Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This weekend, across fourteen services on three campuses, there are going
to be stories that are all over the map. And there is going to be different ethnicities
in the water this weekend, and there is going to be different socioeconomic statuses
represented in the water. We could go on and on and on about the differences that exist
in the men and women who will get in the water and be baptized. Like some of them have no
church background. Some of them grew up in church and, despite the fact that they went
to every youth camp, every Disciple Now, every Fall retreat, listened to Songs From the Loft
over and over again, did not know Jesus Christ at all until recently. So there is going to
be a thousand different variances in story this weekend, but if we boil it down to the
base level, they all have some things in common.
The first thing they have in common is they were all born with a broken way of seeing
that distorted everything. It is a distortion that really oozes in every direction. It starts
with a distorted view of who God is. Like we do not see well who He is, we doubt His
goodness, we doubt whether or not we can trust Him.
So if you are the type of fellow that says, I ll take care of myself, I ll provide for
myself, I ll make it happen, then your relationships with others are marked by you using and abusing
them. Because they have to stay under your control so that you can control everything,
and you crush them. They have to make you happy, so when you are not happy, it is their
fault. You put an impossible weight on them.
Or
because you feel dirty, because you feel unclean, because you feel wicked, you allow others
to abuse you and use you over and over and over again. And this is because you have a
distorted view of God, which has led to a distorted view of yourself, which has led
to a distorted view of others. And normally when you have all these broken puzzle pieces,
you think that if you put these broken pieces with these broken pieces, maybe you can get
something whole. The problem is if you take these broken pieces and these broken pieces
and try to cram the two broken pieces together, you actually further break the broken pieces.
So when broken people try to find redemption in broken people, broken people get more broken.
And all of this begins, almost every piece of your sorrow, almost every bit of your pain,
almost all of your loneliness and despair can be traced back to a distorted view of
who God is, of how He sees you, of what He thinks about you.
And then since you have a distorted view of God that has led to a distorted view of yourself,
which has led to a distorted view of others, we can see why the world is just a big mess,can't
we?
So if there is any doubt whether or not you are worthy, let me answer that question. You
are not worthy. What makes grace so phenomenal is not your worth. What makes grace this thing
that we praise God for and worship Him for is not that you are clean. It is that you
are dirty and He loves you in it.
I have told the Village Church a billion times since I got here that
God does not love some future version of you. It's not some cleaner version of you that
He likes.
ÉAnd over and over again, this is the message of what Jesus Christ does in the cross. Regardless
of background, regardless of socioeconomic status, regardless of whether or not you shook
your fist at the heavens and said, "I hate You" on some dark moment, regardless of whether
or not you were involved in some wicked activities that you can feel the shame on you still.
ÉHe buys us back from the slavery of distortion.
ÉThis is what we're celebrating here across all these campuses. This is what everyman,
woman and child that gets in the water this weekend is going to say. They're going to
say some version in that. You heard it in this one, and they'll hear it in the next
one and every other one. There's a distortion, the eyes are opened to that distortion, there
is a surrender to the cross of Jesus Christ and there's this change in how we see the
world around us. And this is what we celebrate.
ÉSo if you don't have a background in church, you can get really confused about what our
message is and what we believe and what we say. Some of you are like, "Well, I just thought
you hated the gays and were against sex." Uh, no and no. "I thought you guys just didn't
drink beer and didn't watch rated-R movies." Again, no and no.
Although we do want to practice wisdom in all things. If you never quite understood
what it was we were celebrating, if you were like me growing up, you're probably confused
about exactly Christians were celebrating. Were they celebrating their pretend moral
superiority? Were they celebrating that they were once bad and now they're not? Because
that's legitimate. I see that on Oprah all the time. "I was bad. I did these bad things.
Not anymore!" That's not what we're celebrating. We're celebrating that, while we were at our
worst, Christ died for us. And we're celebrating that something happened when we became aware
of that. Something happened in our minds and our hearts when we became aware of that that
changed how we live day to day. We're not perfect, we're still busted, still fail, still
are drawn to the flesh, but God, slowly and surely, is making us more and more like Him
and less and less like the distorted viewing person we were.