Why Are You Still Trying To Finish What Jesus Already Finished? | Galatians 3:1-14

So we just sang open up the heavens. A declaration of God to come in and let us see his glory. And two things that I learned from that song is number one, Megan hates me because I used to play drums for that song just about every week at our old church. So I have nightmares every time I hear that song. Number two, I learned y'all can't clap.

I mean, come on. It's like me and Casey, the only two clapping in this place. Let's practice. Hey, that's on B. Good job.

Good job. Next time, you can do that while the song's going. Anyways, there there's a reason that song is important and we need to think about what that the words of that song are saying to us. We need to we need God to reveal himself to us every day. I can tell you as your pastor, I need God to reveal himself to me every day.

I I spend an inordinate amount of time more than most people studying scripture because I'm preparing to to lead and to teach you as a church. But so many times, I will read through sections of this book and I leave with nothing. Have you ever done that? Like like you read scripture and you're trying to to find god in it but things kind of get in the way, our minds wandering and then at the end of it, you're like, what I even just read? Have you ever done that?

You can raise your hand. You can admit that. I hope that I'm not the only one. Sometimes I read it and I see nothing and it's not for those of us who who do that, it's not like a spiritual laziness kind of thing. It's sometimes it's just because we're checking off a box and trying to to get the the scripture reading in.

A lot of times it's like men are like this. How many men you walk through your house and you see a picture hanging on your wall and it's been there five years since the first time you saw it? Does that ever happen? Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

We walk by the same kind of stuff every single day and we don't even notice and oftentimes it's that same way with scripture. We walk by it, we read through it, and we see these things that we've probably read before and it doesn't speak to us. We don't even notice what's happening in scripture. Familiarity, it doesn't destroy things. It just kind of makes them invisible.

It makes us comfortable with those kind of things. And as Paul is writing to the Galatians, this book, this letter that we've been studying for the last few weeks, he's writing to a church who's kind of dealing with this exact same thing except for them. What was invisible wasn't a picture hanging on the wall. It had become the cross. They were walking by it every single day and they were missing the cross.

So if you've got your Bible, go ahead and open them up. We're in Galatians chapter three today and as we dig into Galatians chapter three, Paul as he writes this and he he we kind of got this from the first two chapters. He's furious with what's going on in the Galatian churches and and he starts out in verse one this way. Oh foolish Galatians. He opens with what would have been thought of in his day as an insult.

You fools. Oh foolish Galatians, who has cast an evil spell on you? Your version may say, who has bewitched you? And Paul's not saying what kind of sorcery has been laid on you. He's he's kind of using it as a figure of speech.

Who has drawn you away? It's like you're falling for some kind of evil spell. For the meaning of Jesus Christ's death was made as clear to you as if you had seen a picture of his death on the cross. That phrase as if you had had seen a picture in the Greek, that word is proagrafe. It's the idea of public notice.

It's not just a teaching word. It's it's this idea that that a poster or a sign has been nailed up and you can see it even those walking across the street can read it. Paul is saying, I preach the gospel to you. It wasn't just explaining the cross to you. It was posting it.

So, you could live on this and live on the truth that the gospel is real and that's why he's angry. Because his charge against the Galatians church isn't that they didn't see the cross, it's that they're totally forgetting about what they saw. They're just missing it now. They stopped looking for it. In verse two, let me ask you this one question.

Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not. You received the spirit because you believed the message you had heard about Christ. He asked them a question and and really this whole chapter and and the theme of the whole book kind of turns on this question. He's not asking them to to weigh a doctrine.

He's asking them to remember their conversion. Do you remember the moment that Jesus drew you to himself? Do you remember the moment that you said yes to Christ? Do you remember what was going on in your life when Jesus pulled you out of the middle of it and said, come to me. Do you remember the gospel and what he did for you?

Do you remember the day?' That's what he's asking them but it's a question we should ask ourselves. Do you remember what you were like before the gospel invaded your life and you said yes? Do you remember? The spirit the spirit came before anybody in a Galatians church had ever heard any of the words about the law, about circumcision. They didn't know any of the religious requirements that were on the table.

