Themecasting question

What are your escape mechanisms? What are your coping skills with the wrongs that have been done to you, and the wrongs you have done to others? And how are they working?

Maybe some of us follow the footsteps of Cal Naughton Jr. [CLICK]

The movie Talladega Nights showed us Cal’s life as the constant runner up to his best friend, Ricky Bobby. They’re Nascar drivers, and Cal would always let Ricky draft up behind his car, and sling shot him to the win. So how does Cal cope with always finishing second? [CLICK]

“Bury it down deep…and never bring it up again!”

That’s actually a time tested coping skill that most of us try. Denial is often our first line of defense. But we have more than just the first line, don’t we?

What are some of the ways you try to cope with the wrong things you do, with the wrong things that have been done to you? When denial doesn’t work, where do you go next? Hyper levels of achievement? Numbing yourself with alcohol or other substances? Eating more, eating less?

What do you do to cope?

I want to invite you to find a blank space on your worship folder and write some of your coping skills down.

Nobody else has to see it; it’s just for you. What are your escape mechanisms from the pain in your life? Invite God to help you see yourself honestly. [GIVE SPACE]

The truth of life with God through Jesus Christ is that there is real hope that is far more effective than any of our coping skills.

Today, I want to invite us to take a hard and fresh look at the power of God to bring change to us, change that makes a real difference. Jesus brings redemption and forgiveness and healing that brings us true change!

Look with fresh eyes at the good news of Jesus today. Compare it with your own coping skills and escape mechanisms. Hold it up against other philosophies and answers and religions. Let’s continue in worship.

Changing in the Spirit.

I suppose the biggest hope, the biggest positive, the biggest longing we have for our relationship God is that we can become different because we follow Jesus.

To put it another way, if following Jesus doesn’t make some kind of difference in me, what’s the point? Most of us want some change in our life. And that’s because all of us have done wrong things, and all of us have had wrong things done to us.

We hurt others and we hurt ourselves with the selfish and wrong choices we sometimes make. The wounds from the wrongs that others have done to us fester and grow and affect us in so many ways as well.

We live in a broken world where people do horrible things to each other, and each of us has to do something with the hurt that has been done to us.

We live in a broken world that WE contribute to…where WE do horrible things to others, and each of us has to do something with the hurt that we do to others.

We’re really good at trying all sorts of things to cope.

We try to ignore. We try to bury. We try to escape. We try to compensate.

It takes on all kinds of forms. All kinds of acting out…cutting, substance abuse, eating disorders, broken relationships, acting out sexually… as we try to find something to numb our pain and soothe our guilt, we’re infinitely creative in the ways we act out.

I’ve been realizing in new ways how amazingly powerful God’s answer is to this issue.

It is truly the good news, the “gospel” that gives us hope for change, good news that comes from what God has done through Jesus for us.

Better than ignoring, better than compensating, better than trying to make up for our wrongs… God offers us through Jesus Christ something better than all of our coping skills.

Did the words from the book of Titus sink in earlier? Change in OUR behavior begins and ends with God’s work through Jesus Christ. Listen again: [READ Titus 2: 11-14, project]

Forgiveness and redemption are powerful words, and I want to invite us to live into them today.

I don’t know where you are this morning in your own journey. But I know this. There is going to come a time, if you aren’t there right now, where the wrongs done to you and the wrongs you have done are going to rear their heads so strongly in your life that doing something about it will be the most important thing you will have to do.

And if your view of the world doesn’t have a lasting solution…you will face a lot of pain.

It’s been several months since we returned from India.

We came face to face with people who viewed the world and viewed God very differently than I do. The Hinduism of India believes in many gods and goddesses, but none of them are incorruptible. None of them looks at human beings with kindness.

The best they can hope for from the gods, in their view, is that the gods will stop actively cursing them. Many of the people I saw were experiencing a lot of hurt and pain, and they felt like much of it came from the gods themselves.

We visited a huge temple while we were there, a temple of a goddess called Yellama. [CLICK] On one end of this temple plaza, a spring comes out of the rocks, and the people believe that this water has healing powers on this holy site. People are constantly there washing and bathing themselves for healing.

Right near this spot we saw a crowd of people around a woman.

This man, a sort of priest, would sprinkle that special water on her forehead, and she would lay flat down, prostrate, on the stones of the temple plaza. [CLICK]

The group around her would chant. It didn’t feel or sound like they were there supporting her; it almost felt like they were heaping shame on her.

Then she would stand up, take one step toward the temple, sweep the ground clean with a branch, and do it all over again. Water, face down, chant, stand up, step, sweep, and repeat.

It was humiliating and heart breaking to watch. It took like a half an hour to get across this courtyard.

Arun Massey told us that she was performing some kind of penance. Something had gone wrong in her life, or she had done something wrong. Something had happened, and she was now humiliating herself in some rite of penance to try and make everything ok.

