God wants to redeem you, not exchange you. Inside your soul there is a battle between a flourishing self - the person you were created to be - and the languishing self. This message series is all about that battle as it moves from deep inside you to a world waiting for God's redemption.
REDEEMING MY TIME
“For a lot of us our problem following Jesus is we're trying to be a better version of us, rather than a more accurate reflection of Him.” - Bob Goff
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23
1. The first step to conquering this deadly struggle with sin is prayer.
a. The reality is with God, we are never speaking in his absence.
b. “The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God.”
c. “Don’t worry about anything, instead pray about everything.” – Philippians 4:6
2. The second step in conquering our struggle with sin is to defeat temptation.
a. “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.” Ephesians 5:15-17
b. What was called idolatry in biblical times, we often call addictions today.
3. The third way to conquer our struggle with sin is to have radical accountability.
a. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Luke 6:41-42
b. I want OCC to be a church with a culture of accountability where we lovingly help one another become all that God wants us to be.
c. “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.” -Galatians 6:1
Hey good morning church! I love having the opportunity to be here and to teach and preach. This series that we are going through right now is one of my favorites that we’ve done since I’ve been a part of OCC. It’s all about becoming the me I want to be, the me that God wants me to be, and that’s a reflection of God Himself.
To be completely honest, I struggled writing this sermon because I struggle with knowing if I’m who I want to be, or even if I am who God wants me to be. But that’s the point! So, if you’re sitting here this morning and you’re thinking, “I’m good…I got this figured out,”… then come talk to me after service and help me out because I’m not fully who God wants me to be yet. But I’ve come to realize that that’s okay…as long as I’m moving toward that goal.
In his book Everybody Always, Bob Goff says, “For a lot of us our problem following Jesus is we're trying to be a better version of us, rather than a more accurate reflection of Him.” (Picture of the book with the quote next to it here please)
I’ve realized how true that statement really is. When we look at the world around us, we see gyms with slogans like “This year become your best self.” We see fad diets that tell us we can become this amazing thin and beautiful person as long as we pay $200-$300 a month for a meal plan. I saw an ad for a beard balm that said women would find us bearded men more attractive if we used their product. My fiancée Mandy has yet to comment on how much more handsome I am since I made the switch! (Ha!)
But the things of this world focus so much on the outward things…the way you smell, the way you look, the style of your clothes…because let’s be honest, the “Me I want to be” is that handsome guy on social media, or the mom who has everything put together on pinterest, or that perfect couple who seem to always be happy and never fight.
There aren’t a lot of Instagram ads, pinterest boards, or tv commercials for improving what’s on the inside…which is really all that matters. We know in Scripture that God is more concerned about what’s on the inside than what’s on the outside. I would much rather hear about a relationship that was healed, or how a marriage was improved, or how someone drew closer to God than to see a picture of what you ate for supper last night or what you did on your trip to the beach.
We need to shift our thinking from the me the world is telling me to be, to the me that God wants me to be, to the me that reflects the image of my heavenly Father. But to make that shift, we need to take a hard look at the very thing that keeps us from being what God wants us to be…and that is “sin.” Sin is any action or thought that we do or have that harms our relationship with God. Trust me, I get it…sin isn’t a fun thing to talk about. It gets sticky, messy, and it’s just easier to pretend it doesn’t happen or isn’t that big of a deal.
But sin is the most dangerous thing in all the world…and the truth is, we’re all sinners. Scripture says “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And while one person may struggle with a certain sin, another person may not struggle with it all. A guy might struggle with lust while another guy doesn’t. Some lady may struggle with greed while another lady is the most selfless person in the world. A student might struggle with their image, while the next one couldn’t care less. So it doesn’t really matter what sins we may struggle with…the truth is, those sins will keep us from being the people that God wants us to be.
And if our struggle with sin isn’t bad enough, Satan knows all about it…and he knows where to get a hold of our lives...it starts out as a toehold, something small...then it goes to a foothold, something stronger...and then finally it’s a stronghold, you find yourself in chains and shackles, a slave to your sin and it takes us away from the me I want to be, and the me God made me to be. He knows how to pull us a few degrees off course so that eventually we’ve drifted far from the Lord. So how do we get a handle on this whole sin thing? What things can we do that will help us resist Satan? How do we become “The Me God wants me to be?”
Well…it all begins with Prayer. The first step to conquering this deadly struggle with sin is prayer. I know that sounds like a cliché…and you’d expect a preacher to get up here and tell you to pray about it…but the reason that we talk about prayer so much is because of how important it is. Prayer is vital to a Christian, and if you’ve never made a decision to follow Christ, prayer is important to you as well! Prayer is where the relationship with our heavenly Father begins. It’s our lifeline between us and God. It’s how we communicate with our Lord. So let me ask you: How’s your prayer life? Alive and well? Dead in the water?… or somewhere in between?
