Transition/transition1l

Hi, this is Wayne, and before you begin this series, let me just give you a brief introduction. What you're about to hear is eight and a half hours of instruction that I do on the life of the Cross and how it is that we move from religious thinking about God to the life of relationship with Him. This turned out to be the most complete package of the things that I share with groups all over the world. It expresses my own journey and what God has changed in my life and how He's done it, as well as the lessons of Scripture that were an important part of that journey. This also updates and expands the teaching I've done on the power of the Cross. It's been our most important CD offering to date, but that is nearly ten years old, and we felt it's so important to add the lessons and the encouragement that God has added to that in the years that have followed. So there's nothing more important I share anywhere in the world, but the things that will be shared here. And rather than making them available by CD alone, we felt impressed to make this a free download for anyone anywhere in the world for whom these lessons might be an encouragement to their own journey to access this material and to use it however God would lead them to use it in their own growth and sharing it with others. As you get to the last four lessons of this transition study, we're going to be referring to a little brochure called Getting It. You can download it from the transitions page on our website, but printing it out and following along might be helpful as you process the lessons here. Our hope is that making this resource available will encourage people to realize that our growth in the life of Jesus is not just about switching the way we do church, it's not about finding different techniques or principles. Jesus has invited us to live in Him by the power of the Cross that frees us from shame, frees us from sin, and teaches us again how to love and trust Him so that He can shape our lives as we journey forward. My prayer is that this lesson helps encourage that processing you as God leads you down the road. What I'm looking for in these days together is not that I'm going to give you something that is hot off Mount Zion, and this is the truth of God and you need to believe this or you're going to rot in hell forever, okay? I'm not there. I'm going to share part of my ... Okay, you're welcome to go. I hope I say some things this weekend that are incredibly challenging to you, that challenge kind of your paradigms, and I'm not looking for you to agree with me. I'm going to say, oh, wow, that's the best stuff I've ever heard. You may walk out or go on, I think that man's nuts. If you do, Monday, I'm going to be safely back in California, and I won't come bother you again, so fair enough. I'm not looking for agreement. I'm going to share with you things that I have kind of struggled through over 12 years of my journey. Some of the things I'm sharing with you, I'm still struggling through. So I don't expect you this weekend to say, wow, I love that. There might be some things you hear that say, wow, I love that. You might hear some other things that say, I don't know about that. And so I hope our prayer is God what's true, make it real to us, not this weekend over time. If this weekend works for me and works for you, I really don't think when we get to Sunday afternoon, you're going to be a different person than you are. We're going to hear a lot of things, and even things you'll say, wow, that sounds really good to me, but isn't living them a very different reality? I think the fruit of this thing doesn't come Monday morning. The fruit of this thing is going to come six months to five years down the road as God makes sense of these in your life. Give me an example about what I mean by kind of getting it, kind of catching what we're talking about. Sarah and I dated for three and a half years through college and got married six days after we graduated together in Tulsa, and we drove up to Ohio where she's from and got married in Ohio a little under a week later. And our honeymoon night got up the next morning. We're going down to breakfast in this hotel. And I'm kind of a news junkie, even on honeymoon, I want to grab a newspaper. So I stopped at a thing and I tried to find some change. I don't have some change. And Sarah said, here, I'll get it. And she pulls out a purse and I'm like, no, no, I'll get it. And I still didn't realize that there was no more of my money, her money. See, all through college, it was my money, her money. Who's going to pay for what? And we've been married and now there was no my money, her money. It was all our money. But at meeting, she said, I'll get it. I said, no, no, no, I'll get, I was going to go get change when she had perfectly good change in her hand because I wasn't ready to live relationally yet with her. Does that make sense? I think there's so many things with God like that. Things happen and there's certain truths that are established. But we still don't live in the reality of those things. In fact, we still live as if religion is the course of the day because we've all been schooled in it from the day we were born. And this is not what the institutions have created. My goodness, people get religion without ever going to an institution. In fact, if you look over the course of human history, we'll talk about some of this over the course of the next little bit. You'll see that every group of people that got together have some kind of religious underpinning to that life together. Even groups that don't have, quote unquote, the truth of Christianity. But tribal groups and tribes from all over the world had religious underpinnings. And there's some very common things to those religious underpinnings. One, you have a local holy man guru. Whether that's a man or a woman, it's a witch doctor, a cleric, or an imam, or a pastor, or whatever. You have a local holy man guru. You have some kind of sacred space. Some kind of, whether it's an altar or a totem pole or something, a temple. You've got some kind of sacred space. You've got sacred rituals, things to observe, to appease whatever God you're trying to keep happy. So it doesn't whack you when you're not looking. And you've got certain laws that you're supposed to follow to keep the gods happy. And it's interesting, isn't it, that those same factors underlie just about every culture that's ever existed. And every culture that has survived over time has had a religious underpinning of some sort. Even I would argue that atheism in fascist or communist states is a religious underpinning. It's an anti-religious thought, but it's still a common religious view and an enforced way of thinking and living in terms of who God is. So I think religion is what we get very early. And I'll tell you why that's true and how God, I think, disconnects us from it. What I mean by getting it is that somehow this salts through our thinking to change the way we live. Actually, the joy of this is in living it. It's not even in taking notes about it. I see some of you feverishly writing notes. And you're welcome to do it because it might help you remember some things. But in the end, I don't care if you have any notes. Because the Holy Spirit doesn't make this stuff real in you over time. If you're like me, I've got shelves full of notes. And I never go back and read them. And when I do, I read them and go, what did that mean? Or sometimes I'll read something and go, oh, yeah. I forgot. I wish I'd remembered that the last five years. That would have been helpful, but didn't. So what I want to do with you in this time is kind of like the first flight lesson I ever took. When I was 