It's Not You, It's Me with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

So good to see all of your faces here today.

We're glad that you can make some time and come to service.

As Pastor Clayton just said, my name is Noel.

Um, usually your worship pastor, but today I'm just gonna be the teaching pastor, and I always love the opportunity to serve you guys in a different capacity.

Usually I'm leading worship.

Today I'll be bringing you the message.

If you've been with us for the past couple weeks and you know that Pastor Clayton has been bringing us through a topic of salvation.

And if you ever miss one of our services, you can always go to Medichurch.tv, click the watch link, and it will take you to our YouTube channel.

And you can actually watch all of our previous sermons there.

But today we're gonna continue in our conversation about salvation and a message that I'm calling, it's not you, it's me.

It's not you, it's me.

I can remember the first time that I ever heard this.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the last time that I would ever hear this phrase used, but the first time I remember hearing it was in the mid-90s on a show called Seinfeld.

Who remembers Seinfeld in here?

115, y'all can be louder than this.

We're not even streaming.

There we go.

Yeah, Seinfeld was famously, for those of you who never watched it, was famously a show that was about nothing.

That means that there was no connective tissue plot-wise, we from one episode to the next, instead, it focused on the eccentricities of the main characters.

And in this episode that I was watching in the mid-90s, George Costanza is at a coffee shop with a girl that he's been dating, and this woman lets him know, George, I just think it's time we stop seeing each other.

Quickly, George's face is saddened.

He can't believe that she's breaking up with him, and she tries to make it a little bit better, and she says, George, it's not you, it's me.

What a concept.

George is completely flabbergasted, and it's not because he's being broken up with.

Quickly, he says, You're gonna use the it's not you, it's me line.

I came up with the it's not you, it's me line, and they start arguing back and forth until the woman finally says, You know what, George?

It is you, to which George says, You're darn right it's me.

And so George successfully takes, it's not you, it's me, and changes it to, it's not me, it is you.

Now maybe you haven't fallen victim to this line, but surely you know someone who has.

And this is usually used to end a relationship.

And I know, I know that it's meant to lighten the blow, but really, has anybody felt better after hearing this?

Has anybody walked away thinking, man, I wish a relationship would have lasted a little longer, but thank you, God, it wasn't me.

It was them, they let me know it was all them and not me, and so I feel better.

Well, of course not.

The first thing you think is, what's wrong with me?

What did I do to make this person not want to be in a relationship with me?

Pretty soon, that movie reel inside of your head starts to spin and it's playing the greatest highlights of all your failures, all your flaws, and you understand quickly that you're not good enough.

Maybe it's not just that you're not good enough for that relationship, but soon you begin to believe that you're not good enough for anything that's good.

So it started as an it's not you, it's me conversation has changed in our mind to it's not me, it is you.

And here's what happens in that moment.

We start to build up these walls so that we don't ever get hurt by this conversation again.

We keep ourselves from entering into relationships and situations that could hurt us and make us feel like we are less than.

It's hands down my favorite thing to talk about, and it's hands down the most important thing you'll ever hear.

And putting your faith in Jesus is the most important decision you can ever make.

But maybe you're not there yet, and that's okay.

Like you just came today because your husband or your wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend, they've been bugging you for a couple weeks now to come to MetaCurch because they just know if you will come to meta church, you will love it.

And you're still not very sure.

The music was great, sure, but I don't know how I feel about it.

But I really want to avoid, and it's not you, it's me type of a conversation where you could have gone at it really hard this weekend.

You did things that you haven't done since you were like in college, and you are living the consequences right now, and you just want to balance out the debauchery of the weekend with a little bit of church time, or it could be that you don't know why you're here.

You've come here a couple times, you don't really believe in anything that we're talking about, but you feel welcome at least.

If we really knew you, you think that we would not let you in this building.

You're not good enough for Jesus.

And if you haven't convinced yourself of that, the followers of Jesus have done a pretty good job in convincing you that you could never have a relationship with Jesus.

And so you walk in, and before he can say it to you, you say to Jesus, it's not you, it's me.

I'm just not good enough.

Metachurch is a place where you can belong before you ever believe what we believe.

