Life.Church with Craig Groeschel - Jesus and We, Part 4: Anything Short of Sin

Episode Date: January 24, 2015

Seven billion people occupy this tiny slice of history. And it's not by accident. God chose our generation to make a difference–but He doesn’t want us to do it alone. Find out how in Jesus and We. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

God did not give us a small commission, but a great commission, to go into all the world and preach the good news of Christ's love and grace. If you think the church is too big, your love for people is too small. Hear me clearly. We will do anything short of sin to reach people who don't know Christ. To reach people no one is reaching, we will do things no one is doing. I am glad to have all of you here with us today, and I would love it at all of our life churches. Would you join me in welcoming the 22nd, lifechurch.TV location.

Starting brand new today in South Broken Arrow. We are thrilled to have you guys already going from three services, expanding to four next weekend just to contain all the brand new people. For those of you who are new, what we've been doing is we've been looking through some of the values at our church. Let me refresh you. Week number one, we talked about faith. We are faith-filled big thinking.

Bet the farm risk takers. We will never insult God with small thinking or safe living. Week two, we talked about serving. We are not spiritual consumers. We are spiritual contributors because the church does not exist for us, but we are the church and we exist for the world. Week three, we talked about generosity. We will lead the way with irrational generosity

because we truly believe it is more blessed to give than to receive. Today, I want to talk to you about the value that is very, very dear to my heart. I want to talk to you about the value of reaching people who are far from God. And we're going to be in Mark's gospel today, Mark Chapter 2. We're going to start at the end of the chapter, and then I want to go back to the beginning of the chapter. Let me give you the context of the verse that will launch off of. Jesus had just healed a guy. Then he called Matthew or Levi, who was a very sinful tax collector and called Levi to follow him.

And to the shock of all the religious people, this very well-known sinner not only follows Jesus, but he throws a party at his house and invites evidently some other very questionable characters, sinners. The Pharisees, the religious people, they are highly offended by this. They're like, why does Jesus eat with sinners? That's how religious people say it. Why does it with sinners? And Jesus responded, and his response was so shockingly controversial. It was jaw-droppingly unbelievable to the Pharisees, and here's what he said.

On hearing this, Jesus said to them, why does he eat with sinners? He said, it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but who is it? All of our churches, he says, but it is the sick. Then this next line would have totally thrown the Pharisees off kilter. they would have called this heresy, they couldn't believe. He said it. Jesus said, I have not come to call the righteous, but who did he come to call? He came to call the sinners. This to me is such an emotional verse when you recognize that Jesus did not come for the healthy, but he came for the sick. He didn't come for those who think they're already righteous, but he came for sinners. In fact,

in a moment, I want to show you a picture that a friend of mine took. I've got to, a good friend who works in the narcotics division, and he was actually on a drug bust and came into a guy's house and took a picture of this guy's nightstand. The original picture was pretty powerful, but I didn't want to show you the actual one because I didn't want to invade this guy's privacy, so we recreated it. Basically, everything you see was in his picture. We just kind of changed the brand or whatever just so we didn't invade his privacy. So let me show you a recreation of what we saw on this guy's nightstand.

This was the guy who was in the, they went in for the drug bust. Up in the corner, you'll see there's a New Testament. There's a Pastor Stephen Ferdick book, Sun Stand Still. There's some drug paraphernalia. There are some contraceptives, just in case you need that after reading your Bible. And there is a life church bulletin along with a bunch of other stuff. When I saw this, it really, it moved me. And so I showed the pictures of some friends and basically said, you know, this guy was in on it, you know, they went in on a drug bust.

What do you think of this? And most people said something like, well, you know, our church didn't do much good for that guy, did it? You know, ha-ha, whatever. And that's one way to look at it. But what I see is totally and completely different. When I look at that, it moves me because what I see is an image of a guy. who probably made some bad decisions early on in life and got trapped in a sinful pattern. And this guy is searching for something.