16 years old and got my driver's license, I went to my dad and said, you know what? I really want to fly. I want to be a pilot, which he already knew. I was not news. Said, can I have the car on Saturday? So I can go to the airport, beg myself a job, and trade job for flight time. And dad said, yeah, if you want to do that, go ahead. Now, I don't know what my dad was thinking. Because when my son turned 16, I looked at him and said, when I let him fly. And I'm thinking, no, I probably wouldn't. But for whatever reason, my dad said, yeah, if you want to do that, go ahead. So I went down, I begged myself a job at the airport from the local flight instructor washing his airplanes and changing the oil and gassing them up and sweeping the runway, whatever. I paid his house. I did whatever he needed at $1.65 an hour. That was the memo wage back then. That'll date me. And when I earned $100 of work time, I could trade that for flight time, which $100 would get me enough flight instruction to where I could solo, which would be about six, seven, eight hours of actual flight instruction. During the course of the working, while I'm earning the $100, I'm going to ground school. Because I'm learning about navigation. I'm learning about airplanes. I want to learn to fly. So I'm getting it all in the classroom. This is like ground school. You can learn a lot in ground school. We learn a lot by talking together and recognizing things about God and how he works. And we can do all that. But you know, the one thing you can't do is learn to fly a plane in ground school. You can't. Someday you got to crawl in that airplane with an instructor sitting next to you and go, we're going to learn to fly. And when that happened for me, the first lesson I had, I crawled into this plane with my flight instructor, a little Cessna 150, we're crammed in there together. And he looks at me and says, I'm going to tell you right now everything you need to know about flying. I thought, wow, it's going to be easier than I thought. He said, you're sitting in the left hand seat. That's the pilot seat. He said, you are responsible for everything that goes on in this aircraft. He said, I'm in the right hand seat. I could be a passenger. I could be a co-pilot. Today I'm the flight instructor, but I'm responsible for nothing. And then he just turned and looked out the wind screen and he just sat there. And it's a 50 year old guy, I'm a 16 year old kid and I'm like, okay, what's next? I'm waiting. Certainly the lesson is going to start. And he was just sitting there, just looking out the window. I looked over at him and he looked at me and smiled and looked back out the window and I said, what are we doing? So what would you like to do? I said, I'd like to learn to fly. He said, well, I'm a flight instructor. I could help you do that. And he stares out the window again. I'm like, gosh, what is it? So I look at him and he smiles and I said, when are we going to start? He said, we can start whenever you want to start. And he goes, quiet again. And I really, this was beyond me. My whole understanding of education from the time I was very young is you show up in class and people tell you what you need to know and tell you what you need to do and you're very passive in the learning process. What this man taught me, he wasn't even a believer. In fact, two years later he was arrested for smuggling drugs in from Mexico in one of his airports. So, not a particular man of God in that sense, but what he wanted to teach me about that airplane was, I am responsible for everything. He is responsible for nothing. He's there to help me. He's not there to control me. And he taught me more about teaching than anyone I have ever had. I finally looked at him and I said, well, I want to learn to fly. So what do we need to do first? He said, what would you like to do first? Should we start the plane? He said, we could start the plane. But before we do that, we'd really want to pre-flight the aircraft. And then he went silent again. And by now I'm catching on. I'm going, okay, he's making me ask him for everything. So I said, would you teach me how to pre-flight the aircraft? Oh, I have a lot to do, he says. And he says, we got to get out of the plane. So we jump out of the plane. He pulls out the checklist. We go all around the whole airplane. We're checking all the flight services, making sure there's no bird nests inside the engine. And we'll go through the whole thing and crawl back in the plane and we're done. And he's quiet again. So I'm really catching on. I said, do we start the plane now? I said, yeah, that'd be good. We can start the plane. Would you show me how to start the plane? Happy to, he says. Pulls the checklist out. We go through the whole thing. We're sitting there with the plane running. And he's quiet again. And I'm thinking like I'm a real pilot now. I'm like, here we go, here we go. I said, oh, what do you want to do now? He said, what do you want to do? Well, maybe taxi to the end of the runway. I said, that'd be a good idea. We could taxi into the runway. Would you show me how to taxi? Yeah, I'll show you how to taxi. You know, I knew this from ground school. I'd been taught it over and over. This is kind of like your wife buying the paper on the first day of your marriage. I know in a little airplane like that it is not the steering wheel that controls where you're going on the ground. That only works when you're airborne. You steer the plane with pedals, the rudder pedals. You want to go left, you hit the left pedal. You want to go right, you turn right. But I have been learning for the last year and a half to drive a car. And I've been driving tractors on my dad's farm forever. So when I want to turn something, I'm thinking steering wheel. And I know better, it's pedals. But as we started, as we kind of released the brakes and started to roll and the plane is going for the gas pumps. And he's going, no, no, no, it's the pedals. And as much as I knew it was the pedals, man. Every time I got in a tight spot for the first few bit when I was trying to learn to taxi the airplane, I was always turning, the steering wheel turned away left like this as I'm pushing on the left rudder to try to get it to turn. And he's just laughing his head off because living it is different than knowing it. And for us to learn to live relationally in father's life, the instructor that I want to be next to you in that seat is not me. It's not your best buddy in the body of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who's been assigned that role. But that role, notice, is not a controlling role. I think he mirrors it exactly. The Holy Spirit is there. And the importance of prayer is, as we ask him, gosh, Holy Spirit, I don't get how to steer this. Would you teach me? Oh, I'd love to teach you. And there's an important diner. It's not just saying the little incantation. Not the Holy Spirit being difficult saying, I won't do it if you don't ask. But if we don't become active learners, if we don't take responsibility for how that vessel, the one you live in, becomes a vessel of God's in the earth and sorts out who he is and learns how to live this life, if you don't take responsibility from it, you're gonna miss the best parts of it. If you're not asking him, if you're in the middle of something, say, God, I don't know how to respond to you here. There's no one better to ask than the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, how do I respond to this? Would you teach me? And he does. Now, Holy Spirit's not quite like my flight instructor who would answer everything the moment I asked him. Holy Spirit sometimes, yeah, I wait a day or two, week or two, month or two. He's