Paradise: The Way Back: Luke 23: 32-34 with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor at MetaCurch, and I hope that today's message is inspiring and enlightening and really builds you up wherever you're at in life.

Well, I want to welcome you in.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

I'm so glad that you joined us wherever you're watching from, if you're with us here physically at our Holotus location.

I'm so glad you joined us today.

If you're watching with us online, I'm so glad that you've chosen to stream with us.

Now, what we do here at MetaCurch right now is we're walking line by line through the Gospel of Luke.

We just finished Luke chapter five, but we are stepping out of that for these three weeks.

We have Palm Sunday today.

We have Easter next Sunday.

By the way, anybody excited for Easter next Sunday?

That's meant a golf clap for Easter.

That's great.

God came back to life.

Okay, we're we'll we'll get there, okay?

I will wake you up today, I promise.

Uh after that, here's your chance.

After that, we have baptisms.

Is anybody excited for baptisms?

Oh my gosh.

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness.

I mean, I'm I'm excited for all of it.

I want to remind you that next week is the ultimate opportunity to invite people who do not know Jesus to come sit with you at a service.

At both of our venues today, we have invite cards that I want to encourage everybody to grab on your way out so that you can put this in the hand of the person that you care about who is not involved in a faith community, who does not know Jesus, and invite them to come sit with you at one of our Easter services.

I just want to remind us as well that baptism is the best thing that we do here at MetaCurch.

I cannot wait.

We are three weeks out from this, and we have over 50 people signed up to get baptized across our venues.

And so if you've put your faith in Jesus and you have not taken that next step that Jesus commands of us to go public with our faith in baptism, I want to encourage you to get baptized on April 12th.

We get baptized at the venue where we consistently attend.

We are making a statement that we are taking ground in this city and that we intend to take more and more ground for the kingdom of God.

Now, we are in a series starting today going through baptism called Paradise.

Paradise, a three-week series.

And so what I'm doing is I'm gonna step out of Luke, and today I'm gonna preach out of Luke.

I just can't, I can't get away from Luke.

I don't know what to tell you.

I'm very excited about our message today, though, because we have these two characters that show up at not just like the climactic moment in scripture, that would be significant enough that Luke diverts attention to these other two men.

This is the pinnacle of human history.

God has stepped out of heaven and into our world for this moment, right here on a cross.

We say it all the time, the cross was not a detour, the cross was the destination.

Amen?

At this moment, it seems rationally like all attention should be on Jesus.

Yes, there are other men getting crucified that day, but in the Roman Empire, that is nothing new.

There are men getting crucified all of the time in the Roman Empire.

Why bring these guys up?

It's also interesting because we hear about these men in all four Gospels.

Matthew and Mark just kind of mentioned them, John just kind of mentions them, but Luke goes deep and he explains them in a greater level of detail than any of the other authors of the Gospels.

And if you've been here in our Luke series, you know that Luke is very, very detail-oriented.

He is a physician in the ancient world, he is a historian of the highest caliber.

We also have some insight that Luke went and got eyewitness account from everyone he could find, and we believe that Luke also interviewed Mary, the mother of Jesus, who we learn in the Gospels was at the foot of the cross.

Mary was possibly close enough to have heard this interaction, and she could tell Luke in detail, and he writes at a level of detail that the other three Gospels simply omit.

And there is something to be learned that could radically change your life, not just in the death of Jesus Christ, which is like everything to us, it's why we're here today, but also in the lives and the response of these two men.

And so we have to pay very careful attention.

Now, these two men we don't know a whole lot about.

One of them we have a name, not in scripture, but this man became such an important pillar of the faith that in the earliest church they had found out the name of the repentant thief, and his name is loaded with meaning.

His name is Dismas.

And Dismas, if you just were to dig into the meaning, it means something like sunset or finish line or even rock bottom.

If you were to name somebody with the same idea today, their name might be something like this.

Dismas might mean the end of the road.

The end of the road.

He could not have a more appropriate name.

If you are on a Roman cross, you are definitively at the end of the road.

Rome had become experts in all of the world in both torture and execution.

