Healing that starts from the inside out
You can’t fix what you won’t look at
You know the drill. Something hurts, so you treat the symptom. Ice it. Stretch it. Take the pill. Push through and hope it fades. Daron spent months doing exactly that with a pain shooting down his arm, until a wise doctor told him the truth. The problem was not on the surface. It was a ruptured disc buried deep in his spine, and no amount of ice was ever going to reach it. The only way to heal was to open things up and deal with what was actually broken. That is the picture behind this message on church hurt. Sometimes the thing wounding us sits deeper than we want to admit. Real healing starts when we stop treating symptoms and let God repair what is broken on the inside.
When grace becomes a credit card
Here is a question worth sitting with. Does the sin in your life still break your heart? Daron gets honest about how easy it is to stop feeling it. He calls it the grace credit card. You know a tree in your backyard is a little rotten, but instead of dealing with it you swipe the card and promise to pay later. Godly sorrow moves you to change. Worldly sorrow just wishes you had not been caught. Grace is real and grace is free, but it was never meant to make sin feel normal. When your own sin stops fazing you, that is the moment to pay attention.
Call up, not call out
You were never meant to walk this out alone. Pulling from 1 Corinthians 5 and Matthew 18, Daron shows that we carry a real responsibility to one another. Not to judge from a distance. Not to point out the problem and walk away. To call each other up. A true friend gets close enough to say, I love you too much to stay quiet, and I am not going anywhere while you deal with this. That kind of friendship is rare, and Daron admits he wishes he had more of it in his own life. So here is the challenge. Are you that friend for someone?
What it all means…
When the roots of church hurt show up, will you let humility lead instead of arrogance? Listen to the full message and let it do its work.
Reach Daron anytime at daron@daronearlewine.com.
Episode Summary:
We treat sin the way Daron treated a herniated disc, by icing the symptoms and hoping the real problem goes away on its own. It doesn’t. It grows, it hurts people, and it slowly stops breaking our hearts at all. In this Summer of Sermons message from Mercy Road Northeast in Indianapolis, Daron Earlewine opens 1 Corinthians 5 to talk honestly about church hurt, the danger of treating grace like a credit card you keep charging, and why the people who love us most are the ones willing to call us up instead of just calling us out.
Key Takeaways
⚡️Real healing deals with what’s broken inside, not just the symptoms we can see on the surface.
⚡️Grace was never meant to function like a credit card we keep charging while our sin stops breaking our hearts.
⚡️A call up culture confronts sin inside real friendship, not from a distance, and it protects against church hurt.
If this hit something honest in you, leave a comment with one area you’ve been quietly charging instead of dealing with, then like and subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the Summer of Sermons.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: DARON EARLEWINE: SUMMER OF SERMONS 3
Everybody, it’s summertime. The weather’s nice, sunsets are later, backyard barbecues, all the good stuff. Here at The Daron Earlewine Podcast, we like to change things up too. We’re bringing back the Summer of Sermons. I do the podcast, I do books, I speak, I do all kinds of stuff, and I get a chance to speak a lot of Sundays. I’m usually at a church here in Indianapolis called Mercy Road Northeast, and sometimes other churches around the country. What we love to do in the summer is grab a couple of the greatest hits from the past twelve months and share these sermons with you. It gives you a chance to hear me communicate in a different way and get more immersed in the content. You gave us great feedback last summer that you loved the Summer of Sermons, so we’re bringing it back for 2026. I hope you enjoy the greatest hits from the past year that we pulled out. Welcome to the Summer of Sermons.
Created on purpose and for purpose.
My name is Daron Earlewine. I get to be one of the teaching pastors here at Mercy Road Northeast, and I’m stoked to be with you this morning. It is our five year birthday bash, which is amazing when you think about everything that has transpired, everything God has done in the past five years. I love that first song and the idea behind our video, look what the Lord has done. It really has been His work as we’ve joined together with Him.