interested in working at a deeper level than just your intellect, so it's not always immediate when I'm saying Holy Spirit, well, I don't get this. Help me learn this. Sometimes it's like, do we start to plane now? And the Holy Spirit's saying, oh my goodness, no, not till we brief like the aircraft. So sometimes the Holy Spirit, I want this. He's got something else in mind, but he'll make it very clear. But I'm hoping over the course of these a couple of days together, one of the things that can happen is that you really take active ownership of your spiritual life and growth. And what that means is a lot of what we'll get to over the course of time. I've got some things that I'm kind of hoping we work through, but a lot of it at some point, this morning's gonna be kind of, I'll do more talking than you probably, but as we get into this afternoon and tomorrow, hopefully we'll degenerate into much more of a dialogue. And Wayne, what about this? And I'm growing here, I'm struggling here. This is what I've heard, talk to me about it. And we'll just talk through. Oftentimes I'll stop in the middle of something, and say, is that clear? And when I'm asking you, is that clear? I'm giving you an opportunity to say, no, you confuse the daylights out of me, okay? When I ask, is that clear? I'm not even asking if you agree with me, because you might say, I have no idea if I agree. When I'm asking, is it clear? Or does that make sense? So I'm asking is, have we got that? You understand what I'm saying? Whether you agree with it or not isn't important to me at the moment, but whether you're understanding it so that if the room does, we can move on. If the room doesn't, we'll back up and take some more time. That all right? And then over meals and those who don't hang out tonight and stuff tomorrow, feel free to dialogue with me. Personal things, things you think may not be so appropriate in a large group setting to ask. You're welcome to have at me. I'm here these next two days to do whatever I can to help whatever you need to have happened in your life to send you on this relational journey with greater freedom than you came in with. And hopefully that kind of thing happened. So feel free to ask away. Most of this is gonna be about your personal life. I know last time we were here in the coffee shop with a bunch of in, we talked a couple of hours anyway about mostly about church issues, right? About leadership and about, you know, where do you meet and what about house church and what about all that stuff? And we may talk about that some later, but I want you to know most of what we're talking about today, I don't think we get church wrong because we don't understand enough about church. I think we get church wrong because we're not on a relational journey to begin with. Therefore we don't know what to share when we get together. And so we end up sharing religion is what we share. We share conformity, we share rules and rituals and local holy man gurus and they can be local woman gurus as well, but we end up sharing religious life because we don't know how to share relational life. And I think what the real challenge for the body of Christ to be the body of Christ in our day is to learn how each of us live in him the way he's invited us to do it. I think Jesus spent almost the totality of the gospels on teaching people to learn the life of his father. He didn't teach him how to do church. He only used the term twice. And he didn't teach him to do anything like what we think. He didn't teach him to meet on Sunday mornings at 10 o'clock. He didn't teach him at Wednesday nights. He didn't teach him to meet in homes and trees and buildings. He didn't teach him any of that stuff. What he wanted them to get is I want you to get this relationship with father. And when you get that, then we'll be learning that life together. Does that make sense? So the kind of ground rules. I, you know, feel free to ask questions, feel free to interrupt. You don't have to raise your hands, but if I'm not breathing and you're not having a chance to speak, you can kind of wave to me and then I'll pause and let you have a shot at it. But hopefully in that process, we're all going to be saying, Holy Spirit, you teach me these things. Father, make these real in my life. And hopefully this sends you on a lifelong journey. I'm not thinking at all that by the end of the week, we'll have everything all sorted out in our lives because that's just not true of mine. I'm 12 years into this journey. We're still, God and I, sorting out some things together. All right. So here's where I want to start. If we could, I want to start with a, just what I like to call a New Testament survey. I'm going to give you what I think the gospel survey particularly gives us and then take you to one passage. That really sets up for what this God always had in mind for us and how it is that we live in him. The gospel start, Matthew, I get through the birth and Jesus and the temptations and the baptism. Matthew five, six and seven is what? Do you remember? Some of you? Sermon on the Mount. It's this wonderful sermon that Jesus gives. It's all red and red letters, if you have one of those kind of Bibles. And basically what I just want to say about the Sermon on the Mount for the moment is, I think Jesus describes the ideal of what it means to live life in God. The life God always meant for us to live. I mean, and if you read the Sermon on the Mount, if you read it religiously, it will kill you. Now I will tell you over the course of these two days, I am a recovering Pharisee. When I first met the Sermon on the Mount as a Pharisee, it wasn't good news. You've heard that it's been said that you shall not commit adultery. I tell you, if you look on a woman to lust after her, you've committed it in your heart. That wasn't fair, not to a Pharisee. Not to have been keeping the law. You know, I had three brothers. So that thing about you heard that it's been said, thou shalt not kill. I tell you, if you hate your brother in your heart, you've killed him anyway. Okay, I really hate that. That's not good news to me because I have managed to live with my brothers whom I hate and whom I, you know, and mom wouldn't even let us say we hate you because if we said that, she would say stuff like, my dad would, if you can't love your brother whom you have seen. How can you love God whom you haven't seen? So you couldn't say you hate your brother, but we did. And you know, I got through 16 years of not killing him and I'm thinking I'm doing pretty good. And then you read the Sermon on the Mount and God says, you know what, you're just as guilty as if you'd whacked him anyway. Now, is there a real difference between hating and killing in terms of my brothers? Well, of course there is. Jesus isn't saying in the Sermon on the Mount, hey, if you hate him, you might as well kill him because you're guilty of him. That wouldn't be the point. Or, hey, I've had lust in my heart, it might as well go ahead and have adultery anyway because I've got the sin, might as well do the deed. You know, that's not the point. But if you're a Pharisee, you just, you hate that Sermon on the Mount. There's stuff in there like, you are blessed when you're at the end of your rope as Eugene Peterson translates the first beatitude. Now, I don't know about you, I grew up in a lot of gatherings of congregations of Christians. Notice I didn't call that the church, okay? Intentionally so. I think the church is a term that we ought to reserve for what God uses it for and that's God's people in the earth who know him and love him and follow him. And just because a group of people say we're one, doesn't necessarily mean they are. The church is God's