Jesus Not Religion

Well, uh, if you're new, by the way, welcome to His Hands.

Glad to have you guys with us.

We're doing something kind of unique in this season, is we are celebrating 20 years together as a church.

This is our 20th anniversary, and uh, and I've been here for 19 of the 20, so almost almost all of it.

And it's been one of the greatest blessings in my entire life.

Honestly, it's been the greatest blessing of my entire life.

It's like knowing Jesus, being part of this church, even my family, it all blends together so much.

I mean, my all of my kids have grown up in this church.

This is our home, this is our family.

And I think it's important sometimes when you get to a milestone to stop and think about and recognize what got you here and what what's foundational.

Like what is foundational?

And so we finished a series last week called Party, because when this church first started, there was a banner on our building, very much like there is right now, that said party on Sunday.

And that was not some flippant, like we're a cool church kind of thing.

Uh, it was a statement that this was going to be a place where people could enjoy their relationship with God.

And I've said this many times in the last few weeks.

Some of you can relate to this.

I grew up in a church that taught me how to honor God, how to believe in God, how to trust God.

Um, I wasn't taught, though, how to enjoy God.

And we're told in Scripture that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

This church taught me how to enjoy the love that God has for me.

And so when we get together, we we take God really seriously, but we don't take ourselves very seriously, and so we party on Sunday.

That's the first banner that we ever had on our building.

But the second banner that we ever had in our building also made people mad, ruffled some feathers.

Just his hand's trivia for those of you who have maybe been here a while.

Does anyone remember what the second banner on our building ever said?

Oh, okay.

Some people said happy hour.

That was not a banner.

Uh that was a billboard we had on 575 that said happy hour Sundays at 10 o'clock.

That also made a lot of people mad, and maybe it should have.

Um maybe we were, maybe we were like kind of doing a we'll one up the whole party on Sunday thing, you know, maybe.

But no, no, the second banner we ever had in religion, it's okay.

Why would you know that?

Like, it said, Jesus, not religion.

Jesus, not religion.

Now, this this also ruffled many feathers.

This offended many, many people.

It wasn't intended to.

We weren't trying to offend people, we weren't trying not to, but we weren't trying to uh offend people with these statements that we were making early on in the early days of our church.

But this also made a lot of people angry because I think they misunderstood the concept of religion.

Religion is not deep reverence for God, that is a good thing.

To have a deep reverence for God, that is a beautiful and important thing.

God is holy, and we are to honor him and everything we do.

That's why when we worship him, we worship him genuinely, passionately, because he is God, he is the one true, holy God above all things.

But but religion is something different.

In fact, you can make the argument that there's nothing Jesus fought harder against than religion.

And there's definitely nothing that opposed Jesus more in his day than religion.

See, we have to understand something about our enemy, about Satan.

Satan is very opportunistic.

Satan will take good things and twist them into the very things that cause us to stumble.

We see this happen all the time.

In fact, in the Bible, Paul talks about how Satan took the law that was meant for good.

The law was something God gave us for a season for a time that was designed to help us know what's right, what's wrong, help us navigate life, help us avoid the things that are major pitfalls.

And yet Paul said that Satan used the law which was good to arouse evil desires inside of people.

And that kind of makes sense.

Many of us, you know, we've we've been tempted because we were told no.

Someone says, you can't do that, you're like, well, why?

Now I want to a little bit more.

Right?

Satan is opportunistic.

We've seen this happen in our culture in the last decade.

We've seen how Satan has taken compassion, which is a good thing.

It's an aspect of love.

Compassion is not the totality of love, because sometimes love is actually challenging someone to do better, to be better.

You care about someone so much that you you want to hold them accountable so they can become the best version of themselves.

That is a form of love.

Compassion, though, feeling empathy towards someone who's struggling, who's hurting, that is an aspect of love.

And we've seen our enemy take compassion, which is a good thing, and twist it into something that makes many people so afraid of upsetting someone that they they no longer have the ability to say, hey, that's not good.

That's not healthy, that's that's not gonna lead to a good outcome, but I don't want to say that because I want to be compassionate.