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to be a part of the Mercy Road family of churches since before they began. I’ve gotten to watch what God has done over the past eleven or twelve years now. It started in Carmel, then we launched Mercy Road Northwest, then Mercy Road downtown for a while, and then five years ago we launched Mercy Road Northeast, and now Mercy Road Anderson is blowing up and doing great things. It’s been so cool to be a part of a church where you’re just seeing what God is doing.
It’s really necessary to say, look at what the Lord has done, and it’s really important that the Lord is doing what the Lord is doing. The good news is, God has been doing that from the beginning, from the first moments the church existed. This week, in our country, and the week before that, and the week before that, and every single week that humanity has been breathing, has been an obvious, huge sign saying we need help. We need the love and the power and the forgiveness and the mercy and the restoration and the salvation of Jesus. It’s great to be a part of that, to be in an environment where we’re doing our best to do what is right, to do what is of God, to see what the Lord has done.
The reality of being around Mercy Road for the past eleven or twelve years, across all the different locations, is that we’ve been in an environment where we’re trying to do what’s right, and sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes there’s hurt that happens in the process. So it’s interesting. We’re doing this series about church hurt, and I knew I had week two of it, and Ken said, oh, by the way, that’s the birthday bash. I said, sweet, that should be fun, because everybody wants to go to a birthday bash. If you went to a birthday party and they said, hey, before we get to the cupcakes, we’re going to talk a little bit about how Uncle Bill’s a jerk, and he hasn’t talked to his mom in six years, and as soon as they get that worked out and their relationship is fixed, we get ice cream. That’s kind of what I felt like coming into this week’s sermon. How are we supposed to say, happy birthday Mercy Road, and by the way, we hurt each other, it’s bad? Then I opened up the Scripture we decided to use for this week, which is 1 Corinthians chapter five, and that got even worse. So you’re about to enjoy that.
It is interesting, because as we look at this story from First Corinthians chapter five, there was a church in a town called Corinth, and they probably had a journey similar to ours. Paul started this church, and I’m sure they had their first birthday bash and their second birthday bash. They probably didn’t have bounce houses back then. But they got together and said, look at what God has done. This is so cool. And then people kept following Jesus and doing life. And then, in this environment where they were doing what was right, wrong started to hurt people.
That’s one of the difficult things about church hurt. When we get inside the church, we’re in an environment where right is supposed to happen, and then something very wrong oftentimes takes place. It made me think of a year ago, almost to the day. Last year I stood up on this platform and I was in some of the worst physical pain I’d ever been in in my life. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew my whole right arm felt like it was getting electrocuted. I couldn’t feel two of my fingers. I had serious pain in the back of my neck. Remember the last time you hit your funny bone, how terrible that feels? I had that twenty-four hours a day. It was wonderful.
I had this pain and I didn’t know what it was, so I kept trying to treat the symptoms. Ice this, heat that, try the stretches, the pills, whatever, to take care of the pain. I couldn’t figure it out. Here’s the thing that was stupid. I was doing something right. I was in a gym working out. I was in an environment of right, doing right for my body, and something went really wrong.
In that process, I tried to treat all the symptoms. But here was the cool thing. My chiropractor was actually really wise, and he said, here’s the deal, Daron. I need you to go this week and get an MRI. Because if you don’t get an MRI, you can keep treating the symptoms and try to fix this from the outside in, or you can go get an MRI and see what’s actually wrong inside your body. Then, if we can heal what’s wrong inside the body, the symptoms won’t happen and you’ll find healing.