And their magnum opus was the cross.

It was crude and it was simple, but it was the ultimate bringing together of torture and execution.

Up to this point in human history, nobody has figured out a more cruel and horrific way to put someone to death than a Roman cross.

If you are on a Roman cross, you are at the end of the road.

And in Torres, I was preaching to about 200 men.

Some of them were there for a few more months and then they would make parole, some for a few years, some for a few decades.

Some of these men had life sentences, they would never leave prison.

They were at the definitive end of the road.

And this was not a hard message to preach because everyone I was preaching to knew they were at the end of the road.

I had to do zero convincing.

I just said, dismiss means the end of the road.

Do you think you're at the end of the road?

And 200 men said, Yes, we do.

We're in prison.

We've done it.

We have found the end of the road.

I told the team this morning that I have a little bit of a harder task because some of you might be at the end of your road and you do not realize it yet.

Your consequences have not become obvious enough to you.

And there's a truth behind the truth, which is that there are many opportunities to come to your end of a road that is leading to destruction, of a road that is leading to rock bottom, and many of us do not take those opportunities.

What we have to try and understand is that every consequence that you come under in your life is a gift from God.

Consequence is an indicator that you are traveling the wrong path.

And God allows these consequences almost like a large sign coming into your life that says, dead end ahead.

God's trying to get your attention to signal that the way you are living, the way you are navigating life, the way you are trying to reach your destiny, the way you are trying to mitigate your pain, that it is a path that will lead to danger and it will lead to destruction.

And when we hit the end of the road, we have a decision to make.

Every one of us has a longing that is deep down in the core of our soul, we know that something is missing, we know that something is not right, and we live in a world where we are drowning in lies.

I wonder if you have ever gotten to a point in your journey of life where it's like, man, I feel like I have tried so many of the things that everyone told me would work.

If I just get more money, I will finally feel satisfied.

If I just have enough sexual partners, then I will finally feel like I am worthy of something.

If I just can climb the ladder in my job, then I will finally feel powerful.

If I just learn to control enough of my life and enough of the people around me, then I will finally have a sense of peace.

If I just take enough pills, and if I just smoke enough weed, and if I just get drunk enough, I'll forget about my problems.

If if I just can hold on to this grudge, then I won't have to deal with the pain from the people who have hurt me.

All of the promises that will finally alleviate the deepest longings in your life, and you go down enough of those paths, and you just end up emptier than when you started.

Here's the core truth that we have to understand in this series.

The core truth we believe as Christ followers is that your pain started in a garden.

If we are going to contend with our pain, we have to correctly diagnose it.

And the problem that most people do not understand is the real source of your longing and the real source of your pain and the real source of your discontentment is much deeper than you could possibly imagine.

What we believe is your pain started in a garden.

We often go to the very beginning of scripture and we read out the narrative of the Garden of Eden because what it does is it shows us God's design and his desire for our life.

God created you for a specific purpose.

That purpose was to be the manager, the kings and queens, those who reign over his earth in perfect relationship with himself.

He created a garden.

And the idea is like the king's walled garden that you can only access if you are in relationship with that king.

And if you are in relationship with that king, then you can walk hand in hand with him in his garden.

And he sets the first people in that garden, and it is all perfect, and yet he gives those people freedom because if you do not give someone freedom, you have not given them love.

If you marry someone and you stand at an altar and you say, I do, and they say, I do, and then that is the moment that you decide they get no more freedom, then you do not have a spouse, you have a slave.

Love requires freedom, including the freedom to break the covenant that forms your relationship.

This is the miracle of marriage, this is the danger of marriage, this is why we don't walk into it frivolously, this is why we take it seriously.

This is why, before any of us here on staff at MetaCurch will officiate your wedding, we take you through a very intense process.

And as we take you through this process and we do all kinds of testing, we might say, you can get married, but not right now.

You are not ready to make this commitment to one another because we do not walk into this frivolously.

And then we help you get healthy enough to make a commitment where you can stand and you can express real love, and real love requires the kind of freedom, even the freedom to break the covenant that puts your marriage together.