And so the enemy's taken compassion and used it, twisted it to silence common sense, to silence wisdom.

Satan is very opportunistic.

He will take good things and twist them for evil to separate us from God, and he does that with the reverence that we have for God.

Satan can take our reverence for God and our recognition that God is holy, and he can twist it into religion, which becomes this rigid system of self-righteousness where we begin to define ourselves by all of these things that we either do or don't do, and believe that that is what makes us holy, that is what makes us acceptable to God, and it makes us tend to lessen in our dependence on God, tends to make us more judgmental of the people around us.

Religion separated the people who should have been the first to receive Jesus from everybody else.

The people who knew Scripture the most when Jesus arrived, the people who should have seen what he did and been like, clearly you are the Messiah, it was their religion, it was their faith, not in God, but in their their way of their way of engaging with God, their whole system.

It was it was that that solidified into something that actually pushed them further from God to the point where they didn't even recognize their own God when he was standing in front of them.

Religion is very very dangerous.

When we become fixated on the rules, the systems, the customs, and those actually rise to a level that they were never meant to rise to, and we miss the point entirely.

So the second banner we put on our building was Jesus, not religion.

And again, like I said, it ruffled feathers because that word religion maybe it's a little bit loaded, but but it's interesting because if you were to take uh if you were to take the book of Galatians, for example, one of the letters of Paul in the New Testament, and you were to say, hey, sum up Galatians.

Give me like a one-sentence summary of Galatians, Jesus not religion would be an accurate summary of that entire book of the Bible.

And so, kind of in honor of our 20th, and I do think out of the necessity of sometimes when you're at a milestone to go back to your roots and say, hey, this is what's foundational for us, we're gonna spend the next few weeks going through the entirety of the book of Galatians, which, if you're new to his hands, that's kind of our norm, is to go through an entire book of scripture together.

Galatians is a short one.

Um, it's a letter written by the Apostle Paul to some churches, some communities of faith that were started by Paul in his very first ever missionary journey.

This area of Galatia, this would have included uh modern-day like Turkey, would have been a big uh area that he would have covered and planted churches in, these little communities.

And one of the first letters that he ever wrote, it may be the first, but at the very least, it's one of the first two or three letters that he ever wrote to any of the churches that he ever wrote to was this letter called Galatians, and it was Paul addressing what I think he would describe as the first major crisis that ever developed in the church.

The first crisis that the church ever faced, true crisis, from Paul's perspective.

And it wasn't an external enemy, it was an internal threat.

And let's go ahead and read about it.

We're gonna read the entirety of Galatians chapter 1 today, but don't worry, it's a pretty short, uh, short book, short chapter.

Galatians 1 · chapter mention

So here we go.

Galatians 1.

This letter is from Paul, an apostle.

I was not appointed by any group of people or any human authority, but by Jesus Christ himself and God the Father, who raised Jesus from the dead.

All the brothers and sisters here join me in sending this letter to the churches of Galatia.

May God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.

Jesus gave his life for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live.

All glory to God forever and ever.

Amen.

I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ.

You're following a different way that pretends to be the good news, but is not the good news at all.

You're being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ.

Let God's curse fall on anyone, including us, or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of good news than the one we preach to you.

I say it again, that we've said before.

If anyone preaches any other good news than the one you welcomed, let the person be cursed.

Obviously, I'm not trying to win the approval of people, but of God.

If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ's servant.

Dear brothers and sisters, I want you to understand the gospel message I preach is not based on mere human reasoning.

I received my message from no human source and no one taught me.

Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ.

You know what I was like when I followed the Jewish religion.

How violently I persecuted God's church.

I did my best to destroy it.

I was far ahead of my fellow Jews in zeal for the traditions of my ancestors.

But even before I was born, God chose me and called me by his marvelous grace.

Then it pleased him to reveal his son to me so that I would proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.

When this happened, I did not rush out to consult with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to consult with those who were apostles before I was.

Instead, I went away to Arabia.

And later I returned to the city of Damascus.