God moved in first. He didn't require anything. Which means, whatever has been built since, everything that you have built on your faith since you became a follower of Christ, every discipline that you have that can be a great discipline like reading scripture, every habit, every good, every hard one one thing about your walk with Jesus. You didn't manufacture the start of any of it. You did not earn the start.

They didn't earn it. None of us in this room earned it. Only Jesus did. Jesus plus nothing. Only for many of us, the cross is still there and we've stopped looking at it.

We miss it. We miss the whole point of all of it. We get caught up in the disciplines and the things that we need to do to be good Christians, and in the middle of it, we miss the one thing that really matters. Not intentionally, it's not like we're intentionally pushing it to the side, we just get busy and it becomes familiar and we just push it away and we forget the whole point. Paul says in verse three, how foolish can you be?

He's already called them fools once, now he's doing it again. How foolish can you be after starting your new lives, How? In the spirit. Why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? He says you started in the spirit and now you're trying to finish it in the flesh.

It makes no sense. It's foolish. That's the diagnosis that's going on in the Galatians church. And for many in the American modern church including some of us, that's our diagnosis too. Far more common than a heresy.

We can preach on heretical teaching and we do preach on heretical teaching, but this is far more common because it doesn't feel like heresy. It feels like discipline and growing in maturity. Because it's not bad things. It feels like someone who's finally taking our faith seriously, and we miss the cross in the middle of it. It plays out for me, it's still a struggle that I have.

I I've shared with you. I've been in ministry for for quite a few years. Started in youth ministry first, then planting a church. I knew that's what God was calling me to even though I ran from that calling for a while. I knew that's what God wanted me to do.

I didn't talk myself into it. God put me in this position. But you go have lunch or coffee with with another pastor and the questions automatically start up. Happened to me this week. I had lunch with a pastor friend of mine.

First question we ask, how many did you have Sunday? How many baptisms did you do this last year? And it's not like evil motives behind it. We're genuinely curious. It's a friendly question.

We're just that's the only thing that we know to evaluate what's going on in our churches and we genuinely want to know what's happening in your church, is God moving? So we ask the questions. But you know what happens to me sometimes? Sometimes quietly. Don't even realize it's happening and you start thinking, you had a thousand people Sunday, I had a 125.

God must really be moving in your church. Then I'll look at you. God is moving so much in the lives of the people of this church. How can I let a number pull me away? How can I let a number put pressure on me?

I would love to tell you I fixed that. It doesn't come for me often but sometimes it does. And the best way I know to say it is sometimes I trade faithfulness for performance. For the number. For the count.

To know how many were in the room and how many got baptized and how many were in a life group and how many did whatever. And when that happens, I don't notice it when it happens. Because performance and faithfulness look very similar. They're not bad things. From the outside, they look very similar.

For me, it's the same hours. I preach the same types of messages. I'm here the same kind of Sundays. The only difference is the motives that lie underneath it. And what it's trying to buy.

But here's here's the truth. Every single one of us in this room, we've got a number. For us, it's all different things. It's not probably for you how many people were in church on Sunday. For some of you, it's maybe how many Sundays in a row have I actually made it to church.

For some of you, it's how long have you been in your Bible and how many days this week did you actually read scripture. For some of you, it's like, how are my kids behaving? How are they turning out? There's different things that we measure ourselves on. For some, it's was I able to keep my temper with my spouse this week and not start an argument.

Or maybe it's whether I was generous and tied or gave this week or so many different things that we evaluate our spirituality on. Whether you're the kind of person that the church thinks that you are or if you're hiding something. These are all the things we've hammered for the last few weeks. That scorecard that we keep or scoreboard that we keep, the numbers, the metric that you have in your head, everybody has a number and we check it and sometimes we don't even realize we're doing it. But we do.