This is what our relationship with God is like.

We broke that covenant, we broke the one rule that was given to us in the garden.

Our heart longed for rebellion, it longed for the ability to be our own God, not to serve God, but to be God.

And because of that, we were exiled from that garden.

In Genesis chapter 3, it says, So the Lord sent him away from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

This verse, everything turns.

We now live east of Eden.

We are outside the garden.

This one moment fundamentally shifted our lives and our experience of living in this world.

You need to know that we believe this.

This is the moment where we are disconnected from our Heavenly Father because of our sin.

And our sin becomes a chasm that we cannot bridge on our own, which means we stay separated from the very source of the one thing that could cure the deepest longing of our soul.

Every pain you experience, every anxiety that has a grip on you, every longing that you can't seem to fill, all of the brokenness in your relationship, all of the habits that turn into addictions, all of it is you, whether you're aware of it or not.

It is you trying to find the way back to the garden.

Now, most of us don't know that.

This is why, as Christians, we are not told to sit in our little buildings that we call the church, even though the church isn't a building, the church is the people.

We call the building the church, and then we hide away and we don't tell anybody about the truth that we have.

And so people are just living, drowning in lies, and they know they're longing for something, but Christians are not bold enough to walk across their cubicle and to tell people the story of reality and how God could change their life.

And so they give in to the lies, and what the world tells you is if you just walked far enough down this path, you will finally feel the longing of your soul.

And so we go after the money, and we go after the sex, and we go after the power, and we go after the control, and we go after the promotion, and we try to go viral, and we think all of these little lies are finally going to fulfill us, and they don't.

You know what they are?

They are paths leading to destruction, and yet God loves you, and so as you walk further down that path, you will incur the natural consequence of living apart from God, and every one of those consequences is a giant neon sign.

Dead end ahead.

Road ends one mile.

And every time we hit one of these, we have a decision to make.

Do we humble ourselves and turn around?

Or do we foolishly just keep on going?

In the book of wisdom in the Old Testament, the book of Ecclesiastes, it says that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yet no one can discover the work that God has done from the beginning to the end.

We have a longing for the garden.

It is like there is a compass inside of us pointing back to relationship to God, and yet the lies of the world have distorted our direction.

We don't seem to be able to find our way back, and so we walk the wrong paths.

As we continue to walk through this and try and understand, what we have to look at are the descriptions of the two criminals, one on the left and one on the right of Jesus.

I want us to pay very, very careful attention to their response to being at the end of the road.

It says then one of the criminals hanging there began to yell insults at him.

Aren't you the Messiah?

Save yourself! And if you can save yourself, save us.

But the other answered, rebuking him, Don't you even fear God, since you are undergoing the same punishment.

We are punished justly because we're getting back what we deserve for the things we did, but this man has done nothing wrong.

And then he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Two men, both with the exact same rat sheet.

We are told they are both criminals, we are told they are both thieves.

We don't know the rest of their life story.

We have the unrepentant thief, and we have Dismas, the repentant thief.

And I want you to notice the stark difference in their response to being at the end of the road.

The unrepentant thief, his response was one of mockery.

Hey man, aren't you the Messiah, Son of God?

Aren't you supposed to be something special?

Haven't you done a bunch of miracles?

His response is mockery and it is denial.

You will notice there is nothing in his response that takes responsibility for his own actions, for how he got himself into this position.

His response is mockery, it is denial, and then it is demand.

Jesus, save yourself, and while you're at it, get me out of here.

Get me off this cross.

Get me out of my consequence.

It is such a sharp contrast to dismus.

Instead of mockery, he leads with reverence.

Instead of denial, he has a confession.

If you have the text in front of you, he's like, I deserve to be here.

This is just.

I have been a criminal.

I was a thief.

Not only is it reverence and confession, but it's humility.

I deserve to be here, and Jesus does not.

The first criminal is trying to draw a comparison to Jesus.

Like, look, we're all up here.

Maybe you could get all of us off.

Dismas is like, we are not the same.

