Grace Changes Everything

Well, good morning, my name is Adrian, one of the pastors here. I'm excited to share with you this morning, and we're continuing our series aha. You've heard some great ahas. You're gonna hear some great ahas today. My aha is something I've learned recently, but it's taken a long time—a lifetime—to get to where I am.

I've told my story a few times in different ways, but I grew up in a house where performance was king. You had to perform, and my parents, both my parents, used guilt as a motivator. You should perform, feel guilty to perform. Both my parents were really good at it, but they had very different styles. My dad was much more blunt, to the point, harsh. One time, when I was in high school, I was a freshman, and we had moved. I wanted to help out; I wanted to be a good son. So, I went into the bedroom to set up my parents' bed. This was the mid-90s. I grabbed a hose, hooked it up, and filled their bed. It was a water bed. For you young people here that don't know what a water bed is, a long time ago, people thought, 'What would be more comfortable than laying on a balloon of water?'

This is funny, actually. I didn't say this last night, but my mom had knee replacement surgery when I was in high school, and laying down was not good for her. She was laying down, and I jumped into bed to say, 'Hey, Mom!' Literally, the wave knocked her out of the bed, and her leg fell off because it didn't know she was okay. I think she was okay. Anyways, what was I talking about? All right, so I'm filling this water bed, and it takes a long time. There's a lot of water that has to go in there. In Santa Cruz today, you'd go to jail if you had a water bed. But I helped my parents out, you know? I unpacked boxes. My dad gets home and calls me from the room. He says my name, and I go in there. I step right into the room and step into water. I look, and the bed, this balloon, is like four feet high, full to the brim and leaking water. So, I run to the bathroom and do the thing to drain it.

I get back, and my dad, in his very harsh way, looks at me and says, 'How can you be so stupid? Get out of here! You don't know how to do anything!' And I'm like... I go to my room. Guilt. So, the next time, I'm gonna try harder. That's how my dad worked—really harsh. Seems very mean now. My mom was similar, not as harsh, not as mean on the outside, but it's actually worse because it's more conniving, you know? It's like, here's a beautiful story where you should feel bad. It's so ingrained into my mom that, you know, if I do something wrong, she'll tell a story. A lot of times, she reminds me how much I weighed when I was born and how painful that was. I'm sorry.

That's like when I do something bad, but even times I haven't done anything, it's just so ingrained into her DNA to guilt me that she just comes out. Like at dinner, sometimes we're just talking, and she'll want to tell a story. This is how it always starts. My mom is Korean, so that's why I'm gonna talk this way, you know? Now she starts with, you know, and then it's followed by somebody's name. If it's your name, just watch out. So, you know, my wife will be there back then, or dating. It's probably like the first time my wife has ever met my parents. You know, 'A Judean, Adrian, he baby, one year, we have a big party, a lot of people. Me cook so many people are working.'

So, I'm working in Korea, and in Korea, if you want to emphasize something, you extend the first syllable. I'm working serious! So many people, you know, I don't have a time. Watch that boy! So, he, Daddy, and she's looking at him, 'Have to watch what happened?' He, Daddy, talking, drinking, singing, dancing. He no watch! I turn around. You know what happened? That baby, he fall down swimming pool one year. You don't—oh my goodness! I stop. I don't care cooking. I learn. I learning. That's a running sounds like learning. Swimming pool, I have to jump in my clothes. I don't care. I go inside. You know what happened? That boy, huh? Fat boy go all the way down, all the way down, bottom. Fat Dad, I have to go down. I pick it up the mountain, baby, like jumping, and somebody catch, somebody catch, take it out, save a baby. But now, Mommy, I know good swim. I'm gonna die. I think my mind, my son, okay, Mommy die, you know why? And she looks at me, 'Good Mommy, good Mommy, you remember?'