I see him looking. I see him seeking God. I see him trying, but he's not quite there. I can sense a spiritual battle going on that he's being drawn toward what's right. He's being held back by what's wrong. And this makes me very emotional because that guy reminds me of me 28 years ago. And what I want to tell you, and I hope you'll understand, this will be controversial to some of you. But when we started this church, we started this church with people like that in mind.

Hands down, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we started it for people exactly like that. And what I hope you'll understand is, to one degree or another, we're all exactly like that. Jesus did not come for those who have it all together. He came for the sick, the broken. He came for the sinners. And that moves me so much to see a guy just like that because I know there are those of you today who you're in a very similar spot.

And this could be a breakthrough day for you just like I believe might be around the corner for this very guy. And the reason I get so excited about this is because when I grew up, I actually went to church. But the church didn't reach me. And so I wanted to create a different type of church. Now, I'm not going to blame the church for not reaching me.

I'm sure I wouldn't pay attention. But the reality is I was never confronted with the horror of my own sin and never understood the truth of the gospel. All I remember about church was it just was kind of traditional. We sat and pews the most uncomfortable seats in the history of the world. Why they're only reserved for church to torture church-going people. I have no idea. I remember standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down. and then reaching under the pews to grab a book called a hymnal

and turning to hymn number 248, and we always sang verses 1, 2, and 4. Never verse 3. I have no idea what was wrong with verse 3, but we always skipped verse 3. And it didn't engage me. And so when I went off to college, the reality of my sin caught up to me.

And I made so many bad choices that the weight of my sin started to weigh heavily on me. And just like the guy represented in that picture, I started to seek Jesus, and I still was doing bad things and was still seeking Jesus. And when I truly started to understand that Jesus didn't come for those who have it all together, but he came for the sick, he came for the unrighteous, he came for the sinners, he came for me. And when I realized what he did for me, when I had no other option but to go all in, it was like, okay, he did that for me. My only reasonable response is to give him my whole life.

And I'm telling you, it wasn't a partial thing. It was a full on. I'm in this thing. I'm following Jesus. And so immediately, I started trying to get my friends to come to the new church I'd found. I found this place that was alive, it's powerful. And so I'd like, you know, I'd tell my teammates in college, hey, come to church with me. Come to church.

And they wouldn't. And I'd go to church. And it'd be like, man, if they would have been here, this was perfect. It was the perfect week. Everything, it was perfect. And they weren't there. Next week, I'd invite my fraternity brothers. Come to church with me.

And they wouldn't come. It was perfect. Why, I wish they were here. The third week, I'd invite somebody, and they would come. And lo and behold, it was screwy Sunday. Screwy Sunday. You know what I'm talking about? Like, oh, I wish they weren't here this week.

Why wouldn't they here last week? Last week, the tambourine lady wasn't here, but now she's here and she's going. Playing a tent. You know, like, ah, I don't even know if God likes that. Maybe he does, but I don't, and my friends don't, you know. Or then they'd come another time, and it was sort of. special offering Sunday. We're going to lock the doors and nobody's leaving until we raise. Oh, not this Sunday. Or guest evangelist day, the double breast, the mullet, permed, and every word has an

extra syllable and the Lord said, and he came to save sinners, you know, and I'm going to, when you go to Taco Bell and order a taco, do you do that? I like a Taco, glory! But anyway, you know, I go, why this week? Screwy Sunday. So when we started this church, we started it with that guy from the picture in mind. And honestly, we wanted every week to be a good week to bring someone that was far from God. And that's why every week, every week, every campus, every service, every week, every campus, every service, we present the gospel. Every week, every time, every week, every campus, every service, we present the gospel. Because we believe God is calling us to reach people who are.

or far from God and lead them to become fully devoted followers of Christ. And that's what I want to talk to you about today is reaching people. And I want to show you a really powerful story about four guys in Mark's gospel, Mark 2 verses 1 through 5. Let me just read it and then we'll dive into it in more detail. A few days later, when Jesus again entered Copernum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man carried by four of

them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, don't miss this, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat, the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, son, your sins are forgiven. Now, notice, before Jesus heals the guy, which he eventually does, he goes for his biggest need, first his spiritual need, and forgives his sins. I want to talk to you today about reaching people, and our value goes like this. We say this. We say, we will do anything short of sin to reach people who don't know Christ. to reach people no one is reaching, we will do things no one is doing.