We check it more often than we would admit at least out loud. But flesh flesh can't finish what the spirit started in you. Your performance can't change anything that Christ did for you. Before you get the wrong idea from this message, Paul is not telling the Galatians you need to pull it back. You need to relax.

You need to stop working for the sake of the gospel. Quit disciplining yourself. The issue isn't how hard they work. The issue is the source of why they are working. Self empowered effort is leading you nowhere.

But spirit empowered effort, it's still hard work. It's still effort. Some of the hardest working people I know are also the freest spiritually people spiritual people that I know. They are working for the right motives. They're working for the kingdom and not for self.

They know the effort doesn't pay the bill. Jesus already paid it. Now they're just serving their king. Really, the bill is the whole problem. We have a performance tracker because we think we have to live up to a standard, But that bill, that bill has already been paid.

In verse four, have you experienced so much for nothing? Surely, was not in vain, was it? Do you hear the ache in Paul as he writes that? Was all this for nothing? Did you experience Jesus Christ?

Surely, it wasn't for nothing. Surely, was not in vain, he says. It's a hard question. Paul fully expects them to see the cross and come back. That's a question that we need to answer ourselves.

Every single one of us in this room, we've got to ask that question of ourselves regularly. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Am I missing the cross in the middle of this or am I doing it because I love Jesus and I just want to be closer and serve him? Or do we do it to keep that scorecard? Some of you've been at this a really long time.

Some of you've been believers since you were little kids. Years of effort. Years of showing up. Years of doing all the disciplines, all the things that you thought were going to work, and what do you have to show for it is not intimacy with God. It's exhaustion.

To the point where we think, is this even worth it anymore? Some of us even ask, do I want to be a Christian anymore? Is it worth it wearing me out? We're tired. The tired is not the same as faithful.

You've been running a long time, and somewhere you forgot what you were running to. Somewhere you missed the cross that was posted. We don't need to feel guilty about that. Guilt is not what this is about. We need to feel the loss of it.

The wasted years. I'm not telling you, you can lose what Christ has given you. If you are in Christ, if Paul has saved you, you cannot lose that. What Paul is grieving is the wasted time. It doesn't threaten their place in the family if they're truly followers of Christ.

That that position isn't threatened. But what he is frustrated with is the wasted time. You can waste a decade and still have Christ and be totally ineffective for the kingdom in the middle of it and miss the abundant life that he has for you? Are you missing the cross for performance? Maybe you don't call it that.

But is there a checklist that you keep that you have to do these things in order to be right with God? In order to be good enough? In verse five, if I ask you again, does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law? Because of performance? Because of anything that you did?

Of course not, he says. It's because you believe the message you heard about Christ. He's asking the same question a second time. He's he's closing this loop and it's the same answer, same way every single time. Everything that's real that has happened in your walk with God came in the same way, not through you, only through the cross.

It's all because of Jesus. It's by believing what you heard about Christ and putting your faith in him. And then Paul, he does something that's really brilliant. It really shows us that he was empowered by the spirit as he's writing this because the false teachers at the time in Galatia, they had this trump card that they could use. The trump card was Abraham.

That same Abraham that you sing a song about in Sunday school today. Father Abraham, that many songs. We're not gonna sing that right now. The covenant, Circumcision. If you want to end with God, you get in the way God that Abraham got in with God.

So what does Paul do? He doesn't avoid it. He goes straight to Abraham. And he takes that trump card and he claims it for the cross. In verse six, in the same way Abraham believed God and God counted him as righteous.

Why? Because of his faith. Not because of what he did, but because of his faith. He believed God. That was the entire transaction.

We need to see the timeline. When did this happen in the story of Abraham? God declared Abraham righteous before circumcision existed, before the law was given at Sinai. As a matter of fact, was over four hundred years before the law was even a thing. Before there was ever a single command that was laid out for the people to follow, there was nothing for Abraham to obey.