So I went and got the MRI, and they got the imaging back, and the guy opened it up and said, whoa. I can promise you, if you ever go get an MRI, you don’t want the first reaction from the person reading it to be whoa. You want them to open it and go, oh, you’re a picture of health. They opened the MRI and went, oh. I said, what does that mean? They said, yeah, you’ve really done it. They said, you have a massive herniation of the disc between your C6, C7, and T1. I didn’t know about spinal stuff. They said it’s bad. I said, how bad? They said, well, we could try this. I said, I tried that, it didn’t work. They said, we could try that. I said, I tried that too. So what’s the next option? They said, here’s what we do. There’s a problem inside your body, and if we don’t heal what’s wrong inside, we can’t fix the symptoms showing up outside. So we go in for surgery. We cut your neck open from the front, move everything in your neck out of the way so we can see your spine, dissect the disc that’s messed up, pull it out, put a cube of titanium in your spine, and screw it to the vertebrae above and below.
I said, is this the kind of deal where I get a massage and an ice pack and we rub some dirt on it? Or could we just ignore it and act like it’s not there? They said, you don’t have to go through this difficult surgery. You can ignore it, but here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll continue to have the pain. You’ll continue to hurt, and that disc is going to become even more ruptured. It’s going to impinge those nerves, and the nerve pain is going to get worse, to the point where you may kill those nerves. You may lose the use of your right arm, or just be in pain for the rest of your life.
So I had a decision to make. I had to decide if I wanted to deal with the aggressive treatment option to actually heal what was broken inside my body, so I could experience healing outside my body. I did the surgery, got a great scar, and everything’s feeling great. Thanks for asking.
So, Daron, why are you and Bill the science guy doing surgery this morning? What’s the deal? I’m guessing you’re putting the pieces together. We’re talking about church hurt. Here’s the deal. Sometimes there are things that are actually hurt inside our body, and what we try to do is treat them from the outside in. Then someone comes and says, hey, what we actually have to do is heal what’s hurt inside the body. And the process to do that, which we’re about to discover in 1 Corinthians chapter five, sounds a little bit like, let’s cut your neck open and move everything out of the way. And we go, I don’t know that I want to deal with that.
I think what the Holy Spirit could say to us is the same thing Paul said. If you want to just keep icing it and rubbing some dirt on it, here’s what’s going to happen. Eventually you’re going to be so hurt that you will not be able to live the life God created you for.
Happy birthday, Mercy Road. Get through these next thirty minutes and we’ve got an inflatable bounce house for you. And evidently some lemonade. Homeboy over there is drinking some lemonade. Is it good, dude? Awesome.
Let’s get into the Bible, and I just want you to know, it’s not PG right from the beginning this morning. But it is the Bible, and I’m not making it up. 1 Corinthians 5, Paul writing a birthday bash letter to the church in Corinth. I also received a report of scandalous sex within your church family, a kind that wouldn’t be tolerated even outside the church. One of your men is sleeping with his stepmother. This is a problem. Got the youth group in the front row, praise the Lord.
This is a problem, and evidently a lot of people knew about it, because Paul, who’s not in Corinth, was somewhere else, and they sent him a letter to let him know what was happening. He sent this letter back to say, hey, this is a really big problem. And here’s the biggest problem. A bunch of you know what’s happening.
But not us. We’ve progressed so much further past finding out, or observing, or knowing that someone you’re in community with is engaged in some type of sinful behavior, and then doing nothing, except maybe conversations like this. Hey bro, did you hear about Bob? Crazy, I know, dude. Dudes at my work aren’t even messing with that kind of stuff. I know, bro. And he was at church last week. I know. You going to say anything? No, man, it’s his life. He wants to screw up his life, that’s on him. I’m not trying to judge him. But I’m judging him. That’s whack. [Brief crowd aside, unclear audio.]
Paul continues. And you’re so above it. It doesn’t even faze you. This is a big question. I didn’t like it, I had to deal with it all week, and you’re not going to like it for the next twenty minutes. Shouldn’t this break your hearts? Shouldn’t it bring you to your knees in tears? And shouldn’t this person and his conduct be confronted and dealt with?
Happy birthday, church in Corinth. You’ve got some really bad stuff going on, nobody’s talking about it, and it doesn’t even faze you. The sin in your life should break your heart, and it doesn’t even faze you. Question. Does the sin in your life break your heart? Sin in your life, sin in your family, sin in your friends, sin in your neighborhood, sin in your school system, sin in your community, sin in our city, sin in our country, sin in the world. Does it break our hearts?
