SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the Southside Church Podcast. Weekly content that inspires all of us to follow Jesus. Join us each week for a message from one of our fantastic communicators that provide practical ways to grow our faith, challenge ourselves, and to love others more. And now, this week's message.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

So we've been in this series. This is week two of our series, The Matter with You. And I'm not going to look around and say who's the matter with what. No. But we launched this series last week, and the heart behind it was that we would get to know the love of our Heavenly Father. And one of the things that many of us know is that in our society, in our culture, that we work so hard to strive. We work hard to be perfect. And oftentimes us striving for excellence, us striving to be perfect, us striving to do everything right often gets in gets in the middle of our relationship with Jesus. Replaces that priority with him. And so we decided to have a conversation around how do we stop striving for God's approval, but rest in his love. How do we do that? And sometimes for many of us, it is difficult for us to rest in the love of our Heavenly Father because of our relationship with our earthly Father. So we had that conversation last week, and John Westland, our friend or friend of this church, he did an incredible job just sharing a letter, a heart of a father who's deeply loved by his heavenly father. And then we took a look at Paul. Paul, one of the authors of much of the New Testament scripture. And if you've ever taken a read through New Testament, you read a lot of letters from Paul. So my heart last week was that you would just at least get a little bit of history of who Paul was before meeting Jesus, before being deeply transformed by him, and who he became afterwards. So that when you're reading some of his letters to the early church, that you you would look and go, oh, okay, this is who Paul was. And then when he encountered Jesus, his life, his heart, everything was transformed. Everything changed. So today, part two, we're going to talk about something that I think is extremely important for us. Because here's the thing: in order for us to rest in his love, that requires us to accept what he's already done for us. And to live in such a way. And y'all know this. That's so much easier said than done. Because as soon as for many of us, when we made the decision to follow Jesus, we went, okay, I can, I'll make the decision to follow him or I'll consider following him, but I've where are the rules to doing this? Where are the instructions? How do I really follow Jesus? So it got me to thinking about something. Do you remember getting your driver's license? Some of you are like, nope, it's been that long. Others of you are like, yep, I just got it three years ago, and some of you are from New York, so you're never getting your license at all. I get it. I get it. Okay, but you know what was so funny about getting our licenses for many of us, probably, is that you were so terrifyingly excited. Terrifying because, well, you've got a parallel park, and that's most of the test. And the other part is you could consider the freedom that you would have. The freedom to go where you wanted to go, to visit some of the friends that maybe your parents or maybe whoever was watching you at the time would say, hey, you probably shouldn't hang out with them, but you got to go because you had your license and you thought, I get my license, I get my dream car, and I'm out of here. Right? So it's also interesting, if you think about it, for those of you who have to renew your license, is that you get to renew your license without even having to take a retest. So I thought, well, what if we all just took a test? So here we go. We're gonna take a driving test. Driving one-on-one, welcome to class, all the students here. Um, we're going to take a driving test now. Here's the only caveat to this: if you are 15, 16, 17, or 18, you cannot answer the questions because you're probably in the process of taking the test, and you know all the answers, so that would be cheating. Okay, no, I'm joking. You can join in too. Okay, so the first question is when approaching, oh wait, before we jump into this, um, there is a gift for the winner. It is. I know somebody said, oh, because the winner is actually the person who gets all of these answers wrong. And we have our um our neighborhood, our local driving instructor, Scott over here, make some noise for Scott. He really does. Along with coaching at um Whitewater, along with teaching at Whitewater, he teaches a lot of people how to drive. So if you lose, I may gift you with um driving instructions from Scott. Okay, so here we go. Let's jump in. Um, when approaching a pedestrian in a marked crosswalk, a driver must. Is it A, stop and allow the pedestrian to finish crossing? Is it B drive through the crosswalk if the pedestrian is walking closely? I didn't write that one, by the way. Don't you do that. Um, hunk lightly to warn the pedestrian to hurry. Everybody said C. I got you. Okay. The answer is there we go. Y'all