Hello, My Name Is Grace

Well good morning everybody. My name is Carlos Ortiz and our senior pastor here at Gateway Church. It’s good to be with you. If you are in the room, will you help me welcome everybody who’s watching online this week, later this week or from another campus. So glad you are joining us. I know quite a few of you watched later in the week as you travel.

Some of you watched multiple times. I met somebody yesterday who just told me they pretty much only watch online, but we’re so grateful for this resource, so we’re glad that you are with us. So if you’re new here, this may not make sense to you as you kind of get to know me a little bit. If you’ve been here just a few times, you may not get this, but if you’ve been around a while, you know what I’m about to say is a major breakthrough.

I don’t normally pat myself on the back, but I did something this week I was really proud of.

I was driving down the road and I let a car get in front of me.

I know, I know, it just, you know, after I’m almost 50 next month. And so I was like, figured, okay, Lord, there’s this one obstacle driving is an issue for me. You guys know that. I try not to drive angry. I try to drive with the joy, but doesn’t even have to let them in in front of me, right, I.

This is how it works. But there’s construction going around all around the city, sometimes in neighborhoods, sometimes on side roads, main roads, freeways all around. And so we were driving on a road and there was not great signage for one of the construction moments that was coming up. And so this car was getting cut off really quick. And so I had some room.

So I let him in. I was like, yeah, come on in. Just it’s just not like me to do that because I’m like, sorry, I’m going to go first. That’s just the way I follow the rules of the road. I don’t go looking to harm people. I don’t. If they get harmed in the process, it’s their fault because they didn’t follow the rules of the road.

And I’m kind of speaking hyperbole, but that’s kind of how I’ve driven most of my life, because I don’t know about you, but I grew up driving in Texas, the good old state of Texas, and there are people who drive so slow it’s dangerous. Anybody agree to that? Yeah. It’s dangerous. So if you’re from out of state and it says 75, it’s a suggestion.

And what it means is we suggest you keep up or you’re going to hurt a lot of people. So this week I let someone get in and it felt really good. I was like, oh, this is what this feels like. But if I cut someone off, well, you know, there’s something coming up.

And there was this thing and there was a… and so I don’t even say I’m sorry. I do now, but I used to not say I’m sorry. I just kind of made my way in. Listen, I grew up in Dallas, Texas, but I grew up on I-35. It’s no joke. Don’t drive on I-35 if you don’t know how to drive. That’s how I drove. And it was like the construction and the two-lane road for half a million people, like all that stuff. It took me a while to kind of get rid of it. But as I continue to follow Jesus, there are things that fall off. But let me tell you what doesn’t fall off: the excuses we give ourselves.

So how many times has somebody hurt you, cut you off, not given you the right change, not brought you the right thing at the dinner table, not met a deadline, not helped your team win at work, not done their thing? And boy, we’re like, “I can’t believe you. I told you this, and I told you this, and I gave you a deadline, and I sent you an email. And we put signs up so that you could follow the rules.” Except when it’s our turn where we get caught not following the rules. Maybe ways we say things like this: “We all make mistakes.”

“I was under a lot of pressure.” “They misunderstood me.” “I didn’t mean it that way.”

And how many of you are going to be honest in the room and say, at some point you have used one of those phrases? Raise your hand.

You see, grace that we have in our limited ability to have grace and mercy towards people—all the grace we have, usually in our humanity, in our limitations, is spent on ourselves, and we have very little to extend to others. But when we make a mistake or we are in need of grace and mercy, boy, we expect others to have so much grace for us.

And so we do things like trying to get a consensus. Why do you think Reddit exists? People are trying to get a consensus. “I did this, so-and-so did this. Am I the person who did wrong?”

There’s a joke in there for those who understand.

Because we need consensus to defend our stance. We want our eight girlfriends, our three guy friends to be all on board, and we’re going to battle together. I was talking with one of our pastors and there was a situation a while ago and they said, man, this one woman has all these friends who are really helping to support her because she’s really upset with her husband.

I was like, wow, she must need some support. Yeah. And as he dove into the relationship, he was like, “Hey, I’m glad that you have support from these friends. And you do group together and you love Jesus and they’re really here to support you. So what does your husband say?” “Well, he doesn’t know I’m mad at him yet.”

So you went and got all your girlfriends, you went and got everybody you know. They know what’s happening. They know your offense. You’ve got this great support system and you have not talked to the person you sleep in the bed with. Yes.