I think it needs to go in that order, and I think some of our issue is that we like to reverse it. My heart breaks for the sin in the world, and in our country, and in our community, and in the public school system, and in that neighbor down the street, and my cousin who lives in Texas, and my spouse. By the time I get to me, I’m just tired of all the sin in everyone else.
I think it has to start here. Does the sin in my life break my heart? Because here’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess these passages from the Old Testament might speak to us. David’s talking about repentance in Psalm 51. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. Ezra 9:6, O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens, as he prays for Israel. 2 Corinthians 7:10 says that godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
Does your sin break your heart? Godly sorrow is, this breaks my heart, because I know it breaks God’s heart, I know it’s hurting others, and it drives me to change my life, change my decisions. It leads to salvation, which leaves no regret. Worldly sorrow is, man, I wish I wouldn’t have gotten caught.
Yeah, but Daron, we’re under grace. I know you’re not trying to come in here with some legalistic stuff, take it easy, because it’s grace. Yes, it is. I grew up in a lot of legalism, and then in my twenties I got free from that legalism and began to understand and appreciate the grace of God. But you know what I’ve noticed in my life? Here’s what I’m going to do the rest of this morning. I’m just going to tell on myself, and you can come as close as you want.
Here’s what began to happen to me in my twenties, and what I’ve noticed for the past couple of decades, and I don’t love it. I understood grace, and it’s kind of like this. I don’t have cash often. I happen to have a twenty today, which is cool. But if you notice the pain of paying with cash. You go, yes, I would like to buy that. They say, this is the cost. You hand them the bill that says it’s worth twenty bucks, they make change and hand you back two dollars, and you go, wow, I had a twenty and now I’ve got two. And you feel it.
Then sometimes, the grace of God can look a little more like this. In college, I started getting letters from really, really nice people. They said, Daron, we think you are an amazing, responsible adult, and we would love to bless you with the grace of a credit card. Daron, we believe in you and love you so much here at Visa. We would love to bless you with five thousand dollars worth of credit. And I said, the Lord is my shepherd, He knows what I need. I need a credit card, because I’m eighteen years old. And it was great. I could see something I wanted. Did I have any money? No. But I had a credit card.
I was so smart. I saw a drum set that I really liked. They gave me five thousand dollars worth of grace, and the drum set was just shy of three thousand. I thought, look here, all I’ve got to do is call this 1-800 number, this is before the internet existed, give them the numbers on the back of this card, and they’re going to ship me a brand new drum set. And I will pay for it later. And it worked.
Here’s what I’ve noticed for some of us. God’s grace to us has become like a credit card. Here’s what I know about most of us, not everybody, but there’s probably a couple of the fruit of the Spirit on your tree that are rotten. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. A couple of those are probably looking real good. You look in your backyard and go, look at the joy tree in my spiritual backyard, praise the Lord. And the Holy Spirit says, hey, have you checked out the self-control tree over there? And you go, oh, that thing is unhealthy. There’s some rotten fruit on that guy. Charge it.
There’s somewhere in your life where sin is a little more normative than you would like it to be. There is in mine. Oh, God’s grace is there, God, just charge it. Lord, I know the love tree, the fruit on that is a little rotten right now, and I really cannot stand most of the people in this country, so I’ve got a lot of bitterness and rage, like Pastor Ken talked about. But just charge it. Lord, I know the patience tree is a little rotten, and at work I’m not patient, I’m not kind, I’m yelling at people, honking and flipping people off, and it’s not working well in my marriage either, but if we could just charge it. I’ll pay for it later. And you know what? We will.