Then three years later I went to Jerusalem to get to know Peter, and I stayed with him for fifteen days.

The only other apostle I met at that time was James, the Lord's brother.

I declare before God that I'm writing this to you.

It's not a lie.

After that visit, I went north into the provinces of Syria and Cilicia.

And still the churches in Christ that are in Judea didn't know me personally.

All they knew is what people were saying.

The one who used to persecute us is now preaching the very faith he tried to destroy, and they praise God because of me.

Okay, so that's chapter one of Galatians.

Let me kind of explain and give us an understanding.

Paul is writing to this church that he started.

He traveled to this region.

He's one of the ones who planted these churches, brought the good news of Jesus to these people for the first time, and it took root and it grew.

But something has happened, and people are now, from Paul's perspective, turning away from the good news.

He says, I'm shocked at how you've fallen away.

And it's interesting because when we hear that language of someone, you know, they've fallen away from their faith.

What we usually imagine is this is a person who has left following Jesus to pursue something that we would maybe view as immoral living.

You know, they've they've left church and instead they're doing, they're in Vegas or something like that.

I don't know, right?

You know, they're they're no longer they're no longer following Jesus.

They're they've given themselves over to all the lusts and passions of the world.

But that's not what he's talking about.

When he says, I'm I'm shocked at how quickly you've turned away.

They're not turning away from following Jesus to worship the idols of their day or engage in in immoral behavior.

They're turning away from their faith in Jesus by by turning to religion.

Here's specifically what was happening.

There's a group of people that are going to be referenced as the Judaizers.

And essentially, these were Jewish people.

You have to remember that the our faith, the faith in Jesus, started through Judaism, right?

Jesus was Jewish, and and God used that faith and that whole system to bring Jesus into the world, and Jesus is the culmination of that, and he's the one who fulfills the law.

That's why we don't sacrifice animals.

I mean, we we did sacrifice some animals today, I guess, technically for meat, meat, and compete, but that's for a very different reason.

That's just for our own personal enjoyment.

Um but we're not we don't sacrifice animals on a Sunday.

We don't do those things.

Why?

Because Jesus is our sacrifice, because he paid the price for our sins, because he fulfilled the law.

Our faith began out of Judaism, but it's its own thing.

But early in the church, especially what's happening here in Galatia, is people are coming in and they're saying, oh no, no, no.

They're telling these believers, these new believers, no, no, no.

You have to become Jewish.

It's not enough just to put your faith in Jesus.

You have to also become Jewish.

That means you have to become circumcised if you weren't circumcised.

And if you were born a Gentile, you weren't circumcised.

That's a tough thing to sell to a bunch of adult men.

You know, you gotta do that.

And you have to start following all of the Jewish laws, you have to start following the Jewish dietary laws, all the Jewish customs.

You have to, you have to become Jewish in order to have Jesus.

And they started to blend faith in Jesus with this religious system that was never meant to be eternal, was always meant to just be honestly like a temporary patch until Jesus arrived and brought us the real thing: relationship with God, sonship with God.

We are now the sons and daughters of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

We're not just followers of God.

We're not just believers, we are those things.

But God already had followers.

He already had believers before Jesus came.

Jesus came to change things, not to just extend what was already going on.

Jesus came to fundamentally change things.

And before Jesus, there were followers and there were believers, but there were not sons and daughters like there are now.

Because he's brought us into that kind of a relationship with God.

And when Paul hears about this, when Paul hears that people are putting their trust and their faith in a religion, uh in customs and rules and laws, like he's taken aback.

He's like, I'm shocked.

Why would you give up this new thing, this beautiful thing, relationship with God through faith?

A gift given to you, grace and mercy, and instead you you want to go back into the old way and try to earn it.

But this is this to Paul is I mean, he's incensed.

This is the first crisis that took place in the early church, and it's it's religion.

But you may not expect to be the first culprit of division in the church.

This is about Jesus, not religion.

And I want us to examine this a little bit.

And over the course of the next few weeks, as we explore the book of Galatians, you're gonna see that this is not Paul just saying, hey, it doesn't matter how you live, do whatever you want, do whatever feels good to you, because we have Jesus.