So if that's the truth, obedience could not possibly have been the thing that made Abraham right with God. It was faith. He believed in and he trusted God. So Paul claims that back and he follows that up in verse seven, the real children of Abraham are those who put their faith in God. What's more, the Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would make the Gentiles right in his sight because of their faith.

God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when he said, all nations will be blessed through you. Paul is saying that God preached the gospel to Abraham before we knew the gospel was a thing in advance before the cross, before the prophets, before Israel was even a nation. God announced this good news and he announced it to one man named Abraham. And he announced it to all nations through Abraham. He didn't even have kids yet.

And he says, everybody's gonna be blessed through you. From the first sentence, it's aimed at the crowd of outsiders who don't have a covenant claim, who aren't a part of the bloodline, who do not have the credentials for the faith. It was aimed at you and me. But when we read this story, we miss part of it pretty much every time. Abraham wasn't even looking for this.

Abraham wasn't looking for God. Abraham was a pagan from the land of Ur. Joshua 24 says it flat out. His family served other gods. He wasn't seeking the one true God.

He was not on some great spiritual journey. He wasn't some great man of the faith at this time. He didn't care anything about that and God interrupted his plan and drew him to himself. Some of you, you've heard pieces of of my story before I went into the faith, so we won't go through all of that again. But there was a version of my life when I was younger where I was chasing the next level of success, the next level of money.

I had a plan of what I wanted to do, and that was I wanted to make movies. Ever since I was a teenager, that's all I wanted to do, and I had a plan to get there. Film school. Then go to Hollywood. Make movies.

And what happened? God shut every single door. He never gave an opportunity for me to do any of those things. Now, I'm not saying that ambition is bad. If you have an ambition on you that God has laid on you, go after it.

It was never about what I was trying to do. The problem was it had nothing to do with the Lord. It was my plan. It was what I wanted to do and I was good with that. I wasn't running from God.

I was a believer. He just wasn't in the plan because his plan was not what I wanted. I knew even at that age that God was calling me into ministry and it was the last thing I wanted to do. And you've heard me talk about how I took that love for making film and video and tried to turn that into the ministry and God, that's not what he was calling me to do. But he came anyways.

He was patient with me, and he came even when I wasn't looking, even when it was the last thing I wanted. Verse nine, so all who put their faith in Christ share the same blessing Abraham received because of his faith. He came for a man who was not looking for him. And he came for you the same way. He comes for you every day.

He's chasing your heart. Every single day. Paul says it's the same blessing. It's not a lesser version of the blessing that was promised to Abraham. It's not some kind of guest pass to get you in the door.

He's saying you were a part of the family. It was planned for you before you even existed. He was drawing you to himself. You're not building your way into the family you're already in. The price has been paid.

You were bought into it by a decision God made to sacrifice His son on the cross for you. A God who's been coming after people who weren't looking for him ever since the first page of the book. Before I get into this next section, some of you are really good note takers. For this next section, I want you to focus. So put your pens down.

Because I want this to go to your heart, not to your hand. You can write it down later. I'll give you the notes later if you need them. But sometimes we get lost in taking the notes and miss the point. I want you focused.

In three ten, those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse. For the scriptures say, cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God's book of the law. Paul, when he shares that, he's quoting from Deuteronomy 27. And he's quoting it because he knows his readers will see the scene the second he brings it up. So let's get into the scene.

Israel, they've just come into the land. Moses, he gives an order. Six tribes go up on Mount Gerizim, six tribes go up on Mount Ebal. And the entire nation stands in the valley between these two mountains while the Levites, the priests, they read the curses of the covenant out loud one at a time. And every single time the whole nation answers back, Amen.

Amen. Amen. They cried out loud together. It's not doctrine. This is a room full of people who are singing this out loud.

Amen to the curses that are being declared. And then in the next chapter, God spells out what the terms are. Here they are. Cursed in the city, cursed in the field. Cursed coming in, cursed going out.