She's asking me if I remember, like, do I remember when I was one, falling in a pool and you saving me? Of course not, but I say, 'Yes, Mom, I remember. Somebody take catch me out. I looked you.' You know what? Now she looks at my wife. 'You know what that boy, that fat guy, never thank you? That baby never say thank you.' And I'm like, 'Never say thank you?' And she looks at me, 'Why you no thank you?' I'm like, 'I was one! I couldn't even talk! So what? Why you no thank you something? Thank you! What about now? You never thank you, Mommy? What happened just now? Would you like to marry me and be into this in this house?'

Every time I watch Everybody Loves Raymond, literally, I tell my mom, like, 'Mom, we watch the show together. That's you! You're just like that lady!' 'No, I am good! How can you say?' And then I get in trouble again. Guilt. So, I'm growing up with all this guilt and to perform. Soon after that, you know, and after I go through all that, I meet Jesus, and I learn about Jesus. He dies for my sins, but I'm in a church that adheres to the same principles that my parents adhere to. That church was very legalistic. They believed that you had to earn your salvation. You had to earn God's love. You had to earn his approval, work hard.

I remember hearing things like, 'If you don't do that, God won't love you as much. If you do this, God will love you more.' So, with my baggage, I transferred the way I looked at my parents as people who sort of were looking down and judging me, wanting me to perform, using guilt, and I transferred that to God. God was standing there with his arms crossed, shaking his head. It's like, 'Why can't you just get it right?' I mean, it was a make-a-really-bad-super-legalistic. I mean, literally, it became a cult. Not the wear-white-linen-and-move-to-an-island kind of cult and drink Kool-Aid, but it was the kind of cult where the pastor told me where to live, where to go to school, where to work, who I could date, who I could be with, who I could be friends with. It was crazy.

Then I went to college, went to Bible college, and I met other Christians. I told them my experience, and they're like, 'Yeah, no, that's crazy, dude.' I'm like, 'Wait, your pastor doesn't tell you who you can date? What?' So, I thought, 'Oh, this is crazy.' I left; I escaped out of that church and started going to my friend's church. I got really involved. I got hired on as a graphic designer, and soon after that, they offered me the youth pastor position. It was a very large church, large youth group. Two problems: I didn't know what I was doing, and secondly, I still had all that baggage, that legalism, that guilt, because I hadn't gone to, like, legalism rehab yet, and so it's all in there.

I look back on my computer; I have files of every single sermon I preached in youth group, and the majority of them are some version of, 'When you sin, it's like you're spitting in the face of Jesus on the cross. So stop drinking and doing drugs and having sexy dirty kids.' You know, it's like, because as a youth pastor, you have this group of kids in your care, and some of them are going down the wrong path. You're like, 'I gotta stop them! Jesus hates you when you do bad things!' is basically what I said. I tried to motivate them with guilt instead of pointing them to Jesus.

Eight years ago, we moved to California. I got a job here at Twin Lakes Church, leading worship for a service called Genesis. A few years in, just a few years ago, Pastor René wrote the book Grace Immersion, and we all, as a church, went through that series, Grace Immersion, and literally, it sort of began my aha moment. It began to change my life. I started to learn about who God is and who I am—that his love for me isn't dependent on my effort and my performance. It was the beginning of the transformation and healing. God began to heal my heart of all the stuff that went on before. He started to show me who he really was—a God who loves me and didn't just stand there to judge me.

Since then, I've learned more and more about grace. That wasn't the end; I continue to learn. Even this week, as I've been preparing, I've learned more and more about who God is and who I am. That's what we're gonna talk about today. You can take out your message notes that look like the paper I forgot to bring up here in your bulletin—a white sheet of paper with a big light bulb on it. Can you open those up? Today's aha moment, my aha moment, is learning that grace changes everything. Grace changes everything because what I used to believe was that the grace of God, what he did on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, all that affected was my position—that I went from un-Christian to Christian, unbeliever to believer, and that's it. After that, it was all on me, all on my shoulders.

But grace, God's grace, is so much bigger and greater than that—than just a ticket to heaven. God's grace affects so much more in our lives. We're gonna look at 1st Corinthians 15. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1st Corinthians 15. If you brought a Bible, paper or digital, you can turn or swipe or point, however you got there. There's a Bible in front of you or under you. 1st Corinthians 15, verses 9 through 10. It goes like this: 'For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle. This is Paul because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them.' He's talking about the other apostles. 'Yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.'

