Lighting A Candle

Text: John 9:1-41

Focus: Shining the light on Jesus

Function: Helping people to focus on Christ instead of other things in Church.

Form: Storytelling

Tell the story:

• The blind man saw
• The pharisees refused to believe what was before him
• They made up a reason to attack Jesus

Their deliberate and stubborn refusal to believe is almost appalling.

How people can, when presented with something good happening to them, and all around them, -how they can- refuse to believe amazes me.

How people can reject what is obvious because they are afraid to give up their ideology flabbergasts me.

It's like, the earth is still flat or something.

That is the story of this passage.

It is a simple message. Jesus did a great thing and some people refused to believe in Him.

Now, let me segue into an illustration that will lead us to the point of this story. The teaching point of the story is found in the last three verses of the text.

In March 3rd's sermon, I shared how God saved my life when the Azar's Big Boy restaurant that I was managing was robbed and I was beaten and left for dead.

Jesus saved me.

While the men were discussing how to kill me, I repented and prayed “Lord Jesus, I am sorry, forgive my sins and save me.

I felt Him enter my body right here (point to base of right ear).

What a miracle happened to me!

But I also shared that when I was a young man, I left the Church altogether because my Church had decided to move its location when the neighborhood integrated.

They did not want to worship with black people.

I let that destroy my faith.

Now, that Church did the gospel wrong.

The NT is very clear about racism, “there is neither male or female, slave or free, Greek or Jew” and “in Christ, God broke down the dividing wall...” between races. And “God has called the Church into the ministry of reconciling people...”

it is just as obvious to me in the NT as this miracle should have been to them.

I believe that they were that way because they were afraid of change.

Part of my restoration back to God had to include forgiveness toward that Church.

I had to accept what good I learned from them, and forgive the poor example.

When I boil that story down I realize something that this passage is trying to teach us.

Think about this.

The Church that I dismissed, the church I had to forgive, was preaching Jesus and racism.

I quit listening to them because they mixed the gospel message with their own personal bias.

This week, President Jimmy Carter attacked the Southern Baptists for preaching Jesus and gender discrimination.

Many Churches have lines drawn in the sand about politics so that the message is Jesus and their view.

I wonder how well people are listening to our message about the gospel of Jesus when Churches have take such strong stands, either for or against a myriad of issues.

Is it Jesus AND? Or, is the message Jesus, who loves us?

And here is what this has to do with the scripture this morning.

Let me read the last three verses from The Message Bible:

³⁹Jesus then said, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.”

⁴⁰Some Pharisees overheard him and said, “Does that mean you’re calling us blind?”

⁴¹Jesus said, “If you were really blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”

Jesus is the light of the World.

The light shined, and since they refused to see it, they were blind.

Their refusal to believe Jesus condemned them.

And Jesus point is a warning for us.

This man was clearly healed. A wonderful miracle happened but the leaders refused to acknowledge Jesus.

Instead, they choose to be blind. They choose not to see.

The whole story leads up to these verses where Jesus gives a warning... ...and it's not just to the Pharisees, but it is also to us:

Do not be blind leaders.

A good thing happened and they refused to shine a light on it.

The gospel is good news.

Instead of rejoicing in the good thing that happened, they condemned Jesus.

It is an avoidance strategy.

When you got nothing good to say, you curse the darkness.

So, I ask myself the question. Do I curse the darkness, or do I light a candle?

When Churches curse the darkness, the message is Jesus and whatever they are cursing.

Jesus was loving on this blind man. What a wonderful story of restoration!

And they changed the message. They condemned Him as a false prophet. They questioned His origin and when the blind man called them out on it, they condemned him as well.

Who else likes the book of Revelations?

It is highly symbolic book. I can't wait to see how it all turns out.

It starts with letters to 7 churches. In Chapter 2:4-5 Jesus, from heaven, tells the Church at Ephesus that He will remove their lamp stand because they have left their first love.

This is important symbolism.

In the OT temple, there was this Holy Place and every day, they placed 12 loaves of bread in it. (move up on stage to lamp stand and uncover the bread)

It was called “The bread of presence.”

The candlestick illuminates the bread.

The bread is/was a prophetic symbol of God's provision for His people. It was an OT prophetic symbol of Jesus Himself.

In John 6:25-59, Jesus Himself specifically calls Himself this bread of life.

