Sermons tagged with Striving

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Erin, and I get the privilege of being one of the pastors here. And thank you for being here this morning, whether you're joining us online or whether you're here in person. We are just grateful that you chose to carve a little bit of your Sunday out to spend it with us. This morning, we are actually continuing in our series, as Mikey kind of reminded us, in Gentle and Lowly, where we've actually been looking at the character of Christ. We've looked at his compassion. We've looked at his humanity. We've looked at him as our gentle priest. And last week, we looked how he is our intercessor, as well as our advocate before the Father. And this week, we're going to jump ahead. We're now in chapter 18, and today we're actually looking at his yearning bowels. That one took a minute to sink in, didn't it? For those of you all that giggled and or wanted to laugh but chose not to, may that middle school boy that lives inside of you remain there forever because they bring such joy and interest to life. And for those of you that the yearning bowels may have brought up unfortunate thoughts of explosive bowels, I apologize on that front as well. And I hope that in this morning I can erase those visions from your head. And you can't blame me for today's topic. Nate holds that one firmly on his shoulders because he's the one that picked up the book and went through chapter by chapter and decided what he felt is what Grace needed to hear. So he's the one that chose that y'all needed to hear about yearning bowels today. But in actuality, if you dig into the chapter, what the chapter is about is about God's yearning love for us, about his tender and his compassionate heart that reaches in and grabs us in the depths of our sin and wants to pull us out. And as I read this and I continue to read over this, I have to admit, and I stand before you very transparent as one of the pastors and say, I struggle with this. And I struggle with what this says. I know it to be theologically the truth but I have moments when I look at it and say hmm there's a God that loves me down to the depths of his being to his core. He loves me that much and I struggle with And I ask sometimes, how is that truly possible? For those of you that know me, this next statement will not come as a shock, but I am a people pleaser by nature. And for as long as I can remember, I've sought the approval of others. It's just who I am. It is part of my wiring, I truly believe. If you go into all the personality tests and you look at all the things, like I'm a helper. I don't know all the numbers and letters. I just don't. But that's just who I am. That's how I'm wired. I also think environmentally there was an impact. My dad was in food retail. We moved a ton when I was a kid. I was in four different elementary schools before I hit fifth grade. So I spent a lot of time trying to fit in, trying to find new friends, trying not to be labeled as, you know, the new girl. That's not something I wanted to carry. I just wanted to fit in and be part of a group or like just a little cluster. The other thing is, is that I didn't in those elementary years have a foundation in God's love for me. I grew up with parents who were believers, but we were also a family that were Christers. For those of you that don't understand that terminology, we went to church on Christmas and Easter. That was my exposure to the church. Good or bad, again, that's just what it was. I also had a brother who played travel hockey, so we were always on the road. These were choices that my parents made, and I don't hold any of it against them by any means, but I think it helped to form who I am and how I continue to do. Because from childhood and even into adulthood, my world's been marked by a lot of striving. This striving to be accepted, this striving to prove myself, to somehow earn a place. And then after I became a Christian, that striving also fell into, I think, and shaped how I viewed God. I knew that I loved him. I knew I believed in who he is and who he says he was. I knew that what scripture said about him was 100% true, but I still doubted sometimes that he could love me the way that he said he did in scripture. Because y'all, I knew I'm messy, I'm stinky, I carry lots of baggage. I carry lots of shame, lots of regret for my past. And so for me to think about that kind of love hitting home for me is hard sometimes to wrap my head around. And so as I was continuing to prepare, Nate and I have met a few times. And again, this might be shocking to you all. He came to me a couple times and said, you have too many words. You need to parse it down just a little bit. But he challenged me to find one thing, just one thing that out of this chapter and out of what I've studied, that I would hope that you guys would walk away with. And so, Nate, I apologize ahead of time because in looking for my one thing, I may have veered off course from what we had talked about originally. So this is what we've got, though. But he challenged me to think about one thing for you all to walk out of here with today as we talk about God's love for us. And the thing that hit me somewhere in all of this was from John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. And what that says is, a new commandment I give you, love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. And