Unoffendable 3: Free to be Imperfect
Unoffendable • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-Hope Dealers and Grace artists: See the potential that God sees
Have you ever been caught?
Painted rocks at grandma’s house
One time I was eating a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven. I got two cookies. Split one in half to give to the girls.
then let the dogs outside so they wouldn’t steal the girl’s cookie.
I only ate about half my cookie before I got distracted, and had to stop the dogs from barking.
I cleaned up the girls since they finished their cookie, but decided I should go refill my drink
by the time I got back, my cookie was gone.
I found all the wrappers and asked him “did you have candy in your bed?”
Noooo.
Then what is this?
(Wide eyes and you could just see his brain trying to find a reason why there would be a handful of empty wrappers in his bed).
One of the keys to living an unoffendable life is fully embracing the fact that you and I are just as screwed up as everyone else.
Think about this…
-Someone is hiding a drinking problem.
You walk up to that person publicly and announce
“you are an alcoholic! Your drinking is destroying your life and you need help now!”
-They will be mad, start denying it, offended, you might get punched. There will be lots of angry words.
-Now same scenario: But this time you walk into a AA meeting.
“You are all alcoholics! Your drinking is destroying your life and you need help now!”
-They would all smile and agree with you.
Probably start sharing stories about how their addiction hurt themselves and the people that they love.
The difference:
One group knows that they are imperfect, the other is living like they are perfect.
-The process that the people in the AA meeting went through to get to that meeting was most likely terrible and heartbreaking and hard….
But now that they are living in the truth of their own brokenness they are living with a peace.
They meet an alcoholic they don’t get offended.. .
they feel compassion, they share their story, they invite that person into a community
rather than push them away.
-There is a lot less stress when you live found out,
but pretending doesn’t come easy.
The truth, admitting to ourselves that
We are all broken people trying to find our way through a broken world
that truth will set us free.
Jesus tells a story in Matthew 18:21-35 about a guy who owed a ton of money.
Like more than he could ever hope to pay.
And the king that he owed the money to, took mercy on him and forgave the debt and sent him away a free man.
-on the way home the freed man ran across a guy who owed him like $100. He had the man arrested and thrown in jail because he couldn’t pay.
-The injustice of the unforgiveness is magnified because of the incredible forgiveness he had just received.
-If you are standing in line at Mejier and someone cuts you off
you and I are going to get mad.
Lets says we were accused of murder and were looking at the electric chair.
But we have just been found innocent
and now we are grabbing ice cream to take home
and someone cuts in front of us…. Not as big a deal.
“I suspect our sense of entitlement to anger is directly proportional to our perception of our own relative innocence”
It’s easy to put a warm smile on towards the parent of the kid having a meltdown in the store when you’ve experienced worse.
Patience is sometimes another word for forgiveness.
But if we are followers of Christ
we have already had to face the fact that we are not innocent.
We are sinners and our sin drove Christ to the cross.
Paul spends most of Romans 1 (written to the church in Rome)
talking about how evil people in the world are.
(That’s an easy chapter to read and agree with… yup, this world is messed up!)
The very next thing he says:
Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.
And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things.
But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?
Any claim we have to righteousness is only because we’ve admitted that Christ died for us because of our unrighteousness
and now he is working in us to re-form us into His image.
We are busted. We are caught in our sin and freedom only came by admitting it and letting Christ work in us.
That story of the unforgiving servant
… it was told by Jesus in response to Peter asking how many time do I have to forgive someone who has wronged me? 7 times??
-Jesus answer: You’ve been forgiven such a great debt against God and now you want an excuse to live in un forgiveness toward someone else??
-You don’t really understand the depth of your brokenness or the greatness of Gods love.
We live offended and push people away because
we think we are right and good
and that we can trust our own feelings.
Ever seen a message like this?
Follow your heart
what does your heart say?
Sound pretty good right?
But scripture tells us this.
Follow Your Heart
“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?
Follow Your Own Path
There is a way which seems right to a man,But its end is the way of death.
Or how about this one:
Now does that mean we should never do what makes us happy?
Or Never follow a new path?
Of course not.
Both of those platitudes are fine IF we have the proper foundation of the heart of God.
Built houses on sand vs rock
tornado?
(Lord give us the desires of your heart… and then give us the passion to chase those things.)
But if I can’t trust my feelings and my desires what can I trust?
The foundation that we must have is this one:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He will make your paths straight.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear the Lord and turn away from evil.