I want everybody at all of our churches, you all at South Broken Arrow, join us, Albuquerque, New Mexico, everybody join us, say this aloud. We will do anything short of sin to reach people who don't know Christ. To reach people no one is reaching, we'll do things no one is doing. I want to ask you how true this is for your life. Just like in the previous three weeks, I ask you to kind of rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. One being the lowest, 10 being the highest. One being you're apathetic about people far from God.

10 being you're super passionate about it. Don't put 10 unless Billy Graham is here today. Billy, if you're here, you can put 10. If you're not Billy Graham, don't put 10. But I want you to kind of rank yourself. And let's start with like really passionate because some of you are. You're going to be a six or seven, eight. You might be a nine.

If you're going to score yourself high like that, let me tell you what's true of you. You probably led someone to Christ last week. You've probably led multiple people to Christ over your lifetime. In the last seven days, you are praying for a bunch of people by name, people you love, who are far from God. You're praying for them. You probably brought someone to church with you last week. There's somebody that's not a Christ's follower with you this week. You probably already know who you're going to invite last week.

You're up. You're eight. You're nine. Okay? you're very passionate and care deeply about people who are far from God. Let's talk to some that might be on the lower end of the spectrum. You're a little more apathetic, okay? Let's just call it what it is.

You haven't led someone to Christ recently. Some of you would say, maybe I've never done that before. Those of you who are Christians, if you look last week in the last seven days, you weren't praying for hardly anybody consistently to find Christ. or let's call it what it is. Some of you didn't pray for a single person who didn't know Christ because you were too caught up in your own little deal.

It's been a long time since you brought someone who wasn't a Christ follower to church. Or perhaps you've never done that before. If that's you, call it what it is. And I'm not here to try to make you feel guilty, but let's just be honest. Let's not just say, this is what I believe. Let's look at what our actions say we believe. And if you find yourself at a two, three, four, five or so, let's just say as followers of Christ, this is really unacceptable because we don't just want to bring people to Jesus.

We have to bring people to Jesus because we know who he is and what his life really means. And so what I want to do in the rest of the time is I want to show you two big thoughts that I believe all of us who are Christ followers are called to do in order to love people in into a relationship with Jesus. Two big thoughts if you're taking notes. The first thing is this. I believe God calls all of us who are Jesus followers to bear some burdens, to bear some burdens, to care for those who are in a place of hurt or in need in our lives.

In fact, this is exactly what happens in verse three. If you look again at Mark's Gospel, this is what the Bible says. Some men came bringing to Jesus a paralyzed man carried by four of them. Now, what I want you to notice is they didn't just say, hey, guys, I heard Jesus is going to be doing a big concert in town. You ought to get a ticket and get a cab. They didn't do that. What they did is they got involved in his life and said, man, we're going to get you there. If we have to carry you, it may be five miles.

I don't know how far it is, but we don't just want to get you to Jesus. We have to get you to Jesus. We care about you enough to do this. It's my observation, one of the bigger weaknesses today when it comes to a lot of Christians sharing their faith. is, you know what a drive-by shooting is? You know, you drive-by, it's horrible and you shoot somebody. A lot of people do what I call drive-by witnessing. In other words, they're not involved in someone's life.

They just kind of drive by, roll down the wind and go, Jesus, look, you know. And, like, those are the nice ones. And there's, like, rude ones are like, you're going to go to hell, turn or burn, you sinner. You're going to hell with a worm never dies and weeping and asking a teeth. Oh, yeah, Jesus loves you. You know, and those are the mean way, and they just drive on by, you know. And I've got to be real honest, man. and you know this, that just doesn't work in today's world.

