The Habit Of Grace

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

We're so thrilled to have you join us this Super Bowl Sunday.

I want to invite you to go ahead and check.

I don't know.

I'm loud though.

Am I in the house though, too?

I thought you guys were just ignoring me.

I was a little her, you know.

Um, hey, as we begin today, I I want to, before we dive into the sermon, I have two things that I want to cover.

One was planned, one was not.

Uh the first is I always wrestle with when do I address stuff that's happening in our world.

Um, and I felt like this is appropriate.

Last Thursday, President Trump posted a racist video dehumanizing former uh President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Let's be clear.

That's evil, it's wrong.

That's not political, that's moral.

As Christians, we follow a Middle Eastern rabbi who was executed by Rome.

Jesus lived under empire, suffered injustice, was publicly humiliated, yet the response was to call out evil.

It's gonna be real loud.

There we go.

And and love his enemies.

Racism must be named.

Dehumanization is a direct violation of the truth that every human being is made in the image of God.

When that image is mocked or denied, especially by those in power, it's an offense to the heart of God.

To our black brothers and sisters, we see you, we grieve with you, and we stand with you.

Our allegiance is not to a party or a politician, but to Jesus and his kingdom.

May we be a people who speak the truth with courage, reject cruelty in every form, and reflect the love and character of Christ in a fractured world.

Amen.

I hate that that's the state of the world that we live in that I even have to start there today.

And so, Jesus, you invite us to pray, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And so in this moment, in our day, for us, give us this day our daily bread.

And as it's so easy to look out and see the faults and wrongs of others, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory.

Forever and ever.

Amen.

The second thing's way better, okay?

Um, our mission as awakened, the reason we exist is we exist to awaken this generation to new life in Jesus.

Several years ago, three years ago to be exact, we wrote down a vision statement.

A vision statement is just a picture of a preferred future.

It's uh what should be and could be in light of what currently is.

And we wrote this down.

Through the power of the Spirit and the intentional equipping of every generation, the heartbeat of awakening will be that we are ascending church of college students and young professionals that are deeply rooted in their faith and calling.

And really exciting.

We're just seeing colleging young professionals uh flock to Jesus right now and to awakenings.

Really exciting.

Uh, with a new facility, we'll create a training center to raise up a church filled with people who hunger for the presence of God, with the people of God, whose hearts breaks for those who are far from Jesus and are moved with compassion to mend the injustices in our world.

Our facility will be a resource for the community to meet the needs of our city.

So, one thing I want you to first notice do you hear our vision in alignment with our word and theme of the year pursue?

We long to passionately pursue the heart of God.

What does it look like to be a church that passionately pursues the heart of God?

The other thing is something that you may not have given a lot of thought about unless you're part of our space and setup team, is that we are pursuing a long-term location.

We have been for years now.

Um last Sunday, we took some of our core of awakening to go see in a potential location for us.

Um, yeah, and there's gonna be some of you excited, the rest of you need to serve on Space Team.

Um by myself.

We are in the early stages of negotiations here on a location.

And as we get more detail, I'll bring you in on this.

Um, what we can say is Delmar has been just an incredible home for 13 and a half years.

We are maximizing this space.

We do not have midweek space.

Constantly we run into like our fourth and fifth grade class had to move because the room we used is no longer available to us.

Uh, we don't know whether we have parking on a given Sunday and different spaces alike.

And then midweek, we just, I mean, this is really exciting.

Jenny gets a text that uh our c we have a college girl small group that meets at um Paris Baguette.

It's awesome, right?

Uh and it just keeps growing.

There's like 14 college girls showing up at Paris Baguette.

It's amazing.

They're like, I think we need a bigger space.

We don't have any space for them to go to because our office that we do have is completely maxed through uh on Mondays and through the week.

And so it's time for us to take next steps to have a permanent footprint here in Silicon Valley to lighthouse for this generation, for this area.

And so, a couple things that I'm gonna ask us to do.

One, I just want to let you know, Delmar, uh, we serve and love this campus.

Nothing is gonna change regardless of where we meet.

Uh, secondly, four things I want to ask you to commit to with us in this season, because we're getting serious.

We're not engaged yet, but we're dating with this building, okay?

Uh we're getting serious.

One, would you pray for wisdom?

We need wisdom.

Uh the second, we need faith.

This is a big step.

It means taking some steps into the unknown.