That's not it at all.

No, he's gonna challenge them to live by the Spirit, to let the Holy Spirit grow things in us in a way of looking at life and thinking and behaving that can never happen if we just tried to follow the law.

But Paul is saying that our biggest enemy is not external, it's internal.

It's something that can be at work within us, and religion, it's dangerous.

Now, I don't know if you've ever experienced something in life that's taught you that sometimes your biggest threats are internal, not external.

I'll give you an example.

I'm gonna think about this forever.

Uh back in January, we had a really, uh unusually cold day for Georgia.

It was like one of those rare single-digit evenings that we have.

And this was you know late January this year.

I remember Megan asking me, as you know, her husband, is the house ready for this?

Are we ready for this?

Have we been winterized?

And I was like, look, not to be prideful, but I'm not from around here, okay?

I mean, I love this.

I've been part of the South for 20 years.

I love you guys.

This is, yeah, go, go, Georgia.

I'm I'm all in.

But like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not one of those people who grew up here, and so like the idea of snow causes me to panic or freak out.

Yeah, I don't rush to the store to buy bread and milk, the two things that expire the fastest.

Uh, you know, I don't, I don't do that.

I lived in Wisconsin for years.

I grew up in Wisconsin, it would snow, not joking, two feet.

And we didn't have school cancel.

The only time I remember school being canceled in Wisconsin was because the wind chill was negative 20-something degrees, and they're like, your skin can't handle the air.

Okay, so that's like I went to college in Kansas City, Missouri.

It gets very cold in Kansas City.

It snows all the time.

There is ice.

That's where I lived my first year out of college.

Like, I'm when Megan said, babe, is the house winterized?

I'm like, it's winterized.

Okay.

I shut off the outdoor faucets over a month ago.

I capped off all the faucets.

In fact, not only did I cap them, I stuffed insulation inside of them just for extra, you know, just to show the weather who's boss.

That's the way I do it.

Okay.

So she's like, all right, cool.

So we wake up the next morning and she turns the water on and nothing comes out of the pipes.

Which is bad if you don't know.

If you've never uh experienced it.

That's not how it's supposed to go.

That means there's there's ice, that the it's frozen.

And she's like, Justin, I thought you said, and I was like, I did.

I don't understand this.

I have no idea how this could have happened.

I shut off the faucets a month ago.

I capped everything.

I mean, we're good.

The heat's been on all night.

We left even like little faux wait, we did all the things.

So I go to the garage to check out the hot water heater where the water comes in our house, and immediately I realized what the issue was.

I left the garage door open that night.

Uh so from the outside, we were protected.

You know, safe, I guess.

But the problem is that the the garage door being open meant that the temperature inside was the same as the temperature outside.

And uh, did you guys know that hot water freezes faster than cold water?

I learned that the hard way.

So our hot water heater froze up and nothing would flow just because of my stupidity.

And you know, it was like I was so frustrated with myself because I did all the right things, I had all the right protections on the external, and then I just left the garage door open, and so the the damage was done from the inside.

Our biggest threats in life are not the external things, but religion will convince us that they are, so we spend all of our attention on those.

That's what religion is best at, by the way.

Like if you want to, if if you just want to have an interesting couple of years, and some of us have been there, some of us are recovering religious addicts, if we're honest.

Religion, when it takes hold in your spirit, it makes you obsessed with all of the external things that aren't right in this world.

And those things exist, sure.

But they're not they're not our biggest threat.

So take, for example, in Paul's day, in Jesus' day, the biggest threat to the health of the church wasn't the immoral culture around them, and it was unbelievably immoral.

Unbelievably.

So, in fact, in in the book of Acts, Paul is traveling in chapter 17, he goes to Athens.

And it says in verse 16 that while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply troubled by all the idols he saw everywhere in the city.

Do you ever look at the world you live in and you find yourself deeply troubled?

You ever spend 30 seconds on social media and go, this is the world that I what has happened?

People are nuts.

Right?