Somehow, and I think this is worth pointing out, the first person in all of history to preach a complete gospel is not one of Jesus' disciples.

It is not someone trained in the Torah.

It is not the Apostle Paul.

The first person to preach a complete gospel is a criminal hanging on a cross.

He rebukes temptation.

He admits his own guilt.

He acknowledges Christ's perfection and even acknowledges Jesus as God.

And then he believes.

Two simple words, remember me.

Whatever comes next, when we breathe our last, Jesus, remember me.

This is the first complete gospel proclamation.

We rebuke the temptation to try and be our own gods.

We admit our own guilt and our need for salvation.

We acknowledge who Christ is, and we place our faith in him.

If you don't know, that is the gospel.

That is what is asked and required of us to have our sins forgiven and to be given the gift of everlasting life.

And Ismus is the first person to preach all of it, and he preaches it with his life.

Two responses mockery, denial, demand, reverence, confession, humility.

These are the two options for when you come to the end of the road.

And if you're not already there, you might be there today.

You might be sitting here at the end of your road right now.

You might be watching this online, and God had you click on this video because today you are at the end of your road.

You don't know where you're going next in your relationship.

You don't know where you're going next in your finance.

You don't know how to get out of this habit.

You don't know how to deal with this addiction.

You don't know why nothing in this world will satisfy you.

You've come to the end of your road.

It's a giant neon sign.

You do not know what to do next.

You will do one of these two things represented by these two criminals.

Unfortunately, for most of us, most of the time, we will see the giant sign of our consequence dead end ahead, and in our pride, we'll go, you know, I still see a little bit more road.

I can't quite see the cliff inevitably coming.

So I'm just gonna keep journeying a little bit further.

God loves you enough to give you your consequence and just desperately beg you to come back, to turn around, to choose a new path.

And yet He loves you enough.

To give you your freedom.

Even the freedom to walk right past your consequence to more and more dire consequences.

The two thieves on the cross represent the difference between immaturity and maturity.

These two men represent the ideas of a boy and the ideas of a man.

We don't know, they're likely the same age.

When I talk about the difference between a child and an adult, between a boy and a man, you need to understand this.

You can be a 15-year-old man of God.

And you can be a 55-year-old little boy.

This is not about age, this is about maturity.

And so let's just walk through it carefully because we do this all the time.

The unrepentant thief has the mindset of a child.

Every parent knows this.

You did not have to teach your child how to lie, you did not have to teach your child how to hide things to try and not get in trouble.

You did not have to teach your child to push boundaries after you have set roles and rules.

They just know this.

The moment that they get old enough to where you have to go, here's the rules, here's the boundaries, that moment they start playing a game.

What happens when I cross the boundary?

How far can I push into this rule?

The moment that you set boundaries, they start playing this game.

When I cross the boundary and when I am caught, how do I escape my consequence?

See, uh, I don't know these things because uh I have some crazy insight.

I know these things uh because I am a human and I've been alive for a little while.

All of us undergo consequence.

All of us undergo pain.

All of us build coping mechanisms for the pain that is present in our life.

And all of us, if we live long enough and we try these coping mechanisms long enough, and we try these defensive tactics long enough, they fail us.

It is just us walking down the wrong path.

A child's mindset is how many boundaries can I cross, and when consequence comes, how do I escape it?

It's unbelievable to watch how manipulative a two-year-old can be.

A two-year-old will look you dead in your eyes, all the way past your heart, all the way to your soul, and you're trying to just give a consequence that they deserve, and they'll go, but I thought you loved me.

Your two-year-old is manipulating you.

And they will just beta test.

If that doesn't work, the next time they'll give you the silent treatment.

If that doesn't work, the next time they'll throw a tantrum.

If that doesn't work, the next time they'll threaten to run away.

If that doesn't work, then the next time they will say the meanest things they can think of.

This is kind of a side note, but it's important.

As parents, we have to allow our children their consequences.

We just have to.

It is our job, while they're under our covering, to teach them the way that God's world works.

Consequence is a gift.

It allows children to learn how to become men and women of God.