The Candlestick illuminates God's provision. Jesus.

And the Church in Ephesus was about to lose its candlestick because it started focusing on the wrong thing. It may not have been a bad thing, like racism. But it lost its primary focus.

If we are not shining the light on Jesus Christ, then we are blind leaders.

It is so easy to do “Jesus and” instead of Jesus alone.

The more we shine the light on other things, the less we shine it on Jesus.

We can easily move the light away from Christ.

Some of the things we move the candlestick toward are good and healthy.

There is nothing wrong with proclaiming them.

Whatever is pure...

If you listen to me long enough, you will think it is Jesus and Kairos Prison ministry.

At times the church needs to speak out.

But when it does, it must remember that it's job is shining its light on Jesus, the bread of life.

Cursing the darkness is not shining a light.

Way too often, we get so caught up in the “and” part of Jesus and that we forget that we are speaking for Christ.

This is Lent. We are focusing on Jesus.

And it is easy to get caught up with distractions.

When we do Jesus AND we too can confuse the issue.

At times, I am just as guilty.

Last year, after George Zimmerman was acquitted, I fell into the trap of getting into a political debate with some fellow Brethren ministers.

And I was invited to write an opposing view, which I posted to my blog. I was angry when I wrote it and I was very critical of some media personalities that they enjoyed.

My critical spirit was very unchristian.

And someone here pointed it out to me. When I reread it, realized how mean it sounded. So I deleted. But the damage was done.

I made a mistake because I was preaching Jesus and my viewpoints.

It is easy to fall into this trap.

We can easily forget that we are here to shine the light on Jesus.

This Lent, we shine the light on Jesus.

Pride gets in our way.

When we curse the darkness, it has the appearance of wisdom.

The Pharisees assumed that if they cursed it loud enough, people would listen to them.

Cursing the darkness can even have the appearance of Godliness. People confuse anger with Godliness.

But it is not for us. James 1:20 is clear, Man's anger does not bring about God's righteousness.

Our pulpit is not a bully pulpit, it is a pulpit of grace, bringing healing.

Every time we curse the darkness, we are preaching Jesus AND. We are moving the candlestick away from Jesus.

Our pride makes us want to be relevant.

On either side of every conflicting viewpoint are people that Jesus gave His life for.

We are good at being:

• Democrat or Republican.
• For gun control or against gun control
• MSNBC or FOX News
• One preacher, the one I got this candlestick/bread illustration from said that the Church turned into the 4-H club in the things they stand against:
  • Harry Potter
  • Hollywood
  • Halloween and
  • Dare I say it? Homosexuals.
    • On that last one:
    • Sincere people, who are fighting over it have moved the candlestick away from Jesus into the AND.

I have to continually remind myself to keep focused on Jesus and what He has done for me.

Pride will get us every time. It will distract the good news.

So, I'll blow you away with a different perspective on racists.

You hear me preach “love the sinner, hate my own sin.”

Well, I have been guilty of hating the sinner.

I did a wedding and they asked the ceremony to be on Wednesday because they didn't want the bride's father to come.

He and his father were Grand Dragons in the KKK. Her parents were divorced and her mother was remarried to a black man.

At the wedding reception, the last seat available was across from her step mother and grandmother.

I remember seeing them as haughty. But Jesus loved them.

An Unlikely Source

Text: John 4:5-26, 39-42

Focus: God's transforming power

Function: God used an unlikely source to prove who and what He can transform.

Form: Storytelling.

Intro: This morning we get to speak about revival. I love revival.

I love the renewal story the God brings to this entire town and I love it because the person God used is an unlikely source.

The unlikely source was a woman with many strikes against her by our religious standards.

If this were a TV crime drama, the prosecutor would not use her because she is not a credible witness.

But that isn't the way that God sees people.

This woman was living with a man whom she was not married. She was five times divorced. Some commentators point to the fact that she alone was at the well at lunchtime was because she was rejected, maybe even banned, from coming when all the “decent folks” in the community went to the well.

And her story of exclusion isn't limited to the town folks, her family and friends.

Jesus' disciples might have felt the same way.

The text says that they were shocked that their leader would be talking to her. First, she was a woman. Second, she was a Samaritan woman.

Samaritans were people that the Jews considered to be racially impure.