are such good people, much better than me. Okay, question number two. A solid yellow line in your side on your side of the center of the road means you may pass only at night, may pass at any time, must not pass another vehicle in that area. Is it C? Scott, C? Yep, Scott says C, so that must be correct. All right, question number three. This is funny. In which of the following scenarios should your wheels not be pointed straight ahead? This is a hard one. Um, when waiting to make a left turn at a traffic light, when parked on a heel or sloping driveway, when parked on the side of a level roadway where there's no curb. How did y'all know that answer? I'm still thinking about it. It's B. Wow, okay. Here we go. Question number four. When making a turn, you're required to start your turn signal within blank of the turn. 40 to 50 feet, 100 to 200 feet, or four to six seconds. I knew I oh, this is a hard one, huh? And the answer is B. Okay. All right, here's the go. Last, last one here, and this is not on the on the screen. This is um my one of my favorite questions as we were processing through some of these. Um, if you see a stop sign and you're driving to a four-way stop, and there isn't a police officer in sight, is it a stop sign or is it a yield sign? But nobody's around, y'all. It's a yield. It's gotta be a yield. If no cops around, I did get a ticket here by Apple Orchard. Um yeah, they caught me going down the yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Um here's here's the thing, each and every one of us, um, we wouldn't say rules are necessarily bad things. Right, we wouldn't say that. We would often say that rules are are actually a good thing that add a ton of value to our lives. Um, because often rules they kind of help us know what we're becoming a part of. Um there are rules for everything. There are rules for driving, there are rules in school, there are rules um for sports, there are even rules for cooking in our household. Tony should only cook breakfast. I am very, very good at breakfast, but everything else, I it's a it's a struggle. Um, however, as it relates to our faith, right, rules can cause many followers of Jesus to feel burdened, to feel exhausted, and in many ways to feel defeated. And it feels as if you're aren't you aren't doing Christianity right. For those of you who are considering faith or considering taking a step in his direction, or you you're thinking, I'm not going to take a step in his direction, it's often because of the rules. And here's what we think following Jesus looks like, right? We we make the decision that, hey, that God sent his son to die on the cross for us, um, and that our sins have been forgiven. Basically, the whole John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. And for those of you who aren't followers of Jesus, you probably can quote that better than followers of Jesus. And then we go, okay, we accept this truth. He died for us, he rose, ascended to heaven for our sins to help in some way close the gap, close the separation that sin caused. Okay, we get it. Now life will be perfect if we accept this truth. That's what we think following Jesus looks like. And then after that, the next thing we do is, well, we go searching for the rules. Where are the rules? What are they? How do I follow them? How do I go about doing them? We we we want to know questions to answers like where can I go now that I made the decision to follow Jesus? What can I eat? What can I do? What can I wear? Can I continue to hang out with this particular group? Can I drive this type of car? Can I can I actually make money? Is it okay to be generous? How much money should I give away? How much money should I keep for myself? What do I do next? How do I it becomes exhausting and it feels like a lot of the questions go unanswered? We start to ask questions like, what can help me appear to look like a follower of Jesus? One of the most asked questions is this one What do I have to give up in order to follow Jesus? And so what do we do? We we make the decision or we think about making the decision to follow him, and then we open up the Bible and we just start looking and turning and trying to find answers to all of those questions. We run to the Ten Commandments, Old Testament scripture, and we're like, okay, we can't eat this, we can't go here, we must do this, and then we see a ton of other laws, and we're like, this is overwhelming. And then we go to the New Testament, okay. Maybe this guy, Jesus, can help, so we start looking, and then we see things about the early church. I'm talking this fast because that's how it feels for us. It feels like, when can I catch a breath? If there are so many rules and so many things that I must do in order to even be considered a follower of Jesus, it's exhausting. It can feel that way. We tend to think that in order to be a good Christian, you have to be a good rule follower. So we hang on to every single rule and relationships and every single rule about being a part of a church and what we should, what should feel like freedom, often feels like a burden. It feels like a burden and it feels like imprisonment sometimes. The first century