Things will happen in our world and we see big news stories, and and we're like, what is go, what is going on?

This is insanity.

This is crazy.

Paul understood that.

He looked at the world and he was deeply troubled by what he saw in the world around him.

He lived in an unbelievably immoral world, obsessed with the worship of idols and with practices that went along with the worship of idols that would shock us, to be quite honest.

And as much as Paul was upset by the immorality around him, he did not view that as the greatest threat to the health of the church.

It wasn't politics.

Just like we live in a time that's politically volatile and divided and all that, so did Jesus.

So did Paul.

I mean, you look at our political culture today.

Right?

Our politicians murder each other on social media and with ads.

You know, it's like Rick Jackson, blah, blah, blah, John Ossoff, blah, blah, blah you know, every ad we have is like, you know, it's just constantly.

They crucify each other online.

In Jesus' day, politicians murdered each other with murder.

Right?

Like, just actual murder.

Study the history of the emperors and how many of them were assassinated, were poisoned, were killed, how many coups took place.

Like if you were an emperor, you might think you've made it.

Short lifespan.

I think that's why so many of the emperors had to believe that they were God, because that was their only security.

Because they weren't gonna live very long on this planet.

I mean, it was incredibly divided, incredibly volatile.

Everything was always on the cusp of falling apart.

And eventually it did fall apart.

And yet, Jesus never got sucked into that.

One of the reasons that Jesus' own people missed him for the most part was that they were so convinced that their Messiah would be a political figure.

He would be political and he would rule with political might.

He would take over in the political sense, with military and political, all that kind of stuff.

And Jesus refused to go there.

In fact, in John chapter 6, Jesus performs a miracle for thousands of people, and they're like, oh, oh, he's the Messiah.

John 6 · chapter mention

And in their minds, that means it's time for the uprising.

Let's do this.

Let's make him our king and let's go at Rome.

It is time, it is on.

And here's what we read in verse 15.

When Jesus saw they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself.

He was like, nope, not interested.

The most political Jesus probably ever got is in Matthew chapter 22.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

It says the Pharisees met together to plot how to trap Jesus into saying something for which he could be arrested.

They sent some of their disciples along with the supporters of Herod to meet with him.

Teacher, they said, We know how honest you are.

You teach the way of God truthfully.

You are impartial and you don't play favorites.

You can just hear the pandering in their voices.

Jesus is like, uh-huh.

Okay.

It's like when your kids come to you and you're like, Dad, you're such a good dad and you love me so much.

It's like, what do you want?

What do you want?

Right?

I know what you're doing.

I know what you're doing.

Okay.

He says, now tell us what uh what you think about this.

Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

See, Caesar claimed to be a god, and in their understanding, uh, if you paid taxes to Caesar, who claimed to be a God, that was like you paying tribute to a false idol.

So if Jesus says it's okay to pay taxes, they're like, aha, you know, you don't support God.

You're you're just like the Romans, but if Jesus says, don't pay taxes to Caesar, they know that the Romans will arrest him, so they're trying to trap him.

And Jesus says, Look, you hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me?

Here, show me a coin that you use for the tax.

When they handed him a Roman coin, he asked, Whose picture and title are stamped on the coin?

Caesar's, they replied.

Well then, he said, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give to God what belongs to God.

And his reply amazed them and they went away.

I just love that picture.

They're like, Well, uh, they just like walk away.

And they're like, you know.

But but that's the most political Jesus ever got.

And I'm just saying this, and this is not, some of us need to just own this, including myself.

If Jesus had picked today to be the time in which he came to reveal himself to the world, many of us would be frustrated with Jesus because he just doesn't talk about politics enough.

Yeah, I heard the Sermon on the Mount and it was all good and everything, but I just really wish, you know, he didn't really criticize our government like he should.

He's just, I think he's afraid to talk about those things.

I wish he talked about that stuff more.

And the people in Jesus today, absolutely, he won't, he's why isn't he roasting Caesar every opportunity?

Why isn't he calling it out?

It's not because Jesus didn't care about the world, it's because Jesus knew that's the way it is.