We say that every single week because we mean that.

Whether you ever put your faith in Jesus or not, we want you to know that you can be a part of what's happening here.

But before you count yourself out today, I believe that God has a message for you to hear.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are grateful for your spirit joining us today, for fellowshipping with us, and we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would help us understand what it means to be saved, what it takes for salvation, God.

Not what we think, what we think doesn't matter, what your word says is absolute truth.

And so, God, help us understand that today.

We love you, Jesus, and we pray it in your name.

And everyone said together, Amen.

I've told you guys this before, but I've been a believer my entire conscious life.

Like, I can't think of a time where I didn't at some level understand who Jesus is or what Jesus did.

And I don't say that as a point of pride.

Actually, when I think back about that, I'm a little bit disheartened.

And I'm disheartened because I spent a large portion of my life, about 30 years, following Jesus, but never really understanding what he actually did for us.

My earliest memories almost completely revolve around church.

My parents were highly active in our local church, and it's something that I consider to be a huge blessing to this day.

We were at church every single Sunday morning, every single Sunday evening, every single Wednesday evening, and it wasn't abnormal for us to be at church even when there weren't services, because there was always some kind of work that needed to be done.

Those first memories go all the way back to the 80s.

There was a tactic used in preaching back then.

Maybe some of you remember, it's called hellfire and brimstone.

It's where these pastors would get up and basically just yell at you for about 30 minutes.

And I have this caricature of a pastor in my mind.

Maybe I actually saw him in person, I don't know.

But he has like this powder blue suit on, and his face is red, and he's spitting all over us like we're in the splash zone at sea world.

Like, and he's yelling at us, you have to turn your life over to Jesus, or you will burn in hell.

As a five-year-old, I can remember my feet just sticking off the end of the pew, couldn't touch the ground.

And it was like I could feel the flames of hell licking at the soles of my feet, and I don't say that as a joke.

I was terrified.

I was absolutely terrified.

And hell is a real place.

It's a real place that you don't want to go to.

But I say it to say I did not know how to handle that information as a child.

From the age of five till sometime in my teens, I was literally afraid to go to sleep.

This was an internal struggle.

I don't think like my family knew.

They knew I didn't like going to bed, but what kid likes to go to bed?

I was scared to go to bed.

This was an internal struggle, not an external one so much.

I don't think my parents knew that I actually understood.

I actually actually comprehended some of the messages that were being preached.

I actually understood some of the conversations that I was overhearing.

The fear I had was real.

I would lay in bed every single night praying until I eventually fell asleep.

Starting my prayer, dear God, and then going through the beginning of my day, all the way to the end of my day, trying to remember any little sin that I could have committed.

Just as soon as I thought I was done, I would remember something.

And so I'd start the process all over again of praying for forgiveness once is good, praying for forgiveness twice is even better.

And this just kind of built on itself.

Pretty soon it was like days at a time that I would go through, even though I had already prayed for these things.

But it was imperative to me that I do this.

Because I was convinced that once I fell asleep, Jesus was gonna come back and he was gonna send me to hell.

Or that the world was gonna end and I was gonna go to hell, and so I would pray.

Sometimes I'd even fall asleep praying.

That's how long I'd be praying for, only to wake up the next morning, realizing, oh my gosh, I fell asleep while I was praying to God, asking him for forgiveness, and then what did that turn into in my mind?

I had sinned again.

I disrespected God.

I didn't care enough about him to stay awake while I was praying, and so my mornings would begin a lot like my nights had ended, in fear that I was gonna go to hell for some sin I had committed.

I developed a terrible way to cope with this as I became a teenager, as I became more of who I am as a person, I would point out the sins of everyone around me because I didn't know how to deal with my own.

I would point out the sins of everyone around me.

And it was like I was literally saying, it's not me, it's you.

Like, God, I know I got some sin, but look at what they're doing.

They don't even seem to care.

At least I care about it.

You can't send me to hell for this, right?

I can't tell you how many people I hurt.

I can't tell you how many people are probably walking around this world who will never step into a place like Metachurch because I hurt them so greatly.

I can't help but wonder if there aren't some of you in this room that got hurt by Christians like me.