church had this exact same feeling. So as Paul is writing to the churches in Galatia. Paul is making it abundantly clear that following Jesus is not about the rules, but it's it's about something much more deeper, something much more endearing. And so I'm gonna give you quick context to what's happening to the churches in Galatia. Uh, Christianity, it started as a Jewish messianic religion. And so it quickly spread beyond Jerusalem and beyond the Jewish community. And the good news was that God's unconditional love was and still is available to all humanity. And so, as you can imagine, there were many Jewish leaders who believed that in order for those who were considered non-Jewish people or Gentiles as they call them, um, that there was this idea that they would have to first follow all of the laws of the Torah. They would have to first become basically become Jewish in order to be a follower of Jesus. And here's what Paul suggests to the churches in Galatia. So we're gonna pick up at Galatians 5 and 1. If you have your Bibles, you are more than welcome to bring them out. If you've got your phones, you can read along with me. We're gonna start at Galatians 5 and 1. If you have neither of those things, it's gonna be on the back screen. So let's read it together. Don't read it out loud. No, I'm gonna read it for us. I got us. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. So stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Basically, he's saying don't let yourself be burdened by being enslaved to the rules. He goes on to say this: for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. Now again, we talked about this a little bit if you were here last week. That when he uses the word circumcision, don't worry, men, we won't come to the front. There's none of that happening. Um, but when he uses this word circumcision, he's really pointing to the laws. He's pointing to the laws, all of the laws that they were trying to follow. He's pointing to that. And then when he uses the word, the only thing that counts is faith. Faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, faith, the kind of faith that reorders our life around Jesus' way of life. And that shifts his perspective through looking at the world around us, through the love, through the lens of love. He goes on in verse 13 You, my brothers and sisters, we're called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh. Rather serve one another humbly in love. So through Jesus, and because of Jesus, you have experienced freedom. He's saying you've experienced this freedom from the laws, and there's close to 600 of them. Telling you what to eat, where to go, when to eat it, whose house you can visit. There's so many more examples of this. And he goes, yes, basically, he's saying, yes, you've received freedom, but exercising this freedom doesn't look like fulfilling your own desires. It doesn't look like fulfilling your own wants. Doesn't look like filling your own desires. And he goes to say this in verse 14: for the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself. And so Paul here, he's referencing something very important. The new commandment Jesus gave when the Pharisees they're asking him, Hey, hey, Jesus, which one of these are the greatest commandments to follow? How should we do it? Like, which one should we follow? Because there's a lot. Which one should we follow? And Jesus replied, This He goes, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest, the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it Love your neighbor as yourself, all the laws and the prophets, hang on to these commandments. So now we're going to jump back to Galatians. Are you tracking with me? So Paul is writing to this church. He's telling them all the things that they should do, that there's freedom in Jesus, not necessarily following all of the rules, but it the most important thing is the relationship, is your relationship with Jesus. So he's saying, hey, um, all of these desires, your own flesh, the the drunkenness, and he names jealousy and rage and selfish ambition, amongst other things, that you should push all of that aside. And he finishes with this thought in verse 18. He goes, But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. So we're gonna pause for a second. We're gonna unpack this word spirit. Have you ever heard of this phrase, the Holy Spirit? You can you can nod. We're in conversations, yeah, a little bit. And for some of you for followers of Jesus, maybe it's something that you still think, okay, what actually is it? And when do I know it's the Holy Spirit and not my stomach rumbling? Like, when do I know it's the Holy Spirit? And for some of you who maybe are considering faith for the very first time, you're probably thinking, I heard this term, but it's so confusing and it feels so mysterious. I don't know if I'm okay with following Jesus without truly understanding what or who the Holy Spirit is. So I'm gonna hopefully unpack that just a little bit to maybe remove the barrier that you feel. So there's this word called ruach. Just for the sake of us feeling like we're in a classroom today, can everybody say ruach?