That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it's going to be until he returns.

We live in an evil world with evil people and evil systems that do evil things.

I mean, Paul addresses this in Galatians chapter 1.

Galatians 1 · chapter mention

He says, Jesus gave his life for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live.

I could stand here every single Sunday and be like, Did you guys hear about that thing that happened?

Evil.

You know that big story in the news right now?

Evil.

And it is evil.

Some of you are thinking, is he talking about the uh-huh?

Evil.

But what is he mentioned?

Yeah, evil.

And we're if I stood here every Sunday and all we did was talk about all the things out there and how evil they are, Satan would be like, yes.

Here's why.

Religion loves that.

Yes, it is evil.

Amen.

I would get amens.

Jesus would have gotten so many amen.

The Pharisees would have loved him if he just ragged on Caesar and Rome all the time.

And how evil Rome was, and how evil Caesar is, he would have done that.

But if you sat at the feet of Jesus and you listened to him teach, he would never ever allow you to walk away being fired up about all the evil out there.

What he did was far, far more difficult.

He made you deal with the evil in here.

And there you go.

And let's be honest, that is frustrating.

Because wouldn't it be so much nicer just to sit here every Sunday and be like, aren't we better than everybody else?

You know?

Isn't it great that we're not evil like all of those people?

That the world around us is nuts and chaotic and crazy and we're not?

And the answer is like, yeah, that's we do, we live in an evil world.

Paul said it.

It's an evil world.

And every day there's a new story.

Evil person does evil thing.

There's evil people, there's evil systems, there's evil governments, there's evil leaders, there's evil religions.

Evil.

And Jesus could have gone there every time he talked.

Every time.

He could have called out the local governor.

He could have called out this.

He could have called out all of them.

And people wanted him to.

And he didn't take the bait, but what he did instead, he said, Hey, what about your evil?

What about my evil?

And it's like, I don't want to know Jesus.

I don't want to deal with my evil.

Jesus said once, why do you worry about the speck in someone else's eye when there's a log in your own?

And I'm I I I have thought about that statement so many times, and it still makes me mad.

You know?

Like I love Jesus, but I'm also mad at him sometimes because I just wish he never said that.

Because here's what's so brilliant about that.

Jesus recognizes that we're gonna see the stuff.

Like he doesn't ever say, don't see it.

Like we're gonna see, you're gonna see the speck in other people's eyes, you're gonna see the evil in their life, you're gonna see all the things that they you're gonna notice it.

Sometimes it's really easy to see, sometimes it's it's not.

But he says, when you notice it, it's like he trains us, when you see it, focus on what you've got to deal with.

And I hate that because man, I see so much stuff.

I see so much stuff in my children.

You know what I mean?

Even my wife has stuff.

Is she in the room?

She's probably not.

Is she here?

Okay, guys, she has so much stuff.

All right?

And sometimes I'm I'm such a fool that I decide it's my role to reveal everyone's stuff.

Now, look, I'm a parent.

Do I have a responsibility in my children to teach them and correct them?

Absolutely, right?

Absolutely.

So again, that's that's a role that I have been given by God.

Do I have that responsibility with my wife?

Kind of.

But then even Jesus would be like, be smart.

You know what I mean?

Like, pick your battles, man.

But no, I mean, like, but what Jesus absolutely has taught me is that, man, if I do, if I do decide it's my job now to be the evil point outer, pointer outer, I guess whatever that, to be the evil revealer.

Have I looked at my own?

And it's crazy because sometimes it's like the stuff that I see in other people is me.

It's like I'll get so frustrated at my children for being just like me.

You know what I mean?

And Jesus teaches us to focus on our own.

And you know, sure, you're gonna see it, but before you deal with their stuff, you better deal with yours first.

And that is inconvenient.

Religion will never teach you that.

No, religion, that that rigid, self-righteous religion is the very thing that led Jesus to teach a parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector who are worshiping in the temple and and the tax collector is broken.

He's like, God, I'm a sinner, and I'm I'm so I'm I'm a mess.

And the tax is like, God, I'm so much better than that guy.