Your basket and your kneading bowl, your children, your crops, your herds, confusion in everything you set your hand to do. Sickness, blindness, madness, a trembling heart, and a mind that will not settle down. The curse is your work, it's your family, it's your food, your health, your sleep, your mind. It's everything. The penalty is applied to every department of every person's life.

That's the curse. It's total. And Paul says that anyone who relies on obeying the law, who has a scorecard that you keep even if you don't call it the law, if you rely on any sort of performance, you're under that. Not you might be under that, that is what you find yourself under as the curse. Because the terms of the curse aren't try harder.

The terms aren't do your best. The terms were keep every single command, all of it. Just it is as it is written continuously your whole life. But here's the trap that you get lost in. There's no partial credit.

There's no you did pretty good. Pass fail. Break one law, you're out. 99% of it right, you're still a failure. There is no curve.

The moment one command breaks, the entire terms of that covenant breaks and you're standing under the curse. In verses eleven and twelve, Paul says, so it is clear, no one could be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say it is through faith that a righteous person has life. This way of faith is very different from the way of the law which says it is through obeying the law that a person has life. Next week, we're going to talk about the law and what the meaning of the law really is for us.

This week, we're talking about why these two systems don't blend. On one hand, this system it receives, on the other hand, it demands. One says, here is a gift. The other says, you better earn this and then it's yours. And you can't do both of those things at the same time.

That's what we need to understand. Every time we we lean on performance for our value for god, it means you're actually trying to run that that plan of earning your own place in the kingdom. In the moment that you're standing becomes even 1% based on your performance, it's all based on your performance. It's not part in and part out. There is no such thing as mostly free.

So let's be clear. That's your verdict. You are under the curse. Every part of your life. Does that sound pleasant to you?

This isn't God saying I'm disappointed in you. This is God saying this is the requirement, perfection, a curse with my name on it, with your name on it, a comprehensive curse, and it covers everything and everyone that you love. And every single time we decide that our performance is what makes us acceptable to God, I'm just gonna be good enough, we're agreeing with the curse. Verse 13, but Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law when he was hung on the cross. He took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing for it is written in the scriptures, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.

He took upon himself the curse. Our translation kinda softens what that really says. Paul does not say Christ was cursed. That's an adjective, description of what is going on. That would just mean Paul endured something bad, or Jesus endured something bad.

Paul says, Christ became a curse. He did not merely suffer some curse, He took the position. He was the accursed thing. He stood exactly where that curse was aimed, and he took it all, Every bit of it. Every line that we read from the Levites, every clause in Deuteronomy 28, the city and the field, the coming and going, all of it.

Jesus took that on a Friday afternoon outside the city wall. He became the curse and then Paul finishes the verse by quoting from Deuteronomy 21. Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. Do you understand what he just did? That verse, that is the strongest argument in the Jewish world that Jesus could not be the Messiah.

A crucified man is cursed. Jesus was crucified, so he's cursed. Case closed. Move on. But Paul takes this thing that is meant to disqualify him and says, you don't understand what you're reading.

That isn't just, the argument against him, that is the explanation of how he pulled it off. He became the curse so that he could save us. The verdict was read. There was a name on it. The name wasn't yours.

It was Jesus. And it was finished before you ever did anything. Every morning you that you wake up and try to get things right with God, they're already right. You're already squared up with God. Every checklist that you have, every number that you keep account of, everything that you try to track to make sure your account with God is in good standing, that account is closed.

Those payments that you've been making on this debt, that debt has been cleared. And the receipt, Paul says, was posted when he preached the gospel to the church. And they're walking right past it. That's why I can stand here and tell you I firmly believe a person in Christ that can never be revoked. If you are in Christ that cannot change not because your faith is strong enough.

I know mine's not every single day. It cannot change because that curse, it's already been exhausted. All of it has been paid for. There isn't a second curse left. That was it.

There's none of it held in reserve. It landed and it landed completely and it landed on Christ for you. But that exchange it runs both directions. He took the curse and what came back across? Most of us assume it's alright.

Go keep a good record. Go keep yourself clean. Do the right things. What came across was a fresh start. It wasn't go be good.