We've been here 13 and a half years.

Um would you uh pray that um we would have favor with the landlord?

That's been a big issue, and right now we do.

We just want to continue to that.

And then the final one, so uh wisdom, faith, favor, and then the last one's provision.

So it's gonna require more and cost more, and we need God to provide.

And so would you just begin to pray, God, would you begin to provide for us in ways as a church that we can step into this next season to be able to fulfill our mission of awakening this generation in the way we believe you've called us to see do it.

And as we see God's grow our community, our heart is to create a family of churches by planning and awakening churches to reach this generation and the renewal of culture through God's word, spirit, and people.

Amen.

All right.

You want to let's go to the sermon, I guess.

Let's do that.

We're in a series called Messy Spirituality.

We kicked it off last week.

And life is messy, isn't it?

And something we don't talk about enough is walking with Jesus is messy.

It's it tends to be messier than most churches care to mid, and messier than what our Sunday morning smiles show.

We long for real deep change, but what do you do when trying harder only leaves you exhausted?

When the patterns you hoped would be gone by now, well, they're still there.

And the question that lingers that we wrestle with is will I ever really change?

How do you embrace a messy spirituality that actually makes a difference?

We kicked off messy spirituality and said this confession of a messy spirituality, which by the way is the only kind of spirituality that works, but the confession of messy spirituality is this.

You ready for this?

I am a mess, go for it.

I can't unmess myself.

Only Jesus can.

I'm a mess.

We all show it up in some form, a bit of a mess.

We may cover it differently or better, but we are.

And our best efforts cannot undo that, only Jesus can.

Now, here's what's exciting.

Last Sunday was what we're we call an invite Sunday, a great Sunday to invite those who are in your life that are spiritually seeking, looking, to say, hey, come on, this is gonna be a fantastic Sunday to just come uh explore spirituality, explore Jesus.

30 plus people responded to the gospel last weekend.

Isn't that awesome?

And I keep hearing different stories of people, one watching online and uh elsewhere, that just God's working and moving.

We saw college students inviting roommates and friends, high schoolers inviting family and classmates, young professionals, inviting coworkers.

It just wasn't the way to go, church.

That was awesome.

God is working.

Today in our time together, I want to talk about the messy middle that we find ourselves in.

Like, how do you live out this new life with Jesus?

I'm a mess.

Thanks, Ryan.

I can't unmiss myself perfect, only Jesus can.

Okay, what do I do now?

The moment you place your faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit of God brings about what's a spiritual birth, new life, and awakening.

Those who have stepped into this new life, it's like seeing for the very first time.

Your heart is set afire, purpose, meaning, and joy.

You infuse your life.

You find some things that you once did you no longer have a desire to.

You have a passion for reading God's word and sharing your life change with everyone you meet.

You ever been around someone that just came to know Jesus?

They're just like on fire.

You remember when you did?

Because the one you were searching for and longing for, you found in Jesus.

But then one day, one day you started to notice something, a tension in your soul of this wrestling.

You began to realize a problem.

And the problem is this that I brought my old mess into my new life with Jesus.

I brought my old mess into my new life with Jesus.

In fact, if you stepped into faith with Jesus as a teenager, as a 20, as a 30, as a 40, you are experiencing a tension you never had before.

And the tension is this you find yourself doing the very things you don't want to do.

And though you don't want to do them, you find that you keep doing them.

You didn't experience this tension before.

You're just like, yeah, I'm good.

I'm good with it.

You promise you'll stop, you'll change, but you find that you keep doing them.

On top of that, you're not doing the things you really want to do or responding the way you want to respond.

The Bible calls this, it's a technical term, the flesh.

Our sin nature, our old patterns, attitudes, actions, thought patterns, instincts.

It's our default ways of living apart from God.

That spirituality may have you have been made alive and new, and now at the same time, you've brought your old mess with you into this new life.

The Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 7 speaks to this very tension, this problem.

Romans 7 · chapter mention

I like how Eugene Peterson unpacks it in the message.

He says, something has gone wrong deep within me, and it gets better the better of me every time.

It happens so regularly that it's predictable.

The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up.

I truly delight in God's command, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight.

Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.

I've tried everything and nothing helps.

I'm at the end of my rope.

Is there no one who can do anything for me?

Isn't that the real question?

The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does.

You feel that?

Been there?

Walking in it?