by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. Y'all, when I read that, when I went back to it and I read over it and I read over it again, and it hit me right in the face. How is it that we can love others if we don't believe that he loves us? He states in that commandment, he wants us to love others like he's loved us. But if I doubt or if I don't believe in the love that he's given me, how then in turn can I give that love out to others? And I think that's why our world today is starving. It's starving for the kind of love that Jesus offers to us. This love that's real. It's not a political correctness or tolerance. It's not a kind of love that is social niceties, but it's the kind of love that is rooted in stays, forgives, it heals. So when he says for us to love others the way he's loved us, he's not asking us to try to do better. I think what he's doing is he's inviting us to be transformed. Transformed by the love that he has for us first. Because see, we can't love others like Jesus until we trust that we're loved by Jesus. This is it. If you hear nothing else I say today, this is it. That we ourselves can't love like he asks us to love others until we trust that we're truly loved by him. And this love that he has for us and is asking us to give out to others, it's not a cautious love. It's not a distant love. But it's a love that is actually drawn into our need and our messy. Which that's the part that I think for a lot of us is scary, right? So when we're at those places down deep, and this is where I said before, I have messy, I have lots of background baggage, right? But that's the place that Jesus wants to meet us and dig in, in that place of sin and love us all the more. So in those places where we feel the most unworthy or the most unlovable, the most ashamed, he wants to meet us there. We have to learn how to wrap our heads around that. And I think that there's a lot of us in this room that may be like, yeah, well, he extends that to others around us. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen that love extended to other people, but he's not going to give that to me because, you know, not after what I've done, not after the fact that I have yelled at my children for the 10,000th time, not after I have attempted and yet failed one more time to quit alcohol or drugs or pornography. Or after I have had the abuse that I have in my past. He can't love me there. He can't. And so instead of resting in his love, what we do when we put up that wall that says he can't get into those down, dark, dirty places with us is we start striving to earn love in other places. We have somehow to prove to others around us that we're lovable, that we're worthy of the love that he has or that somebody else has. I'm lovable. If I just keep doing, if I keep striving, if I keep somehow, somebody's going to think that I'm worthy. But when we doubt, when we doubt, when we strive, it doesn't do us any good. And in actuality, it makes us poor lovers of the people around us. He calls us to love others the way that he's loved us. But if we're striving to get that love from other people and from other places, then we are in a place where we have no capacity to give love if we're always striving to try to grab it from something. And when we doubt that we're loved, we tend to withhold our love from those around us. Because you know what? It took me an awful lot to feel this little bit of love that I've got right now. I'm not ready to give that up. And so we hold on and we're not doing a good job in loving other people. And so when you look at how Christ loved, we go back to where he was when he gave this commandment. He's in the upper room. It's the night before he's to go to the cross. The night before he makes the sacrifice of his life where he takes on your sin, my sin, your neighbor's sin, past, present, and future. So that we can have a relationship with him and that we can in turn be with him forever. So it's the night before he's getting ready to do that for us. He's sitting in a room with his 12 best friends and he knows already that Judas is about to betray him. He knows that Peter will deny him and he knows that by the time that the sun rises, all of the disciples will have scattered. He knows that. And yet he makes a very conscious choice to kneel down and to wash their feet. Y'all, if that was me and my humanness, that would not have been my response. Think about it. I might've been angry. I could have been, you know, or like, like, just not going to talk about this. You're going to be hateful, ugly people to me here in about 12 hours. I'm done with you. But that's not how he chooses to respond. He chooses with love and action. He chooses to serve when it is the least deserved. And he chooses to move towards those who are failing him. He knows it. And that's what he does for us too, right? He moves towards us in those places where he knows we're going to fail him, where we're not doing what we feel or what we should be doing. And then he continues on and he says to them, as I have loved you, so you must love one another. So he's just knelt down. He's just given them that love that they didn't deserve, that love that met them in this place of complete and total failure. And he says, have to receive it before you can give it because love starts with receiving before it becomes doing. We get that backward all the time in our