Not at all. John 316, football game, whew! I just witnessed. You know, what is that? A for effort, D for impact. You know, it's good intentions, but people need to know that you care about them. Not you're trying to convert them to something, you know, that you care about them. You may say, well, I don't even know enough to share my faith.

I like the old saying that people don't care how much you know. they first want to know how much you care. They want to know, do you care about me? Are you involved in my life? And so we as followers of Jesus, we're going to bear some burdens. We're going to carry them. And that's what I like about this,

is these four guys, they carried their friend to Jesus. That's like at our church, we don't just invite people to church. We bring them to church. There's a difference. Hey, come to my church. No, I'm going to bring you. I'll pick you up.

I'll meet you at the 6 o'clock Sunday night or whatever. and we're literally, we're bringing people to Jesus. And that's what these guys do. What's stunning to me is to think about the picture. Jesus is in this house and he's teaching and it's so full of people. I mean, they're like jam-packed in here. They're listening, they're listening. And these four guys come up, they're trying to get in the house,

but they can't get in because it's so full of these people listening to Jesus. And you can almost hear it like Jesus says something really cool, like, woo, that was good. I'm writing that down. Remember to tweet that. Oh, don't forget, get a picture. Jesus. Instagram, hashtag hanging with Jesus.

Oh, it's so good. Hanging out, my brothers. And literally, this is kind of what happens sometimes is we today are in church, and there's people who are in need, and we have our backs turn to them doing our little Christian thing. We have our own little language. Praise the Lord, brother. Hallelujah. I love your testimony.

When you talk about being delivered and sanctified, it made me feel cleansed in my soul. You know, oh, did you hear the new worship album? Oh, we got to do our little worship dances. We got our dances. You know, we're doing our Christian thing. And the whole time there's people who need Jesus, but we're so into our Christian thing. We have our back turn to the people who are in need. And even though our heart doesn't say it, basically our actions are saying, we don't really care about you.

You can just go to hell. I know it's rough. It's not our heart. but our actions say we don't really care about you. We're doing our own little Christian gig. I believe, with all my heart, we're called to bear some burdens. When people are hurting, man, we're there with them. When they're crying, we're crying with them.

When they have a baby, you know, we're at the shower. When their mom dies, it's not like, oh, I'm sorry your mom died, text, text, text. It's we're there at the funeral, man. We're with people. When they're in need, we're walking, we bear some burdens. And then we earn the right to be heard. We don't drive by and just shout, Jesus loves you. We care about people.

We show them as love before we often tell them about his love. In fact, there's a really cool story about Amber from our church. Amber is a real estate agent, and she needed to make, she needed a contract and needed to close. And she had kind of what seemed like a breakthrough deal for her. she was going to make three commissions off one family. There was a couple that was divorcing, and so she was selling their house. Then she already had the house picked out for the husband who was going one way, and the house picked out for the wife that was going another way.

So she was going to get three commissions on this one deal. She had done the math in her head over $12,000 in commission, game changer for her family. And then all of a sudden she came to church, and it was the week that Amy and I released our new book for marriage, called From This Day Forward. And she thought, well, I know this couple's going through a lot. Maybe I should buy them a book.

Now, I don't know if she thought this, but I might be thinking if I give them this and God heals her marriage, I lose the deal. You know, because that's kind of how my selfish mind. She went right past this, didn't even think about that. And, you know, you said, look, you know, I know you're divorcing. Before you sell the house, before you go through with it, would you just read this book? And sure enough, he read it on his own and she read it on her own. And by the grace of God, God did something significant in their hearts. And their marriage started to move on the track of healing.

Well, they ended up not selling any their house or buying the other houses. And now their marriage is doing incredibly well. Amber lost three commissions. But God used her to do something really, really special. Here's a picture of Amber and her husband. They just took the picture in front of the book from this day forward. And she lost three commissions on that deal. What's really cool is the next week.