And so listen, when consequence comes, what do you do?

You can be the unrepentant thief, and if you are living like a child and you are not spiritually mature, every time a consequence comes, your first thought is, how can I escape this?

How do I get out of consequence?

And so when your spouse discovers those text messages that she wasn't actually intended to see, what is your first thought?

How can I lie about this?

How can I shift blame on this?

How can I gaslight?

How can I make this her fault?

How can I use guilt?

How can I use stonewalling?

How can I power up?

Can I be so big and so scary that she'll get off my back?

When you get your two weeks' notice, is your first thought to blame shift?

Oh, this stupid boss and this stupid company and another job has fired me because all the jobs are stupid.

If it's your sixth job to get fired from, it's not all the jobs.

And you'll live the rest of your life and you'll lose five more jobs before it's all said and done, because you're living like a child.

And all you're thinking is, how can I escape my consequence?

You can live like a little boy, or you can live like a man.

When you are a man, when you are mature, when you're a man or woman of God, the consequence comes and you receive it as a gift.

Consequence comes and you take full and complete responsibility.

Consequence comes and you humble yourself and you thank God for the opportunity to change your direction.

When you're living as a child, you will see end of the road one mile and you will just keep walking.

End of the road 500 feet and you will just keep walking.

I told the men at Torres Unit, I said, Do you think you're at the end of the road and 200 men all in unicid said, absolutely.

And my response seems harsh, but I love these men enough to tell them the truth.

I said, maybe.

Maybe.

If you look statistically, the recidivism rate, which means once you're on parole, how many people end up back in prison, it's huge.

It's huge.

A majority of those men, statistically, once they are on parole, will end up in prison at least one more time.

I reminded them that.

They know it.

I said, if that's true of you, this isn't actually the end of the road.

This is a giant neon sign that God has graciously put in your life, begging you to take responsibility, to repent, to turn around, not to blame it on the judge, not to blame it on the officers, not to blame it on your spouse, not to blame it on the person who ratted on you, to own it, humble yourself, change your mind, and turn around.

Really, what determines if it's actually the end of the road for you is what you do next.

And here's the beautiful thing.

If you choose to be like Dismas, if you choose to change your mind, to change your heart, to take responsibility, to turn around and walk a new path with Christ, the end of your road can be the beginning of God's plan for your life.

The end of your road, the worst consequence you have ever endured to this point in your life, the end of your road can be the beginning of God's plan for you to live a life of promise and purpose and power.

We are all one of the two criminals.

We all will come to consequence, to the finish line, to rock bottom.

What do you do when you get there?

Here is the danger of those who will continue living like the unrepentant thief.

You'll do one of two things.

When you hit the end of the road, you will either meet it with aggression or depression.

Aggression or depression.

I wonder if you could allow the Holy Spirit to show you this in you.

When you come to the end and you're not ready to turn around, some will meet it with aggression.

Maybe there's even good godly people in your life who are going, you gotta stop.

You gotta change it up.

This isn't working for you.

You've lost another relationship, you've lost another job, you're even deeper in debt, your health is deteriorating.

Maybe it's a doctor who's like, if you don't change some things, you're gonna be taking years off of your life.

Some people meet that with aggression.

I'm gonna even more aggressively walk down the path I'm already on.

There are people in their pride who will leave a doctor's office where they are told if you do not make some changes, you will not see your grandkids.

And out of an aggression to continue down that path, they will hit the fast food as soon as they leave the doctor's office.

You're gonna lose another marriage.

Out of aggression, they will go and schedule another affair right then.

We will aggressively go down in our sin.

Others will hit the end of the road, they're not ready to humble themselves and turn around, but they've hit it too many times.

Instead of aggression, we go to depression, which means we don't turn around, we don't keep walking, and we stand still and we medicate.

And your pain is rooted in a garden, and we don't know our way back.

And so we try the paths that the world offers us.

And when all of those paths fail us, the aggression isn't working, but we're not ready to own it and go with God, we just stand still.

And we try to take enough pills to make it go away, and we try to smoke enough to make it go away, and drink enough to go away.