Christians who believed in the right thing but practiced it the complete wrong way.

Christians that made you say, it's not you, Jesus.

It's me.

Out of all the different people that we read about in the Bible, one of my favorite, the one I resonate most with is the Apostle Paul.

Now, you may know that Paul wrote the majority of the New Testament or what we call the Christian scriptures, but Paul had a very interesting origin story.

Paul, by his own account in the book of Philippians, says that he was the Jew of all Jews, meaning that he knew the law of Judaism forwards and backwards.

All 613 laws that existed, he knew them.

And he was very proud of this.

He was taught by one of the best teachers of his time, a man named Gamalil, and Paul was his star student.

This was like a matchup between Greg Popovich and Tim Duncan, right?

One of the best coaches paired with one of the best NBA players of all time.

And Paul was literally the big fundamental of Judaism.

Paul was actually at the stoning of Stephen.

It's where we see him first in the Bible, in the book of Acts.

He was at the stoning of Stephen, who was the first Christian martyr killed because he professed his faith in Jesus, and that was blasphemy in Judaism, and so the penalty was death.

Paul was there.

Paul was watching it.

Not only was he watching it, he agreed with it.

And as Stephen was being killed, he was Paul was holding the cloaks of the men that were throwing the rocks at him.

This was the beginning of a great persecution in the Christian church, in which Paul played a huge role until he had an encounter with Jesus.

It was a miraculous event.

I don't have time to go into it, but Paul turned from his Judaism ways and into a relationship with Jesus.

He became a preacher of the gospel, and primarily he was going to reach the Gentiles.

Gentiles is just another way for us to say non-Jewish people.

Not only was he a passionate peddler of the gospel, but he was a protector of the message that was found inside of it.

And that message is unique to Christianity.

It was salvation, the opportunity to be saved through faith in Jesus alone.

Paul knew the life transformation that could happen when you follow Jesus, and he wanted everyone to learn what that meant for their lives.

There's a common problem in the early in the early church, and that the converts to Christianity from Judaism, former Jewish following people, would oftentimes bring a lot of their rules, a lot of their laws and traditions into Christianity.

Now, just to be clear, Christianity did come from Judaism, but Christianity itself is not Judaism, right?

They're two different things.

And if you're confused, well, you're in good company because the Gentiles at the time were very, very confused by this.

You have to remember that Gentiles, if they believed anything, they probably believed in a polytheistic form of religion.

They would have known little to nothing about Judaism.

And so imagine believing this message that you heard about a man who died for the sins of the world, and all it takes is faith to receive the salvation that he provides, only to have followers from Judaism say, yeah, you're pretty close, but you need to have faith, and also there's about 613 laws that you need to follow as well.

Like that's crazy.

The way I like to think about this is like America and England, right?

We all know that America came from England, but we are not England itself.

They have a different type of government.

They're a monarchy, we're a democracy, we have different laws, though some of them coincide.

It's not because one came from the other.

So imagine for a second that a British citizen comes to America, decides to become an American, they're in a class with a bunch of other immigrants from other countries, and upon becoming an American, the English citizen looks at everybody and goes, Hey, great job, new patriots, Americans.

We did well.

If you want to be a real American, if you want to be like the first version of American, what you gotta do is you gotta drive on the other side of the road, like they do in England.

Like that's how you be a real American.

You wouldn't do this, right?

This would result in an accident.

It's against the law, and it's an English law that we don't follow.

But this is exactly what Jewish converts were doing to the Gentile converts of Christianity.

And these people had a name that they went by.

They were called Judaizers.

And if you want to know the truth, Judaizers still exist in the church today.

They may not have come from the Jewish faith, but they still believe it's faith and works that save you, not faith alone.

It was an issue that Paul wrote about many times in multiple different letters to the churches.

And today we're gonna be looking at the book of Ephesians, which is a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus.

And where we're going to be reading, Paul is talking directly to the Gentiles.

These Gentiles who were saved by faith, and they knew that, but then they got kind of coerced by these Judaizers to believe that it took something greater than that to actually be saved.

And so we're gonna start with just a little bit of scriptural context.