Before we go on, I just want to define grace real quick. Grace, simply put, is receiving something you don't deserve. In the context of today, that means receiving the love and the grit and the redemption and forgiveness of God—not because of us, but because of him. So what is Paul doing here? He's talking to the Corinthian Church, a church that's kind of gone crazy, and he's reminding them in this chapter about the resurrection of Jesus, about the gospel. So many times, Paul, when you read his writings in the New Testament, he has to remind them. It always starts, 'Hey guys, good to hear, good to see, you know, write to you again. I miss you guys. What happened? How have you already forgotten the grace of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ?' And so this chapter, again, he's reminding them over and over about what God has done, and it's not about them.

So he says in the beginning, 'Listen, I became an apostle. I got transformed in my life not because of me, not because of anything I did. I mean, remember, I was trying to kill all of you guys! But because of his grace, he transformed me.' But then he goes on at the back half of that passage to say, 'But not only then, but even when I'm working for him, I'm serving him, I'm devoted to him, even then God was at work. He was giving me the work to do, and he was giving me the strength to do it.' God's grace is not only at work; it not only affects our justification but our sanctification. God's grace is at work in our justification and sanctification.

What do those words mean? Justification, basically, is salvation—what God did on the cross to save you. You know, the Bible tells us we all inherited the curse of sin. We all have sin, and the penalty, the price of that sin is death, and each of us is supposed to pay for that. But God sent Jesus Christ to die on a cross for us, to take on all of our sins and die in our place. He resurrected from the dead, and through that, he makes us right with God. So justification is being made right with God, where God redeems us, forgives us. That's justification. Sanctification is becoming more like Christ. That's what happens after you're justified. After you're saved, God calls us to a life with him, devoted to him, in service of him. As we do that, as we grow in that, we're becoming more like Jesus because Jesus was the perfect human on earth and also 100% God. He was perfect; he was perfectly devoted to God. He perfectly served God, and he was holy. Sanctification, basically, is God making us holy, making us more like Christ.

So Paul is telling the Corinthians, he's like, 'Guys, God's grace is not only at work in your salvation but in your sanctification, in you becoming holy. It's not about what you do.' Let's look at 1st Corinthians, that whole passage again in the message. It's a great paraphrase of this passage, and it goes like this: 'I don't deserve to be included in that inner circle, as you well know, having spent all those early years trying my best to stamp God's church right out of existence. But because God was so gracious, so very, very generous, here I am, and I'm not about to let his grace go to waste. Haven't I worked hard trying to do more than any of the others? Even then, my work didn't amount to all that much. It was God giving me the work to do and God giving me the energy to do it.'

Paul is telling them, 'Listen, God's grace, his work is at work not only to save you but to grow you.' Because this is the thing, you know, God poured out his love and showed his grace in one incredible event when Jesus, he sent Jesus to live a life perfectly, to go on a cross innocently, to die for your and my sins, resurrected from the dead, defeating death miraculously. When we believe, he fills us with his Holy Spirit, adopting us as children and making us more like Christ, sanctifying us. Because when you experience salvation, you're experiencing God's grace. When you experience growth in your devotion to God, you're experiencing God's grace. When you serve God with the gifts he's given you, you're experiencing his grace because he's the one that gifts you, he's the one that gives you the work to do, and he's the one that gives you the strength to do it.

The funny thing about grace, and that I struggle with because of all my baggage, is thinking that I have to still do stuff right. Because the Bible clearly tells us you have to live for God; don't sin. You read Colossians 3, you read Ephesians, you read all these epistles, and Paul is like, 'Hey guys, you need to live right! God has called us to this holy life.' But where I used to, where I always got it wrong was I thought I had to do that all on my own. But here we see Paul saying, 'Listen, God is giving you the strength to do it. Live in freedom in his grace and his love and not shackled to your inadequacy or what you feel like you can or can't do.'