So, the towns people knew her as “evil sinner.” The disciples knew her as “half-breed.”

But Jesus knew her as a daughter of God.

And Jesus restores her with the promise of the life giving power of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, the gift that Jesus promises will satisfy the longing in the human soul.

We would guess that the woman's five divorces and the current living arrangement sprung from a deep desire inside of her to feel alive.

We can even surmise that she was trying to fill the innate human need for connection to the divine with destructive relationships.

Not only does Jesus restore her, but He restores the whole town to Him through her.

When Jesus meets the woman. She herself is shocked that He is willing to speak to her.

“How come you are speaking to me?” She says.

Perhaps life had beat her up so much that her charms weren't working anymore and a strange man giving attention to her was no longer common.

And the first thing Jesus does us use His mystical language, “drink from the water I give you and never thirst again.” Jesus intrigues her with the promise that God knows her needs and longing and can heal them.

Then, Jesus tells her about her living arrangement and her divorces and she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. I love the line: “Sir. I perceive that you are a prophet!” It seems to me to be the epitome of understatement.

There are a lot of reasons for the brokenness that invades people's lives. And I know that Jesus is still the Great Physician who can heal the wounded soul. This is what He promises her.

I know, because I have experienced it for myself.

God just keeps on healing us. He loves to do it.

So, who this woman is and the fact that God uses her to inspire revival to the entire town is central to the story.

Jesus used an unlikely source.

But by His Holy Spirit, it worked.

This seems to be a theme in the gospels. He works through unlikely sources. Perhaps that is the point of grace.

Let me move this story forward 2,000 years.

At one Church I pastored, the congregation had decided that no one who was divorced and remarried could serve as deacons.

Some accepted this, and others didn't.

One couple, strongly compelled to be members of the Church, faithful in everything they did, decided if they could not be deacons, they could be beacons of light, And they were.

I never told the congregation that I didn't agree with their decision. A pastor is always an itinerant, he or she works for God and is on loan from God to the congregation.

The sooner the pastor figures this out, the easier it is to be the spiritual guide for the congregation.

The congregation sets those rules, policies and practices. A good pastor can work with any system.

So, I didn't complain.

But pastoral personalities do attract different people.

For some reason, I seem to attract those unlikely sources like the woman at the well.

Maybe this is just my ego, but I think -I hope- that it is because believe in grace.

And, through the preaching of Grace, God began to change both the culture and the dynamic of that Church.

So, let us go back to the woman.

She certainly qualifies for the first part of the phrase: “love this sinner hate the...”

People like her are the people we are talking about.

Loving the sinner isn't our problem.

We all love the sinner. Every Christian does.

But sincere Christians can disagree as to whose sin we should hate.

I say, love the sinner, hate my own sin. And if someone disagrees with that, GREAT! There are good reasons, good biblical reasons, to disagree with my perspective on this. A church where everyone has to be, or is made to feel like, a clone of the pastor is not a healthy church.

And so, divorced people have felt comfortable where I have been pastor. But on the reverse side of that, some people have actually said that they are uncomfortable having “people like that” in their church. I have heard it other places, I am sure I will never hear it here.

Back to this church that had this policy: It was a great ministry for me, probably my favorite one so far.

And as a result of what God was doing through me, not me, but God through me, many divorced and remarried couples found God and joined the church.

I didn't realize that it was a problem for some.

It caught me unaware.

A few had family members and friends from other more conservative congregations in the area who chided them for associating with divorced and remarried people.

It came back to me that my stand on divorce and remarriage was too generous for a few since I allowed “those kinds” of people to minister in the Church. I allowed them to serve.

And that church was a great ministry for us. We eventually we moved beyond the hiccup of that issue.

But here is the rub. Here is where this story from Jesus' ministry and my experience coincided.

Here is how “I allowed” this to kind of person to serve happened.

One Sunday morning, during Joys and concerns, a divorced and remarried woman stood up to praise God about how God was healing her life.

And something wonderful happened. I don't quite know what it was except it was a great move of the Holy Spirit. It was a revival.

I didn't get to preach that Sunday.

Before her testimony was over, several people came to the altar for prayer and ministry.

It was a miracle just like what happened in this Samaritan village. The woman at the well, who nobody liked, went back to town and God used her to bring the whole village to faith in Jesus Christ.