humanness. We get that backward all the time. When we're not anchored in his love for us, all we end up doing is making ourselves exhausted making ourselves defensive and disappointed I said before that I am a people pleaser and one of the things that people pleasers do so beautifully is they put others before themselves quite often to your detriment. Many of you guys know that my parents passed away within 17 months of each other, and sandwiched in between there, there was lots of running back and forth to Pinehurst, lots of hospital visits, lots of taking on responsibility and helping my dad and aunt. There was a whole litany of things that I could add in there. In there also, I was trying to be a good wife. I was trying to be a good mom. I was trying to be a good pastor here at Grace. And I can stand before you and tell you I failed miserably at all of that during that period of time. It wasn't pretty. I was short with my family. I know I let people here down. I let my coworkers down. It wasn't pretty. And I know it. And I was constantly running. I had my kids later admit to me that there were things that they didn't tell me during that time because they didn't want to add anything else to my plate. And as a mama, for those of the other mamas in the room, you know that just breaks your heart to think that they just can't come to you. I just was not a good human at that moment or during this time. And I can also admit to the fact that I would get phone calls periodically from my dad after my mom had passed. And I remember seeing his name pop up on the screen and literally just staring at the phone and in moments dreading answering it. I love my dad to my core, but I knew to answer it there would be questions and he was very needy at those moments and I didn't have anything left to give. I was done. I was exhausted. I did answer it, by the way. But still, in that moment, there was always that thought and that hesitation as I looked at the screen because I was like, oh, no. And the thing is, I neglected myself, and I realize now that we can't, you can't pour out what you haven't first received. I was working from an empty cup, a very empty shell, because I was running myself absolutely ragged. And this goes back to the fact that we can't love like Jesus if we don't trust that we're loved by Jesus. If I'm not filled up by Jesus because I trust that he loves me, I am not loving others well. And I think that there's a lot of us in the world like this today. And I think that this emptiness or this constant striving and this constant motion trying to earn something, trying to pour ourselves out from empty cups is why the world can feel like it does sometimes, where we're living in this place where we're quick to divide and quick to assume things and slow to forgive. And we see that often sliding into the church as well because the church is made up of a lot of humans, right? And it slides into the church as well. You don't need me to tell you that. You all have seen it at some point in time. All you have to do is look online. And it makes you sad. And I think back to what Jesus said about his disciples loving others. And I wonder to us too, if we classify our followers, ourselves as followers of Jesus, what would it be like if the people of Jesus were known not for being right or righteous or all the things you could add there, but for being rooted. Being so secure in his love that we freely give out our love to others. That we are so rooted in his love that we no longer compete, but we serve, that we're so rooted in his love that we no longer compare ourselves to others, but we celebrate each other, and that somehow when we're so rooted that we no longer condemn, but we just choose to forgive and to offer grace. Because I think then the world will start to take notice. And the world's going to recognize us as Jesus followers by our love for one another. Our love, this love that is so rooted deep inside of us, is meant to be living evidence of who he is. It's meant to be that living evidence to the rest of the world that he is real and he is love. Not our striving love, not our performing love. That's not the kind of love that we need here. What we need here is that secure love, the love that is flowing from a heart that is rooted and anchored in grace. And I know some of you all are now looking at me going, okay, that sounds really good. And you've not met my mother-in-law or my father-in-law or whoever it may be, my coworker, my brother, my sister, whoever it may be that says, and you're going, but loving like Jesus is going to be really hard in those circumstances. Yeah, it is because we're human and we run out of patience and we run out of kindness and we run out of, in a lot of cases, just run out of ourselves. But I go back to that commandment that he gave us. And I don't think he gave it to us to be impossible. I think he gave it to us as a reminder and an invitation to draw us back to him and to remind us that that same love that he gives and that same love that saved us is now going to be the love that empowers us to love others. And that that love and that grace that he met us with in the middle of our messy, stinky mess is now going to be the love and grace that helps us to meet others in their mess. It's an invitation and a reminder that even with those that are super hard to love, we can't work it up sometimes. We can't just walk into the