And why is it so important to understand this? Well, firstly, it's the truth. Okay, that's really simple. It's the truth. That's why Paul has to remind them so much, like, 'Guys, have you forgotten the truth of the gospel of Jesus and his grace and his love? That it's not about your effort, but it's about him and his love?' So it's the truth. Secondly, and before we do that, I know there's three blanks in your notes if you're filling those out. If you're a perfectionist and leaving one blank is gonna freak you out, and you're gonna leave like God didn't do something for your life because there's a blank piece of paper there, I'm skipping the third one. So if you need to put something in, just put my name, Adrian, okay? Because when you understand God's grace, it protects us from becoming—

The third one you don't want to be like me, okay? So becoming Adrian. But the first one is a Pharisee. All right, understanding grace protects you from becoming a Pharisee. The Pharisees are like the perfect example of people who have great intentions but lose their way. They are people who are the religious leaders of the day. They devoted their life to God. They memorized scripture. They followed the commandments the best they could. One time, they come up to Jesus and say, 'Hey Jesus, what is the greatest commandment?' and they're thinking to themselves, 'We're the commandment masters! What is he gonna say?' And so he says, 'Well, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength.' And they're like, 'Yeah, that's... but...' and 'You have to love your neighbor as yourself. When you do these two things, you fulfill the whole law.'

What Jesus is doing there is he's reminding the Pharisees about the law, what it's really about. Because they were people who followed the law perfectly, or as perfect as a human could, but they didn't love people. I mean, these guys were like the most judgmental jerks of the time. They're the religious leaders who should be loving and caring and bringing in people to learn about God, but they just went around judging people. Like Jesus, when he calls Matthew, the disciple, Matthew's like, 'Oh, that's awesome! Let's have a party at my house!' So he invites his friends, and the Bible describes him as sinners and tax collectors. That just sounds like a crazy party!

And so Jesus is at this party, and the Pharisees go to his disciples. They're like, 'How can Jesus be at this party?' You hear the thumping music in the background. 'What is he doing over there with those tax collectors, those people?' Jesus describes the Pharisee praying out loud and saying, 'God, I thank you for my life. Thank you that I can follow you unlike that guy!' He's using his prayer, like my mom used the stories, to judge me. He uses his prayer to God to judge this guy. These Pharisees had lost their way because they thought if they followed the law perfectly, they could earn salvation. They could earn God's love; they could earn his acceptance.

But what Jesus was telling them was this: 'Listen, you've got it all wrong. The law wasn't about you following it to earn salvation. The law was to show you that it's impossible to follow the law and that you need somebody to save you.' The Pharisees thought they could do it on their own. This is the thing; I don't blame the Pharisees, but it's not hard to believe that they became people who were judgmental because when you do things really well and other people don't, you judge them. When I was in school and I did well on a test or a paper, and I asked people, 'Hey, what'd you get?' 'You got a C? You're an idiot!' That's just natural.

Why do you think on the news and on your Facebook news feed it's just filled with people failing? 'Look at what this athlete did! Look at what this movie star did! Look at what this politician did!' And we eat it up. You know why? Because we think, 'Well, at least I'm not like that guy! Well, at least I didn't do what she did!' It's just natural. We just kind of feel—I mean, maybe you're not as evil as me, maybe, but deep inside, I think there's a little bit of that in all of us. And so these Pharisees, they lost their way because they didn't know that it was about God and not about them.

Secondly, it protects you from becoming apathetic. Now, that's more where I fall into. If you're very driven and you're a perfectionist and you do very well, you're more in danger of becoming a Pharisee because you're already doing well. It's not bad, you know, if you're doing well in your work and at school and you're succeeding—that's great! But when it comes to God, thinking that it's all about us is where we get it wrong. But apathy, I think, is for those of us that might be maybe a little more lazy or, you know, just filled with guilt.