Does the sin in our life break our hearts? Now, I’m not saying does it make us feel condemned. That’s not the point, and that’s not what God does. He does not condemn. He convicts, He encourages, He heals, He welcomes, when we humble ourselves and turn to Him. The word of God says this about grace. What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? Just keep charging it? Paul says, by no means. We’re those who have died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? Paul talking about his own experience. By the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace to me was not without effect.
This week, and in this sermon, what I’m saying to God is, God, would you break my heart for the sin in my life? Because it’s gotten too calloused, and the balance on my grace credit card is a little out of control.
Another issue. Happy birthday, Mercy Road. If you’ve liked the sermon so far, it’s going to get better. Hope is not a plan. Paul says, hey, I’ll tell you what I’d do. Even though I’m not there in person, consider me right there with you, because I can fully see what’s going on, and I’m telling you that this is wrong. You must not simply look the other way and hope it goes away on its own. Bring it out into the open and deal with it in the authority of Jesus, our master. Assemble the community, I’ll be present in spirit with you, and our master Jesus will be present in power. Hold this man’s conduct up to public scrutiny. Let him defend it if he can, but if he can’t, then out with him. It will be totally devastating to him, of course, and embarrassing to you.
We’re going to have to cut your neck open and put some titanium in your spine to find some healing, and it’s going to be devastating and a little embarrassing, but it’s going to heal you. Better devastation and embarrassment than damnation. You want him on his feet and forgiven before the master on judgment day.
When we see sin in our life, or sin in other people’s lives that we’re in community with, we say, I hope it gets better. Hope is not a plan. We actually have a responsibility to one another. Jesus says it like this. If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you’ve won that person back. But if you’re unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then, if the person won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.
That’s what Jesus told us to do. I can tell you what I tend to do. Once again, I’ll make myself the example of, sometimes, C-minus Christianity. I like to ignore things and hope they go away. Why would I want to make a problem of this? It’s a great sunny day. Whatever it is, I’ll just pray from a distance. Praying from a distance, quite a bit of distance, that would keep me far from that actual conversation. Holy Spirit, there’s no distance with You, so Holy Spirit, do Your Holy Spirit stuff. I’ll be over here being a coward.
Here’s what else I’ve noticed. Have you noticed this? I tend to give more grace and say less to people who are charging the same sins on their grace credit card as I am. You ever notice that? If somebody’s struggling with a sin you’ve got buttoned up, you’re like, hope you can smell the smoke on your feet, because that’s hell. But the things you’re struggling with, you’re like, well, it’s been a tough month for her. I know she gossips and slanders everyone in our rooted group, but it’s what I do too, and if I call her out on it, I have to deal with my own sin.
Here’s the thing. We actually have a responsibility to call one another up, not just call one another out. This is really hard for some of us to do. Paul goes back in and says this. Guys, I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn’t make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn’t mean you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort, or with criminals, whether blue collar or white collar, or with spiritual phonies for that matter. You’d have to leave the world entirely to do that. But I am saying you shouldn’t act as if everything is just fine when a friend who claims to be a Christian is promiscuous or crooked, is flip with God or rude to friends, gets drunk or becomes greedy and predatory. You can’t just go along with that, treating it as acceptable behavior. I’m not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don’t we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide on our brothers and sisters when they’re out of line. If necessary, clean house.
Listen to it from the New Living Translation. It isn’t my responsibility to judge outsiders, but it certainly is your responsibility to judge those inside the church who are sinning. God will judge those on the outside, but as the Scriptures say, you must remove the evil person from among you.
I want you to pay attention. Pause. When I read that Scripture, what did you think? What did you feel? What did you want to do? Some of you are thinkers, some of you are feelers, some of you are action-oriented, and when I read that, my guess is you had an instinctual thought, feeling, or instinct. Pay attention to it. Because that’s not something we talk about much in our culture or our church, that it is our responsibility to judge one another. Did I say condemn? No. To judge is to discern, to evaluate, with grace, in a true friendship. Why wouldn’t we want that from our closest friends?