people over the whole earth who are knowing who he is and growing in relationship to him. And because of that, growing in relationship to each other. So we'll use church for that. But in one of these congregations, and they've got all these rules and things you're supposed to observe. And boy, when you look at the Sermon on the Mount in that contact, it is not good news. And all the services they ever attended, I didn't hear anybody ever get up and say, you know what, I'll give a testimony. I'm feeling really blessed because I'm at the end of my rope and I have any idea what I'm gonna do. Now people were blessed because they got money, they got a new job, they got a new house, they got a new something. It was always temporal material terms is how we define blessings. Jesus, when he goes, here's to the blessed people. They're poor in spirit. They're persecuted. I mean, read that list and you'll be like, oh my goodness. And God's life is to be a light. We're to be salt and light in the world, impacting the world with God's life. Well, that sounds pretty good. But then it gets into all the rules again. And you think the rules are bad, I'm gonna make them even worse, which is not what he was saying at all. I think what the Sermon on the Mount is pointing to is the freedom from sin is not in the actions, it's in the heart. And until I get your heart, your actions won't change. I think what he's actually doing and working on a book with a friend of mine, and I love what, one of the things he says in the course of this book, he's got this language in God's mouth, the character God in the book he's working on. And they're talking about the 10 commandments and following the rules. And he says, you know, why do you guys call them commandments? This is God talking. Why do you call them commandments? Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery. That wasn't law, that was promise. When you know me well enough, you will not murder. When you know me well enough, you'll have no other gods before me. When you know me, I'd say, wow, now that's, that captures the heart of the New Testament. It certainly doesn't capture what Moses brought down from the mountain that looked like, here's the rules, follow them or die, which is what Deuteronomy is all about. That's the covenant, do it or die. But this is the heart of God. You will not. I will change you. And Jesus comes and describes this incredible life. Matthew six, we'll talk Matthew six, Luke 12 a little bit later on about not living by anxiety and not worrying about tomorrow but living every day for its own. Seek first the kingdom. Man, that's beautiful. We get into sevens, more great stuff. Jesus now describing an ideal way to live in his father that you and I don't have a prayer of living in our own strength. So if you read the Sermon on the Mount as a Pharisee, it will kill you. There's so much in there and the responsibility is way beyond anything. I mean, even when Jesus, and I don't want you to be anxious about anything. You ever tried not to be anxious? Even when wonderfully well-meaning people come and say, no, wait, I don't want you to be afraid. But see, I don't even know what follows the butt. I'm already afraid. If you tell me I don't need to be, I'm gonna be. You tell me not to be anxious, I'm anxious. So I mean, you read this stuff and go, man, if that's just the rules, we're dead. But Jesus gave us the ideal. This is what life and father is like. And then for the next three and a half, four years, he lives that, he models that, he demonstrates a life living that ideal, living dependent upon his father, living in a loving way with everybody around him, even people who are trying to kill him and betray him. No hostility, no bitterness, no falling to sin, because he knew how to live related to his father and he did it. And now we come to the passage that we'll mostly be in this weekend, which I just love the symmetry of how this even worked out in our printed text. You've got, I don't know why they put Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the order they did, not necessarily anointed in that sense. It wasn't written in that order. But what you have is the Sermon on the Mount beginning of the thing in Matthew. You've got Jesus living it all the way through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then the last bit of John, you get this counterpart to the Sermon on the Mount, which is what we call the upper room discourse. It's almost a fifth of John's gospel, John 13, 14, 15, 16. And I like to tag the 17 prayer onto that as well. You've got five chapters of now as he's explaining to his disciples, this is how you're going to live what I just left. This is how you get to live it. And so the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount is not how it's what. Jesus models it so we know, wow, it can be done. And now John 13, 14, 15, 16. Here's how I want you to begin to live it. Makes sense? You're gonna spend a lot of time in John 13, 14, 15, 16 because that's where Jesus, and I'm not gonna study every, I'm not gonna exegete the whole passage and do all that kind of stuff to you. I just wanna kinda look at what this is and what this means. And there's a number of things that happen in this moment that I don't think Christianity as a whole in the world really appreciates. I'm gonna posit the idea, particularly as a recovering Pharisee, that most of what we do, and we call New Testament Christianity, is we slap New Testament terms on old covenant concepts. And because we call it grace and because we call it freedom, we think it is. But we still end up, even in Christianity, local holy man gurus, sacred space, sacred days, sacred rituals, sacred law. You become a good Christian by following those things and we have, yeah, we can talk about grace and Jesus dying for our sins. We can use all the language, but miss the reality. I'd like to kinda define the reality this way. I'm gonna use three scriptures. One's taken from this upper room discourse. It's the language of Jesus, John 15 verse 15. You'll know some of this stuff well enough, I think. I no longer call you slaves, but I call you, why? Remember? What does he say after that? I don't call you slaves, I call you friends, why? Because everything I've learned from the Father are made known to you. So I'm giving you the relationship I've had. Notice, this is one of those passages where we're trading something for something else. I no longer call you slaves. Well, when did he ever call them slaves? You found the gospel? Hey, slave Peter, come here. Hey, slave John, come on. I don't know if they ever called them slaves. I don't know that he's talking about the way he treated them. He didn't treat them the slaves. So I think he's referring to something else. He's not referring to what he called them while they were on the boat across the Sea of Galilee saying, oh, you stupid slaves, let me call them the storm for you. He never called them slaves. But he is establishing a change in paradigm. The Old Covenant, you can certainly take all of Matthew, Mark, Genesis through Malachi, let me get the book right. You take that whole section of scripture and really the image it paints of our relationship to God, is it not slave to sovereign? Is it not king to servant? Is it not? It is. Here's the rules. Here's God, I'm telling you, do this or I'm gonna whack ya. And the fear of God becomes ultimate in that way of engaging him because fear is what keeps a slave related to the king, to the sovereign. And so now, John 15, I think is a big clue. I no longer call you slaves. I'm switching the paradigm. I'm switching the image. I'm calling you friends. And not just, you know, chummy little buddy friends. He