Paul is considering that the ultimate example of God's power, at the end of chapter one, he says the ultimate example of God's power is the fact that Jesus was dead and now he's alive, physically dead and now alive.

It's that resurrection power on display that makes God so great.

And so now Paul is considering what the implications of that same resurrection power are for our life.

And so in Ephesians 2 it says, And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient.

And when Paul says that we were dead in their trespasses and sins, he doesn't mean like physically dead, right?

Because then he would be writing to no one.

He meant that they were dead in their trespasses and sins on a spiritual level.

He's reminding them of where they came from.

They were once dead because of these trespasses and sins.

To trespass is to cross a line willingly, right?

It's an act of disobedience or rebellion, of rebellion, and it's no accident.

And when we trespass against God, we sin against God.

And I know that all of us kind of have a general idea of what sin is, but sin literally means to miss the mark.

It's actually an archery term.

So to sin, an archery would be to take a bow and arrow, shoot the arrow, and miss the bullseye.

That would be a sin.

And so Paul is saying to sin against God is to miss the mark of God, which is righteousness, something that only he could uphold.

And we did this because we allow ourselves to be live under the influence of darkness.

Not darkness as in the absence of light, darkness as in Satan, the devil.

It's because we allow ourselves to live under this influence that we continue to be in opposition to God.

It's who uh Paul is talking about when he says the ruler of the air, the spirit work now working in the disobedient.

The church in Ephesus, and we today are being coerced, we're being tempted and manipulated into living lives of opposition to Jesus by Satan.

And here's the good news Satan can't make you live in opposition, you choose to live in opposition, but he can make that opposition look really great, and far too often we fall for it.

Here's what living in their trespasses and sins looked like to the church in Ephesus in verse 3.

It says, we too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts.

And we were by nature children under wrath, as the others were also.

These are the trespasses, the sin that Paul was talking about, that they lived in their fleshly desires and that they carried out the inclinations of their flesh and their thoughts.

It's because of this that they were by nature children under wrath.

Now, if you've ever taken a sociology course in college, and I don't want to tout my education over anybody in here, but I took sociology three times with the same teacher in community college, so I pretty much know what I'm talking about here.

There's a device known as nature versus nurture, and this is how sociologists explain how people behave.

Like if you're nurtured into behaving a certain way, it's something you've learned from someone probably really close to you, right?

And so a great example is like if your dad likes the Dallas Cowboys, then you're probably gonna like the Dallas Cowboys, right?

You weren't born loving the Cowboys, you learned to love the Cowboys because of your father.

It could go for another team.

If your dad loved the Patriots, then you're probably gonna burn in hell forever.

That's not true.

See, I almost said Green Bay because I saw Green Bay, I decided not to do that.

All joke is that you won't go to hell for loving the Patriots.

But it's a learned behavior.

If you do something by your nature, it's something that happens naturally, right?

When you're born, nobody teaches you how to breathe.

You just breathe.

It's what you do naturally.

And this is what we live in on a spiritual level.

Our inheritance is one of sin.

It's our nature, it's what we're born into because of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve.

And it's because of this that we are considered to be children under wrath.

And thank God that's not where the story ends, because living under the wrath of God is not a place that you want to be.

Paul continues in verse 4, he says, But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ, even though we were dead in trespasses.

You are saved by grace.

This is one of my favorite lines in all of Scripture.

You are saved by grace.

And here's why it's so great, so many people are trying to save themselves all the time.

If you're saved by grace, grace, by definition, has to come from something that is greater than you.

And if you want to put this to test, go into work tomorrow and try and give yourself a raise.

You can't do it.

Your raise has to come from something higher than yourself.

You can try and give yourself a raise.

I don't think it's gonna work out too well.

It has to come from a manager, a boss, a supervisor.

And it's a gracious act that allows you to get paid more.

We're saved by grace, something that has to come from something above us.

When this grace saves us, we're made alive with Christ.

Even though we were dead in our trespasses, this is that same resurrection power that God showed through Jesus.

He brought him from death to life in the same way he's bringing us from spiritual death to spiritual life.

And why would he do this?

Why would a perfect God make a way for sinners to come back to him?