God used this woman, who wasn't supposed to serve in our church to spark a revival.

I remember feeling the gentle nudge of the Holy Spirit in my own mind reminding me of this passage. I thought this exact phrase “God used an unlikely source.”

This is what Jesus spoke of when He said the Holy Spirit would flow out of us like rivers of living water.

I don't remember exactly what words she used in our Church, but I remember the gist.

She started giving witness to God's unconditional love to her.

She spoke of how wonderful it was that God had delivered her from a violent abusive husband and gave her a gentle man.

She started testifying about how great it was to be in a congregation where her past didn't matter anymore, where she sensed the actual love and acceptance of God.

Now, I had been preaching grace in the Church for 6 years at this point and I preached it another 4 years.

But I don't believe it was ever better understood until this woman, who to them was an unlikely source, testified to God's redeeming power in her life.

God changed the culture of that Church.

The change wasn't without a small amount of conflict, conflict, when it doesn't create winners and losers can be a healthy process whereby everyone grows. As a matter of fact, we rarely grow without conflict because they challenge us.

But it is hard to argue with change when the Holy Spirit moved in such a loving way.

And God is still doing the same thing today.

And that is what happens when we let the Holy Spirit work through us.

She told me later how terrified she was to stand up and speak. She told the entire church “I feel the hand of God on me this morning and I need to share what God has done.”

You see, God is in the business of healing the brokenhearted.

I keep having to remind myself that Jesus left the Church here on earth to continue this work.

God does this because God wants to connect with every single person.

Every single person is God's child and His heart breaks over whoever lives a life without being reconciled to Him

CONCL:

This is Lent.

I haven't been preaching as much about the three years of Jesus teaching us how to live.

I have been preaching the three days of Jesus reconciling sacrifice for us.

He gave His life to restore us to God.

His promise, to this woman, is a life-giving refreshment, restoration from Him.

And if you are here this morning and this relationship with Jesus has never began. Why not today?

As it was then, and is always, this altar is open.

Help From Above

Text: John 3:1-17

Focus: God's saving grace

Function: A gospel call

Form: G^od O^nly K^nows

Intro: Let us count off the first 9 words of John 3:16 together: For God so loved the world that He gave...

God gave. God gives. God gave Jesus.

Nicodemus was a religious man. He was a sincere scholar, honest in his search.

But for some reason, he wasn't quite getting who Jesus was.

You have to admit it, all those parables and the way Jesus lived His life, He was pretty mysterious. I am not sure I would have gotten it either.

Jesus came to establish a new Covenant with humanity, a New Testament. And thank God it includes everyone, everywhere.

Up until Jesus, the Jewish faith was a national faith, it was a theocracy, it was a covenant that God established with the nation of Israel.

The New Testament, the New Covenant is different.

Here comes Jesus, healing everyone, no matter which nation they came from.

Jesus was a friend to sinners. And in a Pharisee's eyes, according to the Old Covenant, sinners brought the judgment of God on the entire nation.

His role was to kick Him out, but before he did that, he wanted to check Him out. Something mysterious was going on with Jesus and he needed to see.

And Jesus was upsetting his preconceived notions.

That every happen to you? It seems to me like it does every time I read this book.

He, and John before Him, preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand, that it was here and now.

This confused ol' Nic.

But because he is honest in his search for God, he checks it out for himself.

I think he was missing the generosity of God.

I think he was missing the gift of God.

I wonder if he missed the concept that God gives.

I wonder if he missed the concept that God wants to be inside the hearts of men and women.

Perhaps he didn't understand the the message of the OT, the Spirit of the Law, which is to love one another.

But good news for Nicodemus: being a Pharisee, he was of the sect that believed the OT prophets.

And the OT prophets were excited about the coming of Jesus.

As a matter of fact, 1 Peter 1:10-12 tells us that they longed for it.

Jeremiah longed for the day when by God's Holy Spirit the hearts of everyone who believes would be changed and they would feel what he was so passionate about.

Isaiah longed for the day when the Lion would lay down with the lamb and a little child will lead them.

He also longed for the day when those who are thirsty can be filled, for the day when wine, bread and milk flow freely to everyone and people exchange greed for brotherly love.

Micah and Joel longed for the day when men would beat their swords into plows.