already defined friendship in this passage. Remember we said about friends? Greater love has no one than this that a man laid down his life for his friend. He's about to do that. Big important bit of John 14. He's saying this the night before he's going to be executed. So that's why it's the upper room discourse. Last things he's saying to his disciples. And what he says to them is I no longer call you slaves. This relationship, you and God, is not about slave to sovereign. It's friend to friend. And not friendship like we describe it. We describe friends as those people around our life that benefit us in some way. Those are our friends. We talk about having friends because there's a mutual. My co-writer on the Jake book says, defines church life and love and friendship the way we talk about it humanly as it's the mutual accommodation of self-need. So if you do something for me, that benefits me. And I do something for you that benefits you. And just being near each other's lives is a benefit and a blessing. We talk about friendship. And suddenly if you need more from me than I'm getting from you, then that friendship gets compromised. In romantic sense, we talk about falling out of love. Because now I'm not getting the benefit from you I used to get. And you're not getting the benefit from me. And our sense of love and friendship and even fellowship oftentimes is really based on our self-needs. What do we need? And am I getting it? If I'm not getting it, I'm gonna go somewhere else and get it. And you're my friend until you go through a hard spot or you betray me or you hurt me in some way. Then you know what? You're not my friend anymore. I'll get some other friends. And all of it centers around my own benefit and what I need. Jesus describes friendship not as what they needed. Speaking of the trinity now. But what they were willing to give. Greater love has no one than this. That one laid down his life for his friend. So it's not, he begins to reshape now. This is friend is not just good buddies. But a friend that's willing to die for you. That depth of friendship. A friend that would never betray you. Never use you. Never exploit you. A friend that would always be there for your benefit not theirs. That's the level of friendship he's describing. Paul says it this way, Romans 8, 15. Again, I think one of those transitional theme passages. I think John 15, 15, I just gave you the words of Jesus is a theme passage of the upper room discourse. I want to give you now Romans 8, 15 is the theme passage of Romans. I could read you the whole book and it makes the same point. Here's the point from Romans 8, 15. God has not given us a spirit of fear leading to slavery again. Well, wouldn't that indicate he had at some point? That God had given us a spirit of fear and that it did lead to slavery and that was the way that God worked through the course of the old covenant? He said God hasn't given us a spirit of fear leading to slavery again, but he's given us what? A spirit of? Spirit of what? No, that's a different verse. That's in Timothy, huh? A spirit of adoption. Whereby our hearts cry out what? Oh, Papa things, God. Yeah, the question is, weren't Abraham called the friend of God in that sense of friendship? David getting past the sacrifices to say, that's not what you want. You want a broken and contract. Do I think God always wanted this relationship of friendship with us? I believe he did. Did some of the old covenant people see through that at slender moments of their lives? They did. Could they participate in it in the way we can? And the answer is no, they couldn't. Because a major thing hadn't happened yet and that was the cross. Jesus even says that himself, among those born of women, no one greater than who? John the Baptist. And that's better than Moses, better than Isaiah, better than Daniel, better than David, better than Abraham. No one born of women's better than John the Baptist and he or she that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. I say this amazing language. The benchmarks, John the Baptist, nobody before him had it any better. And yet the least in the kingdom is better than John. Why? Better people? No, have access to a better relationship because all of those men of the old covenant before the death on the cross and the dealing with our sin and shame, which we'll talk about this afternoon, until that happened, we couldn't be near God and befriend him. As much as God wanted to be our friend, we didn't feel like we could be near him and be safe. Because even language of Hebrews 9 and 10, which we'll revisit a little bit, all the Old Testament sacrifices for all the things they were doing, what couldn't they do? They couldn't make the worshipper perfect in conscience. Hebrews 9 and 10, so we'll argument that. All the sacrifices, all the things, kill the lamb, put the blood on the scapegoat, send it out into the wilderness, offer the lamb into the... Do all the hocus pocus that God asked for, and it still didn't make you feel clean. When you got near God, he was a terrifying presence. And isn't that true through the whole of the Old Testament? When God shows up on Mount Sinai, you don't have the sense of friend. You don't. When God asks you to kill your only son, take him up and throw him up on an altar and kill him. You know, whatever Abraham understood about friendship with God, he didn't live the most of his life there. He didn't. He may have discovered that in the course of it, but my goodness, he's lying about his wife, keeper from getting raped by Pharaoh. That was a good plan for you. I've got to stare at home, and I'm trying to think about this. If I was in a situation where someone's going to kill me and rape her, or just rape her without killing me, I can't imagine Sarah thinking that's a good deal. Yeah, we'll just lie. So yeah, you get out of it, I'm OK with that. Gee, Sarah would not be OK with it, how much? So Abraham is really struggling into this reality. Isaiah, he has a vision of being in God's presence. What's his immediate reaction? Whoa is me, he falls on his face, wicked man that I am. We're not talking about, oh, hi, God, how are you doing? Moses, as close as he knew God, God said, you know what? I can't let you look me face to face, it will kill you. But I'll put you in the rock, and I'll pass by, and I'll pull my hand away, you can see my back. More than that, it's going to kill you. Mount Sinai, bring the people to me. I want to speak to my people. People get to Mount Sinai, what happened? We're excited to be there? OK, admittedly, a little thunder, a little lightning, a little earthquake, could be a bit unnerving. But at the end of it, it was, you know what, Moses? You go up and deal with that. We're going home, find out what that wants, let us know, and we'll do whatever you say. Did they ever do whatever he said? I mean, this just, God's not in the Old Covenant an endearing presence. Now I think God, because God is an endearing presence, he was an endearing presence even through the Old Covenant. We have a God who has not changed. God didn't get saved somewhere between Malachi and Matthew and say, I could probably do this better. I think the old bad cop didn't work, so I'm going to do the good cop. In fact, most of our Christian traditions, God doesn't even get through the New Testament as the good cop. When I was growing up, God was the scary guy. Jesus was the good guy. And it was good cop, bad cop. It was God ready to judge me for all that garbage I'd done. And I'm led into that courtroom. And God looks at me and he says, it was told to me this way. I remember in Sunday School, guilty Wayne. And then Jesus jumps up because we have an advocate with the father, and