She actually got three contracts. And I never really promote people anything, but there may be some of you who might want to use someone like that. And I hope she's tremendously blessed because that's the type of person that's going to have the impact in people's lives. When they put someone else's well-being ahead of their own gain and said, I want to love you into healing, we're going to bear some burdens. I don't know how this will play out for you,

but I guarantee you all of you, that if you have eyes to see, you're going to see people who are hurting, and you're going to see people who need you to listen, and you're going to see people that need help on the side of the road, and you're going to see people at work that you didn't like, and suddenly you find out that they're actually in the middle of hell, and that you can love them into a better place, and I believe that God calls all of us to bear some burdens.

Four men carried their friend to Jesus, because we don't want to just get people to Jesus. We have to get people to Jesus. God's going to call us to bear some burdens. The second thing is, some of you're going to like this one, God is going to call us to break some rules. Some of you're going to get into this message sometimes. I don't know when. Break the rules is a good place to do it because a lot of you, you love to break the rules.

I love to break the rules, man. I never like rules. I love to break the rules. I'll be honest with you. Dead honest. I never waited 30 minutes after eating before going swimming. In my whole life, I broke the rules, man. I'm telling you, I didn't wear a seat belt as a kid in the front seat of the car.

My mama was my seatbelt. Some of you remember. If we had to stop fast, what'd you do? Boom! Right? I broke the rules. I ran with scissors and with a lollipop in my mouth. And I sniffed more magic markers than you could even count.

Some of you going, that explains it right there, right? I love to break rules. And in this story, we see four guys who massively break some rules to do whatever it takes because we will do anything short of sin to reach people who don't. No, Christ. Look at verse four. Here's what these four guys did. Okay.

So as they couldn't get their buddy to Jesus because of the crowd. Watch this. They made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it, and then they lowered the mat the man was lying on. Now, don't miss this. We've got to get our friend of Jesus. We've got to get our friend of Jesus. Jesus is teaching.

People are listening. We can't get in. Let's go up on the roof. We can dig through the roof. Now, I did a little research just to find out. how these roofs were made. And according to one commentary, they would have had post or beams

that were about three feet apart. And then the roof was actually made of mud, of thatch, and actually manure. Okay? And that kind of helped hold it together. And then the manure actually served as a fertilizer so grass would grow on the top of these roofs, and it was a place that people would actually go

and take naps. It was up on the top. And so here comes these four guys. They get up on top of the roof, and I don't know how they dug through it, But, you know, maybe one guy is like a Boy Scout. It's like, good thing I brought my shovel. You never know where you need a shovel.

You know, I don't know. Or probably not. But, you know, they're on the roof and they're digging through. Now, I want you to remember one of the things that the roof was made of. Right. Sometimes you have to dig through a little, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, to get somebody to Jesus. Hashtag, he just said that in church. Yes, I did.

Sometimes you have to dig through a little manure to get somebody to Jesus. And so you can imagine this, they're digging through, and then, you know, they're in the house and suddenly, like, you know, roof stuff's falling in the house. The owner's like, don't think insurance is going to cover this one, you know, and light comes in. And then you got these four guys who don't want to get their friend to Jesus. They have to. And so you can imagine, like, leaning over the hole. I don't know how they did it, but like, okay, Bert, you get that arm. Jim, you get a leg.

Sam, you get a leg. I get an arm. All right, boys. Take them down as far as we can go. Far as we can go. How much farther? About six feet. All right, boys, as it's as good as it going to get.

On three. Right? Boom! It's not like we're going to reparalize them or something. I don't know. Hoping Jesus heals the hurt butt, too. I don't know. Boom!