And we laugh, but we all do a form of that. We all do. And so what we find is rarely a time where there is a people or a person who are truly contrite, who truly own it, who truly say, “No excuses. This was wrong.” And yet we’re going to find that here in Nehemiah chapter nine. So if you have your Bibles, take them out, we’re going to be in Nehemiah.

If you didn’t bring your Bible, totally okay. We have it on the screen. If you are in need of a Bible, find somebody at one of our tables after service, we want to make sure that you have a Bible. Okay? So if you have it, take it out, we’re going to follow along in Nehemiah chapter nine. And let me give you a little context here.

Here we find a group of people who have been exiled. These are God’s people. They’re the Hebrew nation. And they have been sent out from Jerusalem, actually taken as slaves to the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire. And they’ve been gone for a couple generations. And now they hear that their homeland and their capital city, Jerusalem, is just… it’s not been rebuilt.

It’s destroyed. And they’re on their way back. Doors open up for them to come back to Jerusalem. And Nehemiah is so burdened for the city, he’s burdened for his people. He’s burdened for the history. He’s burdened because he knew God had their ancestors and their predecessors, and he’s wanting to bring restoration to his city. And God uses Nehemiah to rebuild the city.

Can I tell you something? Rebuilding the walls was not enough. Rebuilding the walls was not enough because you can rebuild a city without rebuilding a heart.

You can rebuild a city without rebuilding the heart. And why is it important to rebuild the heart? Because when the heart is off, when the heart is not aligned, the heart leads us astray. And when we are astray, we make decisions and we do things that are contrary to what God wants for us. And we find ourselves like the people of Israel, being led astray, enslaved to situations far away from what we know, where we know we should be.

We long for the days of return, and we’ve passed down those sins from one generation to another.

And now Nehemiah is saying, let’s go back. Let’s rebuild the walls. But as we rebuild the walls, are we rebuilding the hearts of the people who are going to live within the walls? So Ezra, who we also find in the Old Testament, is reading God’s Word out loud, and as they’re reading God’s Word out loud, the people’s hearts begin to melt.

They’re reading their own history. They’re reading their own heritage. They’re thinking of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and what they went through and realizing there were some things that went on and there was a pattern that arises. There’s a pattern: God blesses, the people rebel, God disciplines, they cry out, God shows mercy, then they rebel again.

And it’s the same pattern again and again and again. And Nehemiah 9 is essentially saying this: When we look at our story and we keep finding the same thing over and over again, when are we going to put a stop to it? When are we going to say enough is enough? Because the problem is not God, because the pattern we find is that even in the inconsistency of our humanity, of our people, of our predecessors, God remains faithful.

God remains faithful. So we’re going to be in Nehemiah chapter nine. We’re going to read 16 through 21 together and look at how the people look, look at what’s happening, and look at what they’re saying. “But they, our ancestors, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and they did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked…”

You’re like, okay, that keeps getting repeated. Here’s what it means to be stiff-necked. If you’re over 40, you know what this feels like.

If you’re over 40, you’re in an era of your life where you are now injured while you sleep. I don’t know how it happens, but it does. It’s when you turn a certain way and you wake up and you cannot turn to the left and you can’t turn to the right. You have lost flexibility. And all you can do is look straight ahead, which means whatever I see is what’s right. Because I don’t have the ability to be flexible, I don’t have the ability to be available. And that’s why you shouldn’t drive when you have a stiff neck; you are a danger on the road. And yet what they call when they say this phrase, they’re saying religiously these people were not flexible with the God that created them.

They were stiff-necked, which means they were focused on only what they could see.

So our ancestors were so focused on what only they could see, and in their rebellion, appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love. We hear that throughout the Old Testament, this phrasing, this comes from Deuteronomy. It says you are gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, and therefore you did not desert them.

And even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, “This is your God who brought you out of Egypt…” You might be thinking, wait, I’m new here, I don’t understand. You’re telling me these people made a statue of a calf, like a cow calf, and then they worshiped it? Yes.

Well, that’s stupid. I know, about as stupid as your team losing yesterday and not showing up to church because you haven’t gotten over it.

Well, somebody really liked that over there.

What do we worship that is ridiculous?

A golden calf, and that became their god.

But because of your great compassion, you did not abandon them in the wilderness. And the pillar of cloud did not fail to guide them on their path, nor did the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take. You gave your good Spirit to instruct them. What was happening there is during the day when they were walking in the wilderness, there was a pillar of cloud, so they knew the direction to go.