We just scroll enough.

If I just scroll enough, I won't have to think about my pain.

We we abuse pornography just over and over.

It's like if I can just escape into these fantasies.

We go to just as many sexual partners as we can, and we go down this road of degeneracy, and we just stand still and we just try to medicate our depression that life isn't what we thought it was.

And maybe you're in one of those places.

Maybe you know, it's like you know it's not working, and you're just aggressively continuing to pursue it.

Maybe you're at the end of the road and you're just depressed.

Nothing this world has promised you has worked out.

And so you're just medicating however you can find.

Trying to numb, ease, or suppress your pain.

See, the problem is we are trying to fill a spiritual longing with the prescriptions that the world is offering us, and it just won't work because it can't work.

Dismas is our example.

My prayer is that you have come to the end of your road enough times today that you are ready to follow his path.

Let's look back at Luke 23 and verse 42.

Then he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

I don't actually even understand how he had this much insight into who Jesus was and what was coming next.

But something about Jesus led Dismas to believe that even though both of them were surely about to die, that Jesus could still offer him something even in death.

He never wants asked Jesus to get him out of his consequence.

The unrepentant thief wanted Jesus to save his skin.

Dismas wanted Jesus to save his soul.

The unrepentant thief wanted Jesus to help him escape his consequence.

And listen, Dismas just wanted Jesus.

And when you begin to understand, like Dismas did, who Jesus is and what he's offered you, all you'll want is Jesus.

And if all you want is Jesus, then you have everything you need.

Let me show you Jesus' response.

Verse 43, Jesus said to Dismas, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.

Now that is a promise of heaven.

And we know that.

Paradise, heaven.

But it's so much deeper than that.

All of your pain exists in your life, all of your longing, all of your worst ways, all of the paths that have led you to destruction, they are all a symptom of pain that started because we have been exiled from God's garden.

The writers of Scripture use the word paradise.

It's not really a translation as much as it is a transliteration from a Latin word.

The word is paradisos, and what Jesus actually said is today, you will be with me in the garden.

Paradisos is the king's walled garden.

This is a promise that you today, because of the gospel, because you rebuked temptation and admitted your guilt, confessed your sins and believed in Jesus, today you will be in the very place that can actually satisfy your soul.

What Dismas wanted more than anything was just Jesus.

And we focus a lot on the paradise, but I just want you to see Jesus is promised, truly I tell you, even better than paradise is today you will be with me.

You cannot enter the king's garden if you're not in relationship with the king.

When we see the cross, what we see is the bridge back to the garden.

Jesus in his death and in his resurrection shows us the way back home today.

You will be with me.

And I don't know where you're at.

I don't know if you've come to the end of your road, and maybe you've done it again and again, and you just keep walking down the same path that hasn't been working.

And this is what we do.

I'm not mad at you.

This is what I did for years of my life is I just doubled down and I just tripled down.

And I had just sunk so many costs, and my worldview was framed so incorrectly that consequence would come.

And the problem was, I was just a little boy.

I may have been in my 20s, but I just lived like a little boy.

I just thought I don't deserve that consequence.

What I did really isn't that bad.

What I'm doing surely will work eventually.

If I just keep going and I just keep moving, what does the world tell you?

Just believe in yourself.

Just believe in yourself.

Just keep doing that thing that's ruining your life.

Just believe.

If you just believe hard enough in you, you need to know that's a lie from the culture.

Scripture does not say believe in yourself.

Scripture says believe in Jesus.

I'm wearing Nikes right now.

Nike says you can do it.

Try it, live long enough, and find out you just cannot.

You can walk yourself right off of a cliff.

We cannot do it on our own.

We cannot navigate it with just what the world has to offer.

Here's what we do: we just dig and we dig, and our hole gets deeper, and we just dig, and eventually we hit rock bottom.

And if you're like most of us, most of the time, once you get to rock bottom, you go, Well, someone get me a jackhammer so I can find out how deep I can go.

And Jesus is just like throwing you a lifeline today.

The cross is the way back to the garden.

We are not promised tomorrow.

