Slow Drift

Into a violent world that prized only power, came a movement motivated by love. A few frightened failures huddled in one room became a global phenomenon, fanning across their world within 30 years. With no army, no politics, no detailed strategy, they changed history. How did it happen and can it happen again? This is Axe Odyssey.

What a great service we've had so far. But we're the kids fantastic. Give it up again for those kids. They sounded so good. I was listening from up there in the balcony and it sounded great up there. Really, really nice. Well, my name is René. I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. And welcome to Axe Odyssey. That is what we call our series in the biblical book of Acts.

Why are we studying Acts? Well, sometimes church stinks. Would you agree with me on that? It can be dull. It can be boring. It can be exclusive. And sometimes Christians stink. And I'm including me on this. Sometimes we can be mean and we can be hypocritical and petty and judgmental. But it wasn't meant to be that way. This whole Jesus thing was meant to be exciting and adventurous and welcoming.

And when you study what the original Jesus movement was like in the book of Acts, you really see that come through in spades. And what we're trying to do in this series is not just study the book of Acts. We want to do the book of Acts. There's so many ways. For example, it talks about them meeting in small groups in homes. And so we've got small groups all over the county and beyond.

I've been able to go visit a lot of these groups this past week. We also have a group. We just found out meeting in Florida going through Axe Odyssey. We've got a group in Kenya going through Axe Odyssey and all over the world. So that's very exciting. You just heard Mark talk about some of the community service projects. We did those because you read about the church in the book of Acts doing that for their community.

And there's some exciting stuff coming up too like the worship night on October 30th that we hope you can be a part of. Again, the big idea is to kind of generate some of the excitement, some of the atmosphere of the early church. Now, just kind of a quick plot Greek cap over the last four weeks or so. We saw how a handful of men and women about 50 days after the crucifixion of Jesus pours into the streets of Jerusalem.

And they say, hey, Jesus is alive. And within just a few short days, they grow to 5,000 people. And of course, that threatens the religious people already in power. And so persecution breaks out. The apostles are arrested. One of the leaders, Stephen, is actually killed. And an organized oppression of the Christians breaks out. And so the believers scatter out of Jerusalem.

And everywhere they go, they spread their message. And something happens that they never expected to see. Blew their minds. And what happens is this. They were all Jewish. And so when they go out and they tell other people the message of Jesus, they are going to Jewish synagogues. And they're talking to Jewish people. But Gentiles—that's the word for non-Jewish people—they're kind of eavesdropping on this.

And almost instantly, Gentiles in huge numbers, completely against anybody's expectations, start to pour into the very, very early church. First, the Samaritans, who had serious racial tension with the Jews, start to just flood into the Jesus movement. And then we saw last weekend an African royal official comes in. And then the small group studied this week how an Italian Roman soldier, a centurion, comes in.

And then the leader of the persecution against the Christians, Paul, comes into the Jesus movement. And he takes the message to Greek cities and to Roman cities. And everybody is surprised that all these Roman pagans start to pour into this movement. You're talking Roman soldiers, Greek business women, Roman government officials. And none of them have a Jewish background. They are all pagans. And they're becoming followers of Jesus Christ with a lot of joy.

Well, meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, which is still sort of the hub of everything Christian at that point, a controversy starts brewing. And this is so relevant to the modern church. Because listen, this controversy has to do with some of the things some of you experienced in church growing up that you did not like. It has to do with why some of you have not been back to church in a long, long time until just recently.

It has to do with why some of you had parents who actually took you out of church and said, we are never going back to church again. It has to do with why some of you actually have wounds from church in your past. It's why a lot of people in our culture today say, yeah, I believe in God, but I don't believe I can ever find him in organized religion.

And here is what this controversy is about. What is a Christian? Who gets into church? How many rules do you have to keep? How holy do you have to be? How much of your lifestyle do you have to change before you can get into church? Really, here's the question, what does Christian mean? And the very early Christians have a meeting about this. Can you imagine that? How historic this meeting was right in the middle of the book of Acts.

And they're going to define the answer to this question. And for 2,000 years churches have been ignoring their conclusions and getting the answer to this question wrong. And when we get it wrong, that's when churches and Christians go bad. So we've really got to pay attention to this. Here's the background. The first Christians were raised in a very orthodox, very conservative Jewish culture.

And so since Jesus is the Messiah coming from this Jewish culture, they just assumed that to become a follower of Jesus, you had to become a follower of Moses first. And so they hear what's going on and they send teachers to these Gentile believers to kind of correct what Paul and Peter have been teaching them.