And then at night, when they couldn’t see the cloud, there was a pillar of fire to bring light. So there was always direction. God was always directing and guiding, even in the wilderness.

And you gave your good Spirit to instruct them. You did not withhold your manna from their mouths. Manna was physical… was food that showed up in the desert. How, we don’t know. It just showed up every morning and God provided food in the middle of the desert. They lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out, nor did their feet become swollen.

I mean, the people returning to Jerusalem to rebuild it, they’re saying we messed up. Our people messed up. God, we are not faithful; You are faithful. When was the last time you heard somebody apologize to you and it was heartfelt with no excuses, not with, “you know, what had happened was…”, just a “I messed up, just… I shouldn’t have said that.

I shouldn’t have done that.”

I’m a defensive person by nature. Years ago, I thought I would try something new in the middle of an argument with my wife. I recommend this one—I don’t remember most things I do, but I recommend this one. Libby was like, “You did this,” and you know what I did? I looked at her, I said, “You’re right, I did that.”

And she was having like a physical reaction. She was like, “Yeah, you did this!”

“Yeah, I know I did. I shouldn’t have done that.” She didn’t know what to do because the fleshly me always has an argument. I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid, by the way, and I have a fleshly argument and I have a reason. And so she geared up for this argument, and I was just saying I messed up.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” “Do you know how that made me feel?” “Yeah, I’m sure that wasn’t really good.” And she was like, “Do you really know what you did?” And I remember—I didn’t say this in the first service—I remember she said this in the argument. She looked at me and she goes, “Are you really sorry?”

Because she was used to like a two-hour fight over nothing, and I was just… “I’m sorry, I messed up.”

That’s what the people of Israel are doing. They’re saying as we rebuild the city and rebuild our hearts, it is just best to own where we fall short, where we have sinned, and look at the cycle of rebellion that we see. This is what they’re talking about. They became arrogant. Their people were stiff-necked. They did not obey. They refused to listen.

They failed to remember. They rebelled. They made an idol. They committed awful blasphemies. And yet there was no spin, no PR move. Just saying, “God, we’re the worst. I’m sorry, we’re sorry.” And then they invoke the character of God. And they said, “But You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.” See, they owned their character and invoked the name that they had no right to invoke except for God gave them the right to invoke it, to invoke a God who is gracious and compassionate towards them.

Why? Because even though there was a pattern of sin and a pattern of brokenness and a pattern of unrighteousness, there was also a pattern of grace. God showed a pattern of grace. Now that grace does not mean that we don’t take sin seriously or a wrong seriously; we have to understand the wrongs we have done. We can’t make light of it.

You can’t come home and tell your partner or your kids, “Oh, that wasn’t that big a deal. I didn’t mean it. It was only one time.” Whatever it was, you have to own it. “I fell short, I have sinned against you. I have done wrong.” And God’s like, “There is grace for you if there’s a willingness to be repentant and to acknowledge where we have fallen short.”

Because the gospel of Jesus Christ does not preach, “You’re not as bad as you think you are.”

You might feel that way.

The gospel of Jesus is not, we pray with you and I’m like, “Oh, don’t feel bad. I know you cheated on your husband and broke up your family, but it’s not that bad.” That’s disingenuous. That’s actually evil to treat you that way. We need to allow you to own when you make a mistake. I need to own when I make a mistake.

We all do that because when there is genuine, genuine repentance and owning of what we have done, there is a grace that overshadows it all only when we own it. Let me tell you what the gospel does say: You are more sinful than you and I want to admit, but God’s grace is greater than you and I could ever imagine.

And that’s hard. But if we don’t walk in that, it’s easy to be like the people of Israel and forget the goodness of God, abandon God, stop listening, rebel, judgment. But here’s the truth: Our failure is not bigger than God’s faithfulness. Our failure is not bigger than God’s. God’s faithfulness overshadows it all. There is freedom for us to own when we have fallen short, when we have sinned, when we have wronged.

That does not minimize our sin; it magnifies God’s grace. It does not minimize our sin in what we’ve done. We need to own it. We understand that it’s big. When we do something big, we need to own it. Stop trying to hire the PR move from Reddit, the PR move from Facebook. “Well, if you only understood what was happening…”

I saw a post from a friend of mine and it was like… you know those posts where you’re like, just make a video already? I promise it was like this long. And he spent the whole post like defending himself and at the end said, “I’m really sorry.” Who’s going to read that? Why don’t you start off with, “I’m sorry, I should not have done that.

