of fact,

the ways that I've mentioned, it goes right back to this verse from Proverbs chapter 14.

Proverbs 14 · chapter mention

There's a way that seems right to a man, but the end is the way of death.

It goes right back to sin.

We try to be good. We try to do these things that bless other people,

and a lot of people do some really good things.

There's a lot of great philanthropists that aren't necessarily Christian,

but they're doing some good things in the world.

But even in that doing, the Scripture says, there's a way that seems right to

a man, but the end thereof leads to death.

The end thereof leads back to the brokenness. it leads back to the sin.

But I want you to know, folks, this morning, there is a better way.

You're not stuck right there. You're not stuck in this brokenness.

You're not stuck there trying to get out. Like, I don't know if you use those

glue traps for mice. Have you ever used those?

I love those things. My family hates them.

Man, you get a mouse there with two feet stuck, and it's trying to claw its way out.

It knows it's trapped, but it can't. In unfortunate cases, those mice will chew

off their legs In order to get away I'm sorry, I shouldn't say this this morning.

This poor field mice just trying to earn a living.

But maybe we feel like that, so we're ready to chew our leg off just to get

away from sin and brokenness and doom that we know awaits us.

There's a good way, and that's what the Bible calls good news. The gospel is good news.

You see, that brokenness that we experience shows us there's something that needs to change.

And why do we go about trying all these different things? Because we're trying

to initiate that change, but we don't realize that that change can't be initiated

from within because it's already been fixed from without.

And the good news that we see in the Bible, the gospel message is that the Bible

tells us what needs to take place in order for us to escape that brokenness,

what needs to happen in order for us to escape the broken emptiness that we

feel inside because we've strayed away from God's perfect design.

You see, the scripture says, John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he

gave his only begotten son. I want to stop right there.

God loved you so much that he took care of the problem that you couldn't solve on your own. Amen?

Yeah. The gospel is the story of Jesus.

That God, the Father, God of all, the Creator of all,

saw the crown of His creation in the midst of a brokenness and could not stand

it anymore that He gave His only begotten Son, only begotten,

the only one-of-a-kind Son, Jesus.

To come down and to take care of the problem for us.

Wow, that a God would love us so much. In all of our religiousness,

in all of our building cathedrals and churches and temples and monuments to

some nameless God, God saw humanity and said, I love you so much that I'm going to come to you.

You don't need to try to reach up to me, but I'm coming to you and sending my son Jesus to you.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to save those of us

who deserve death, who deserve those wages.

In Colossians 2, verse 14, the scripture says, when Jesus came, what did he do?

Colossians 2:14

He erased the certificate of debt, and he has taken it out of the way by nailing it to a cross.

So God sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to us, who lived a perfect life, a sinless life,

an admirable life, but yet suffered each one of those days of his life,

living up to this point to where he gave himself up on a cross to take the penalty

for sin, to cancel the debt, as the scripture says. Well, what debt is that?

Well, that's my debt of sin.

It's your debt of sin. It's that sin that separates us from God.

And when Jesus came, he said, I'm wiping it out.

It's gone. And I will go all the way to the cross to take care of that.

And he did. He canceled that debt.

I know we have a lot of talk these days about canceling student debt,

and we could have a great argument back and forth this morning and make it into

some big political rally about student debt things, but get this.

Some of the reasons that people are against canceling student debt is because

it takes it off of one part of the population and puts it on another part of the population.

Hey, I'm not trying to rile you up this morning, but I'm just trying to say

when Jesus canceled your debt, he paid the debt.

It didn't get transferred to somebody else.

What Jesus did was he canceled it by his own life to pay it completely.

He didn't kick the can down the road for somebody else to have to take care

of. He took care of the debt of your sin, the debt of my sin.

We owed a bill that we could not pay, but Jesus paid it for us.

That is the gospel message.

In 1 Corinthians 15, it says, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

He was buried and raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures.

God raised Jesus from the dead to show that Jesus is the Son of God.

He raised him from the dead so that he could do, Jesus could do what he said

he was going to do, and that was to forgive us of our sins, to heal us of our brokenness.

The one thing we could not get away from.

Jesus said, I'm going to take care of that. You just hold on,

wait three days, and I'll show you what's going to happen.

And in three days, he rose up from that grave, conquering sin,

conquering death, to show us a better way that we could live,

a way that we could live that would follow in his path.

The gospel message is that there's a way out.

And that gospel message, well, what do we do?

Simple scripture to help you there. Mark 1.15, repent and believe in the good news.

Wait, it can't be that simple. You don't understand.

I've got this emptiness, this void in my life that I've been trying to overcome.

And you're just saying I need to repent. Well, that's a churchy word.

