JUL 7 2019 | Shame of Thrones: The Story of David & Bathsheba S1E4 | Ewe Da’ Man

Sea Change Church · Shame of Thrones: The Story of David & Bathsheba · "Ewe Da' Man" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · July 7, 2019
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning. I'm Daniel O'Keefe, and I'm part of the worship ministry as well as Serve Church. And I'm going to read 2 Samuel 12, 1 through 10. The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, there were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. He shared his food, drank from his cup, and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.

Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him. David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die. He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.

Then Nathan said to David, You are the man. This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master's house to you and your master's wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah, and if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?

You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own. The word of the Lord. Heavy, right? Goodness gracious. Right on. I thought this was one of my best titles ever. Check it out. Get it? You demand. Get it?

Pun is the highest form of humor, by the way, so. I thought it was really funny. Yeah, thank you, Kai. Got somebody here that likes it. I've been working on these. I don't know if you know. Few things display grace like being told when you're wrong. Think about it. Few things display grace like being told that you're wrong. Now, I'm not talking about when the you're wrong police, you know, come to you all the time and are constantly pointing fingers at you.

But to be told when you're going in the wrong direction, perhaps when you get on a freeway going the opposite direction in England and there's a sign that says, do not enter one way. There is some grace that somebody came and put up a sign, right? That says you're going the wrong way. When you tell a child not to put a fork or a coat hanger into an electrical socket, there is grace in that. And few things display grace like being told that you're wrong.

I think it's interesting as a society will oftentimes push back, our society included, that the thing that they like least is being told that they are wrong. But being told that you are going in the wrong direction is an incredible grace. And one of the things we need to understand as believers, because we've been sold a lie, that letting people know what is right and what is wrong is some disrespectful thing to do. That puts you in a platform of superiority over people, as opposed to seeing people as wrong and more as lost and wanting to help save people that are lost.

It is a great grace that God did not just snuff David out immediately. And God had the ability and probably should have snuffed him out immediately for this act. But God shows him incredible grace and incredible patience. As a matter of fact, the fact that God tells you what is wrong at all is an amazing sense of grace. The fact that we have a Bible, that God took the time to give us what is right and is wrong, is an incredible grace.

The fact that he wrote, as it says in Romans chapter 2, verse 14 and 15, that the law of God is not only written on tablets of stone. It doesn't say that, but it does say that the law of God is written upon the hearts of mankind. That he wrote what is right and what is wrong upon our hearts. It is an incredible grace to know what is right and what is wrong. In China, in imperial China, before the fall of imperial China, they have a thing that you did before the emperor.

It was called the kowtow. And perhaps you've heard, I will not kowtow to somebody. Kowtow is spelled K-O-W, T-O-W. And when you came before the emperor, there was an elaborate performance of kowtows that needed to be done so that you would not be executed at one point during the dynastic history of imperial China to be executed before the emperor. If you were to run in before the emperor, you see this in Babylon as well, in different kingdoms, in front of Nebuchadnezzar.

You cannot just run in to, in front of the king. And so when you came in, you had to do these elaborate kowtows. Now, one of the issues that they had is around the 1800s, one of the traders came and said, I will not perform the kowtow. And this was a massive political change with the relationship between England and China. But not talking about that, the fact that before this, if you were not warned about the kowtow, it would not be an act of grace.

As a matter of fact, perhaps someone is trying to take you out. The fact that somebody would tell them that you need to do this so that your life is not in danger is an incredible grace. God has shown grace with David. He not only has given him a conscience, he not only has given, which is written upon his heart, it says that he has given the law written upon his heart, he has also given us a conscience, which is a second layer.

He has also given us a Holy Spirit that speaks to us about when we're wrong. He has also given us the word of God to tell us when we are right or wrong. All four of those are meant to work in collaboration to keep you on the right path. Why would God give us four ways in which we can stay on the right path to know how we cannot offend him? Because when you offend God, a perfect God, God should, and David shows this, the way he feels when the ewe lamb is taken from her master.

He immediately shows what the result should be. What is his immediate response? The man should be killed. God has gone out of his way over and over again to show us the right path to take. It is an incredible grace. But David has lost the ability to hear from his conscience. And his heart has become hard. We're going to talk about that today, about how we maintain baby skin soft hearts. Pliable hearts. Hearts that do not accept everything that our mind puts before them.