Amos longed for the day when God would be excited about human worship because instead of mere religious ceremony, it would include justice rolling down like a river.

And although the prophets spoke these messages that the revived Kingdom, under the Messiah would be a kingdom that included foreigners, peace, justice and changed hearts, Nicodemus, steeped in his traditions missed that message.

And Jesus Himself makes it clear that God's kingdom is not earthly, not political, not an human construct, but a kingdom that dwells in the hearts of men and women.

So Jesus is explaining this to Nicodemus. But although he is steeped in tradition, he is an honest seeker. So, it takes him a while to get it.

And to help him, Jesus makes it simple: “you must be born again.”

According to commentators, John is employing a literary device, a word play with Jesus phrase that has two meanings: Born again, and born from above.

Jesus tells him that he must receive help from above to be a part of the heavenly kingdom.

The prophets were mystics. They were spiritual.

According to the text, Nicodemus takes everything literally and wonders how a person can crawl back inside his own mother and be reborn.

But it was mystical language. The OT prophets were proclaiming what salvation in the New Testament, the new covenant, would look like.

(pause) It isn't a corporate religion, it is a personal faith brought about by God's Holy Spirit.

As a matter of fact, probably the best description of what it means to be born again, born from above, comes from an OT prophet: Ezekiel 36:25-27: ²⁵I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities.... ^26...I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

And here is the main point of this entire teaching about being born from above: The Kingdom of Heaven consists of people whose hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit.

The Kingdom of God, the Church, has nothing to do with lists of rules, regulations, devotion to either or any political ideology, race or nation. The Kingdom of God is a relationship with God, provided by trusting in Jesus where His Holy Spirit indwells us and changes who we are.

(Repeat) The Kingdom of Heaven consists of people whose hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit.

There is a heart transformation.

God reaches down from heaven, right into the human soul, grabs the heart of every man and woman that believes in Jesus and changes them.

How do we know this has happened to a person?

John 13:35 gives us the one proof of our salvation: We know it by the love we show others.

It is not a list of rules, but two principles: Love each other and Love God.

The proof of this change is the way we love each other.

The proof is not quoting the right creed, articulating the doctrine of the faith in just the correct order or joining the right group. The proof of Jesus' transformation is in the way we love each other.

Let me emphasize that. If love your for your neighbor is not obvious to you in your life, then you got some more “borning again to do.”

Nicodemus and the rest of the Jewish leaders were looking for a political Messiah, a military Hero like King David from 1,300 years before.

They couldn't embrace God's Kingdom which transcends nations and kingdoms and racial boundaries and changes the attitudes of men and women.

Nicodemus was confused initially because he approached Jesus with his expectations of what he wanted the Messiah to be.

The traditional approach, at the time of the Old Testament, was a God who loved them and hated their enemies.

But Jesus changed all of that. The Spirit of Christ, through the OT prophets proclaimed God's love for the whole world.

Let me distract for one minute. I love the teachings of Jesus. The world loves the teaching of Jesus. It gets uncomfortable for many, but people love the ideas that Jesus preached. They aren't sure the church lives up to them, but the concepts are beautiful.

And they will believe when we remember that membership in God's Kingdom is evidenced by our love for others.

If your faith does not increase your compassion for others, then something is missing.

See. Nicodemus wasn't getting this idea.

Preconceived notions of who Jesus was going to be kept him from seeing who the true Messiah is.

He was looking for an human answer to a spiritual problem.

And so, Jesus tells him, you need help from above. God is the one who does this.

I had a deacon who was huge. He was 6'4” and over 300 pounds. He had a deep gruff voice and he was scary. My kids were scared to death of him.

He didn't practice religion in order to be seen by men.

And he was tough. I have never been big, and have always been sort of a wimp. But the only way to gain this guy's respect was to get into his face and challenge him. It was scary, but I did it.

And we loved -well, we still love- each other dearly.

I know a secret about him, and without giving away any confidences, suffice it to say that he was one of the most generous people I know.

Oftentimes, he called me to ask me who was hurting in either the church or the community because he had money he wanted to give to someone.

With all of this rough exterior, he was a teddy bear.

God's kingdom was evidenced in the way it ruled his heart.

He didn't put on any pretense, but in here (point to heart), God had touched his heart and made him into a new creation.

One day, he told the whole church how God had changed his heart.