Here’s where it gets wrong sometimes. We began judging from afar rather than judging as a friend. What’s happened is we’re often in such false relationship within the North American church. We don’t really know each other, we don’t know each other’s names, we’re not living in community, we’re not in a rooted group or an outpost or a huddle together. So we just see people from afar, and when you begin to judge someone from afar, it usually doesn’t go well. But when you are in relationship, walking side by side with someone, you can judge them as a friend. You have a true friend who will call you up into your best version of yourself.
That’s the culture Jesus set. The word tells us that when Jesus came, He was full of grace and truth. When we are full of grace and truth in our interactions and relationships, we create a call up culture. A call up culture of love. Not a call out culture, where I come in and just point out what’s wrong with you and say, go fix it, bye. No. I come into a friendship and a deep connection with someone and say, hey, listen, I’m noticing this in your life, and I don’t think this is what God has for you. And listen, I love you too much not to bring it up. Here’s what I want you to know. I will not step out of relationship with you if you want help with this. I want to call you up into the best part of your life, and I want to walk with you to help you step into everything God has for you. Why wouldn’t we want friends like that?
I wish I had more of them. In the season of my life where some of the fruit on some of my Fruit of the Spirit trees was a little more rotten than I wanted it to be, the sad part, looking back, is that I didn’t really have a lot of people in my life who called me up. People who knew there were areas I needed to address and grow in. And people didn’t. And guess what? I hurt people. And it breaks my heart.
During that season, I had two people in my life. Two people who loved me enough to actually call me up to my best version of myself. Guess what? They did it terribly. It started off really poor. Instead of coming to me like Jesus said, they went to some other people and gossiped about me, and shared some prayer requests about Daron. It didn’t go very well. It was tough, and I had a decision to make. I could be offended, or I could be healed.
It took a while to work through the ins and outs of it, but as I look back, it wasn’t done perfectly, but I know it was done because they loved me, and because they wanted to see me be everything God created me to be. They’re two of the only people in my life who have ever had the courage and the humility to call me up into something better. I wish, and I pray, that I get more people like that in my life. Are you that kind of person in someone’s life? And how would you respond if someone did that to you?
How do we protect against church hurt? We love each other enough to, with grace and mercy, call one another up to the fullness God has for us, and walk with each other in relationship to see it become a reality. How do we get into these church hurt situations in the first place? They happen by one word. Arrogance. Arrogance is how it happens. How did this guy in Corinth get to the place where he was engaging in that kind of relationship with his stepmom? Arrogance.
As Paul lays this out in chapter five, verses six through eight, he says, your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it’s anything but that. That’s just charge it. I know I’ve got that sin in my life, but it’s not that big a deal. I’ll pay for it later. Paul says, no, no, no, it’s a big thing. Yeast is a small thing too, but it works its way through a whole batch of dough pretty fast. So get rid of this yeast. Get rid of this yeast of sin and arrogance in our lives. In your life. In my life. Not their life. Right here.
You see, arrogance, we could break it down with four things. An exaggerated view of self, a dismissal of others, a resistance to correction, and entitlement. You want to see if there’s some arrogance stewing and fueling sin in your life? Take a picture of that slide. The next time you willingly do something the Holy Spirit says don’t, and the Bible says shouldn’t, and your good Christian friends say stop, and you go ahead and do it anyway, pay attention to your motives, your thoughts, and everything around it. Here’s what you’re going to find. I had an exaggerated view of myself. I dismissed the feelings of others and how this would impact anybody but me. I was resistant to the correction of the Holy Spirit and the people around me who spoke into my life. And I felt entitled to do whatever I wanted, thank you very much. That is how sin stops breaking a heart, and how the account balance on the grace credit card gets way out of hand.
So what do we do? One-word solution to arrogance. Humility.
This was another one of those weeks I didn’t want to preach. I realized that wasn’t from Jesus, that was from the enemy, so we had to move past that. Then I read 1 Corinthians 5 and I was like, again. And we were stuck with it. And then everything we had to process through as a country this week, I was sickened, and I was angry, and I was sad, embarrassed, a lot of really hard emotions. And the whole time I’m having to talk about this, the Holy Spirit’s saying, hey bro, apply this to yourself.