They drop them down there. And what I love about this is, you know, These are guys that are not taking obstacles as a sign that God's stopping them. We're going to bust through barriers. We're going to break rules. We're going to do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus. And then we've got a church full of people that are crazy like this. I mean, I've heard story after story after story about how God is using different people

to aggressively bring people to Christ. One of my favorites is a guy named Brent. Brent actually employs convicted felons. And he works with it. They're on kind of like a work release. so they're in prison, they go out, they have the little monitors on, so they track them wherever they go. They work for Brent, and then Brent says, since I'm paying you, you're going to church with

me. And some of the guys kind of resist at first, but every week at the 630 service at one of our churches, Brent is there with 18 different guys that are felons, but are getting a second chance through a work release. Let me just show you a picture of, this is, that's Brent, the guy who's highlighted, and then this is a group of some of the guys that he brings. brought to one of the services. Let me show you a picture of one of the guys getting baptized.

This is so cool. Fifteen of the 18 guys have actually met Christ in a personal way. This guy is getting baptized with his tracking device on. You can't even see in the water. This is the before picture, and here's the after picture of him being changed, new life in Christ. I love a guy named Brent, who will do anything short of sin. Now, I don't know if it's actually legal or not

to force people that you pay to come to church, So that could be a sin, but we're going to pretend like it's not because it's a much better illustration if it's not. I said, we're going to do anything short of sin to reach people who don't know Christ. And here's the key. To reach people no one's reaching, we're going to have to do things no one's doing. So we're going to do some things that maybe normal churches don't do, and we're going to do them all the time.

One of the things church online has been one of the most heavily debated ideas in church circles. We launched the world's first church online several years ago. and all sorts of people still debate, the validity, the ecclesiology. Can you really do church online? Well, while they continue to debate it and argue about it, we're going to continue to do it to the point of touching over 5 million people last year in every country and territory around the world.

While they debate whether it's real or not, we're going to praise God for 9,500 people who indicated and told us about their decision to become followers of Christ, and they may not believe in it nor like it, but we're going to keep on doing it. We'll do things no one is doing to reach people in places they can't even own a Bible. We're going to take the message of the gospel there. We thought there was more upside potential in this, so we decided to buy Google AdWords

to help bring extra people to church online. So if someone typed in on Google, church online, an ad would pop up that said, searching for church online, why not try church online? The problem is, you guessed it, ain't nobody searching for church online. So we ask ourselves, what are people searching for? And someone said, naked ladies. So, if during one of our live church online experiences, you type in naked ladies, do not do this, take my word for it, do not do it, I rebuke you if you do this, do not type in naked ladies.

But if someone did, typed in naked ladies, an ad would pop up that says, searching for naked ladies, why not try church online? I would not believe the click-through rate. You think about it. Naked ladies. Why not try church on them? We'll have to do things no one's doing. I believe with all my heart, the church should be the most creative, innovative organization around.

Several hundred years ago, this was the case. Several hundred years, just a few centuries back, the church was the center of the city. The church was the epicenter. of community. The church drove the arts. Somewhere along the way, what happened? We delegated innovation to Apple. We handed off creativity to Hollywood. We said to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can have relationships. We allowed the government to meet the needs of the poor. When we are the best equipped organization to do all that and far more. That's why I believe, with all my heart, that we are the best equipped organization to do all that.

must stop going to church and start being the church. And as the church, when we recognize that Jesus didn't come for the healthy, but he came for the sick, and that we're all sick. And we all need his grace. And when we recognize who he is and what he's done, our only reasonable response is to give him our whole lives. And if this doesn't excite you, then you must not have been saved from much. Because when you know what I was saved from, man, it's not something I do. It's who I am.

I am the light of the world. And I see a church that does not judge those who are without Christ, but loves them to know the grace of Jesus. I see a church full of people who will bear some burdens and get messy and get dirty and get involved in the lives of people and who will break some rules and cut through some religious,

mm-hmm, where you have to do it in order to get people to Jesus because I see a church full of people who knows what it means to be sick and knows what it means to be healed and knows what it means to be a dark, desperate sinner, and knows what it means to be forgiven. And when you know that by the grace of Jesus, then we will do anything short of sin. to reach people who don't know Christ.