that's a legal term, because we need a lawyer with God, because God's scary guy. Jesus jumps up and says, I died for him. You can't kill him. And it was like God going, oh, God, another one. And it was this good cop, bad cop. When you really needed more repentance and better living, you got the God that wanted to whack you. And then when you performed fairly well, then you got the Abba. Oh, the Abba God. God's an Abba. Man, we teach that all the time, but I didn't live it. I didn't know what that meant. I grew up like the schizophrenic son of an abusive father. You're never sure what God's coming around the corner next. Is the Abba guy? Come jump in my lap, let's have fun. Or is it that wrathful, vengeful guy that wrote revelation that just can't wait to whack somebody with a wrap? Which one is it? And what you finally come down to when you grow up in that tension is, well, it depends on me. If I'm performing well, that's how every schizophrenic abused child grows up. If I perform well, daddy will love me. And if I don't perform well, then I'm at fault for his anger. I'm at fault for his stuff. I heard a tape, a lot of MP3 file off the internet. And this guy had written a book, and he sent it to me. And I was intrigued by the book. I went to his website to find out more about him. He had a little sermon thing. I clicked on MP3. And actually, very interesting stuff. At one point, he actually gets his one-year-old daughter from his wife, who happens to be in the room. And he's teaching some kind of thing. And he gets his one-year-old daughter, named Emma. And he holds Emma up like this. And he says, here's what we believe about God. Emma, you're the delight of my life. I love you. Every day is better because you're in it. You're the apple of my eye. And daddy will always love you. I will always love you no matter what. But Emma, I've got some things to tell you. Emma, daddy's gonna write a book. And when you get older, if you don't read that book every day, I'm gonna be very disappointed in you. And I'm not gonna be nice to you if you don't read my book every day. And you know what, Emma? As you get older, daddy wants to use you. Oh yes, I want to use you, Emma. I'm gonna use you for my purposes. I'm gonna use you for what I want. In fact, Emma, when you get it right, you're gonna sing songs like, use me, daddy, use me, daddy. This bear some familiarity of you. And he says, then when you get older, Emma, and then there are more things you'll need to do. And if you don't do the things that please me, if you don't put me first above everything else in your life, daddy's gonna be very angry with you. And daddy's gonna do things that will cause your life to be very difficult. Because I love you, Emma. And I want you to love me more than you. You hear the crowd in the background just groaning and going, oh. And then he gets to the end and he says, Emma, and when you get to the end of your life, if you don't love me more than anything else. Now, Emma, I want you to know I love you. I wouldn't even do this if I didn't love you. But I am going to pour gas on you and throw a match on you and burn you up. And the crowd's just groaning. And he said, isn't that what we've been taught to believe about God? The God most of us have grown up with is not the God of the Bible. He's an abusive dad who wants to use us, use us. I mean, how your Christians think, oh, use me, God, use me. Would you ever say that to another human being? And does it sound healthy? The reason we go up with the God of religion is because if he is that God, you want religion between you and him. You want a buffer. You want a local holy man guru. You want some rules you can follow. Just go into a meeting once a week, I can do that. Let's read the Bible every day. I can do that. I can find a few rules. I can get that right. And then somebody else deal with him. When Paul writes, we've not been given a spirit of fear leading to slavery again, but we've been given a spirit of adoption whereby our hearts cry out, Abba. He's now down to the core of it. The relationship God has always wanted with us is not a relationship of slave to sovereign, of master to servant. It is the relationship of a father to a child that's Abba-aged. Not teenager-aged, Abba-aged. I've got a little Abba kid at home. I've got an 18-month-old granddaughter. She gets in my, she's at the, she's on my, my dad, dad. She's at that stage. I'm telling you what, it is just a joy to be with Amy. Amy get everything right? No, Amy's an idiot. She's only 18 months old. She can't even ask for what she wants for dinner. She can't even tell us if she needs a sweater yet. She can't, she can't even, she's really just, she's funnering the dickens to be with her. And when we hear her wake up from her nap at our house, it is a fight between who gets to her room first, between Sarah and me. Because there's nothing like opening that door and watching Amy's face just light up. There's nothing like it. Mostly I'm home because Sarah's at work and my daughter's over working for me a few hours a week. So I get to get Amy and then when Sarah's home, I kind of let her because she doesn't get to do it. She's off on it. But I still go in behind her because it's that moment with Amy that's the best. She's playing with Amy. It's Amy on my lap reading a book. She doesn't even know what we're talking about. She didn't get the word yet. Has no idea. And how much expectations do I have of Amy? None. I just love her. And that love, if she grows up in that love, that love will transform her. My love for her, parents' love for her, that's what Paul's describing here. It's the abba daddy that he's invited us to engage. And that changes everything. It's not the rituals of a God that needs to be appeased. It's a God, and I know he's a better word than love because even in those religious settings, we sing songs like, Jesus loves me this I know. Again, Jesus is the good guy. God's the bad guy. But we sing it and we don't really mean it. We don't really understand it because we grow up under these weight of expectations. He will love me if I do all these things. And it just does not work. We end up, same, religiously engaged as we were before. Romans 8 to 15, powerful, powerful verse. And then Romans, or first John, excuse me, four. So from Jesus' own mouth, from Paul's mouth, and now from John's mouth, where he talks about God is love, and in him there is no darkness at all. And in perfect love casts out fear because fear has to do with punishment. And the one who fears is not perfected in love. Pardon? Is there a fear that's not... You know, I think we play fast and loose with some of the scripture stuff. I heard always growing up that the fear of proverbs, about the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, or the Psalms, is a healthy respect for who God is. And first John is about the fear that has to do with punishment. I actually think they're the same thing. I actually think there's such a huge paradigm shift going on old to New Testament, old covenant to new, that he is really saying, look, fear was the old way to get it right. And I say to the state, if you don't love God, you'd be well-served to fear him. Because fearing God will keep you from doing some really stupid things. I mean, I was raised in the fear of the Lord. Man, I hardly did anything wrong as a kid, just because I knew if I did one little thing wrong, I'd get caught and I'd go to hell and boy, hell didn't sound fun to me. So the fear of the Lord did it keep me from a lot of things that my fellow classmates and people growing up in the free love and free drugs of the sixties were doing. It did keep me from a lot of stuff that I appreciate. Did it help me know God