unknown 17:47

Ruach.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Wow. If I was a Greek, if I were a Greek or a Hebrew professor, that would be an A plus. Um basically I want you to think of this word Ruach as God's personal presence and God's spirit here on earth. And so have you ever been out in the cold? And when you take a deep breath, there's this there's this air that comes out, and you can kind of see it. I want you to envision that. It's invisible, it's God's invisible spirit here on earth. So, Ruach, God's invisible, the Holy Spirit, God's invisible spirit here on earth. And so the question now you may be thinking is, okay, so how are we led by the Spirit, as Paul says in verse 18, when he says, But if you're led by the Spirit, okay, so how does this invisible presence lead us? Or maybe even a better question before we get there is how do you receive it? How do you receive the Holy Spirit? Well, that's a great question. And Jesus has an answer for it. And after Jesus is he's resurrected, um, he has a moment, and before he's ascended to heaven, he has a moment with his disciples. And he's he's talking to them and he's sharing a lot about what's happening and what's to come, and he goes in John 14, 15. He says, Hey, if you love me and if you keep my commands, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. The spirit of truth. So when you make the decision to follow Jesus, that's when you have access to the Holy Spirit. It takes time to unpack that, more time than we have today, and I hope that one day we get to create a whole series around the Holy Spirit just to help us navigate that question. Um, but the role of the Holy Spirit. So once you make the decision to follow Jesus, now you have access to the Ruach, God's presence here on earth, his spirit that dwells in us. When you make the decision, the Holy Spirit has a role in us and for us. And that role is to help energize and empower the work of humans. So because of humanity's corruption, chaos, and harm to our world, that resulted in suffering and so much more. So the life-giving presence of the Spirit is here to help restore all creation to its original creation, filled with beauty and filled with goodness. So the Spirit, it also reminds followers of Jesus of his teachings and his ways and God's truth. That we are a part of, with the help of the Holy Spirit, of bringing beauty and goodness to our world by loving God with all of our hearts, with all of our minds, and loving others as Jesus has loved us. Now here's the thing, the Holy Spirit is a bit mysterious. But one thing I know for sure, I'm not it. You're not it. So it's not my job, and it's not your job to do all of the convicting, to tell people when they're constantly wrong or making mistakes. No, it's it's our job and our responsibility to introduce people to Jesus. And it's the Holy Spirit's job to move people along their faith journey. You tracking with me? Now, how do we experience the help of the Spirit? Many of us believe, and I fall into this often myself, um, that in order to follow Jesus, we have to surrender to the laws. We have to make sure that we're keeping all of the rules and all of the instructions. I fall to this often, but that's not what we should be surrendering to. We should be surrendering to the Spirit and allow Jesus to live in us and through us to help us fulfill our role in bringing beauty and in bringing goodness to the world around us. A better way to say this is following Jesus is not about rule keeping. Or self-effort. And if we tried to keep up with all the rules, we would all fail at it. We would do a terrible job because there's so many rules that we could and could not, and there's different churches and communities that have different set of rules for different things. And so you could get lost just simply trying to follow him. Follow all the rules. Or try to perform your way into experiencing his love. But it's about surrendering to the spirit and allowing Jesus to live in us and through us. For us. And I love how NT Wright says this. It says this about freedom, and I think it's so fascinating. He goes, true freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace. Grace is getting what we don't deserve, right? But precisely because it is freedom for as well as freedom from. And this type of freedom we all have access to. The freedom to love like Jesus, the freedom to live like Jesus, and in many ways the freedom to do what Jesus did. Free from being imprisoned and from feeling the burden of all of the laws and all of the instructions. And we replace that with reordering our priorities to those priorities from Jesus. And to experience this freedom is to understand that true freedom comes from dependence on the spirit and not independence from God. And when we surrender to the Spirit, we live by the Spirit. And the Spirit produces a reflection of Jesus. And Paul, he defines this reflection as the fruit of the Spirit. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh, passions and desires. And since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. And when we make the decision to follow Jesus, we have an unbelievable opportunity to bring goodness and beauty to the world around us through surrendering ourselves to the Spirit that lives in us through Jesus. And we're invited into a relationship, y'all, that changes us from the inside out. Who we are becomes evident by what we do. So here's the thing: we don't try to do the things that we think we need to do in order to become. We don't try to keep all of the rules, we don't try to follow all of the laws, we don't try to perform, we don't try to strive for excellence, no, but we become, and therefore we do. Simply because the Spirit takes up residence in our hearts and in our minds and in our souls and in our actions, and it empowers us to bring the fruit in God's truth wherever we go. And what's so remarkable about this is that God made the decision to work through ordinary people like you, through ordinary people like me, to reveal his love and his character to a broken world. But our rule following and human effort, it can't produce this kind of fruit. Determination and rule following won't allow us to produce this kind of fruit, especially when our hearts are filled with frustration. When our hearts are filled with anxiety, when our hearts are filled with grief, when our hearts are filled with shame, it won't allow us to produce this kind of fruit. But the fruit God desires to produce in us is not a result of us striving harder, of us following all the rules, but of surrendering deeper. That we make ourselves available to allow the Spirit to guide our actions and our word. Daily surrender. This is why daily surrender is so important, it's so essential to our relationship with Jesus. Daily surrender is the practice and rhythm of placing every single part of our lives in God's hands. It's going, hey God, here are my dreams, they're in your hands. God, here are my goals, they're in your hands. Here are my desires and here are my wants. Hey God, they're in your hands. Here are my dreams and here are my expectations, here are my disappointments, and here are my failures, they're in your hands. And it's waking up at 6:30 in the morning, acknowledging that your talent, your leadership, your ambition isn't the source, but he is. He is the source of all things, of knowledge, of wisdom, of guidance. He is the source of understanding. He is the source of everything. And this allows us to walk in step with the Spirit, drawing nearer to God as He draws nearer to us. So I'm gonna ask Coach Scott. He has no idea I was gonna ask him this, and so you can see the surprise on his face. Coach, can you come up here for a second? We can make some noise for Coach. I love it. All right, Coach. Coach has no idea. And Caroline, his sweet wife, was up here today. She's laughing, y'all. She is howling right now because he has no idea. So for many of us, um, daily surrender for us looks different. And we often think that um surrendering to something is surrendering how and when we want to surrender. So it's based on our schedule. I'll surrender if all of these things are lined up. And as you all know, you're way smarter than I am. That's not true surrender. We can surrender to what we trust. And we grow that trust by surrender. So, Scott, I'm gonna ask you to stand here for me in front of me. I've known Scott now. How long has it been?