And some of us just need to start editing our mind. Just because a thought comes into your mind doesn't need that you need to receive it, even if it was given up to you by yourself. I had thoughts this week when I started pursuing this idea of what I'm going to allow into my mind and what I'm not going to allow into my mind. What thoughts I'm going to allow of having to battle against certain thoughts to become an editor.

We'll talk about that in a moment. But few things, like I said, display grace like being when you're told when you're wrong. The innate ability to know, this is not in your notes, but I wrote it yesterday. The innate ability to know right from wrong is an immense act of grace. And Romans 2, 14 and 15 says that. The fact that God lets you know. He lets you know what offends him. The Bible speaks about in the New Testament how tragic it would be if you lived a life thinking you were doing the right thing, but you were doing the wrong thing.

It is the grace of God to let a sinner know when they have sinned. But God, even in immense grace before that, says, while we were yet sinners in Romans 5, 8, while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. Before you knew, before you even cared, Christ died for you. And this is powerful because David has moved to a place where three of the three, actually there's a fifth way actually if you send somebody else to speak truth, but three to four, the entire series of channels and locks that God has created, think about the Panama Canal, that God has created to keep you in a place of having a soft heart, David has failed to recognize those or to heed them and has moved on to this incredible act to where he has become comfortable in compartmentalizing a deep act of injustice and sin and able to still live and be at peace with sin.

That's incredible that he was able to do that and he was a man after God's own heart. God has given us the innate ability to know right from wrong. And I guess I didn't add this, but the fifth way God can tell us what is right and wrong is by sending someone. It says, how beautiful are those that share the gospel. It also speaks in Romans about the ability of other people to come speak truth so that we might be saved.

Letting sinners know that when they have sinned is grace. God let David know that he had sinned. God sent Nathan and I guess, I mean, do you have any Nathans in your life? Or have you just, you know, you know, some people they use anger, they blow up. You'll see this. You ever watch any of those shows about where they, somebody's going to go to rehab and they have the intervention. And you can see all the tools that we developed so that no one can tell us that we're wrong.

We blow up in anger. So no one speaks to you because you blow up in anger and no one wants to deal with that. Or perhaps you become silent. You just won't speak to them anymore. So if they speak any truth to you, then you're just going to ostracize them. Or you're so good at arguing or having a conversation. You ever argued with a person all of a sudden, you don't know what you're arguing about anymore. They're just, just, it's, they're so slippery.

It's big. It's, it's, it's a, maybe it's you. Maybe you're phenomenal at that. You know, the ability to invite Nathan's into your life is, is a spiritual weapon. And knowing when you're wrong and quickly correcting your quote wrongness. I, I, I really want to get, I've, I've worked really hard at, at, at, and if you work with me, most, I think most people work with me close here. We'll, we'll know that, you know, when they approach me on things, maybe on a lot of areas, I try my best to admit that I'm wrong and make a quick correction.

Why do I want to spend 48 hours or three weeks in self-denial before I finally feel good enough about coming around and apologizing? And now I got to apologize for being a jerk for three weeks. No, I want to know when something's wrong. I want strong people around me who can speak to me when I'm wrong and not be the emperor, the naked emperor that doesn't know that he's not wearing any new clothes because you got a bunch of yes men and women around you.

I want Nathan's in my life. And it says that in the scripture that wounds from a friend can be what? Trusted and faithful, but they are faithful is one, is one definition. Wounds from a friend can be trusted. And if you ever had a friend and you gotta be, I mean, obviously timing is everything. I think telling people they're wrong requires precision surgery. It's like brain surgery closer than it is to like, you know, like some shiatsu massage, you know, and you're getting banged on and the whole thing.

And it takes brain surgery and it takes people that are willing, but I want to know when I'm wrong. I had a conversation one time with somebody and I had done something and I knew I was wrong and they came in and they told me I was wrong. And I said, you know what? You were wrong. I was wrong. I said, you're right. I admit it. I was wrong. How can we have a solution? But I want you to know you were wrong. Yes, I was.

I was wrong and I admit it and there's nothing I can do to fix that, but we can have a solution now. We can change that. But why were you wrong? Because I was wrong and because I made a mistake. Well, but you're a person who hears from God and prays and why were you wrong? So now we're putting that little bit on. I was playing basketball with a guy the other day. He called me pastor during the game. I said, my name's Adam.