Well, Paul says at the beginning of the verse, it's because he's rich in mercy, or you could say that he's rich in kindness, or that God is rich in forgiveness.

And it's not just that he's those things, it's also because he loves us.

I love how Paul tells us in Romans about God's love.

In Romans 5.8, it says, But God proves his own love for us.

And that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

His grace has shown to you because he loves you.

And it doesn't matter whether you've put your faith in his son or not, right now, in this moment, no matter what you've done, are doing, or will do, God loves you and nothing can change that.

And I get it, salvation can seem like a disparant, dissonant aspiration when we're in the middle of the mess of our lives.

We get so consumed looking at everything that's happening to us, and we get so consumed with our own sin that it's really easy for us to say, it's not you, Jesus, it's me.

I gotta get things right before I get into church.

And if you've ever been to Metachurch and you've heard Pastor Clayton say, This is not a place where you get better and then come to church.

This is a place where you come to church so that you can get better.

God loves you.

And he has a great mercy that he shows to you by saving you by his grace.

But how do we access that?

How do we actually go from spiritual death to spiritual life?

How do we go from being children under wrath to being children of God?

Verse 8, Paul goes on to say, For you are saved by grace through faith.

And this is not from yourselves, it is God's gift.

It's only by God's grace that you can be saved, but that grace is only accessed when you put your faith in his son, Jesus.

And this salvation by grace is not something that you can do for yourself.

And this is what we have to understand.

And Paul makes it very clear in verse 9 this is not from works, so that no one can boast.

You cannot give yourself salvation because salvation happens after grace.

Grace has to come from something greater than yourself.

You cannot save yourself, you cannot grant yourself salvation, you cannot earn your salvation because salvation does not come from works.

The only work that saves you is done by God and not by you.

And all that's required.

In fact, all that you can actually do is put your faith in the one who makes that salvation possible.

You have to put your faith in Jesus Christ.

This is what it means to be saved by grace, the work of God through faith.

I was 20 when I got my first tattoo.

I can't really tell you why I decided to get this tattoo.

I know at the time I was playing music a lot, and we just say get tattooed until all you can do is play music.

And so I guess that worked out a little bit.

I'm still playing music, but I didn't really have a process for picking this tattoo.

And so I got a tattoo as high as I could on my right arm so my parents wouldn't see it.

I didn't want to get grounded, had 20.

Thank you, Celeste.

And it was of a swallow in mid flight, and above it, there was a banner that said, Saved by grace, which was really ironic because I had no clue what it actually meant to be saved by grace.

I can tell you what I thought it meant at the time.

What I thought it meant at the time was that grace was available to me.

Like Jesus came and he bridged the gap between my sin and God, and so anytime I accessed him, anytime I asked him for forgiveness, I was able to be saved.

And anytime I sinned, I was taken out of it.

And then once I asked for forgiveness, I was put back in there, right?

Until I was 30 years old, I literally believed that one sin was gonna send me to hell for all of eternity.

And it was 10 years after I got that first tattoo.

I was having a hard time falling asleep, not something that was abnormal for me.

I was stressing over all the sin in my life, beating myself up because here I am again, God, asking forgiveness for the same thing that if I've asked once, I've asked a thousand times, and that's probably still undershooting it.

I couldn't sleep.

I sat straight up in the bed at 2 a.m.

I was alone in my room.

And I said out loud to an empty room, I said, God, I just want to know.

Am I going to heaven or am I going to hell?

Just tell me, so I'll at least know.

I didn't hear from God.

I didn't hear him audibly.

I never have.

I feel like I hear him speak to me internally.

I didn't hear him that way either on that night.

Instead, I was just left with a feeling, and that feeling was, how odd is it that you have believed in Jesus, the man who came to save all of humanity, and you don't even know whether you have eternal security or not.

I wrestled with this for about two months.

It's Valentine's Day, 2013.

I remember the day really well.

It's one of the most important days of my entire life, if not the most important day of my entire life.

I was at work and I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a post by someone who is very dear to me.

I love them very much.

And this post was meant to, with the purest of intentions, but it was filled with this religiosity, and it was completely void of love for the people that were gonna read it.

And the comments that I read in the post proved that.