We do believe that Jesus will come back.

We do not know when, which should give us a sense of urgency.

That if we were to die outside of Christ, or if Christ returned, we had not put our faith in him, that we would be exiled from the garden forever.

You cannot possibly be more at the end of your road than Dismas.

You just can't.

There is no greater end of the road than a Roman cross.

And whatever he did, however many sins, however much rebellion, however much pain he was trying to manage, one look of faith, Jesus.

Remember me.

And Jesus says, Today, every longing of your heart, every pain that has driven you, every anxious thought, every bit of suffering, today, dismiss.

Every bit of it will be healed today.

You'll be back in the garden.

This is what Jesus offers you.

If you don't know Jesus and you don't know the good news that he brings, it is our sin that has separated us from God.

It is why we live outside of God's plan for our life.

It is what causes the pain and the longing of our soul.

And that perfect God stepped out of heaven and he came down to our earth.

He put on human flesh and took the name Jesus.

He walked this earth, he lived a perfect life.

Here's what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 5.

He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him, that's in Jesus, we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus took the sins of the world, all of them, past, present, and future sins, all of them upon himself.

And he nailed them to a cross.

So that everyone who puts their faith in him, who admits their guilt, who recognizes who Jesus is, and who just is willing to say, Jesus, remember me.

I believe in you, remember me.

We'll be made the righteousness of God.

We'll be put in a state eternally.

Or when this life is over, we will head right back to the garden.

As we close today, would you bow your head and close your eyes across our venues?

Just create a little bit of space for reflection.

Here's the truth for those who are already believers in Jesus, we are headed for heaven.

We will be back in the garden, and yet we still have the free will to continue down paths that lead us to consequence.

Almost all of my years of rebellion, I was already a believer, already a child of God.

This is not just a message for those who are not in relationship with Jesus.

If you are a believer and God keeps graciously giving you consequence, are you turning to aggression?

Are you doubling down?

Are you turning to depression and just trying to medicate your pain?

Today it is time not for aggression, not for depression, it's time for confession.

Own it, take responsibility, turn around, go with God.

When we walk in the ways of the Spirit, we can experience the garden right here in the midst of our time on earth.

Before we close, I want to talk to anybody who is here at one of our venues or with us online today, and you've never had a moment in time where you have put your faith in Jesus.

I want to be very honest with you, what this means is you're outside of God's plan, you're outside of the garden, you're outside of relationship with your heavenly father.

You will try to fill that void for the rest of time, and nothing in this world will satisfy it.

The cross is the way back to what your soul longs for.

And my encouragement is to move today with a sense of urgency to get this right.

Jesus didn't come to offer you religion, he came to offer you a relationship, and what it requires is admitting your need, confessing who Jesus is and what he's done, and putting your faith in him as your only hope for this life, and your only hope for what comes after.

And so if you're here today and you've never had a moment in time where you've put your faith in Jesus and you're ready to do that for the first time today, with everyone's eyes closed, I want to ask you right now to just simply raise your hand where I can see it.

By raising your hand, this is a symbolic gesture that says, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raised a hand, we can say with confidence that God sees and accepts your faith.

We can say with confidence that all of your sin has been forgiven, and because of that, that you have been given the gift of an eternal relationship with God.

A gift that no one and nothing could ever take away from you.

For those who raised a hand, I want to help you acknowledge this moment through a very simple prayer.

I'm gonna ask you to repeat this with me.

I'm gonna ask all believers across our venues to pray it out loud as well.

Let's pray like this Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God, that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Let me pray over you, Jesus.

I thank you for how you're moving.

I thank you for the hands that were raised.

Holy Spirit, we thank you that you are just speaking and moving and changing lives.

God, we are not going to be mad about our consequences.

We thank you for them as a great gift that you give us a warning to turn around and follow you.

To follow you into the life we were created for, a life of purpose and power.

So, God, help us to that end.

Help us to be like Dismas.

Help us to grow up, help us to take ownership and to follow you.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Amen.

Hey, give the Lord a hand.

Good things are happening.

So glad you joined us for today's message.

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