Don't call me pastor. I don't call you bartender when we play. But he's like, he didn't like the call. He didn't like the call. So now I'm pastor. I said, Uber driver, pastor Uber driver over there. So we're the Bernstein Bears. Everyone's being talked to about what our jobs are. Now I've forgotten what I was saying. What was I saying? Words from a friend can be trusted. Yeah. I don't know where I was. I got lost. I'm going to listen to that tonight and I'm going to remember and think I'll probably remember in a moment.

Words from a friend can be trusted, but we want to get our lives in a place where they're pliable, where someone can come and speak to you about your wrong, about being wrong. Oh, I told you I was having a conversation with somebody and the person wanted to keep convincing me that I was wrong. And it took a half hour before they finally accepted. It was literally a half hour of wanting to bring back and live in the wrongness.

This is what guilt does. Okay. When you know that you're wrong, let me just say, the Christian, if you live according to scripture, should never experience guilt. Guilt is a result of condemnation. The Bible talks about a righteous understanding of guilt, which means when you're convicted, you immediately move back to rightness. When you move into guilt, guilt is a form of self-persecution that you allow yourself to have so you can feel the weight of what you did.

You never need, as long as you know what the right thing to do is, you never need to move into guilt. Some people live in guilt and it's basically putting yourself on the cross for something Jesus died for. You don't need to live with guilt and I hope that makes sense. But in this conversation, I was trying as quickly as I could to move in the right direction. Look, learn the ability to put trusted people around you who you actually respect.

A lot of us don't want people around us that we respect because they can speak truth to us. And we want, you know, there's a whole new thing. Hey, you speak your truth. I love your truth. My truth leads me to death a lot of times. I want the truth of God's word and I want the truth of a community that can come to me and pull me up on occasion and say you're wrong. This whole secular humanistic idea of like you just speak your truth, girl, or you speak your truth, man, or whatever it is.

I mean, I think there's some truth to that, but truth is not based on what I think it is. Truth is based on some absolutes that we know. How do we know? How do we have a ballast, a compass, an anchor for truth? It's because we have the anchor of God's word and these other ways that God has given us to live in truth. Looking down at the notes. David, two insights I want to extract from this text before we take communion today.

First is David had become cold-hearted. What he did was straight up cold-hearted and you don't get there immediately. He had been 12 years king over all of Israel. God had given him, it's a big deal to have Judah and Israel. They were fighting all the time and after Solomon, it can't be kept together. But Judah and Israel, the two divided kingdoms, had become one underneath him. He had ruled in Hebron, I believe, for eight years before this, but became king over Israel.

And in 12 years, he'd become cold-hearted to the point where he could send somebody. Now, I never understood that. That was kind of a bad call. You send somebody to go get Bathsheba and then she sends somebody to you afterwards to tell you that she's pregnant. If you're going to keep this under wraps, you don't do any sending. You know what I'm saying? Never put anything in an email you don't want the world to read. That is, I live by that.

I will, if you don't want the entire world to read it, don't put it on social media. Don't put it in an email because you all of a sudden, it's like when you're in fourth, you know, seventh grade and you tell your best friend that you know you want to go with so-and-so. That's an old term. Or you like somebody, it is going to get out. So they're sending people back and forth and the word is already out. David had become cold-hearted.

This is straight up cold-hearted. How do you keep your heart from becoming cold? We're going to talk about that in a moment. The second thing is the idea of the scandal of grace. There is no other world religion. There is no other philosophy, whether it be atheism, which I think is a religion because you have to have faith to not believe in God as much as you have to believe in God. whether it be agnosticism, whether it be Hinduism, Islam, all the religion, there is no religion or philosophical understanding in the world that has the scandal of grace that the scripture and Christian scripture has.

That God would send his son, a perfect unblemished ewe lamb, basically, or a lamb, and this is an archetypal scripture of what that is, to be destroyed for those that hate him or those that are against him or those that are enemies that they might be saved. The grace in the scripture, the grace that God would come and tell us what is wrong. As soon as, you know, Adam and Eve or mankind fell, they should have been left astray and to be destroyed, but God said, no, that isn't enough for me.