This tension that we feel.

We brought our old mess into our new life.

Our solution is we try harder.

And we try harder and we do good for a little bit, and then we trip, then we fail, then we slide back.

And it just feels like life's on repeat.

It's here, shame is given the loudest voice in our lives.

You're such a failure.

How many times can you come to God with the same mess?

After all Jesus has done for you, you keep doing this.

The problem.

I brought my old mess into my new life.

God's solution is not guilt but grace.

When you bring your old mess into your new life, your solution is to guilt yourself, to shame yourself.

Somewhere along the way, we think that will motivate us and help us change.

Guilt has never created sustained life change, period.

God's solution is not guilt, but grace.

Grace, the grace of God not only is the beginning of the Christian life, it is the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Grace is God's undeserved favor in our lives, God's power to accomplish what we are powerless to do in our lives.

Grace is how we're saved, grace will carry you through.

And so listen to chapter 7, Paul's saying there's this tension.

I have this tension.

I brought my old life or my old mess into my new life.

And then he says in Romans 8, therefore, there is no what?

Okay, let's try it again.

Try it again.

Therefore, there is now no for those who are in Christ Jesus.

He talks about this tension, he talks about this wrestling that you've experienced, that I've experienced, that fills us with such a sense of defeatedness, because guilt becomes our story, shame becomes the soundtrack of our lives, and Paul immediately follows it up in Romans 8:1.

Romans 8:1

Therefore, therefore, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Like, well, kind of a little bit, right?

Probably a smidgen.

You mean no condemnation at all?

Not even a hint.

You see, there's a big difference between condemnation and conviction.

We get this confused all the time.

Condemnation is a legal verdict of guilty, deserving punishment, living condemned.

Condemnation's often vague, general, attacking your identity.

You are worthless.

You are broken beyond repair.

You deserve this.

You'll never change.

You're a failure.

Condemnation always moves us away from God and to hiding.

You have a spiritual enemy that wants you to believe the lie.

You are not lovable.

You are not wantable.

And the fact that you keep tripping over that just proves it.

In fact, Robert McGee in his book Search for Significance says, this belief that we believe begin to believe is those who fell are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished.

Conviction, on the other hand, is what the Spirit of God uses to lovingly highlight areas of our lives that need healing, surrender, or change.

It's specific.

Naming what needs attention so grace can do its work.

Condemnation says you failed and you are a failure.

Conviction says because you are loved and accepted, this doesn't belong in your life.

Condemnation focuses on your failure.

Conviction focuses on God's faithfulness.

Condemnation comes from the accuser, conviction comes from the spirit.

Condemnation drives you into hiding.

Conviction draws you in to a light.

The reason there is no condemnation is that the moment that you place your faith in Christ Jesus, I'm a mess.

I can't unmess myself.

Only Jesus can.

Would you come into my life?

Something happened.

That something theologically is called justification.

Yeah, we're gonna learn some theo here.

All right?

You say that word with me, justification.

Justification is this in Christ, you have a new standing and a new identity.

It's a legal term.

You are declared righteous, fully forgiven, completely accepted, and adopted as a beloved child of God.

Romans 5, 1 through 2 says, Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith and to this grace in which we now stand.

How do we stand right now?

Grace.

Grace got you in.

Grace is how you stand.

Grace sees you through.

The picture the Bible uses over and over is that of adoption.

Under Roman law, adoption was legal, public, and permanent.

Once a father adopted a son, the son received a new legal identity, his old debts were canceled, he gained full inheritance and rights, he came under the absolute authority and protection of his new father, and he could never, ever be disowned.

You now have a new identity and standing in Christ.

Adopted, beloved, daughter, son of the King Most High.

Years ago I came across this story of a family that adopted this little girl.

She was about ten years old.

Her background, she came from a really broken home, as so many kids do, that are taken out of homes, brought into the foster care system, and uh then adopted.

Um they found that she um was hiding food in her room.

And they came, you know, in and would find stuff hidden underneath her bed in different places.

And they began to ask, you know, and do some research, where did this come from?

And they've come to find out.

This little girl lived in a home where the fridge, the pantry, they were padlocked.

You did not have access to it.

So you couldn't just get food anytime you wanted or when you needed.

And on top of that, one of the ways she was punished was placed in a room for several days and locked in there.

She just learned a coping mechanism to figure out how to survive, is when she had access to food, she would pocket a little bit of it.