unknown 28:23

Since we've been open.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Since we've been open. Okay, so um, if you don't know, Scott serves on our production team and he does so much more. He's a coach, so he he's fired up about a lot of things, and I love his fire. Um, but I've also watched a Scott coach um watch him teach. I've watched how he's loved his family. So I've grown, and we've had some really great conversations, so I've grown trust in Scott, which means that surrendering to Scott, my desires, I can just surrender. Even if, you know, there's something that happens, I trip and fall, you know. But there was a moment in in my wife and I's journey where Scott's text message and Scott's phone calls, um, some moments that we had allowed me to truly develop a deeper level of trust. So here's what it looks like. Caroline, he's ready now. You all saw that? So, Caroline, this is for this moment, um, he's he's God, okay? All right, so um, I have these desires. You have some desires, and for the sake of our conversation, I'd love for you to just call out a few desires that you have. Simple wants. What are some of your wants? Peace, okay?

unknown 29:41

Healing.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Healing, okay. Health, money, yeah. Sleep. That's a good one. Patience, oh, fulfillment, obedience, humility, grace. Okay, we've got 10. All right, so what would it look like for you? For true daily surrender. To go, okay. If I got my health, I surrender. If I've got healing, I surrender. Peace, I surrender. Joy, I really want joy, I really want happiness. I surrender. Sleep. Ah. Right. Sleep, right. Gosh, sleep. But then here's the thing about surrender is that as you're walking forward, you know, one of the beautiful things about trusting God and having a relationship with God and deciding every day that, hey, God, I am going to surrender to you regardless of what it's looking like in my life, regardless of what my marriage looks like, regardless of what my friendships look like, school, all the things you want to make, great grades, I get it. All the things, it also looks like being able to take a step and then wake up and go, you know, I still surrender to you. So because I know that God is with me and I want you to know the same thing. He's with you, he's for you. When you're walking, you can trust for him to follow, and you can just fall. God, I surrender. God, I surrender my fears. God, I surrender my disappointments. God, I surrender my failure to you. God, I surrender my marriage to you. God, I surrender, I surrender my health to you. God, I surrender this cancer scare to you. God, I surrender my children. I want them to be the best, but I can't control everything. I surrender it. God, I surrender whatever's happening next in my future. I've graduated from college, but I don't know what I want to do. I don't know what you have for me, but I'm trusting you, and I'm surrendering. God, I know that I've been praying for my marriage and I want it to get better, but it doesn't feel like it. It's going to get all the things, God, I have this newborn in my life, and it's been hard as a mother. Gosh, it's been hard as a father for some of you with the newborn. You're like, oh, this is hard. But God, I still surrender. And what if, yeah. And what if we could trust God? Caroline just told me not to pat him too much. Um what if we can trust God with our daily surrender? With all of our things, all of our desires, all of our wants, all of our frustrations, and with all of the noise in our world today, it's hard to focus on that. But just what if? What if today every single one of us, all of us, we made the decision to go starting tomorrow morning, I am going to Scott last time. Surrender. Can we make some noise for Scott? And when we surrender to the Spirit, we experience a life of freedom, a love, of purpose that we could never achieve on our own. And the more we surrender, the more we begin to walk in step with the Spirit. In his presence, the fruit of the Spirit begins to grow naturally in us and through us and for others. Not because of the rules that we're trying to follow, not because of the striving, or not because of the perfection that we're going after, but because of our daily surrender and our relationship with Jesus.