If you want to know a theme of the Bible, the theme of the Bible is grace. You want to live according to grace. We'll talk in a moment if you give yourself enough grace. Do you have a life that is defined by grace? Or is it defined by criticism, anger, discouragement, things left unsaid? Well, let's look at David. He had become cold-hearted. This is amazing. Twelve years it took him. Twelve years. Twelve years is a long time.

This didn't happen overnight. Happened a little bit at a time. A little bit at a time. Beginning to believe the lies of his greatness. The songs of how great he was doing. The songs that the maidens would sing. Now, if you're a 20-something dude and thousands of maidens are running around saying, you know, Saul killed his thousands, but homeboy over there killed his 10 thousands, it's hard not to drink that Kool-Aid.

Hard not to live in the abundance of self. David started living in the abundance of self and he disenfranchised himself as we saw last week from community. Do not allow yourself to be disenfranchised from community. One of the reasons we come here is so that we grow strong together. As I said last week, when you grow strong in a community, you grow strong individually. One of the best ways for personal success is communal success.

One of the best ways for communal success is individual success. David's heart had become cold. A man after the soft heart of God and we talked about that as a destination. Not just following, a lot of people follow God. It's easy to follow God in this concept of universal understanding of a power that's out there somewhere that's pushing good on the world. But to find out what the heart of God is and to learn what forgiveness looks like and to learn what mercy looks like and what love actually looks like, to find the heart of God and make that your destination is a different spiritual journey on a different spiritual road than just seeking God.

David was a man after God's own heart and there's a reason that is put in the scripture over and over again because it showed that he was on a different path, a different road, traversing a different hill. A man after the soft heart of God had allowed his own heart to grow cold, but how? We're going to look at this quickly. The first thing is this. Leave it unattended. If you want to have your heart be overgrown, full of weeds and tangling out any fruit that the fruits of the heart of the Spirit might do in your heart, leave it unattended.

Let anything come into the fertile place of your heart, the garden of your heart, and forage on it. Let all, you know, if you think about any of you are gardeners, you know, they put little fences around. Why? Because things come in and destroy the work, the fruit that comes from that garden. Your heart needs to be tended. You need to pay very close attention to the attitudes of your heart. I got to experience this week at Costco about my heart because I went to Costco on July 3rd.

Not a great day to go, right? Not smart. Tried to get there early. So did everybody else, okay? Okay, well, I won't go to the two entrances. They should have more entrances there, but nonetheless, I'm rethinking the entire thing. You know, ways to get in. Go to the back entrance now. Don't go into the first one by the gas station. Just go to the back one and then just park in the back and walk and you're just less stressed.

Go farthest away, take the farthest parking lot away and you're not stressed. So I'm in there. And all of a sudden, I realize how easy it is to just let little comments, thoughts in your heart, little attitudes, just a certain, you know, person walks by and I don't like the way you wear your shorts, dude. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, whatever it is, like all of a sudden these things come up and all of a sudden if you don't guard those, they will become an avalanche that 12 years later will harden your heart.

You have to be so careful what we allow into our hearts. I'm talking to my daughter, 11-year-old Lucy, about, and we're really taking charge of media in our home and technology. We're trying to turn that off. We've got some new things on the computer that we're stopping and slowing down, the amount of usage, trying to turn all electronics off at a 7 p.m. for everybody in the household, not just the kids. I'm not going to expect my kids to live according to something that I don't want to live according to myself, which I think is hypocrisy.

And so, my daughter's really into Japanese anime. Now, if you know anything about Japanese anime, she's making her own anime. She's very good at it and wants to maybe be an anime artist. There is a real dark side to anime. If you have looked at it, it's pretty dark, very sexual and violent, but not all of it. And so, the thing that I oftentimes want to do with kids, just say, no more anime. Can't do it. You're out. Or, if there's a certain friend, all of a sudden, I'll say, well, that friend's, you know, can't hang out with that friend anymore.

Now, sometimes that needs to happen. But, what I would rather do is encourage my daughter to be able to be in the world, be not of the world, and look through it. This happened with Harry Potter. So, Harry Potter has a bunch of witchcraft in it. And I don't know, if you just go to the bookstore over here, and then you'll see the horror and witchcraft section, which is big, is right next to the children books. So, they're right next to each other.