They were all very hurt that this person had posted what they posted.

And so I direct messaged this person that I love.

And I said, I know you didn't mean to hurt people by this, but I think you are hurting people by this, and you might want to consider taking this post down.

And the response I got was, This is the truth.

Maybe if you would study something, you would know something.

And I was a little bit offended because this person knows me very well.

And they know that I am passionate about the word of God, that I have read his word, and that I have studied, and yet more or less are telling me that I'm ignorant.

I dealt with this for the rest of the day.

I was going home and I knew that I didn't have everything figured out, but there is a command that Jesus gave us after the Last Supper.

He says, A new command I give to you to love one another as I have loved you.

This is the command that Jesus told us to live by.

We call it the law of love, and I knew, I knew that what I had read was not loving, and therefore it couldn't be correct.

As I was considering everything that had happened to me that day, a verse popped into my head that a pastor had shared with me.

It comes from 1 Corinthians.

And he was writing to the church in Corinth uh to a bunch of religious type of people, and he says, We know that we all have knowledge, but knowledge fluffs up and love builds up.

It stuck with me because that was true.

It was true from my life.

I had learned a lot about the Bible in my 30 years.

I had the verses memorized, I had all of my talking points ready to go for anybody to debate me if they believed differently than I did.

I had everything except for assurance of my own salvation.

I was shell-shocked.

All at once I realized that I did not understand my faith as clearly as I thought I had.

I was in the shower getting ready to go to dinner, and another verse popped into my head as I was considering the implications that this would have on my life, and that verse is the one that we ended with today.

That you are saved by grace through faith, not by works, so that no one can boast.

What God revealed to me next changed my life forever.

The years leading up to this revelation, I had done a lot of good things.

I had done a lot of good works, and I had tried my best to avoid all the bad works.

And I was very fortunate to be around a lot of really great teachers of the Word.

But no matter how many times I met with them in their office, no matter how many messages I heard them preach, I still couldn't quite grasp what it meant to be saved.

I believe God revealed it to me that day, that Valentine's Day in 2013.

And so, in light of that, I want to be as clear as I can with everybody in this room in case you were unsure of what it means to be saved or what it takes to be saved.

And here's what God showed me, and this is confirmed in his word.

That salvation is a free gift from God.

And that gift came through his son Jesus, who lived a perfect life and died on a cross to pay for our sin debt.

Once he was dead, he was resurrected three days later.

I want you to focus in on that this is a gift from God.

This is not alone, this is what most believers think that once you believe in Jesus, you're gonna pay him back for the rest of your life for this gift.

That's not what a gift is.

A gift is received, it's free of charge, it's something out of the goodness of the heart of the person giving it to you.

And if you want to receive this gift, you have to put your faith in Jesus, which simply means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the Son of God and that he did what he said he did, that he died on the cross for your sins and was resurrected.

It's in that moment of faith that you go from death to life.

You experience the resurrection power of God in your own life.

You go from being a child under wrath to being a child of God.

Once you put that faith in Jesus, you become an adopted son or daughter of God, and nothing can ever, ever change that relationship.

You are his forever.

And this promise of salvation will be upheld forever.

Despite what Christians may tell you, and I know they tell you these things because I was one of them that would say these things.

There are no amount of good works you can do to keep your salvation, and there are no amount of bad works or sin that will make you lose your salvation.

Listen, salvation has never, not once in all of humanity been within your power or your ability to give yourself or to take away from yourself.

Remember, when you believe in Jesus, you become a part of his family, and the scripture says that God cannot deny himself.

His promise is true forever.

There's no takebacks.

I believe that God is calling you into relationship with him today.

And I believe he wants you to hear something, and it's what we started with.

But rather than ending a relationship, it's meant to start a relationship.

And what Jesus wants you to know is it's not you, it's him.

I know that if your sin was on display right now, you would be ashamed.

You would have a lot of guilt.

You would feel embarrassed.

I would too.

But Jesus already knows everything there is to know about you.

He knows what you've done, what you're doing.

He even knows what you don't know, which is what you'll do in the future.

And he loves you.

And he forgives you.

It's not about what you've done, it's about what he did.

