Messy Grace | Living in the tension of Grace and Truth

Love in the midst of the mess

Today we’re beginning a 4 week sermon series that will no doubt be a challenge for you and me no matter if we come to church every week, come when we can, are disenfranchised with church, or not following God. The title of this sermon series is “Messy Grace.” We’re calling it “Messy Grace” not because God’s grace is messy, rather His perfect grace appears to be messy when it intersects our messy lives.

Over the next 4 weeks we’re going to talk about 4 different aspects of Messy Grace and a better understanding of these aspects will help us better understand messy grace:

Week 1: Grace

Week 2: Truth

Week 3: Love

Week 4: Identity

At the end of this series, It’s our hope that though everything might not make sense, maybe you and I will consider diving deeper into God’s grace and discover what it is that we can do---and how we can love people as He wants us to.

With this is mind I want to tell you a very personal and Messy story.

Story | When my kids were born. saw things I never knew existed (loud, scary, bloody, meconium, umbilical cord, blood pressure dropping, bad breath, cone-headedness, tubes, screens, beeps and lights)

you need to know something, and for those of you who don’t go to church on a regular basis or don’t live in a home where this is a reality I want you to know that the world WANTS TO DEFINE you by your messiness. The world wants to say, “you’ve got addiction problems. you’ve got emotional problems. You’ve got financial problems. you’ve got relational problems. You can’t get the right grades you’ve got learning problems. problems with friends. you’ve got problems, problems.” The world wants to define you and identify you by your messiness but heres what God does: He looks through the messiness, when you follow Jesus and he says, “THATS MY CHILD, and I LOVE MY CHILD.” God says. “I would do anything for you,” and God did by the way, when he sent his son, stretching out his arms on the cross, When God sent Jesus his one and only son to die in your place so that all you need to do is out your trust in him so that your sins would be forgiven, you can follow Jesus and be with him forever.

God says, That’s my child and I would do anything for them. BOTTOM LINE: God Loves Messy People. You see, we're all messy. We all have things going on because the first two letters of the word "messy" are M-E, "me", right? When you trust Christ and when you follow Jesus, you have to repent, right? That's part of believing in Jesus. Repentance is owning your stuff and saying, "I have not lived the way that God wants me to live." Again, I just want you to know that God loves messy people, and if God loves messy people, we need to love messy people as well.

Don’t believe me? Lets look at one of my favorite stories of where we see this in the life of Jesus. John chapter 8.

New Living Translation Chapter 8

A Woman Caught in Adultery

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, 2 but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. 3 As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

4 “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

6 They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. 7 They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” 8 Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

9 When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. 10 Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

11 “No, Lord,” she said.

And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”

You see, there's a tension there. Don't you feel that tension? The tension is like, "I know the Bible says this, but this person's doing this." You feel that tension, you're like, "I don't know what to do." Right? You've been there before with people who make life choices that you don't agree with. You know what that tension is? That tension is love.

Love is the tension of grace and truth.

(Have a big rubber band with you on stage for this illustration)

Let me illustrate it like this: You have a rubber band right here, and if you are just all about grace, it's like holding the rubber band on this end and there's no power in that, but if you are just all about the truth it's like, "Hey, I'm all about the truth," but I'm not holding both ends of the rubber band. There's no power in that. Grace and truth go together. They're married. You can't have one without the other. Look at where the power is. If you say, "Hey, I'm about the grace and I'm about the truth," where's the power? The power is in the tension of the two. The power's in the tension of living in grace and truth.

Over the next 4 weeks we’re going to talk about 4 different aspects of Messy Grace and a better understanding of these aspects will help us better understand messy grace:

Who is the person in your life that you need to live in this tension with?

Week 1: Grace

We cannot do this in our own strength. the first step is receieving the love of Jesus into our own messy lives.

Week 2: Truth

The more clearly we see our own messiness, the more clearly we see Gods GREAT GRACE toward us and toward those around us.

Week 3: Love

Week 4: Identity

At the end of this series, It’s our hope that though everything might not make sense, maybe you and I will consider diving deeper into God’s grace and discover what it is that we can do---and how we can love people as He wants us to.