And I really want you to take a tour. Just go look at the young adult section, see what they're reading in this whole thing. I told my daughter, look, if we're going to do Harry Potter, because I'm not really into witchcraft, I know, hey boy, you know, the little accent, Hogwarts and all this, it's all, you know, it doesn't mean anything. But it does pique kids' interest. And I said, look, I'm not going to say you can't read Harry Potter.

And maybe, you know, but if we're going to read it, we're going to read it together. We're going to go into that world together. And then when we're done, we're going to have conversations about it. I want to say the same thing with you. Are you being wise? I told my daughter, she gets an hour of YouTube now, just like I got TV. You have to watch YouTube in the living room with the sound on like we did in the 70s. So when the TV was on, I wasn't in my room hiding, you know, with just this world, the parents don't know anything that's going on there.

And I said to her, we want to watch things with wisdom. Now back to you and back to your heart. What are you allowing in? Can you feast on blatant, licentious sexuality just because it's a Netflix thing and not expect it to affect your heart? Can I tell you the answer? No. Can a society feast on violence? Which it does. Just go to any action movie, okay? When you go to the movie next time, pull out your phone or whatever and check down every time you see a gun or someone being shot or every time you hear a gunshot or a bomb.

Just do it. Do it during sports commercials. Just check down and see how many. Our society loves violence. We say we hate violence but we feast upon it. We love it. We love it in our shows. We love sexuality in our shows. My question is, can you just open your mind to that and not have wisdom about what you're going to allow in? Leave your heart unattended. You have a garden that is your heart that God wants to make fertile and rich and have fruit come from your heart but we leave all the gates open.

We don't check it for bugs. We don't go out and trim. We don't prune. We don't have the fruit. Can you continue to open this up and say, well, it's just a show. My daughter was in this one show and I went and looked at it and I said, this isn't appropriate. We're not watching this anime anymore. We can do this other one. Dad, I'm so invested. I said, I don't care if you're invested. Dad, you're no fun. I said, look, I told you I would take you to Japan to an anime conference so don't tell me that I'm not invested.

I will go to Japan. I told you. Our kids get a 13-year-old trip and they have to decide whether she wants to go to Japan and I said, look, don't tell me I'm not invested. So you see what I'm doing there? I'm not axing it. I'm like, we're going to go to Tokyo and I'm going to go and she can wear the little outfit and do the whole thing. I don't care. We're not watching that one because that one is gross and we don't want to watch it.

Back to you. What are you letting into your heart? You cannot continue to watch stuff like that. What are you letting into your thoughts? Do you even edit your own thoughts? Just because yourself serves you up a thought about who you are might not be in alignment with who God says you are. Are you going to filter it? And it is a battle. If you're going to take charge of technology in this society, it is a battle. And the enemy is going to do everything he can to stop you from doing it.

Leave your heart unattended. Question on the screen. Who's doing most of the talking? In your life? CSNBC? MSNBC? See, I didn't watch it. MSNBC? CNN? You know? Your mother-in-law who doesn't like you? Your friends? Chirp, chirp, chirp. Your negative voices in your head that you've agreed with that don't agree with scripture about who God says you are? Who is doing most of the talking in your life? If you want to keep a heart on fire, go to the next part.

It says in Luke 24, 32. And this is about having a heart that is on fire. They asked each other. This is when Jesus comes back and he's walking with the disciples and he begins, and they don't recognize who he is, which happens a lot. They don't recognize who he is. And he says, and they say to each other after they had spoken to him, were not our hearts, what? Burning within us while he what? He talked with us on the road and he opened the scriptures to us.

Two things happening there. One, they talked to Jesus. You can talk to Jesus in prayer. You can talk to Jesus through the scriptures as he speaks back to you. But the thing that they were talking about was the scripture. If you want your heart on fire, just I would say inundate yourselves with scripture. Binge listen to the entire book of Jeremiah in a weekend. It's over 40, 50, I don't know. It's a lot of chapters. It's a big book and there's a lot of heaviness.

Or find a book that you like, the entire book of Matthew. Binge listen to it. One of my friends came up to me today and said, oh, I watched the whole season three of Stranger Things that came out this last week, Stranger Things. I watched the whole thing. I binged it, you know, and it's right at the edge of what I can take in. I'm like, well, good. It's a little beyond my edge, but that's a good edge for you. And if you know, you know.