What I mean by apathetic is, you know, not caring anymore. Like you fail so many times, you're just like, 'Forget it! I can't do it!' And for me, when I was in college, it happened. You know, in the late 90s, I had just gotten a computer. Like, for the first time, I had a typewriter all through high school, and I was like, 'Look at this computer!' A young man with a computer in college with the internet does one thing, and they look at pornography. When I was in college, like many young men my age, I struggled with pornography, and that was sort of the tip; that was like the beginning of this downward spiral of sin in my life. I went to places and I did things I never thought I would go. I never thought I would do. I regret a lot.

But why did that happen? It's because when I would fail, I thought, 'God is so disappointed with me. There's no way I can get back to him!' That I just kept falling more and more into sin. I was going to church; I was in Bible college; I loved God. But I thought of him as a judgmental father who was just waiting to scream at me, 'How can you be so stupid? Why can't you do anything right?' And so I thought the weight of my sin was on top of me. I couldn't climb out; I couldn't climb to God because it was so heavy.

This is the thing, you know, I stopped reading the Bible. I stopped praying. I stopped caring and thinking about God because I thought, you know, when I read the Bible, I listen to him. When you're praying, you're talking to him. So it's like I was coming in front of him, and I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to get near him because I thought he was so disgusted with me because I thought it was all on me to get back to him.

It's like last week, Mark talked about the prodigal son. The prodigal son had sinned, had squandered all the things his father had given him so graciously, and he thought, 'My dad can't forgive me. I've lost it all. I'll just go be a servant. I'll just eat the slop with the pigs.' And that's how I felt. I'm like, 'I'm just so sinful. I'm just gonna live in my sin, and maybe God will be merciful and let me into heaven.' Because I thought it was all on me.

It's important to understand that it's God's grace that not only saves you but sanctifies you. The thing is, it's so easy to fall into these traps because they both start out being a Pharisee and being apathetic. Both start out innocently. The Pharisee wants to love God, and so they're trying really hard. Myself, the guilt-ridden legalist, I love God, and so I'm just trying to earn his love. They start out innocent, but it's just off by a degree in understanding who God is and our part in this relationship with him.

René describes it. He said it before, and he's told me that it's like two lines. Two lines are—it's like two lines, and the one on the left is 90 degrees straight up. That's grace, right? Now the one on the right is literally one degree off. I use a program. This is 90 degrees; this is 89 degrees, okay? And that one looks like grace. It kind of sounds like grace at the beginning. It sounds like who God is, like God loves you, but it's just like, 'But I gotta do stuff still, right, to earn some of that?' So it's a little off—very similar. We'll call it Gratia. Like, it's close but not—there's like Tarjay, you know? Like if you are ashamed of going to Target for some reason, you call it Tarjay because then it's like the French Target, I guess. I don't know. I went to Tarjay for the shirt.

But so they start out okay; they're pretty close. But as you live your life with this misunderstanding of God, you get farther and farther away from who God is and who you are, so far that you're off the screen. The God you believe in is not the God of the Bible. It's so easy to fall into those traps. So how do we get out? What's the answer? Where do we start? It's this: to shift your perception or change your perception. Change your perception.

I listen to a lot of pastors and preachers and sermons and messages, and I'll be honest, when somebody, when a guy comes up or a girl comes up and says, 'Listen, the answer is think differently,' I'm like, 'What? This is the most general and, you know, general thing I've ever heard.' I don't know the other word that I was thinking of—generic. Tell me, like, the 10 steps to understanding God's grace so I can go home and I can do it. Because it's like that legalism in me wants me to have those things. But it does begin with just changing your perception.

If it—listen, that grace is deep, and I still don't understand it all. I encourage you, tlc.org, tons of messages about grace—great ones. Grace Immersion, that I talked about earlier, that book is available. You can go watch all those for free. Grace last year, free this year. We just went through Galatians; that's all about grace. I encourage you to learn more about it, but it starts with changing your perception, changing your mind. When you can really understand who God is, it changes everything.

It reminds me of Roger Bannister. Do you guys know who that is? He's the first person to run a mile faster than four minutes, run a sub-four-minute mile. Nobody had done it before that; nobody thought it was possible. But then one day at Oxford, he runs this race and breaks it. Let's watch to remember.