I have no excuse. Period.” You know how your life would change? How your life in God would change? How your life with people would change if we took what we see in Nehemiah—we have fallen short, because we learn these things from Scripture. We learn that Scripture leads us to repentance, not the Scripture itself, not the actual physical pages, but when we read Scripture and we allow God’s Spirit to be in us learning about the character of God, it leads us to a place of repentance, not to feel bad, but to live different.

“But it’s making me feel bad.” I know, I know, but let’s break that down for a second. That feeling that you feel when you know you’ve done something wrong, you need to admit something, you need to apologize to someone… that feeling. Let’s break this down real quick, because when we engage Scripture, it is interpreting things for us: the character of God, the character of humanity.

And it has application; it’s both. Some of us are doers. You love to do. You just do, do, do, do, do, do everywhere.

I said it like that on purpose. And some of us love to sit and learn and understand the why and the why and the why and the why, and we have no intention of doing anything with what we learned about the why. And some of us do, do, do, do, do, and we don’t even know why we’re doing it.

We are supposed to do both. We’re supposed to be in Scripture, understand, and do something about it, to interpret and to have application. That’s what we’re called to be: a people who do both. So here’s what I want you to understand. There’s a difference between shame and repentance. And we’ve talked about it several times over the years, but it’s not bad to revisit it because a lot of us deal with this.

There’s a difference between shame and repentance. Shame says this: “I am terrible. I’m terrible. I did wrong,” but the focus is on self, and it leads to hiding and isolation. Shame says “I am terrible.” The focus is on self and it leads to hiding in isolation. Repentance says, “I have sinned, but there is mercy.” The focus is on God’s character, and that leads to running towards God.

Amen. So anything that is of God, no matter what you’re feeling, that pulls you into relationship, that pulls you into a group, that pulls you to come up for prayer with someone—that is repentance. Because shame tells you, “Well, if I just ride it out by myself, I’ll just figure it out on my own.” Have you figured it out on your own so far?

And here’s the number one thing I get from a lot of people: “But Pastor, you don’t understand. You’re an extrovert and I’m an introvert.” Let’s see… where in Scripture does it say there’s a different process for repentance? Oh, I see, repentance except for introverts should be done with other people.

I love introverts. I am married to one, let me tell you. Let me remind you what an introvert is: It’s the person who needs to be alone and get alone to regain energy and strength to go back into relationships. It’s not a perpetual state of aloneness, and I know we live in a culture that’s very isolated right now.

That’s not the way God created us. So yeah, you need to replenish by yourself. Go to that movie by yourself, go do whatever you do by yourself. Take a long walk. Read a book. You need 24 hours? God bless you. But you get re-energized to be in community with others. But what about the extroverts?

What about them? Why aren’t you going to say something to them? Yeah, because I am one. And sometimes extroverts, we need to shut up and give people space.

Why? Why am I talking about this? Because we don’t live in shame, friends. We live in an attitude of repentance. Shame keeps us away; repentance is an invitation to relationship. Big difference. Next thing we learn is this: Forgiveness leads to obedience. Forgiveness leads to obedience. Have you ever forgiven someone? You’ve forgiven them, you’re like, “Oh man, I forgive you. I listen, I know I’m upset about it, but I’m going to forgive you. And you know what? Let’s meet next week so I can forgive you again.” No, we forgive with an expectation that there’s going to be change and obedience to a boundary, an obedience to Scripture, an obedience to the relationship. Forgiveness leads to obedience because forgiveness is meant to make us different.

So when we turn from our sin and shame and we go and we turn and we accept an invitation to relationship, to true forgiveness, this causes us to want to be obedient to the faith, obedient to the things that we learn in Scripture. That is what it’s supposed to be about. Repentance says, “God, I was walking in the wrong direction,” and that’s good to acknowledge.

“I was walking in the wrong direction.” Obedience says, “Because of Your grace, I’m going to now walk in the direction You have called me.”

It’s one thing to acknowledge, “Hey, I was doing this wrong,” and then you don’t actually change anything. See, when we are forgiven by God, we have an opportunity to do something different, to be different, to look different, to talk different. And I know people might be like, “What’s wrong with you?” “I’m trying to be less of me.” Let’s all say it.