What if you did the same thing with the word of God? Yeah, what if you, thank you, what if you did the same thing with worship? He said, this weekend is a weekend of worship. I'm just going to worship God all weekend. You know, that same thing happens. We're not our hearts on fire. I'm going to say, sometimes you've got to expose your heart to the flame to have it catch fire. You can't keep exposing your heart to cold water and expect to have fire in your heart.

Are things that dampen down the spirit of your heart. Do you need a cultural change? That's what we've spoken about every week for the last three weeks. Do you need a cultural change? I got to tell you what, I want to be here to feed, I want a church that feeds the hungry, not tries to convince those that are full. My friend is preaching the gospel in Africa right now. He goes to Ghana and he speaks, he's invited me to go next year to Ghana.

And he says, you know what, people are hungry. They come and they're filling, you know, stadiums as he preaches the gospel. He just goes to these places and they preach because they're hungry. I want to feed those that are hungry. And if you need a life change, we're here to help you have it. If what you're doing is working, then keep going. It's interesting as I look at the world, I keep getting told what we've been doing is wrong, but the world now is in the worst place it's ever been.

And well, I wouldn't say it's in the worst place it's ever been, but it's in our culture is in a very difficult place as we've abandoned our past values. It doesn't feel like it's gotten better. It feels like it's gotten worse. The question is back to you. How do you keep your heart soft? Is your heart soft? The other thing I would say is accept wickedness. You know, the Matthew 24, 12 through 14 says, and it talks about the heart again, because of the increase of wickedness, and the world is wicked, let's continue to use words like that.

I want to continue to use words like sin. I'm doing a whole sermon series on sin and the cross, and sin will be in the title. Knowing what sin is, is grace, grace, that God would tell us what it is, and wickedness. Do you even know wickedness when you see it anymore? Seriously. Do you know wickedness when you see it? Or have we bought into the arguments of the world that make things look better than they are? My 12-year-old, after a week of being off and having our technology life changed, began to think again, which was awesome.

She's using her mind, and she came up to me. She goes, you know what I've learned, Dad? When it comes to truth, people in the world take one thing about the truth that they don't like, and then they say everything's bad because of this one thing they don't like. But then they take things that are bad and negative, and they find one truth about it that's good, and say the entire negative thing is good because I found one truth.

I said, you go, 11-year-old. That's solid. Beginning to think again, do you know wickedness when you see it? David got to the point where he didn't know wickedness when he saw it. The love of most will grow cold. The love of whom will grow cold? Most. But the one, the one, interesting, most and one. Are you going to be the most or are you going to be the one? I tell you what, I want to be the one. I want to be Joshua who says to all of Israel, this is what God says, you want to follow it?

Follow it. But if you all don't want to follow it, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And I say, there are doctrines out there in regard to whether it be sexuality, whether it be into licentiousness, whether it be into all these different things that are very enticing, but there is a way that seems right to a person or a man, and the scripture says, that in the end leads to death. And I want to know what truth is and I don't want to back off of the truth and I want to know when I see something that is wickedness, just because it has a few good things in it that we try to highlight, it is still wickedness.

And I don't mind going to the grave and I'm not trying to get my opinions on truth based on social consensus of what the society thinks is true. I find it in the word of God and I want to be that one that remains until the end. It says, but the one who stands firm to the end will be what? Saved. And the gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations. I want to testify. And the end will come.

Wow, it's powerful. Here's another verse that wakes me up. Now the Bible is challenge and the Bible is invitation. We're going to end on grace because that's an amazing invitation. But it says in Proverbs 29, one, a man, and let's go for quality here. This includes women. So the scripture includes this is mankind when you're speaking about it. A man who hardens his heart or her heart after much reproof will suddenly be broken beyond remedy.

Does that scare you, that verse? That verse terrifies me. The verse of like, hey, you're just going to get, you're not going to see it coming. You're not going to get, it's not like you're going to get warned. It's like thief in the nighttime. Boom. You got to be very careful when all of a sudden you drink, you drink and drive, you drink and drive, you drink and drive, you kill somebody. Boom. Have you ever had that happen?