And how do you gauge the success of your prayer life? By how long you pray? By how often you pray? By what you confess in your prayers? By how many people you’ve been praying for? By how much faith you pray with? You see, how you determine what a successful prayer life looks like can totally change your answer of how your prayer life is going.
Here’s a concept that I want you to understand. I encourage the kids in HV to do what 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says to do…it says to “Pray without ceasing,” But when the kids hear that, they always ask, “How can I pray without ceasing when I’m so busy? I have friends, sports, school, work…who can pray all the time?”
John Ortberg answers that question in his book The Me I Want To Be when he says, “If you believe in God, you have already begun to pray – to enter into a dialogue with him – because believing in God means believing he is always present, always listening to what you say.” (Picture of the book with the quote here please)
Understanding that God is always with you, that He is watching and listening to everything you do and say can totally change how you pray. Prayer isn’t a magical telephone call where we’re waiting for God to pick-up. He’s always listening, and that should affect how we interact with Him.
There have been times in my life when I’ve said something in someone’s absence that I wouldn’t have said in their presence. You know how that is. There’s a true story of when Mark Twain was riding a train home from Maine after three weeks of a highly successful fishing trip, I guess you could call it a chew chew twain! Hahahahaha. – even though the state’s fishing season was closed. He was bragging to the only other passenger in the train car about his huge but illegal catch of fish. The passenger grew increasingly upset and when Twain asked him who he was, the man said that he was the state game warden. The game warden asked, “Who are you?” And Mark Twain said, “To tell you the truth, I’m the biggest liar in the United States.”
You see, Mark Twain would never have told that story if he knew who the warden was. And I wonder if we really thought about it, how much we would say or think knowing that God is always there. It’s easy for us to hide the truth when we’re talking to someone but the reality is With God, we are never speaking in his absence. That’s how we can pray without ceasing…because praying is simply talking to God as we go through the day. John Ortberg also says, “The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God.”
If you’re struggling with sin, you need to start talking to God, because even when we don’t know what to pray, or how to pray, or we feel guilty that we’re trying to pray knowing that we’re struggling with sin…we need to believe that God is there for us…listening to us…and that He can even use our struggle to help grow our faith. So let me encourage you, like Paul said in Philippians 4:6, “Don’t worry about anything, instead pray about everything.”
The second step in conquering our struggle with sin is to defeat temptation. Let’s turn to Ephesians 5:15-17. If you don’t have your own bible, you can go to the next step area at the back of the room and we will give you a free copy, or if you’re watching online or you’re here in person and you want a digital copy download the youversion bible app, excellent app and wonderful way to always have God’s Word with you. Okay, let’s check out Ephesians 5:15-17 Paul says… 15 Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”
Did you notice how Paul says “Be very careful”? He didn’t just say “Be careful”…no, he said be VERY careful how you live. One of the ways that we do that is by what he says in verse 17…by understanding what the Lord’s will is for our lives. There are a lot of things that make it hard to live a godly life…things that try to keep us from knowing the Lord’s will, from being “The me that God wants me to be.”
For me, it can be food. One of the biggest temptations I face is Wendy’s 4 for $4 meals. I pass Wendy’s as I go home every day, and I’ll be honest…I could eat a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, French fries, and Coke every day! That is very tempting to me, especially since I can get all of that for $4! But I know those things aren’t good for me.
And that’s how temptation works…our desires, our appetites end up overriding what we value…which is why we need to know what the Lord’s will is. Now I’m not saying that eating at Wendy’s every day is a sin...i’m glad it’s not because i would be one of the worst sinners there is, but i’m simply illustrating how temptation works. So understanding the will of God will help us resist temptation, thus helping us be the godly person God wants us to be.
Actually, think about this for a moment, it takes a lot of work walking down the wrong path. Sure, it seems easy, broad is the road to destruction, but think about all that goes into sinning and living a destructive lifestyle...you have to silence God’s voice within you because there’s no way that you can willfully sin while listening to God. Then you have to make sure that you’re not praying. Then you need to stay away from faithful Christians because they’ll be trying keep you accountable. You can’t be reading Scripture because that will convict you. And worst of all, you’ll have to turn off your relationship with Lord because you can’t be in a relationship with God while you’re giving into sin! See how much work it takes? All of that just so you can have a momentary gratification of the flesh. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a lot of work to live a godly life as well, but it costs a person more to walk down the wrong path than the right one. Discipline has a cost in the moment, but if you don’t have discipline there will be a cost, usually much greater, later.