Let’s all say it together. On the count of three, say “I’m trying to be less of me.” One, two, three.

Isn’t that the very opposite of a world that tells us to be who we are?

Now, I’m trying to be more like Christ. So I let somebody have the right of way when we drive. I own when I make a mistake. I say I’m sorry. And before God the Father I say, “I want to live a life that is of obedience.” Why? Because the other thing we learn is this: God remains faithful.

We get to learn about a God… if you’re new to faith or exploring faith, you have to learn about the character of God right now. And as you say yes to Jesus, as you walk to become more like Him, as you are a disciple of Jesus every day surrendering your life, your will, your way to the way of Jesus…

We get to do that with a God who is faithful, a God we can trust. It’s important for us to understand that. And He’s faithful in the middle of the cycle again on the screen: Blessing, rebellion, discipline, crying out, mercy.

Blessing, rebellion, discipline, crying out, mercy.

I don’t know why God does this, folks, I don’t know, but I’m glad God does. And yet we’re supposed to be more and more like God. And so many times we maybe receive the mercy of God and we get comfortable, and in that comfort we forget and we drift, and we make decisions outside of God’s will. And then we want God to come and fix it.

And He is merciful.

But look… look at Nehemiah’s prayer. They’re back in the city, they rebuilt the walls, they’ve got the gates, they’ve done the whole thing. And instead of talking about how good Israel is, “How good we are, we rebuilt it…” That’s what would happen nowadays. Somebody would post a picture, “We rebuilt the wall,” and they post a video, “We’re so great.

We came back and fixed the gates of our city.” No, Nehemiah says no, no, no, no, no, we are wretched people. Look what he does with his time. He says, “You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love. Because of Your great compassion, You heard from heaven, and in Your compassion You delivered. You were patient, and in Your great mercy You did not put an end to them.” Nehemiah spends his time not gloating on what they did in the rebuilding of the city; he gloats in the God who called them, and has always been with them, and is faithful.

What if we did that? What if every day as you learn the names of God, you’re like, “God, You are compassionate”? “I can’t do that, that crosses into too religious, is it?”

To call God by God’s name? R.C. Sproul, a theologian, said this: “Grace and mercy are never deserved.” Grace and mercy are never deserved. And so you might hear grace and mercy used interchangeably, and they’re usually used in the same context, but they have two very different meanings. And let me break it down for you. Mercy is you not getting all of the punishment you deserve.

It doesn’t mean there are not consequences, but you don’t get the full weight of the punishment. There is mercy. There is Jesus standing in the gap as you were on the ground. And there might be some consequences from some of the things we’ve done, but in His mercy, we are not squashed by the weight of our sin and shame. And grace is His great blessing towards us, especially the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ that we have not earned.

So think of it this way: Mercy is God’s heart extended to us that withholds punishment, and grace is God’s gift of salvation and blessing. Both are undeserved. “But I’m a good person.” Nobody deserves this. It’s a gift we didn’t deserve. It’s a mercy we cannot earn.

Because the last thing we learn is this: The cycle gets broken when we say yes to Jesus. I should say it this way: It has the potential to be broken. That’s what Christ came for. When I was a new follower of Jesus, I was told to read this book on discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And there’s a quote in there that really stuck out to me.

It took me about a year to read the book because I was probably too young in my faith to read it, but I’m glad I did. And I’ve read it about 12 times, and it really challenged me. So I want to read this excerpt to you: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.

Cheap grace is baptism without church discipline. It’s communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship. A life surrendered, a life saying, ‘Yes, I’m going to follow Jesus.’ And grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ living and incarnate.” What the world offers and what our flesh offers is cheap grace. What Jesus did when He took on our sin and our shame…

And He comes to the earth and He lives a sinless life, and He goes to the cross, and He’s resurrected, and He promises the Holy Spirit… What Jesus does is a costly grace, because God the Father, His Son had a cost, just casting it on Him. That’s a costly grace. And anything below that is a cheap grace that people try to imitate.

It’s in our flesh, it’s in our nature. No, no, no, no, we don’t live with a cheap grace. We live with a costly grace, and His name is Jesus Christ. It’s because of Him. And what’s happening in Nehemiah is what I want to happen today. It’s a people saying, “Can we be the people where the cycle is broken?”