And she would just kind of put it and hide it.

So in those lonely days, locked in a room, she would have some food.

Do you know how the new adoptive parents responded?

They didn't go to the little girl and go, What in the world were you thinking?

Stop it.

What's wrong with you?

What they did was they took this little girl to the fridge and said, I know this is going to take a while, but what you need to know is the fridge will never be locked.

You have access all the time because you have a new home and a new reality.

And it's going to take a while, and I get it, but you're loved.

See, your new identity in Christ is your reality, even though you keep going back to your old mess.

And that's what we the problem is we think our old mess signifies our old identity.

See, there's a different word for this, this process of becoming more like Christ.

Justification.

Love.

That is who you are in Christ.

No matter what you're going through, no matter what you do, it's true.

And nothing you can do can undo that.

And then there's this word sanctification.

Sanctification is the lifelong process of learning to live out what's already true of you in Christ through the empowering grace of God.

Sanctification, like this little girl, is the lifelong process of unlearning old habits, unlearning old ways of being, unlearning some things that were the ways we coped, the way we got by, the things that just helped us, and learning to live out our new identity in Christ.

Sanctification is grace teaching you how to live at home in your new identity.

I love that.

When I thought about sanctification, I thought about it like a graph like this, Christ-likeness is, you know, if we're going up this way, and then time following Jesus right here.

And where you go, like, okay, the process of sanctification probably should look something like this.

Like I come to know Jesus right here.

And then as I come to know him, I'm kind of growing in him, and I have peaks and I have valleys.

But pretty much it's just up and to the right.

I'm a terrible line drawer, uh, aren't I?

Um but it's just kind of up and to the right.

Like the things that I struggled with in year one or two, uh, those are old, and I'm kind of dealing with new things over here, and and I'm just kind of progressing and I'm becoming more and more like Christ.

The problem is, is this is how I feel sometimes or often about my own journey.

And especially as I was wrestling with this, is instead of a graph, I feel like I'm just stuck on a loop.

You ever feel that?

Yeah, you're just stuck on it's like a closed loop.

And here it comes again.

I hit the same issue again.

Right?

Oh God, I don't want to please tell me, please help me.

I come around, I just keep hitting the same thing.

And we feel like we're stuck on this track or this loop, and we just keep hitting the same thing over and over and over again.

And be honest, it's defeating, isn't it?

It's discouraging.

Man, I keep bringing my old same mess that at 15 and at 25 and at 35 and at 45, and I'm not older than that.

Um here's the realization that I had.

And maybe maybe this has been your experience too.

I'm not actually on a loop.

Yes, I keep hitting some of the same things over and over again, but it's more like a spiral staircase.

And yeah, I hit some of these at 15, at 25, at 35, at 45.

I may be hitting some of the same issues, but I'm not hitting them at the same altitude.

So my personal story I've shared with you before, I uh when I was like eight years old, I walked into a room where a movie was playing, I saw uh pornographic images, it just impacted me.

My teenage years was when the computer, um, like internet, not the computer, I'm not that old.

Uh the internet was just coming online and uh you could start to search, and it was dreadfully slow, by the way.

I mean, it was dial up, it took like four or five minutes to download one image.

I got hooked on pornography.

Just like a part of my life.

17.

I give my life a fresh lordship to Christ.

I'm still struggling with it.

Then I go to college and I'm actually studying theology, wanting to follow Jesus with my whole heart, and I'm still struggling with it.

And there's like the amount of shame and the amount of guilt, like it's just a failure.

And the enemy whispers, and I grind you're just a screw up.

You'll never change.

This is just who you are.

I just felt like I'm on this track hitting repeat, nothing's changing.

The thing that had the most powerful transformation in my life was a dream I had uh in this area, at least when it comes to pornography.

I was in college, even had thoughts of self-harm and all those other things that come.

And I had this dream one night.

I I um in my dream, I walked into my dorm room, the lights were all off, and there sitting at the desk in my dorm was this blonde-haired boy, eight years old.

That was me.

And I saw the light hue of the screen kind of on the face of this little boy, and my heart broke.

Because for the first time, instead of shaming myself, guilting myself, condemning myself, I began to see myself the way my heavenly father saw me.

Like he's not angry, his heart just breaks.

He's not down, he just wants to help.

His heart is for your good, for my good.