So…we have a choice to make every single day. It’s a choice between satisfying our spiritual hunger and satisfying our fleshly hunger. The hunger that is going to win is the one that you are diligent about feeding.
I would hope that all of us want to live faithful lives for the Lord but to do so, we need to feed our spiritual lives. If not…we’re feeding into our sin and our sin will beat us down. And the things we end up focusing on will become idols…because anything we replace the Lord with becomes an idol. Kyle Idleman puts it this way, “An idol is anything that comes between you and God.” Don’t miss this. What was called idolatry in biblical times, we often call addictions today. Someone might say, “I don’t worship idols” but they watch trash on their phones or tv every night, or they’re looking at inappropriate images. That’s their idol…it’s taking the place of God. “I don’t have an idol,” but they gamble. “I don’t have an idol,” but they yell at their wife and kids. “I don’t worship idols,” but they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol. Sinful things can turn into idols as they take God’s rightful place in our lives. To overcome our struggle with sin, we must defeat temptation. If i didn’t want to eat wendy’s so much i could go home a different route so i don’t even get tempted. If you’re struggling with watching inappropriate things cancel your netflix, or invest in something like “Covenant Eyes” which can help you live a life of purity. One of the biggest ways to defeat temptation is to begin to avoid it...simple, but effective!
Then the third way to conquer our struggle with sin is to have radical accountability. John talked last week about how the Holy Spirit is our Helper. In the same way, we can’t win our battle against sin without a helper. Of course, the Holy Spirit helps us in fight against sin, but our help can also come from the people around us…our spouse, our friends, our mentors… those who are close to us who can tell when something is off. But we need to be careful when we hold someone accountable. We need to make sure that we do it from a place of love and concern. We can’t do it out of anger or feeling “holier than thou.” In fact, that type of attitude usually makes things worse rather than better because you’re heaping shame on top of their sin. Wen we are embraced with grace and acceptance it can lead us into the light, where sin dies, instead of being pushed into the dark, where it thrives.
Luke 6: 41-42 says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
I want OCC to be a church with a culture of accountability where we lovingly help one another become all that God wants us to be. One of our core values is “Life Transformation”. That’s going to take all of us working together to get there! We all need help in our pursuit of godliness. We all need help to overcome sin, and to resist temptation. We all need help to understand what God’s will is for our lives.
When I was a teenager I was on a mission trip in Cincinnati and we were helping to renovate this single mom’s house. I had a circular saw in my hand and I was cutting two by fours when all of a sudden a splinter from the wood was kicked up from the saw and flew straight into my eye. It was horrible. It hurt like crazy…I could barely see…so I was rubbing my eye, splashing water in my face, anything I could think of to help myself…but it wasn’t until the youth minister and some leaders came around me and literally pushed me to the ground. They held my eye open, flushed it with water, and one of the leaders had a pair of tweezers and they were able to pull the splinter from my eye. I never would have been able to do that on my own. I had to have people come around me and help me.
That’s how it works when a brother or sister in the Lord is struggling with sin. They need to have spiritual people come around them and help. Galatians 6:1 says, “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.”
God doesn’t want you caught in a sin. He doesn’t want you living a life that is hindered by continued sin. If you consistently find yourself in a patten of sin it’s going to be near impossible to become the me you want to be. You certainly can’t be a reflection of God if you have sin in your life because God is perfect and blameless. In order to become the true me you want to be, to become a reflection of Christ, you need to conquer the sin in your life. God wants you to be able to become “The me that God wants you to be” which is a direct reflection of who He is.
So the three steps to conquering your struggle with sin is to pray, to resist temptation, and to be open to radical accountability. (Slide with all three steps on it please)
Jonathan and the worship team are going to come up and play through a song, and if you’re a Christian who is struggling with sin, then please be willing to repent of that. Spend some time talking to the Lord about it right now. Get down on your knees and confess that sin to the Lord. You can do that here in the room, or at home if you’re watching online. Or you can go to the back of the room and connect with a next step leader who is ready to talk and pray with you, or request prayer on our livestream.
Maybe you’ve never made Jesus the Lord of your life. Maybe you’ve never allowed Him to forgive you of your sin. We want that to happen right here and right now! You’ve been living in sin for way too long and it’s time to let the Lord take a hold of your life. If you’re ready to become a Christian today, then find me in the back of the room, or find one of the other ministers in the room, or find a next step person, or if you’re watching online just call the church! I’ll make sure someone is there to pick up and talk to you. Let us help you make the best decision of your life. You don’t have to be a slave to sin any longer! You can conquer whatever sin is plaguing your life and you can enter a joyful and godly relationship with the Lord. You can become the person that God wants you to be right now….as you enter a relationship with Him and are made brand new.