Thank you.

There's a version of religion that makes us so convinced that we're right about everything, and you know what?

We might be.

We might be on the correct side of moral issues.

Great, that's important, that's good.

But being on the correct side of the biggest political or moral issues of the day does nothing for your spirit, your heart.

But the Pharisees weren't wrong about their take on almost everything.

Like they they had, if they if Jesus had handed out a test, they would have gotten most of the answers right.

But their hearts couldn't have been further from God.

That's why Jesus famously said in Luke chapter 5, I've come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners and need to repent.

Luke 5 · chapter mention

You know, I've thought a lot about our our church and our history, and I know many of you are fairly new to the party, so welcome.

Um but I'm I'm so grateful to the people that started this church.

I'm so grateful to Steve and Susan for wisely laying the foundation.

Because, you know, it's little things, right?

Like partying on Sunday.

We are all this is always going to be a place where we leave lighter than when we came in.

That doesn't mean we don't deal with the serious issues.

We obviously do.

We don't skirt around the hard stuff.

We've taught on all kinds of stuff, but it means that when we leave this place, we've spent time in the presence of our God.

Jesus said, Come to me, those of you who are weary, and I will give you rest for your soul.

So if we spend time in his presence and we don't have rest for our soul, it's really for one of two reasons.

Either, A, we've spent time in his presence and we are wrestling with something really deep and hard that we've got to go deal with because he's helped us see it.

It's either that or we've done something wrong.

This is always going to be a place where we celebrate.

I'm glad that they laid that foundation.

I love the the Jesus not religion.

I needed that.

Because I'm pretty good at religion.

Like I played that game for a long time.

I'm good at thinking I'm better than other people.

I'm so good at that.

I'm the best at it, actually.

So, you know.

It's just, that's what religion does, right?

You got all the right answers, you got, you know, all the you know all the things, you have the right opinions, and you can spend your whole life just being looking at the world and everything that's happening and going, that's evil, that's evil, that's evil, that's evil.

And again, Satan will love it because you'll spend all your time doing that and very little time saying, Lord, like like David wrote, search my heart.

Search my heart.

Point out anything that offends you, and I will deal with that.

For Paul, the biggest threat, the first threat to his churches that he helped start, was not the temptation that the immorality around them provided, which it's there, and he's gonna deal with that.

Read the letters to the Corinthians, right?

That's a real thing.

We live in an evil world.

The biggest threat was not the persecution that was going to come from having corrupt leaders and the wrong people in charge.

That's a real thing.

It was a real thing then, it's a real thing now.

And and Paul was willing to fight those battles when the time was right.

But but that wasn't the primary uh concern.

The primary concern was self-righteousness.

It was abandoning genuine faith in Jesus Christ and the reality that He has given us something we could never ever earn through grace.

We all of us, we know God because of grace.

It's a gift.

You can't earn it.

You can't do it.

You can waste your life trying, and religion would love for you to do that.

Waste your life trying.

And in the whole process, you become completely and totally blind to the very things that God might want to work on in your life.

And Paul would say no.

That to Paul was turning away from the faith.

And so, foundationally as a church, we are a church that is all about Jesus and not religion.

That doesn't mean we don't address serious issues, we do.

That doesn't mean we don't strive through through the Holy Spirit, through the Holy Spirit's empowerment in our lives, we don't try our best to live righteous, good lives.

We should.

That doesn't mean that we can't look at the world and call it evil.

Paul does right here.

It is evil.

We can look at the world and go, that's evil.

Yep.

Been that way for a long time.

But what it means is our primary focus, always, is first and foremost to have our eyes on Jesus and to recognize that it is through faith in him and faith in him alone that makes us right with God.

Faith in God alone, it's only that.

This is grace, this is mercy.

This is not something we earn.

And when we recognize that, and it rightfully brings us to the kind of humility it should bring us to, where we recognize I don't deserve you, Jesus, and yet I have you.

And because you love me, because you gave this to me through no effort of my own, that's kind of what Paul communicates when he says, Before I was even born, God chose me.