situation going, I'm going to love them better today. I am. I'm going to love them better today. It doesn't always work that way because our ability to love doesn't come from some sort of willpower. I truly believe that it comes from being willing to be loved. I had the opportunity last week to hang out with some sorority sisters. We did this the year before. It's just a sweet time. We get to reconnect. This year, my old roommate got to join us, and I was so excited. I had not seen her in probably seven or eight years. And Shelly and I got to actually room together again on this trip, and we spent many nights just chatting and talking and catching up. And I asked her about her sister and how things were going. Shelly had a sister who about 15 years ago had a brain tumor, multiple surgeries, etc. Left her sister with basically some traumatic brain injury. She had short-term memory issues. Long-term memory was very much intact. Her physical ability is very much intact. So she could live somewhat independently. It was always nice just to have some people around to check on her. And about seven years ago, she moved up to be close to Shelly and her family. Lived a couple houses away, so very involved in her life, constantly looking after, checking in on her, and all the things. In 2022, her sister caught COVID, and because of her compromised health, landed her in the hospital for a great deal of time. It accelerated some of her decline. And because of that, she ended up in a rehab facility. And Shelly's comment in all of this to me was, I don't understand why it's her and it's not me. There was a lot of guilt in that respect. And, you know, we talked about it, and she's a believer as well. And I'm like, I don't have an answer for you on that one. There isn't an answer for why it's her and not you. And then she went on to say that one of the things recently that Amy has started to do is that every time they go to visit, Amy just looks at her and says, God has been so good to me. And it's at every visit. And Shelly looked at me and she said, I don't know how she can say that. After 15 years and all she's gone through and all the struggles and all the things, I don't know sometimes how she can say that. But this time I knew I could look at Shelly right in the face and go, I know exactly why she says that. Because of you. You are her personal representative of God's love. You who shows up and loves on her unconditionally. You who takes her out. You who does all the things for her and with her. To her, you represent God's love. So when she says, God has been so good to me, she can say it because of the way that you love her. And I hope, Grace, that we can be that to other people as well. Nate often states that we can't be the big C church, but we can be Grace. And we as individual people can impact, we can work on ourselves, we can impact our families, we can also then impact this body and the communities around us. And so when you think about Shelly and you think about her willingness to love so unconditionally the way she did. I think about us and myself. This is me talking to myself too. But what would it be like if we chose to believe the best about one another because we know that that's what love does? What would it be like if we showed up for people who were hurting? Even when we didn't want to because their hurting is hard. But we did it because we know that that's what Jesus would do. What would it look like if we were forgiving before it's earned? Because we know that that's what grace would do. And what would it be like if we had all the patience with those that are just new or learning? Because again, we know what grace and love would do. Because I think every act of love then becomes this small reflection of the greater love that we've received. Because we can only do that, however, when we're sure of his love for us. And when we're secure in his love, we stop striving to earn it and we start living to spread it. And so today, I don't believe in my being that this is an invitation for us to walk out these doors and try to love better. I don't think that that's what this is. I think what this is is an invitation to us to let ourselves be loved deeper. To receive his love for us. All that Aaron and the team sang about. How much he loves us. That's what we have to receive first. And when we truly trust that we're loved by him. Freely, fully, without any condition. That will be the moment that we will turn and love others like he loves us. So we can't love others like Jesus until we trust that we're loved by Jesus. And so what is it, Grace, that you guys can do this week as you walk out these doors to root yourself deeper in the love that he has for you today? And will y'all pray with me? Thank you. Thank you, Lord, that you love us. Thank you, Lord, that you give so freely of your love. We just ask that we are willing to receive that, that we put down ourselves, that we quit striving to earn our love from someplace else and quit striving to earn your love. But somehow, by staying rooted in you, that we learn how very deeply you love us. That down deep in our core and our soul, that you love us that down deep in our core and our soul that you love us that much and by doing so challenging us to then take that love and spread it to those around us thank you Lord for your love thank for your son. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.