It was you are now clean and guess what you get for it. Verse 14, through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith. What do you get? What's your reward? God is your reward.

The indwelling of the holy spirit is your reward. You get the spirit. Christ took the curse and what did you get? You got him. Look at how that verse is built.

You have two purposes. They're stacked on top of each other. Each one, it turns out to be the same. The blessing of Abraham, it comes to the Gentiles, and we get the spirit. Paul lays them side by side.

It's not a concept. It's not your legal status or some category that has to be fulfilled, it's God living inside of His people who could never have earned it to Himself. He took the curse. You get the spirit. That's the trade.

I've seen it. Recently, I saw it play out. See it all the time, but this is my most recent example. A couple of weeks ago, us, there was a group of I think eighteen, nineteen of us men went to Nashville for the Nashville Men's Conference. We had an incredible time just hanging out together, worshiping together, 4,000 guys in this room.

4,000 men all standing there praising Jesus Christ. And you stand there and you look across the room and I remember who I was sitting next to, but we were talking about this. You look across the room, you see guys in golf shirts. Probably guys who just came to the office, came from the office on their way to this event. Next to them, guys covered in tattoos.

Every background you can think of in the room. Every kind of wreckage you can think of was represented in that room. Men who lost marriages. Men who'd done some pretty terrible things. Probably men who'd been locked up Sitting next to men who looked like they had it all together and they clearly did not.

Sitting next to teenagers who were just trying to figure it out. 4,000 voices raised together as one. I'll tell you, it's something to experience when you hear 4,000 men singing for Jesus. There's just something that hits different with that. Now, we could stop there and talk about how awesome that was.

It was an incredible time, a moving worship service. God spoke to, I think, all of us through the preaching of the word, and we could move on and say, that was awesome. That's not what that really was. That was Genesis twelve three represented in the room. All the walls, all the barriers broken down.

All nations blessed through Abraham, that is the promise. And the differences that were in that room, that is a miracle. God tore down those walls and brought this group of guys together that had no business being together. The whole argument of Galatians three is that promise and every wall that was built up to contain it crumbled. 4,000 men from every background you can imagine singing the name of Jesus Christ and the wall was crumbling.

But that's not the part that actually gets me. If we stop there, we it's limited to an event. Don't take me wrong, the event was incredible. What happens on Monday when you're standing at home and nobody's around to sing with you? You assume God left the crowd.

Now what astonishes me when I think about what God's doing isn't the 4,000 men, even though that was incredible, that that same grace that holds up those 4,000 men holds up every single one of us on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday when you're driving to work, just a normal day. Nobody else to sing with. You see, the volume of that room, it kind of reveals what's going on but it didn't create it. And I don't have to go very far to prove it. We do fight club here.

Fight club and flourish. Flourish is our women's gathering that we do. Fight club is our men's gathering. I've never been to flourish because I'm not female. So hopefully you all get to experience some of these same things.

Fight club, we meet several times a year for four weeks or six weeks at a time depending on the season. And this last session that we just wrapped up, I saw this. Four straight weeks, four different men got up to share. Four totally different perspectives on their faith, totally different places in their faith. They talked about manhood and the struggles.

They they talked about what it looks like to be a father. Four different stories, totally different stories of God's redemption. And every single one of them, they were honest about what they're still fighting with. There's no fluff in their stories. And you think about what that actually took.

Men don't stand up in a room and confess their struggles when they're trying to look good and perform. Nobody confesses in a room if you're keeping score. But the fact that those men were able to share like they did, It's not about a program. That's the fruit of what we're reading about. God tearing down walls.

That's the spirit invading a room on a Wednesday night in Kodak, Tennessee, speaking through broken people and showing how great God is. It's the same miracle. It's a little quieter room. 4,000, that's a pretty high volume. But so often, miss what God's doing right next to us.