But maybe that's a hard step for you to take because you've been hurt.

Not just hurt, you've been hurt by the church.

And I confessed earlier that I had hurt a great number of people in my life.

And if I'm gonna be completely transparent, I was ruthless.

I cared nothing about what they felt.

I only cared about myself.

I was trying to prove my own salvation, and in that I took away their desire to ever want to experience that same thing.

And again, I can't help but wonder if some of you have been in that situation.

And so I want to do something today.

I want to apologize to you if that's part of your story.

And as I apologize, I'd really like it if you would look at me as if I was your mom or your dad or that religious figure or whoever made you feel like you weren't enough.

Not only enough for God, but maybe just not good enough for anything.

And I'd like to look at you as though you're the people that I hurt because one of my greatest regrets is that I will probably never get the chance to apologize to those people.

And so I want to say that I'm really grateful that you're here.

I literally have wanted to have this conversation for decades.

I wanted to say that I'm sorry.

I am so sorry that I singled you out in front of everybody, that I made you feel less in, like you weren't good enough for God or anyone else.

The truth is, is that I never felt good enough for God.

There is no separation between you and me.

We're both sinners.

We both need the good grace of a good father.

And it's here.

And he does want to be in relationship with you.

And I know maybe some of the things I said, maybe some of the things I did made you want to step away from God.

But I promise you, God is so much better than I could ever be.

Jesus loves you so much more than I could ever show you that he loves you.

And he wants to be in relationship with you, and he wants to be close and fellowship with you.

All it takes is a moment of faith.

That moment of faith gives you access to forgiveness.

And he doesn't forgive you at this point in time.

It's not something you have to continually ask for, he forgives you as a person, the past, the present, and the future.

It's a free gift done by the good work of God.

It's by his grace that you are saved.

The band and I get opportunities to go and play at different camps, and sometimes we play for different church events.

And it always seems like at the end of the message we have a time that we call altar call, and it's where people can come to the front if they've made a decision to follow Jesus, or if it's not up to the front, it's just sit where you are and raise a hand, or maybe just look up at me so I know that you made a decision.

But we don't do that at Metachurch, and let me tell you why we don't do that.

We do not want you to be confused that that feels an awful lot like a work.

Like if I walk to the front, then I'm saved.

Nothing saves you but God's grace.

And it comes through faith in Jesus.

If you've believed that today, then you are saved forever.

But sometimes it's helpful to say a prayer, though you don't have to say a prayer.

Sometimes it's helpful to say a prayer.

So if everybody will bow their heads, maybe you could pray something like this.

God, I know that I have been dead in my trespasses and in my sin.

But I also know that you are a powerful God, that you have resurrection power, that you brought Jesus from death to life, and you can do the same for me.

You can bring me from spiritual death to spiritual life.

It's by your grace.

It's by your grace that I can be in relationship with you, that I can experience salvation.

And so the best I know how in this moment, I do believe in you, Jesus, who you say you are.

I believe you are the Son of God, and I do believe that you died on a cross to pay my sin death.

God, I just want to tell you that I'm so thankful.

I'm so thankful that my nature would has made me a child under wrath, but because of your goodness, I'm a child of God.

I love you, Jesus, and I thank you.

And I pray all this in your powerful name.

Amen.

I think it would be a good thing to maybe say a second prayer.

Maybe some of you heard my story and it resonated with you because you know you've done that.

You know you've pointed your finger at people, you know you've tried to convince people that they are actually not saved because they're not doing all the right things.

Maybe you live with a little bit of regret because of it.

Maybe today's the day you repent.

The word repent in Greek is meta noia.

It means to have a change of mind, to literally stop believing this way and start believing this way.

So again, if you'll bow your heads with me, if that's you today, you could pray something like this, Jesus, I do.

I do repent of what I've believed for so long.

I know that works cannot save me.

I'm sorry that I have cheapened the gift that you offer by pretending like I had any power to do it for myself.

You are all powerful, you are all loving, you are gracious.

And I know that it's only through that grace that I'm saved.

So I ask for your forgiveness.

I ask for restoration of fellowship between you and me, God.

I love you.

And I pray this in your son's name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.