Good Morning! Let
us begin this morning with some Calvin and Hobbs:
(Calvin and Hobbs cartoon)
Like Calvin, we all rebel against authority.
“God – I’m not going to! I don’t have to do what you say!
I can do anything I want!"
This is the essence of sin: willful rebellion. Choosing to rebel against
God.
But why would anyone choose to rebel against God? Why do we sin?
There are a number of correct answers to this question, but I want to focus
this morning on one simple answer:
We sin because we don’t trust God.
We think that we know better. It is not just that we think that we
don’t have to obey God, but we think that we are better off not obeying God.
It is a failure to trust that God loves us. We do what we think will
make us ultimately the happiest; we disobey God because we don’t think God
will ultimately make us happy.
This is the main thing that I would really like to communicate this morning:
Jesus, and only Jesus, can make you happy.
Jesus is what you want. Jesus is what you need. Jesus will give
you life, and nobody and nothing else can satisfy you.
Jesus.
The name “Jesus” comes from the Hebrew name “Joshua” which means “The Lord
is Salvation.”
So many times we think of salvation in terms of heaven and hell. Now
certainly salvation includes living forevermore. But it includes so
much more than that.
In Matthew 1:21 we read of the angel telling Joseph: “And you shall
call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Jesus is the savior – the one who saves his people from their sins.
What is so bad about sin, anyway?
How horrible is sin? The more horribly we think of sin, the more wonderfully
we’ll think of Jesus.
If we think of sin as a bad stomachache, for example, Jesus would be just
about as good as a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
If we have a poor view of sin, we’ll have a poor view of the Savior.
How bad is sin?
Time for our short movie….
(Film: Light of Darkness: http://www.globalshortfilmnetwork.com/films)
How bad is sin? Sin is like the coming train. It utterly destroys.
But look at us… holding onto our sin, refusing to trust the Savior.
I would like to take a few minutes to use this modern parable (the movie
we just saw) to look at the experience of salvation. There are five
stages:
#1: STUCK
Stage 1 in the salvation
experience we’ll call the “Stuck” stage. You are stuck when you run
out of gas in the middle of nowhere in the dark of night. You are stuck
when life is not serving up for you what you hoped for. You know there
is more. You are dissatisfied. You are unhappy. Everything
may even look good on the outside - you have a smile on your face and your
life looks quite together… but inside, you are nothing but stuck.
You are stuck if you don’t know what you are living for. You are stuck
if you are running on empty and you don’t know Jesus.
Or maybe you at one time prayed the prayer and trusted Jesus as your savior
and Lord, but you are not living like it now. You are not experiencing
the intimacy with God for which you were created. You would not describe
your life as one of life and peace. – you do not experience communion with
God. You don’t pray. You don’t read your Bible. You are
certainly not walking daily with Jesus.
You are depressed. You are lifeless. You are in the stuck stage.
And what most people do when they are in the stuck stage is just role up
the windows, lock the doors, and hope that nobody comes in and invades that
depressing life of darkness….
#2 APPROACHED
And that is exactly
when you need to be experiencing stage 2. Stage 2 is the approached
stage. This is when the Savior comes to you and tries to communicate
his love and truth to you. You don’t understand him, though, because
you are still stuck… you’ve got the doors locked and the windows rolled up.
His muffled voice of love and strong words of truth are too hard to hear…
you don’t understand that he wants to help you. You don’t understand
that he wants to save you. You only think he wants to hurt you.
You don’t trust him. He doesn’t even look like a Savior!
And it only starts looking worse for us, for the very thing that we think
is protecting us he proceeds to destroy – smashing windows and prying doors
open. Kicking and screaming, we try to fend him off. He is persistent
because he loves us, but we don’t see it. We perceive him to only want
to ruin us. He came to save us and give us life, but we think that
he is there to destroy us. So with every ounce of strength, we hold
onto our sin…
#3 VANQUISHED
And then we lose
(or win, depending on how you look at it). This is the third stage:
vanquished. (Vanquished, by the way, simply means ‘defeated’.)
This is the stage when the Savior succeeds at actually dragging us away from
our sin. Looking back, we see how little we deserved salvation – we
were working so hard against it! Being vanquished is all grace.
It is here that we have finally been defeated by his truth and love.
#4 EDUCATED
And then the fourth
stage is when we lie there in awe of the destruction that we just barely
avoided – thanks to the persistent love of the Savior. This stage we’ll
call the ‘Educated’ stage. This is that instant when it all makes sense
– we realize that he loved us all along. It is at this stage that we
have realized that he is LOVE.
#5 DEVOTED
And then lastly,
we enter into the fifth stage: devoted. We can look back and see how
foolish sin is. We see so clearly that the wages of sin is death, and
we have experienced the gift of God: life. We have experienced salvation,
and we are so thankful. We know that the Savior loves us; we know that
only he can make us happy; so we seek him with all we’ve got. And…
we give ourselves to saving others.
Stuck
Approached
Vanquished
Educated
Devoted
Where are you at this morning?
Have you been saved from your sin? Do you see how wonderful Jesus is
for saving you? Maybe this morning your heart is just overflowing with
thankfulness to Jesus. Are you devoted to him?
Having experienced salvation, are you willing to give all you’ve got to save
others? Do you see the people around you who are stuck… and do you
recognize that their train is coming? What kind of sacrifice are you
willing to make to save them? Are you willing to be misunderstood?
Are you willing to be disliked? Are you willing to smash into people’s
lives with God’s love and truth? What are you willing to sacrifice
to bring people to the Savior?
Or maybe you yourself are still stuck on the tracks? Is the Savior
trying to loosen your grip on sin? Are you kicking and screaming?
Give in.
No matter where you are at this morning, know this: sin is bad. Sin
is utterly evil. It will destroy.
And this is the essence of the message this morning. This is what it
all boils down to:
Sin kills; Jesus gives life.
Do we believe it? Will we live it?
The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.
The train is coming. And there is only one name under heaven by which
you we can be saved:
Jesus.
“And you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people
from their sins.” -Matthew 1:21
Let’s pray….