It's like he's saying, I couldn't have even done anything to deserve it.

I hadn't even been born yet.

And he chose me.

I can't take credit for any of this.

And that should bring us to such a place of humility that we say, Lord, I am better than no one.

I am not more deserving than anyone, and yet, Lord, you've loved me and you've given me your grace.

What do you want me to do in response?

How do you want me to live in response?

Tell me what to do, and I will do it.

I will follow you, I will obey you because you love me so much.

I'm not obeying you in order to earn your love, I'm obeying you in response to your love.

And if we live like that on a daily basis, that's Jesus, not religion.

And that's a huge part of our foundation as a church.

We're gonna take Lord's Supper, and then we've got uh we've got an 11-year-old getting baptized that we get to celebrate with together, which is awesome.

So we got to start with a baptism and finish with one.

So I was thinking of a silly like sports anecdote, because you know, it's it's football season.

And uh I don't, I don't, I guys, it's been a while since I've mentioned basketball.

I think at least, anyway, until now.

But this one's not basketball, it's football.

Vince Lombardi, original coach of the the Green Bay Packers.

I used to live in Wisconsin, you know, so I can I can quote Lombardi.

That's what that means.

He was famous for beginning his first practice of every new season, looking at professional football players and saying, gentlemen, this is a football.

That's how he would begin practice number one.

Gentlemen, this is a football.

Like they, I'm sure they knew that.

But he understood that it was very important to always start at the basic level.

No matter how advanced you think you are, no matter how proficient you have become, no matter how much you know, gentlemen, this is a football.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is grace.

This meal represents the unearned and undeserved love and forgiveness of God for every single one of us that completely and totally covers all of our sin, wipes it away, and makes us holy and righteous in the eyes of God.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is grace.

Religion will not give you this.

Morality will not win this for you.

This can only be received through faith in Jesus Christ.

And if you've received that, don't forget it.

Never forget it.

Don't let yourself be so consumed by all the things happening around you, all the evil in the world, all the craziness in the world.

Don't let yourself be so consumed by all of that that you you shift your eyes from Jesus Christ and you you think for a moment that your primary focus in this world is to somehow enter into all that stuff and try to, no, no, no.

Like keep your eyes on Jesus and recognize that it was an evil world 2,000 years ago.

It's it's in many ways, it's an evil.

I'm not saying everything's evil.

There's good in the world too, but there's a lot of evil.

Don't be shocked by it.

Because you have this.

This is the basic thing, but it's also the most important thing.

And every week we have an opportunity to get our eyes on it, get our hearts around it, and just remember what this is all about.

It is about Jesus, not religion.

And so we're going to take this meal together.

The bread represents, if you're new, you're welcome to join us.

Hopefully, you grabbed one of these on the way in.

If not, do it next week, or you can get up right now and grab one.

Take part.

This bread represents his body.

The Jewish people who grew up in a religion had been trained for centuries that sin has to be paid for.

And it had to be paid for in the flesh.

And so they had this system that constantly was sacrificing lamb after lamb after lamb after lamb.

And it was this constant reminder to them that sin is serious and sin has to be dealt with, and a sacrifice must be made.

And a sacrifice was made once and for all.

Jesus, for all of our sin.

And he paid it.

So let's pray and thank him for that.

Jesus, this is grace.

This is grace.

We love you.

We thank you.

We ask, Lord, that you help us as a church family, as followers of you, Jesus, as your sons and your daughters, most importantly.

Help us have a soft heart.

Help us have a humility in us that keeps us soft, that does not allow us to become rigid and judgmental.

So focused on all of the evil outside of us that we're unaware of what you want to deal with inside of us, Lord.

This is your grace.

Help us focus on it.

Lord, use this to soften our hearts so that we can just become more like you.

Let's take the breath.

Now the juice.

Jesus, this is your blood.

You gave this as an offering.

It washes away our impurity, our sin, all of it.

Gone.

This is grace.

This is undeserved love, undeserved favor, unearned acceptance into your family.

And we thank you for this, Lord.

We love you.

Let's take the juice.