better? No. Did it change me from the inside? No. Did it drive my sin deeper and it came out in more religious ways? Oh, yes it did. That's why I say I'm a recovering Pharisee. I'm not using it tritely. I was that goody two-shoes kid that grew up, that did everything right, that are obnoxious to my classmates. I think, I look back at high school and the one that they hated me, I was so righteous, disgustingly so. And I had the truth and they were all pagan sinners going to hell and oh, just I quivered when I look back. There's nothing about my life that would have been engaging to those kids other than, and I had a pool of kids who were also Pharisees with me so I wasn't alone in that. So I had friendships, but. So if you don't love God, you'd be well-served to fear Him. Once you love Him, you will never need to fear Him again. And I think that is the message of the New Testament. And the man, I did this in a seminary one time and I got attacked by the class because the fear of the Lord is really important and fear of the Lord is where we get holiness from and so they were all over me on this fear issue and I just said, let me ask you one question. What is it that God fears? We knew what it's got. God doesn't fear anything. God's God doesn't fear anything. I said, and yet He's holy. You're telling me fear derives from holiness and yet God fears nothing and He's holy. So I was confused a little bit. Where does God derive His holiness? Love. If I absolutely love every person I meet, I would never need a law of any kind. I don't need the rules for my marriage. I know they're marriage rules. I know I'm not allowed to have sex with anybody else. I know the rules and I believe in the rules. But I don't stay faithful to Sarah because it's the rules. I've had 31 years of loving this woman. I love Sarah from the core of my being. I am loved by her absolutely, totally, more than anyone in this planet ever has or ever will. I have that kind of love from Sarah. Am I going to do anything that would hurt or defraud or betray her? No, not to keep the rules because love has won me. I think that's this paradigm, the shift. When you live loved, you will love. And love, the Galatians 5 says it absolutely. Here's the deeds of the flesh. Well, what fulfills the law? Love, love. When you get the loving right with him, with each other, the keeping is not an issue. Law is not an issue. In fact, when you love, love will take you further than the law ever will. The law just says you can't do this and say, okay, we can do everything but that. You know, the marriages I saw growing up, the only rule was you couldn't get divorced. So they treat each other like hell, and they did. I knew some very, very bad marriages, but they were good marriages because they were never divorced. That's the rule. Couldn't change them. The rule in marriage, oh, goodness. Aren't rules pretty cheap compared to a depth of love that a man and woman can experience together in this life and partnership on a journey? I mean, the rules mean nothing to Sarah and me. They're not even important. Not anymore. Did they serve us at a time in our life when we might have done something weak and stupid? Yeah, maybe they did. I thought I loved Sarah completely on the day I married her. I dated her three and a half years for Pete's sake. You know, most friends are dated before they got married. But now at 31 years, Sarah and I laughed at her. We didn't even know what love was. We had no idea it was a mutual accommodation of self-need. It really was in the early days of our marriage. So we could both get out of it and we both really enjoyed about each other. And it was all about us. It was all about me, what I get out of this. 31 years into it. Oh my goodness, it is so different. And neither Sarah nor I are the same people we first met and married. We're not even close. So the scripture I'm giving you, I think there is a whole flip here. I think what he's saying, the man who's perfected is perfected by what? Love. Perfect love, yeah. Is fear, does fear have an value when you don't understand father's love? Yes, fear has a value. And I think scripture teaches that. Once you engage that love, fear will have no place. You will not need it. It will not be a blessing to you. In fact, the fear that I think he's talking about in 1 John is the fear that I can't get near God, the fear that Adam and Eve had from day one in the garden when they have to eat that fruit and God comes to see them and they're hiding. They're already afraid of him. Who'd come every day in the garden, they've never been afraid of him before. And now they're afraid of him. We'll talk about that too more down the road. And that's the paradigm shift. I think he says at the beginning of this upper room discourse that we're still trying to get back to, John 13, 14. He said, and all along people have been asking me, well, what's the law say? And they always sum it up with the grace, love God with all your heart, soul, body, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. That's been the answer to what's the law and what's summed up the whole law. And it really is kind of absurd, isn't it? Do you know anybody you can command to love you? I think the whole idea of that, it really, if we took a look at it, we're so used in religious settings to commanding things like love because we see love as an act. If love is an act, yes, you can command me to act like I love you. You could do that. But can you command love? Can I command Sarah to love me? It's absurd, isn't it? Not when love is affection. Not when love is the reality of a relationship. It's not an action. Religion turns love into an act. I remember sitting through a wedding of a friend of my daughters and the pastor read the 1 Corinthians 13, love bits about love is kind, love is patient, love does all these things. Great passage of scripture. I love it. He's reading it to a couple, often done at weddings. And then the man says, I'm gonna give you a homework assignment. One day, one night a week for the rest of your lives is a married couple. I want you to sit down, read this part of 1 Corinthians 13 to each other out loud. And then I want you to each look at the other partner and say to your spouse, how have I failed to love you like this in the past week? Just with, what? What is this man saying? This is a recipe for divorce if I've ever heard one. If Sarah and I are gonna sit down every week and say, okay, honey, here's how you failed me this past week. And she's gonna tell me how I failed her this past week. We're divorced by Friday. I gotta tell you, this is not fun. And this is a newly married couple. My goodness, they have no idea what love is. How are you gonna give them an assignment like that? But that's what religion does to 1 Corinthians 13. It makes it the rules. 