Anybody else? You don't have to say, you don't have to nod your head. Anybody experience that? Anybody, you know, with a little bit of age in them realize that if you keep going down a certain path, all of a sudden that path ends very quickly. Just like grace can overwhelm you, so can death. And it overwhelms. Since we've accepted wickedness. Now I want to look now, I want to lean more into the grace element. That was a challenging part.

But this final bit as we land the plane here, talks about the scandal of grace. And I want to say if the Bible had a theme, that theme would be grace. And is the life, the theme of your life, grace? The Bible gets a very bad rap when people constantly say it's just a book about rights and what to do and trying to control your life. It is so, you have never read the Bible if you think that. The Bible tells us how to live righteously and to get on a path with God that saves us from our sins.

If the Bible had a theme, that theme is grace. There never should have been a second chance. There shouldn't be four and five different ways in which God tells us what is right and what is wrong. Because when the, when the, um, word that is written on our heart isn't enough, God gave us the word of God and he had it written down by people. When that was enough, he gave us Jesus, his own son, to show us. And when that wasn't enough, he sent the Holy Spirit.

And when that wasn't, on and on and on, there's a scandal of grace, do you give yourself grace? Do you live in grace? And a spoiler alert, the grace that God has given you is that you are sin free. I don't know hardly any Christians, myself included often, who live in the spiritual reality that you have no sin. Now, we can sin. The Bible says that. But if we confess our sins, 1 John 1, 9, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from some unrighteousness.

No. Thank you. All unrighteousness. How different would your life be if you actually believed the Bible? That you're completely holy, that you have no sin. And if you have no sin, because condemnation leads to guilt, leads to shame, leads to death, if you have not been condemned, then you don't have to walk in guilt anymore. Matter of fact, a Christian should never experience guilt. I will prove that to you scripturally if you want to go have a conversation with me.

A Christian, if you do come to the doorway to be tempted with experiencing guilt, you can say, no, I'd rather just lean on conviction and righteousness and turn. You never have to go spend time living in the land of guilt so you can feel bad and it assuays your own sins. Guilt is your way to hang yourself on the cross. That's what guilt is. Jesus died and there is no sin. There is no, not that we can't sin and we can't do sins, but before God, you have a, you are perfect before him.

Now, this is anathema to the world. This is a stumbling block to the world. This is foolishness to the Greeks and to the Gentiles, but it is salvation to those that are being called. It is salvation. And I'm going to say, if the church began to live, not with cheap grace like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cheap grace that says you can do whatever you want because you don't have sin, but you begin to live a life where you don't experience the consequences of sin anymore.

You don't, you know that you are completely righteous. You don't have any sin. Before God, you be under his blood. You have no sin. There is no sin. I just have to encourage you as a prescription this week to come to the reality that you have no sin. That seems pious, doesn't it? It goes against, it's a scandal. It is so scandalous to tell people, not that I don't sin, but that I am saved from sin and I have no, that I, that I have no sin in my body.

Now it says that we have, you know, we have this, this, this flesh that wars against our soul, but it's the soul that is going to heaven. Your flesh isn't. It's the soul. We'll have new bodies in heaven that will confirm the truth of what happened in our soul, but your soul is righteous before God. I want to say, we want a church that lives like that. Imagine the power of a church that rose up like that. Imagine how you would rise up in your life if all of a sudden all the things that you have guilt about and feel shame for was gone and you just live in the reality of God's truth.

That is the scripture. That is the scandal of grace. And we're going to find out next week that David experienced that in Psalm 51. David comes, and I got to say, this is a scandal. The church has a place for those that have been broken. The church has a place for those that have done wrong. The church has a place for sinner when the world no longer has a place for sinners. When the world calls you out, now you are ostracized and kicked out and now you are excommunicated and they are doing what the church did for a very long time.

They're following the same playbook. Name it, shame it, and excommunicate it. That's what, do you not see that happening in the world? You name it, then you shame it, and then you excommunicate them and give you no ability to come back into the system. And I say, that is not the place of the church. All those broken people that are being cast out, that are being called, whatever name you're having, I ought to say, the church has a place for them.

Come as you are, but just don't stay as you is and be changed. The scandal of grace. Will you allow yourself to accept the scandal of grace? Amen? Let's stand as we take communion together today. Amen.