When we build our lives on the foundation of trust in the Lord
then we recognize that our own perspectives can be colored by our brokenness and our selfishness.
Even the good things we do can be tainted by our selfishness
by our own desires to appear holy
or to do something for someone else with expectation of quid pro quo
-So when we desire in our own hearts to live offended
we can choose to say wait a minute…
.. My heart is telling me one thing,
but maybe I’m deceiving myself here.
-Maybe there is a better way, maybe there’s a better response?
Maybe God has a different path for me to walk other than anger, offense and bitterness?
In John 8 we see Jesus had an encounter with a bunch of guys who were trying to do the “right” thing.
They were actually trying to catch Jesus in a trap.
They had found a lady in the act of committing adultery.
They drug her out into the street
(where was the guy? Why didn’t they drag him out too? Seems us, like a set up.)
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them.
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court,
they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act.
“Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?”
They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground.
But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.
When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court.
Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”
-The law said stone her. Punish her for her sin.
We can’t just let people get away with theses things! It’s the righteous thing thing to do right!
-But the Roman law prevented them from capital punishment.
-So in their minds Jesus was trapped.
Either way they could accuse him of breaking a law and discredit him.
-In their minds their anger at her immorality was justified, it was not only ok, it was the right.
Anyone who wasn’t judging her would have been considered morally compromised.
-Jesus, as you know, didn’t take the bait. He knelt down and wrote in the sand
…. We don’t know exactly what he wrote, but look at
Jeremiah 17:13-14
O Lord, the hope of Israel,
All who forsake You will be put to shame.
Those who turn away on earth will be written down,
Because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the Lord.
Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed;
Save me and I will be saved,
For You are my praise.
The “hope of Israel” writes the names of those who forsake him in the sand….
Because the Lord is a spring of living water (life to the thirsty)
and a healer (of the broken)
and a savior (of the lost).
Then he said “let the one without sin cast the first stone.”
-1. They all knew they had sinned.
Maybe even that they had set her up and her “sin” was a trap laid by them.
They saw their own guilt and their self-righteousness
-You can’t stone her, because you are all just as guilty.
2. There was one person there who could have cast a stone.
Jesus himself looks at her and rather than casting a stone,
he see’s the deeper desire of her heart.
Rather than being offended by her (here was after all the perfect, sinless God in flesh)
rather than offering her condemnation
he calls her to a better way of life:
go and sin no more
When they saw themselves as sinners they lost the justification for stoning someone else for their sin.
-We still love to cast emotional and verbal stones at those we judge to be immoral or evil.
-But remembering our own sin and Gods mercy to us give us a chance to
“trust in the lord with all of our heart and lean not on our own understanding…”
-We have a strong foundation that allows us to give grace, forgiveness and love
because their brokenness doesn’t impact our hope,
God doesn’t need us to defend him,
just to be his witnesses.
-He did call her to go and stop sinning.
In that way He did “judge” her.
“Look honey what you are doing is sin. It’s wrong. You need to stop.”
-There was no watering down of Godly standards.
He didn't just look the other way or pretend that sin was no big deal.
-But he didn’t cast judgment in such a way that it crushed her,
but rather that she felt protected, loved and challenged
to be better because He believed in her.
It’s not about pretending that evil doesn’t exist, or that sin is no big deal.
It’s a heart that is free from the need to control others
and free to love them while they are in process and imperfect.
This is where grace wins the day.
Yes, people are sinners,
but when we remember that so are we,
we can live free from the stress of the image of perfection
and set other free from the impossible expectation of perfection.
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
“When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard.
“And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place;
and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went.
“Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing.
“And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’
“They said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’
“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’
“When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius.
“When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius.
“When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner,
saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’
“But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius?
‘Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you.
‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’
“So the last shall be first, and the first last.”
Comparison is the thief of all joy
Lets pray…
-I am not not perfect… and thats ok.
None of us are
and we don’t have to pretend to be.
We’re all recovering sin-o-haulics
and that realization gives us the freedom from hiding our struggle
or from the pressure of perfection.
-It also helps give us the ability to see others with compassion rather than condemnation.
Yeah they’re broken.
Yeah this world is broken.
But remember: James 1:19 "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”.
And then he says:
The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
This you know, my beloved brethren. But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger;
-Maybe you are far from God…. ———————————————
You are a sinner
Stop judging others and show them compassion
stop thinking you are better than others
consider others better than yourself