1 Corinthians 13, this is the way God is. When you see this in your life, patience, kindness, you know you've engaged God's love. So you get to know that. And then as you see God transforming you, so now you're in situations where you used to be impatient and now you're patient, you're going, ooh, that's not me. That's God's kind of loving. Party. Oh, that's a great question. That's why we're here. The next six, eight hours is gonna try to answer that question. It's a perfect question. I love it. I love it, yeah. When Jesus gets to the uproom discourse, the language changes now. It's not this I command you to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and neighbor yourself. John 13, 34, and 35. It's theme verses from John. A new commandment I give you. What is it? That you love one another. Okay, a new commandment I give you kind of wipes out everything before. It kind of says that's obsolete. We're giving a new program now. Giving you something new. It's not an upgrade. It's new. New commandment I give you. I just want you to love each other as I've loved you. It kind of sounds like coming back to the love thing again. Well, Jesus saying it puts it in the command. See now, here's how religion takes that. Okay, now Jesus loved John and Peter and James in a certain way. If I study the New Testament, I'm gonna figure out how God loved them and then I'm supposed to love Carmen in that way. And by that, all the world will know. So we turn love into an act yet again. Jesus found out something very real. Listen, I've loved you guys in a certain way. I want you to go love. First John says it this way. We know loved by this, not that we loved him, but that he loved us. Implicit in the new command is I cannot possibly love you until I've been loved by him. Can't possibly. I can't begin to love you. I will only use you. My love, I may even be trying to be nice to you and do compassionate things for you, but until I've been loved, I can't love. It's not I'm supposed to love you like he loved John. I can't love you until I know what his love is. And the whole upper room discourse is how you experience that love. The first act of living relationally is throwing out the principles and learning to live in a love relationship, learning to live loved. It seems selfless yet, because it's not others first. No, it's not others first. It's until you know the love of the father for you and the love of his son, until you know that to the core. You wake up and you know father delights over you far more than I delight over Amy getting up from her now. Until you know that. Until that's real in your life and experience. Intellectual, yes. Emotional, yes. Until you know the depth of that love, you'll have no idea how to treat other people. So the whole upper room discourse, it just keeps coming back to this new command I give you, love one another as I've loved you. But the whole upper room discourse is here's how we're gonna love you. Here's how we get the loving. Because here's the deal with God. We talked about God in the Old Covenant, scary guy. Every time he shows up, people die, people hide. Scary, right? Now, Jesus has been living with these guys for three and a half years. Is he, Jesus, is he God in the flesh? He is, he is God. He is with them. No one's hiding in the bushes. No one's falling on their faces, going, oh wicked people, but we are. No, we're coming with you. Why are they not? It's God. He's with them. Why are they not? Oh, he spooked them a couple of times. Yeah, granted, comes a storm, spooked them like no. Ooh, and the other guy. But overall, hanging out, Mary and Martha's house, Bethany, Peter and mother-in-law's house in Galilee, on the boat, going across. Guys fighting over who gets to be first in the kingdom. They were pretty comfortable around this guy, weren't they? Why? Why? Huh? Part of the love thing, but why? Pardon? You just hung out with him? Okay, we're getting there, but why? Didn't hurt him. Pardon? He accepted him. Oh, that stuff, yeah. He was their friend. He was their friend. Okay, so what is it that you want to say? Yeah, I only have some fun for a while. Don't worry about the right answers, where's when I'm fine? He is recognized as a job. They had no idea who he was. I really didn't. Yeah. Cheater. Didn't they not have any idea who he was? Had no idea. He was God. Why was no one hiding from him? They had no idea who he was. They knew he was God. Even when they thought he was the Messiah, the first century Jewish hope of a Messiah was not a God incarnate figure. It was like a Moses, a man, God uniquely empowered to deliver his people. They're not looking for God hanging out in the flesh. We're looking for it. So even when they're saying he's the Messiah, they have no idea what that means. And they come to this upper room and here's what's going on in the upper room. The next time Jesus sees them, after the upper room experience and the cross, he's not coming through doors anymore. Right? Suddenly they're going to know this is the God of the universe. And the first thing he says to them when he appears through the wall, remember? What does he say? Don't be afraid. There's a whole lot of language in the upper room discourse and beyond it. Now, okay, don't be spooked by this because it's gonna come home to them a few days from now. They have no idea who he is. Yeah, great teacher, healer, man of God. Yeah, all that, but all the things you said, he had said them at ease. He was able to with them. He didn't hurt them and exploit them. He didn't take offerings from them. He just loved them. He just poured out his life to them. That's all he did. And they got comfortable around him. They enjoyed him. He'd become their friend and brother. And now, you know, this is a Wednesday night. Sunday night, he's gonna be hanging out with them in the upper room. And you know what? It's gonna be obvious who he is. See, when I travel around, it's difficult in rooms this size, but some places where I get to travel, I get to hang out with a group of people gathering in a room and they have no idea who I am. They don't know I'm the speaker. And I just introduce them as Wayne and they still don't get it. And I get to talk to them about their family, what's going with their lives, and I get great conversation with them. And we're sitting down, talking, and the service starts. At some point, they're saying, introduce me and I get up and you should hear them gasp. Ah! Didn't know how to it was. See, that's just the speaker or author from out of town box thing. That's not a very big box. The God box is huge. But people change in some environments when they figure out who I am just because, oh, you're the guy that's this. And they'll come up to me after the deal and go, you know, I'm sorry, I went on about my kids and job, and see, you know, if you remember, I was the one that asked you about your kids and job. Ah, that's right. See, because that box, that box is a frightful thing. Jesus coming back, he'll be in that God box. They're gonna know now. And the uproom discourse, I believe this whole 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 is Jesus taking this wonderfully tender relationship he had cultivated with these men and women, including Mary and Martha and others. And he's throwing it past the cross, past the resurrection, to when he comes back to be with them. And he didn't wanna lose this relationship in that new reality. He had already defined the relationship. No longer call you servants, call you friends. He had already with them in a way that allowed them to feel safe with him. He made them feel safe when they didn't know who he was so that when they knew who he was, they would now be reconciled to him by the power of the cross and they could be at peace with him. Now, they really didn't get that for a while. So Jesus is trying to throw this relationship beyond that. Not just with him. He's now adding a couple of characters to this relationship. He's adding the father, right? And the Holy Spirit. And I think it really gets serious about that. John 13 thing I said, the whole paradigm shift is we're not gonna live by principles. Now we're gonna live by love. Love is what changes. That's a big step from, because principles and rules or law really is the substitute for this love relationship. I'm not having this, so I need this. And principles bad? No, they're not bad. The principles helped me understand who God is. But until I find God as the enduring father to live with, the principles are just more rules to keep. And discipline is just getting bashed around to keep them. And it was something so much greater.