What does that mean? It means turn your back on the way you were going and start in a new way.

It means do a 180 and stop doing what you were doing that obviously didn't work

to help fix your brokenness and start going in the way that Jesus has made. Start following Jesus.

Repent, a change of mind, a change of heart to say, I'm not going to do that anymore.

I'm not going to try these old squiggly line ways to get out of my brokenness

because Jesus already paid the price through the gospel, the good news to show me a way out.

And so I believe, I turn away from that which I've tried before,

from that which was not working.

Ephesians 2, 8, 9, for it's by grace that you have been saved through faith

and that not from yourselves, it is a gift of God, not of works so that no one

can boast or brag about it.

This verse just says, hey, it's God's work.

It's what God's doing. So you can't brag about saving yourself.

Oh yeah, I went to church all of my life. Every single Sunday I was there.

I deserve to get into heaven.

Well, I gave a tithe of 20% of my income, so I deserve to be there.

I've done this. I've done that.

Showed up at the work days, made some chili for the chili feed. I mean, don't I deserve?

Well, you better taste the chili first before you think, I don't know.

Huh? It's good. Oh, oh, all right.

Had a sneak peek here that I didn't get. I could have, yeah.

I can't preach on a full stomach? What are you talking about?

You see, we try to say that we can do all these things to earn what God wants,

but it's already been earned for us.

The only thing that we've earned is death. The wages of sin is death.

But the gift that God wants to give us, it's everlasting. It's eternal life

in Jesus. Well, what does in Jesus mean?

It means I'm living out in Christ by repenting from my sin, turning my back

on it, and believing that Jesus did what he said he did in forgiving me and

is showing me a new life to live that I'm going to walk in.

You know, repenting and believing, those are the keys to the gospel,

not anything that we could do to earn what God wants us to do,

but it's for by grace that we've been saved.

As the scripture says, for by grace, God's grace, that undeserved favor,

that he opens the door and says, here's the way to go.

In Romans 10, 9, Scripture says, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

Lord, and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you might be saved.

Is that what the Scripture says? What does the Scripture say?

You shall be saved, you will be saved. If you believe in your heart,

if you confess with your mouth, that is the way to enter in to this gospel.

That is the first step that you take to leave your brokenness and to accept

to receive the good news of Jesus.

And when you do that, you're on your way to recovery and to purpose.

You're on your way to recovering what was broken and busted up in your life.

You're on your way to seeing Jesus redeem what was lost to sin.

You're on your way to seeing what God wants to do in you and through you.

You're on your way to seeing who you can be in God.

Back to Ephesians 2, Scripture says, not only are we saved by grace through

faith, not of ourselves as the gift of God, but we are God's workmanship.

We are God's masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works,

which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

We think about now leaving our brokenness, entering in through the portal,

the pathway, the gate, if you will, of the gospel, repenting,

turning away from our sin, and turning to God to follow Him.

It's this way of discovering how God has created me,

how God has made me His masterpiece, how God has made me His workmanship,

and what God is doing in me so that I can then be set free to live by God's

design and finding my purpose in life.

Why did I want you to take some silly shape survey and answer a million questions

about yourself, which I know for some of you, it's hard to talk about yourself?

Well, because it's beginning to see how God has shaped you, how God has created

you. What kind of masterpiece are you?

When I look out here and see all your beautiful faces, you're God's masterpiece.

It's like God's art gallery in here, that God has created you,

redeemed you from brokenness, pieced you back together.

I don't know if your kids have ever broken anything in your house, have they?

I take it I'm not alone this morning in that.

We try and we try to piece that back together, whatever's broken,

especially if it's like a family heirloom or something.

In our house, in a special cabinet that we have in our dining room,

we have some precious moments figurines. Does anyone else have those in your house?

This was on our wedding cake, Melanie and I's wedding cake.

Interesting thing on this cake topper, though, that has never been fixed in 28 years of marriage.

The groom's head seems to be off of the cake topper.

I try not to take that personally.

I don't know what message to read into it. If I read too much,

I will definitely need some professional counseling, I do believe.

But we've made several different moves. I'm not saying anyone broke it on purpose

or anything through a rough patch in our marriage. I don't think that happened.

But I'm just wondering, why has it never been fixed?

Why haven't I fixed it? That's my other question.

You know, there's things in our lives that even though we come to Christ and

we repent and follow God, there's still those things like a broken precious

moments figurine that still needs to be fixed and put back together and to be made whole again.

And when we follow the way of Christ, when we live in to God's design for our

lives, God starts to put those pieces back together, even more perfect than

when they were originally broken.

Don't you hate that when you order a package, it comes to you,

and it's all busted up inside.

Man, that makes me mad. It says Fragile on the box and everything.