His earliest memories were of his father waking him up in the morning with a baseball bat.

He sobbed as he told the story of how finally, God's unconditional love touched his heart. That love melted a heart of stone and made it soft.

I watched him get born again, time and time again.

The prayer we started with today witnesses to God's continual process of us causing us being born again, and again, and again.

Did he get perfect? No.

He would get upset of I didn't preach out of the King James Version. He would get upset of I went to the market in short pants. He would say” “you should dress like a Christian.”

Did I mention that we are great friends?

In my opinion, those proscriptions for me still smelled of religiosity instead of faith, but God loves him, God is inside of him and God is the one changing him, not me.

The Holy Spirit transforms people. Let Him in.

Remember, God so loved the world that He gave....

And He keeps on giving His love and grace.

He pours out His Holy Spirit on those who trust in Jesus for salvation. It is a gift, free, without cost and open to everyone.

And, it is the gift that keeps on giving.

Have you received Him today?

Oops!

Text: Matthew 4:1-11

Focus: Jesus temptation.

Function: To help people see that God knows we fail where Jesus succeeded: GRACE

Form: Topical expository (on THE atonement)

Intro: To continue in the vein, or theme, of Wednesday night's Ash Wednesday Service, I want to talk about temptation, failure and sin.

Do you remember that right before Jesus' arrest, He told the disciples that they would all fall away that night? You can read it in Matthew 26:33-34.

• Peter bragged that he would be faithful no matter what.
• He was actually proud and was setting himself above the other disciples.
• He knew that he loved Jesus.
• And he couldn't imagine turning his back on the Savior.
• I remember for myself I used to say this:
• “I can't wait to get to heaven because I will never be tempted to sin again.”
• I'll never have to ask for forgiveness again.
• Repentance will be a thing of the past.
• I will never miss the mark.
• It's because of our love for Jesus that we want to please Him.
• So, I can relate to Peter's bragging.
• But he failed terribly that night because we can never perfect ourselves.
• We are not perfect and we need Jesus.
• So now, I guess the best response is this: “Oops.”
• -I'll explain that at the conclusion.

Jesus was and is perfect.

Because of His perfection, He alone can be the sacrifice for our sins. Hebrews 7:26-28

This temptation story is a story of God's mercy.

I'm going to do a little theology lesson on why I believe in the atonement.

(REPEAT) Because of His perfection, He alone can be the sacrifice for our sins.

We read in Genesis 33:20-23 that Moses could not see God because if He did, it would kill him.

The theology is that God is so holy, so majestic, so powerful that in His presence, we would die because of our sin.

In Matthew 27:51 we read that when Jesus died, the veil guarding the holy place of the temple was rent, top to bottom, -rent by God- not humans- so that humanity can have access to God.

Because of Christ's sacrifice, the Holy Spirit dwells fully in the hearts of men and women.

Because of Jesus' sacrifice for us, we are reconciled to God

This, to me, is the real joy of the good news. We are brought back into God's family.

And in three places in the NT, we are told that we are sealed, we are secured by God, through the promise of His Holy Spirit.

We are now God's Children and our care is in God's hand.

So what about sin?

In times like these, it seems to be a nasty word.

Because it has been abused, or misused, I don't like the word very well.

It divides the world into two categories either “the lost” or “the righteous.”

But modern theology has changed the meaning of words to suit its purpose. The word for righteous means “just” and should be translated that way.

Actually, there are two categories in the Bible, “the just” and the “evil doers.”

If you read the prophets who announced the coming of Jesus, and if you interpret the rest of the New Testament based on the teachings of Jesus, you quickly understand that a righteous person is a “just” person.

Abuse has happened with the words, when we say that we are the "righteous," and they are "sinners." Then we imply that we are somehow more valuable, and more importantly, others are less valuable. Jesus was a friend to sinners.

And it gets worse. You see, modern theology has adopted a sin based salvation instead of a grace based salvation.

This causes us to focus on “not sinning” instead of “doing the right thing” and that is a recipe for failure.

If you say to your kids “don't put beans in your ears,” the first thing they will want to try is beans in the ears.

Go to the original temptation, original sin.

The tree with the forbidden fruit was directly in the center of the garden. Adam and Eve faced that temptation every single day.

Did God set humanity up to fail?