To reach people no one's reaching, we will do things no one is doing because God is calling us to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ. Father, I pray that your spirit would do a work in our church, that we would be lit on fire

with a love from people who are far from God, not with a judgmental attitude, but a heart that breaks and recognizes that Jesus came for sinners. And we are all sinners in need his grace. All of our churches, as you take a moment, for those of you who are followers of Jesus, those of you who are Christians, I don't care if you scored yourself a two, I don't care if you scored yourself a nine. If you want to increase in your passion and love for people far from God, and I hope it's every single one of you.

If you say, yes, God, give me a greater love. May my heart break for the things that break your heart. God, give me a deeper or passionate love and heart for those who are far from God. Would you lift your hands right now just all over the place? All of our churches, lift your hands, all of our churches, lift your hands and say yes. Father, I thank you for a church full of people who recognize the call that you put on our lives. I pray God that today would not end, that we wouldn't see someone hurting in need and recognize this is a chance to love someone, to earn their trust and to one day point them, maybe today, whenever you lead, point them to Jesus. God, I thank you in advance that every person here is going to start praying and praying for those

who need Christ. And God, we believe that prayers are powerful. God, I pray for those who have given up on somebody they love. They think their dad could never come to faith. They think their best friend could never come to Christ. They think their children would never come back to Christ. God, I pray that we would have faith to be. believe you for the impossible. Give us a heart, God, that breaks for those far from God,

recognizing that Jesus didn't come for the healthy, but he came for the sick. We thank you, God. He didn't come for the righteous, but he came for sinners like us. As you keep praying today, nobody looking around. I can't tell you how much the picture of that guy's nightstand moves me, because I see a guy who is hurting and searching all at the same time. I see me, 28 years ago. And quite honestly, that's some of you right now. The weight of your sin is very real. I remember thinking, I've done so many things wrong. How could I ever be forgiven? How could I ever be good enough? Some of you feel that right now. Some of you, your past is drawing you back. You feel like you're stuck. There's like a war. You want to break free, but you don't know how. Let me tell you,

you're here today because Jesus came for you. He came for sinners. He came for sick people. He came for We're all sinners and we're all sick people. He came for you. And you don't have to be perfect to come to him. You come to him as you are. Levi, the tax collector, came as he was. Jesus loved prostitutes. He loved sinners.

He loved the worst to the worst, the lowest to the lowest. He loved those that religion rejected. They came to him and he accepted them as they were. Then they were transformed by his love, set free from their sin. And all of our churches, there are those of you that you recognize you're here for a bigger purpose. There's something more than just watching online or being in. in a building, but something spiritual is happening. And there's a war going on for you, and you're about to make a decision. Some of you, you're about to break free. What you're going to do is

recognize, I believe Jesus is the son of God, and I believe he died for me. And I believe when I call on him, I will be new. And that's why you're here today, because when you cry out to him, he hears your prayer, he'll forgive every sin you've ever committed, and you will be brand new. So by faith today, many of you're going to say, I give him my life. I don't even know what that means completely, but my only response is to say, yes, Jesus, take my life. I give it to you. That's your prayer today at all of our churches and say, yes, by faith, I surrender my life to you. Be my Savior, be my Lord, I give my life to you. Lift your hands high right now, all over our churches and say yes. That's me right up here. God bless you, right over here as well,

both of you right here. Leave them up. I want to look at you. Nobody else looking around over here on this side back over here, toward the back, here in the middle section. Right here, man, God bless you. Others of you say yes, sir, right back here. God bless you as well. right over here, way back here, both hands on this side. Praise God for you. Back here in this middle section, you can clap the whole time if you want to because God is doing something very special. Over here in this section, Jesus, save me.

Others of you today, you're leaning into it, pop your hand up right now, and say, yes, I surrender my life to him completely. Would you pray with those around? You pray, Heavenly Father, forgive me and make me new. Jesus be my Savior, the Lord of my life. fill me with your spirit so I could know you, serve you, follow you. My life is not my own. Today I give it to you.

Thank you for new life. Now you have mine. In Jesus' name I pray. Would you all worship big, worship loud, welcome those born into God's family today.