So now it’s the end of the week, and I’m saying, what do You want? What are You trying to say? And here’s the beautiful part about this struggle we have as we try to walk with Jesus. He is so loving and so faithful to you. He’ll never leave you or forsake you, and when you humble yourself, He will come and lift you up. So I said, God, what do You want to say? And He led me to a passage in the Old Testament. I think this is what He was saying to me, and I think it’s what He’s saying to our country.
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin, and I will heal their land.
Everything we saw this week made me sick. But here’s what I struggled with. Whatever party it is, the overarching feeling this week, in the pain and the sorrow, as we saw evil happen from coast to coast, in a bunch of stories that never even made the news, our response was, we’ve got to fight them. Like they’re the issue, that’s the problem over there, that’s the thing, we need to rise up, this is the time for us. And it felt to me like, I just can’t get my mind around Jesus reacting like that.
So what are we supposed to do? I was realizing that every time you’re pointing somewhere else, there are a lot more fingers pointing back at yourself. So I wonder, as a church and as individuals, if we could just say, here’s what I’m going to do, as imperfectly as I’ve always done it. I want to humble myself and pray and seek God’s face. And I want to turn from my evil and wicked ways. Because I want the promise of God poured through my life, that He will hear from heaven, He will forgive me, and He will heal my life. And guess what? If all three hundred and seventy-some million of us Americans said, that’s my game plan, guess what would happen? We would see His kingdom come and His will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus, we thank You for today. We thank You for Your grace, that we have been given five years as a church, and God, You have done great things. I know You want to do even greater things. So God, I pray, by Your grace and Your love, that You would help us to be a hundred times more introspective of our own lives over the next five years than we were in these five years. May it drive us to be so much more dependent on You, to see so much more of every fruit of the Spirit ripe and ready to bless the people around us. May it transform us into some of the most loving, gracious, and courageous Christian friends that people have. May we say, it is my responsibility to call you up to be the best you can possibly be. And God, please help us learn to do it with grace and mercy and peace, but to have the courage to do it. Thank You for the example You set for us, the way You call us up with gentleness, with love, with kindness, and Your unwavering faithfulness to us, God.
If there’s somebody here today who came in and you don’t know Jesus, you’ve never made the decision of faith to follow Him, what God is saying to you this morning is that you need to deal with your sin right now, for the first time. What you need to do to deal with it is allow me to nail it to my cross. Jesus came and lived a perfect, sinless life, and He died to forgive you of your sins and invite you into personal relationship with God Himself. So if you’re here this morning and you say, you know what, today I want to humble myself, I want to pray, I want to turn from my evil ways, and I want a relationship with Jesus, here’s what I want you to do, because I want to pray for you. I’m asking you to be courageous right now. That’s okay, because that’s what you need in your life anyway. Fear is never going away from messing with you, but courage can rise up. So if you’re here and you know, I need to start a relationship with Jesus, I need the forgiveness of God, would you just raise your hand real quick so I can pray for you? You say, Jesus, I want to be forgiven. God, I want a relationship with You. Praise God. Praise God. You can put your hand down.
Lord Jesus, I pray for these people who have raised their hands and said, Lord, I want to be forgiven, I want to invite You into my life. You can pray a very simple prayer like this. Jesus, I give You my life. Jesus, I receive the gift of Your forgiveness. I receive the gift of Your love and Your mercy. God, by Your gentleness and kindness, continue to break my heart for what breaks Yours, and give me the wisdom and the courage to respond to Your voice. Father, hear these prayers, and be everything that You always are. We love You. We ask this in Jesus’s name. Amen.As we get into the word of God this year, may we meet you in it, and meet ourselves in it. We love you. You’re the best. In Jesus’s name, amen.