The cross is there and we walk right past it. If you are a note keeper, pick your pen back up because this is the one I wanna leave you with. We've said it several times. It was finished before you started. So how are we gonna close this morning With one challenge.

Not a list of things to do this week. One thing. What is the place you're still trying to finish for yourself? The marriage? The addiction that you can't let go of and nobody knows about?

Your parenting, your reputation in your school, That failure that you look at every morning in the mirror and keep bringing it back up to yourself. What's the number you check? Gotta do this to be good enough. What is it for you? We've all got it.

We've all got those things we can't let go of. And whatever it is for you, that's the one place that quietly, often without even realizing it, you have decided the cross can't reach it. But Jesus covered it all. So this week, before you take another swing at that thing, look back at this passage especially verse 13. Take a look at it.

Don't work on it. Look at this. Because the curse has already been lifted. It landed on him. He became the curse so that you don't have to.

So here's how we're gonna close this morning, and it might feel a little strange to close this way, but I don't see any other way to close this than to just go and worship. We're not gonna end with something for you to do. We're going to end it the way text leads us. We're just gonna stand here and look at the cross. And we're gonna sing of how awesome God is, and we're gonna invite him into this place and ask him to reveal himself to us.

But before we do that, some of you, everything that I just described, the curse, the verdict, you're still sitting under it. Not because God hates you or is angry with you, but because you refuse to come out from under it and surrender. Here's what Christ did. Everything that was aimed at you, he took it on himself. He became the curse so that you don't have to.

All of it. He took it, and in him it was nailed to a cross. And he walked out of a grave three days later, and he says, it's all yours. What do you have to do to get it? Believe.

Trust Jesus. Totally free. Surrender. I mean, this means you're giving your life to Jesus, but it costs you nothing. You don't have to perform.

You don't have to do anything. You just say, take me, God. Use me. You got my life. I know I'm gonna mess up.

There's no payment plan for this, though. It's totally free. I trust Jesus. Jesus. I surrender.

That's it. And he will take you, and he will change you, and he will mold you over the course of your life into what he wants you to be. You don't have to clean up first. There's not some checklist you gotta come across first. You come empty handed.

You say, I believe you are who you say you are. Take me, Lord. Save me. If that is you, don't work on a better version of yourself because it's not gonna happen. As we sing, I'm gonna be up here.

Just come out of life. I love there's nothing I would love more to do today than talk with you about that. So if he is drawing you in, come, let's talk. If you don't want to come talk to the big scary pastor, grab somebody else and say, God's doing this, Lord. He's working in me.

Would you just I just want to share it. Show me what I'll do next. For the rest of us, we're gonna sing. In a few moments, we're gonna close it out with a song that you have probably sang your whole life. Jesus paid it all.

And as you sing, it's not just words. Pay attention to what you're singing. He paid it all. It doesn't say he's paying it. He doesn't say I'm going to pay it.

It's paid. Past tense, it's done. Totally finished. That's what we are celebrating today. So many times, We walk past it, and we miss it because it's just become normal.

My prayer for you today is that it's not normal anymore. Are you astonished at the cross? Do you stand in awe of what God has done? Let's pray. Father, as we close today, Lord, there are people in this room who do not know Jesus.

And I pray that right now you are convicting their hearts that they need a savior, that they can't clean themselves up, and that they see Jesus became that curse so that they can have freedom, so that they can be turned loose, that they can have purpose, that they are no longer bound by performance but covered in your love. Father, I pray that you would draw them to yourself right now. And Lord, that right now, in this moment, are people who are asking you, who are confessing, God, I know. I know I'm broken. I know I need a savior, and I believe Jesus paid it all.

So I ask you, Lord, to save me. I give you my life. Lord, for others in this room, we've just missed the cross. We've been missing it recently anyways. We we've forgotten we've forgotten that moment.

So I ask you, Lord, remind us, help us to be in amazement of the cross again, to stop trying to perform our way to please you, to just rest because you are God and you've already taken care of all of it. Father, move. Give us the courage to respond in Jesus' beautiful name.