They couldn’t see in the Old Testament. They couldn’t see in this time that there was going to fully be a new covenant. There was the promise of a Messiah. And so, yes, there might have been some people who prophesied and saw, but the people in general didn’t have eyes to see the vision of what was going to happen in the New Testament when Jesus came, that there was going to be a revelation of the fullness of God’s restoration.

But here we are 2,000 years later, and we know how we stop the cycle: It’s when we surrender our lives to Christ fully to become more and more like Him. Why? Because Jesus demonstrates how far God’s forgiveness will go.

He took on all of our sin, all of our shame. And the more we are like Christ, the more we sometimes bear the burdens of our brothers and sisters, not to replace Christ, but to bear with them as they surrender to Christ.

There is a grace that is His, a righteousness, a reconciliation, a new identity, a Holy Spirit. And we learn in the New Testament, Ephesians chapter six and other places, where we put on the garments of Christ, we put on His righteousness, and we walk in Him. I want to close with a quote… with actually a poem. But there’s more I actually have in my notes.

I know you guys got to get to lunch, and so if you go to Gateway Church at the bottom, there’s this place called Digging Deeper, and there’s all the stuff we’re going to cover in groups that week. And if you’re not in a group, you can go there; there’ll be some of this stuff in there and Scripture verses for you to kind of learn even more.

But I want to close with this, and this poem was written by George MacDonald in the 19th century. And George was a pastor, a preacher, he was a fiction writer, and he really influenced your life and you don’t even know it, maybe even in a minor way. But George MacDonald influenced two writers who really impacted the 20th century: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

They looked to him and they were inspired by him. And he wrote this about surrendering our life and transparency to Jesus. So I want you to position yourself however you listen best, if that’s to sit up straight, if that’s to close your eyes, open your eyes, whatever that looks like. But I want you to listen as I read this beautiful poem from about 150 years ago. He said this:

“O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.

Take me and make a little Christ of me.

O Master, my desire’s to work, to know, to be

Aware that I do live and grow.

All restless wish for anything not Thee

I yield, and on Thy altar offer me.

Let me no more from out Thy presence go,

But keep me waiting, watchful for Thy will,

Even while I do it, waiting, watchful still.

My Lord, I have no clothes to come to Thee;

My shoes are pierced and broken with the road;

I am torn and weathered, wounded with the goad,

And soiled with tugging at my weary load.

The more I need Thee. A very prodigal

I stagger into Thy presence, Lord of me.

One look, my Christ, and at Thy feet I fall.”

Can we close our eyes in prayer today? And before I pray, I just have two quick questions. How many of us would be honest with ourselves in the room and say, “Man, I feel like the life I’m living right now is like the people of Israel. I feel like I’m in a cycle I can’t get out of, and I keep repeating it over and over and over, and I’ve tried my best.

And maybe the learning today is I can’t do it on my own, but I can’t keep living this cycle I’ve been living in, and I need help.” Is that you? Will you just raise your hand? I’m being honest, like, just like the people. I’m being honest, I can’t keep living the way I’m living. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.

I haven’t figured it out and I won’t figure it out; I need help. Yeah, thank you so much. Put your hands down. And maybe you’re in the room and, again, you’ve been exploring faith, or maybe you’ve deconstructed some things. Maybe you’re back in church for the first time in a long time. And maybe in this journey you’ve been on of faith, you would acknowledge:

“Today I need to acknowledge I’m in need of Jesus. I don’t know what it fully means, but I do know this: If God sent His Son to take on my sin and my shame so I would not have to walk in that, and I get to have that mercy and grace, that’s what I’m in need of.

I’m in need of not living my life on my own, but living a life in Jesus. And I need to make this decision and humble myself to walk with people to live this out, but I want to say yes to Jesus.” Is that you? All everybody’s… just me looking. Would you just raise your hand right where you’re at and say yeah?

Oh, yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, thank you for the honesty. Lord, I thank You for my friends. Thank You for family. I thank You for those who raised their hand today saying, “I’m in need of Jesus.” What a thing we celebrate. And as they make that acknowledgment, help my friends to take the next step of coming alongside someone in our church and letting us walk with them as they say yes to You.

Give us wisdom as a church. Continue to walk with them, to walk in grace and mercy, to celebrate with them the new life You want them to live. And for my friends who raised their hand across all of our campuses and even online, who raised their hand and said, “I am in need of the cycles of my life to be broken, I need to acknowledge that,” would You meet them where they are? Would You help them to take a step out from where they are, and that they would not try to do this alone? It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.