See, the Christian life is not about behavior modification, it's about identity formation.

The more we understand who we are in Christ, gosh, I gotta tell you, your desires begin.

You're like, oh, I'm living into my new identity, adopted son and daughter.

The Apostle Paul talked about a pattern in his life.

He called it a thorn in the flesh.

We're not told what it was.

It could have been a physical issue, a spiritual struggle, a persistent weakness.

What we do know is God prayed, or Paul prayed for God to take it away, deliver it from him, and God gave him a different response.

He said, My grace is sufficient for you.

For my power is made perfect in weakness.

The same grace that met you when you first said yes to Jesus.

I'm a mess, I can't unmess myself, only Jesus can, is the same grace that meets you today.

And it's the same grace that's gonna meet you this afternoon.

And it's the same grace that's gonna meet you when you're in whatever dark room you are or whatever place you're at where you're going like, I don't think Jesus wants me or wants to be around me.

I feel like such a failure.

He says, Grace poured out on you.

His unearned, undeserved favor, God's power working for you to do what you cannot do on your own.

And so that confession of messy spirituality isn't just like a one-time thing, it's a daily thing.

God, today I just feel it.

I'm a mess, and I know I recognize I can't unmess myself.

There is no power like powerlessness because when we finally recognize that we are powerless, we will turn to the one who has all power to meet our needs.

But as long as we try to maintain our own self-sufficiency, we'll never experience the sufficiency of Christ.

I can't, but you can.

And once more I come to the throne of grace.

And I think what you'll find like me, as you journey over these years, yeah, there's some times you hit the same thing.

I don't I don't hit it the same way.

I don't struggle with porn, so you your pastor can, you're like, but I still struggle with lust.

I hit it in a different way, in a different altitude.

I'm not where I want to be, but thank God I'm not I'm not where I once was.

By his grace, he is forming and changing me.

So I don't know where you walked in.

Maybe you're on the verge of giving up, feel defeated, a failure.

Maybe you feel so bad coming back to God with the same thing for the thousandth time.

In fact, um, I used to play a lot of music.

I remember writing a song, uh worship song, or my own kind of worship prayer song, and the line goes, here I am again.

But the same thing I've prayed a thousand times.

What I want you to know is right where you're at, what you're walking through, his grace is more than enough for you.

And would you invite him into the messiness?

Invite him into the places that you push down or you hide away so that his grace can meet you there.

Because here's what I know, and this is what I've clinged to.

This is one of those passages that I've clinged to.

What I'm sharing with you is just like this is basically Ryan's learnings over 20 plus years.

What I am confident of for your life and for my life, and the promise that I cling to and hold on to is what he began, he will complete.

And you need to hold on to this.

Because I can tell you there's days you're like, man, I don't really feel like it.

I feel like I'm just not even gonna amount to anything.

I feel so far behind in life.

I feel like a mess, Ryan.

You're right, messy spirituality.

And Jesus gave you a promise.

What he began in you, he will complete.

And so if he hasn't completed it yet, he's not done with you yet.

Being confident of this, the apostle Paul would write, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.

Being confident of this, daughter, son, yeah, you brought your old mess into your new life.

Your heavenly father loves you, he's so for you.

Fridge never gonna be locked.

And it's the consistency of his grace that forms us to where we start to just realize, ah, I get to live in the freedom and the light.

It's the invitation in.

And it's not based on my faithfulness, but my ability or your ability.

Who began the good work?

Jesus.

Who will finish the work?

That's really good news.

That's really good news.

Because somehow we get into this idea and mentality that, like, yes, we're saved by grace, and then now it's all on me.

I gotta really show up and prove myself.

Jesus, like, hey, listen, child, you can't even do it.

So let me do it through you.

When you admit you can't do it, I want to do it through you.

I want to work through you.

I can't, but you can.

And I'm gonna see you all the way through.

Jesus, thanks for my friends.

Thanks for this time.

God, I just I know that in this room, as we're talking about like the the honest stuff.

That you want to do a deep freeing work.

May your grace just pour over each person, that they just would have a fresh reality of your love, your kindness, that they'd understand their identity in you.

Not because of anything they've done, all because of what you've done.

Would you make us a people?

Daily.

The habit of our life is just to come to you.

I can't.

I can't, but you can.

Would you step into this mess, Jesus?

Step into this place.

Would you bring life?

Would you meet me here?

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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