We watched her slowly make her way across the courtyard. [CLICK]

At one point, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I caught her eye, and I realized she had absolutely no hope that this was going to do any good at all. She was desperately trying to find any way to make the wrongs in her life right, submitting herself to embarrassment and shame and scorn…and she had no real hope that it would do any good at all.

And I just ached for this woman. I ached for the pain in her life that would cause her to do this. I ached for her hopelessness, her view of a world and a goddess who offered her no way of escaping her pain and her wounds.

I literally wanted to scream at her to get off the ground, to stop, to stand up because she was a child and creation of the God of the universe who loved her.

[CLICK] And as I watched her disappear into the temple, at that moment perhaps more than any other time in my life, I realized how powerful the good news of Jesus Christ really is.

In the world of this temple she is entering, she had one more option after this act of penance.

If it didn’t work…if whatever she was doing this for didn’t go away…she had one last step she could take. Our guide said almost surely if this didn’t work, this woman would be told to dedicate the rest of her life to being a temple prostitute.

She would try to earn relief from the punishment of the gods by offering her body to men. That way of life would leave her either old and broken and begging, or dead with a body ravaged by AIDS. [CLICK to black]

I’ve seen the same hopelessness and brokenness here that I saw in that woman in India.

My friend Todd who destroyed his life with alcohol, because he couldn’t stop believing what his father said, that he was a worthless human being. A woman I’ll call Jessica who refused to eat because she saw herself as fat and unlovable.

Too often, we follow the same path as the Indian woman with no hope. We choose escape or we choose to punish ourselves, and it’s all because we don’t see any other hope, any other way out, any other way to deal with our wrong choices or the wrongs done to us.

Jesus DOES give a way out!

Following Jesus means we have a hope that is NOT dependent on escape or on punishing ourselves. Jesus died and lives again to give a real solution, a living hope, a way to do something about the wrongs we’ve done and the wrongs done to us.

Let me say it again: the good news of Jesus Christ is that real change is possible, not because of who we are or what we do, but because of what Jesus has done for us. Jesus came to give you and me and everyone on the planet freedom and healing. He came to bring change for us, change in the Spirit, change that breaks the pain of the wrongs done to us and the power of our own selfishness that causes us to do wrong ourselves.

When Jesus began his ministry, he walked to the front of the synagogue where he had grown up, and he read the scripture passage for that day. As he did it, he chose a passage that defined the good news of what he came to do. [READ Luke 4:18-21, project]

That is fundamental, earth-shattering change!

Healing of oppression, sight for the blind, a new era where God’s favor would be poured out on all people! Jesus is reading from Isaiah 61, and when Luke recorded it, he used the Greek translation used at the time. Jesus and the people of his time would also have known the original Hebrew version of Isaiah 61, which is much richer and more amplified. We can see that in our own English translations of Isaiah 61. [READ Isa. 61:1-3, project]

This is a picture of redemption, of what it means to be redeemed. And it is completely unfair. It is a horrible business proposition from God’s standpoint.

God is giving us good gifts in the face of our pain and brokenness and our evil choices.

Redemption is such a powerful word in the bible, and we do it such injustice today. We redeem a bottle for a nickel. Redemption has become the vengeance or pay back somebody accomplishes in a movie or a football game.

But God’s acts of redemption are so much more beautiful, so much more powerful. What God loves to do, because it is his character, is to redeem and buy back and make right past wrongs. God’s love doesn’t stop until the loved ones..US!...are bought back and brought back into right relationship.

Redemption brings change in us.

Not the kind of change that erases the bad stuff and makes it go away. Nowhere in Isaiah does it say God takes away the ashes or the mourning or the despair. It says that what God is doing is showering us with good things on top of the hard things that are already a part of our lives, some of our own making, and some that have come into our lives through no fault of our own.

God just gives right on top of that, showing his love for us, showering us with value and worth as we are chosen by God to be the receivers of his great love for us.

This is our God! This is our hope!

God wants to bring value to our lives again by bringing us back into right relationship with him.

Have you really let that picture of God and what he wants to do for you through Jesus Christ sink in?

My prayer and hope is that each one here today will hear the good news of God through Jesus Christ and live into it! The gospel literally means good news, and one of the many places Paul defines it is in Col. 1:21-23 [READ, project]

Changing in the Spirit happens because of what Jesus did.

And the Christian answer for how change happens really is fundamentally different and better than other belief systems. It’s not us who have to escape our pain or our wrong choices, it’s not us who have to make up for it.

Our hope lies in a holy and loving God who has redeemed us, bought us back through the death and resurrection of his son.

This is the good news…and I believe that many of us, many of us who have known the story of Jesus for a long time, need to live into this on a deeper level.

Many of us need to set aside our escape mechanisms that we have turned to in place of the redeeming power of Jesus. And this morning, right now, I want to ask you if it is time to make or re-affirm your commitment to accept what God has done for you through Jesus Christ, and to invite God to be at work in your life to forgive and redeem the wrong things you have done, and the wrong things that have been done to you.

Is it time to make some kind of decision today, a decision to let God’s good news be at work in your life in new ways?