On May the 6th, 1954, Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student, shook the world by breaking what had seemed an insurmountable athletic barrier. At least that's what many experts claimed as Bannister, paced by two fellow graduates, set off to try to break the four-minute mile. Over the years, the target had become an elusive obsession for all middle-distance runners. The nearest anyone had come to it was four minutes, 1.3 seconds by the great Swedish athlete Gunder Hagg, and that was nine years earlier. Christopher Chataway took over the pace after Chris Brasher had done his bit in the early stages. The weather at Oxford University's athletic track hadn't looked too promising; a cold wind was blowing just before the start. By the time Bannister had begun his final 300 yards, the wind had dropped. It was now make or break for the finishing line. Bannister had run the last lap in 59.4 seconds, and it was more than enough to give him the record: three minutes, 59.4 seconds. No one had beaten the four-minute barrier before.

Pretty incredible, right? So he runs super fast and runs that mile in under four minutes, but the cool thing about that story is one—those shorts are pretty incredible. I was like, 'Wow!' Anyways, that's really all I was thinking, like, 'Man, those are really short!' But what's really cool isn't just this one guy's achievement; it's what happened right after. The world thought it was impossible to do this. Six weeks later, another guy did it. A little bit after that, that guy and Roger Bannister, John Landy and Roger Bannister, rivals, run a race, and they both break it again. Since then, thousands of people have broken it. You know what the record is today? Three minutes and 43 seconds. I ran a mile on Friday, like part of this workout, so that's me! I broke the world! I was like almost 11 minutes! I thought I was gonna die, but I'm alive! But my legs are sore—super fast!

He broke a perception; it changed the world. But you know, the other thing that's really cool about his story is the way he did it. In a movie today, this is what it would look like: Rocky. He actually was in the Olympics and was supposed to medal and didn't, and he was just upset about it, wanted redemption. So he thought, 'I'm gonna break that record.' Now, in a movie today, he would think, 'I'm gonna break that record!' So he goes to some warehouse and he starts, like, bench pressing cars and strapping stakes to his legs and, like, releasing a tiger and, like, running as fast as he can. This is all from Rocky IV, which is like one of my favorite movies. He goes to Siberia. That's my ad kicking in. Sorry, but that would be the story. But what actually happened was he was a medical student at Oxford studying the human anatomy and the human body, and when people said that it was impossible, he thought to himself, 'That's not true! If a person can run consistent lap times, he or she would get enough oxygen to break that time.' I mean, that's the truth; that's the facts! I'm gonna go on, and then he did it.

It took him looking at the truth, looking at the facts to know that it was possible. Listen, about grace, about God's love for you—not only God's love for you, undeserved—not only affecting your salvation but also your sanctification, your growth. Understanding that truth, that fact, that Jesus' death on the cross, resurrection from the dead, that power is at work in your life from beginning to end. Just thinking about that fact will begin to change your life.

René's told me many times he knows I suffer from legalism; he did too. He says, 'You got to preach the gospel to yourself every day. You have to look at the cross. You have to look at what Jesus did on the cross. You have to look at his resurrection. You have to look at the fact that when you believe, he fills you with his Holy Spirit, calls you to a holy life, and then he gives you the strength to do that.' We look at that; it begins to change everything. In just a moment, we're going to take communion and look at the cross, remember God's incredible grace and his incredible love. As we do that, I just want you to remember, remind yourself that it's all about what God has done, not about what you can do. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your love and for your grace. God, you are so gracious, so very, very generous. And I thank you, Lord, that you saved me. You saved and loved many people here. And God, for the people that might not know you, God, may they know that you love them so much and you are gracious, and they don't have to become perfect to become saved. They just have to come to you and look at your cross and believe that you died for their sins. You rose from the dead. I thank you for your redemption. I thank you for justifying us, God, through your grace. And God, through your grace, I thank you for sanctifying us, that in our daily lives, you're there strengthening us in our walk with you. In a moment, Lord, as we take communion, I pray you help us, Lord, to look at your cross, to look at your sacrifice, to look at the work of love and grace on Calvary, and know that it was all about what you did and not about what we can do. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.