You're not supposed to break those things. Well, here it comes to you,

and then you got to call the factory. You got to call Amazon or the U.S. Post.

You got to do all this work just because they sent you something broken.

I wonder if God feels like that sometimes.

Here we are born, we're broken.

God doesn't mind, though. Because of his love, because of his grace for us,

he puts us back together, even better than when he found us like that.

All because of what Jesus did.

And so this morning, maybe you're going to stand there with a big question mark

over your head, just kind of saying, what do I do with this, Pastor?

Okay, I know that God's design was for me to live like this,

to serve Him, to love Him.

I know that I've been broken just because of sin in my life,

and I'm finding my way back through the gospel.

The good news that Jesus has already made the way for me, and all that I need

to do is to repent and believe and begin to follow Jesus into this way that

brings recovery to my life, that brings purpose to my life.

But I'm just not sure. Maybe some of you are here, if you think of a traffic

signal, some of you are on the red light, say, whoa, hang on,

dude, I'm just here for the chili.

This is good stuff, but I got to have time to process this and think I'm just

not ready. I got to give you a timeout. Hey, that's okay.

What I want you to do, if you're right there at the red light.

Hey, just remember, remember this, that if you're at the place of brokenness,

that there's a God that loves you and he's ready to help you take the next step.

Hey, enjoy some chili today. If that's just where you're at,

we'll definitely feed you some chili.

Maybe you're kind of at the yellow light and you're not gunning it to get through

the intersection, but you're just there.

And I'm just like, yeah, I know this, but I'm, man, you just don't know what

I've been through. And I'll say, yeah, I don't.

I don't know what you've been through. I don't know what's facing you or what

questions you have, but I'd love to explore it some more with you.

I know you've got a church full of people here that would love to take that

next step of exploration to say, hey, let's look at the word together.

Let's talk. And so if you're at that yellow, just not sure yet,

man, I've got to tell you, we can help you get through the yellow.

Maybe this morning you're at the green.

And at that green light, like, I am ready to do something. I'm tired of that brokenness in my life.

I'm ready to repent and turn. I'm ready to believe in Jesus.

And I want to tell you, it's not just a green light in your life,

but it's a green light here this morning.

It's a green light here that says, hey, take the next step that God has for you.

And how do you do that? Well, I've got a prayer, and I want to just display

the prayer up here for a little while.

What I would ask is just that you admit that your life is broken.

You're not admitting it to me.

Hey, I know what the Scripture says. All of us are broken. All of us have sinned

and fallen short of what God expects.

But if you'll admit to God that your life is broken, if you recognize that it's

because of that, that because of your sin that you need God, God listens.

If you believe that Jesus Christ came, lived a perfect life, a sinless life,

that he died for your sins, for the sin of the world, and that he was raised

again victorious over sin and death, for the purpose of rescuing you from that sin.

Boy, I've got to tell you, God hears you. And God especially hears when you ask him to forgive you.

He hears so much that there's a verse in the Bible that says,

if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us of those

sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Not just some of them, but the scripture says all of them.

And if we will turn from those selfish ways, if we'll repent,

if we'll turn away from those sins, and if we'll begin to trust God,

as the prayer says, and we're telling him this.

Then we open up ourselves to need some leadership, to need someone to be our

Lord. It's not the pastor that's your Lord. No.

It's not your Sunday school teacher that's your Lord. It's not your husband

or your wife or your boss at work, but it's the Lord himself.

It's God that wants to lead you and guide you and direct you.

And if you pray this prayer, if you mean it, guess what? He will. He will do that.

But what's still up to us if we're going to follow Him or if we're going to

go back around that circle the other way and go back into that brokenness?

Folks, I just want you to know that the choice is yours.

Where are you this morning? Are you at a red light? Are you at a yellow light?

Are you at a green light just ready?

And folks, it's not just for those that have never placed their faith in Christ before.

It's if we as believers have found ourselves sucked back into some brokenness

in our life that we did not submit to God.

God still wants to take that brokenness.

Jesus paid the price for all of your sin, for all of it.

And so this morning, as the praise team comes, we're going to sing a good old hymn of the faith.

And I just want you to have a few moments. You can sing along,

or you can just prayerfully consider where you're at with the Lord this morning.

And I want to come back to you and give you a chance to come to the altar and just pray.

Maybe it's this prayer that we had on the screen that you'd like to pray.

Whatever it is, let God speak to you in these next few moments, would you?

I want to thank you for joining today's sermon podcast. You can find a copy

of today's sermon, as well as other sermons, and the sermon outline from today

on our church's website,

www.mvcnaz.org.

It is my prayer also that you will seek out a church home that recognizes the authority of the Bible.