No, the first thing we need to remember is that God is an humanist.

God believes in people.

Romans 2:14-15 tells us that even those outside the faith have a God-given light inside of them that leads them to do the right thing.

Like Jesus, I believe that there is value in every single person. I believe that in every person is the image of God.

God calls out to that part of Him within every single person with His appeal to love, with the offer of His mercy, with the offer of His grace.

Adam and Eve sinned. They rebelled against God's clear command and the saddest part of it was that they caught the idea of shame.

Immediately, they covered themselves.

Evil entered the world after the fall.

God was calling out? “Adam? Eve? Where are you?”

And He is calling us today.

He wants to save us.

He wants to save us from sin, or perhaps the better way to understand it is to save us from the evil that is prevalent today.

This Devil's temptation of Jesus is symbolically the same temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed. Genesis 3:6:

⁶When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Good for food: turning the stone into bread, Pleasing to the eye: the Devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world: and desirable to make her wise like God, be like God and jump from this high spot of the temple.

The same three points are referred to by John. He refers to this temptation as the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life. 1 John 2:15

In the wilderness, Satan recreates the temptation from the garden. This is the temptation that lead all of humanity to be broken away from God's family.

Good news. Jesus didn't fail.

God wants humanity back in His family.

He wants us back without judgment.

We can't bridge that gap.

So God joined humanity and did it for us.

And because God is pure and sin cannot abide His presence, but He wants people, Jesus overcame the sin that drove Adam and Eve out of the garden and God's presence. He did it for us.

But evil still exists today.

Until evil is wiped out, we have a job to do.

God left the Church in this world to continue the work of Jesus, simply, peaceably and together.

So what about sin, shame or this constant failure?

A sin based religion is not what Jesus taught, John 3:17 -I did not come into the world to condemn the world....

Remember, God believes in us. He does. He believes in everyone just like we believe in our own children.

We live in a culture that measures everything by certain standards of performance.

When I am preaching it is such a great temptation to fall into the trap of telling people exactly what to do, how to do it, in order to have a successful Christian experience.

But you see.

The point of this wilderness experience is grace TO US.

GRACE TOWARD US!

We couldn't do it.

And again, that is not about shame, failure, or God having an ego to prove that He is the best person in the room.

No. Not at all. It all changes with a grace based faith instead of a sin based religion.

The change comes with the Holy Spirit in us.

I love the book “The Shack.” In the original printing, on page 209, the 2^nd full paragraph of the character who plays God says: “I am a verb. I am that I am.”

“I am that I am” is the name God gave to Moses.

“I am that I am” means that I am the universal force. In Scientific terms, it could be “I am the Big Bang.”

But for the Christian this concept is liberating.

When God is only a noun, He becomes this standard that we measure ourselves against and fail every time.

Now, only God is perfect and that is why we worship Him.

But He made us in His image with four great longings.

We long for God, for spirituality, we long for beauty, we long for justice and we long for community.

He gave humanity the ability to excel in these things.

Why do we worship? It fills this longing in our hearts? Longing for God.

I saw a couple of figure skaters once whose performance was so good that I wept at its beauty. That is from God. And that is through humanity. Longing for beauty.

When I heard the testimony of Malala, the young Muslim woman who was shot in the head by the Taliban, I was brought to tears. First, she describes the terrible violence and fear that her region endured and then she told us how she was fighting them with peace. Longing for justice.

This Church. People visit and they stay. And so far, the reason everyone has told me that they stay is because of the way you welcome people. This is love for community.

All of these things show the human potential of Christ in us, the hope of glory.

And yet, when we compare ourselves to Jesus' success during this temptation, we could fall into the trap feeling like failure.

But God is a verb. The Holy Spirit is in us. God empowers us to succeed in what He has given us to do.

In a grace based spiritual economy, when God calls us to serve Him, the responsibility for success is God's.

In a sin based spiritual economy, when God is only a noun, something to live up to, instead of it being God's responsibility to succeed, it is our burden to perform.

And that, my friends leads to shame.

Jesus did it. He did it for us to bring us back to God.

So, when I sin, I like the answer “oops.”

Not that we celebrate failure or sin.

No. But God is in us. Now that Jesus' sacrifice has been accomplished, we have power to be the good that Jesus preached.

The temptation of Christ leads us to grace.