And these new teachers teach in order to follow Jesus, you first need to be a kosher keeping 10 commandments following Jewish convert and then you get to follow the Jewish Messiah. And these non-Jewish Romans and Africans and Greeks, they kind of feel stuck because they go, now wait a minute, Paul and Peter told us that we're saved by grace.

And now these new teachers sent from the leaders in Jerusalem are saying, believing in Jesus is great, but you also have to do all these extra things. You got to jump through all these extra hoops and then you can become one of us. Now many of us, that is exactly the reason that we dropped out of church when we were younger.

Many of us here got the feeling from some Sunday school teacher or usher or priest or pastor that we just weren't good enough to be a church person. And so we said, fine, I'd stop going. However, on the flip side, many of you like me grew up in church and honestly you can understand a little bit of the angst of the established religious people here because part of Christianity is an ethical moral standard. Am I right?

I mean, we are told in the Bible, don't lie, don't kill, you know, treat your spouse a certain way, treat your kids a certain way. There are moral standards, right? And sometimes a lot of these new people pouring into church can be a little rough around the edges and they need to be told about the rules, right? And so the truth of here's what's right and here's what's wrong, the commands in the Bible, that feels like it comes into conflict sometimes with the grace of the gospel, right?

And it can be so hard to know what to do because you don't want to dumb down grace, but you don't want to dumb down the moral imperatives of Christianity either. So what do you do? Well, we're going to look at Acts 15 to see how they resolve this exact question. And I got a lot of insight for this message from a sermon I heard by Andy Stanley and some other resources that I put at the end of your notes.

And I just have to warn you, Acts 15 is a little PG-13, okay? And I know some of your parents are here because you got kids singing in the kids' choir. That's awesome. But if you have your kids with you, I just want to warn you, they might ask some awkward questions after church, but this is in the Bible, all right? And also, if you do have your kids with you, you know, we have an amazing new environment for kids in our new 2020 kids building. Put them there. All right, you've been warned.

Acts 15 starting in verse 1. Certain people came down from Judea, that's where Jerusalem was, to Antioch, and they were teaching the believers. So these are the new teachers sent by Jerusalem, and here's their message to unbelievers. Unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.

Okay, what now? What? Yeah, unless you have a little bit of a surgery, you can't be a Christian. Okay, Paul did not tell us about that part. Yeah, you know, all Jewish baby boys and all Jewish adult male converts, they have a little circumcision surgery in order to be Jewish, and since you can't be a Christian without first being Jewish, it follows that you have to have the surgery to be saved.

And of course, what that meant was that the new members' class became mostly women and children. You know, the guys are all sitting in their chariot in the parking lot going, "Honey, you go on in, I really have to think about this a little bit more." Kind of weird, right? But this was serious business. They really believed it just made logical sense that you had to kind of join the Moses Club before you could join the Jesus Club.

And then verse 2, "This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them." So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. They say, "We really need to get this straightened out. This is a really super big deal."

So verse 4, "When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders to whom they reported everything God had done through them." And so Paul reports, "Listen, all over the world, Gentiles have been embracing this message and their imaginations are being captured by Jesus Christ. But you got to know, I haven't been front-loading my message with this requirement that they got to keep the law of Moses. And so we are sending people major mixed messages here. We need to get this all straight."

So Paul and Barnabas have their say, "And then some of the believers who belong to the party of the Pharisees..." Now these are the exact same guys who were part of the group that had killed Jesus, the Pharisees. But they had become followers of Jesus. However they cannot, they're so religious that they cannot let the law which they have obeyed so well their whole lives go. And so they stood up and they said, "Listen, that's great, but the Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses."

Now let's do a little History Channel investigation here because when we say law of Moses, we probably tend to think of the Ten Commandments and we think, you know, who wouldn't want there to teach their kids to obey the Ten Commandments? Don't steal and kill and don't take the name of the Lord in vain and so on. But when they say the law of Moses, they meant the 613 laws in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, plus all of the hundreds of what some called "fence rules" that were invented to uphold and protect those original 613 laws.

For example, in the law of Moses, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah, it says to keep the Sabbath holy. And that was interpreted as don't work on the Sabbath, but that raises the question, what's work? Right? And so there are all kinds of dozens and dozens of extra rules to clarify that, like you could only lift a fork of a certain weight up to your mouth, any heavier than a certain weight, than you were working and you were breaking the Sabbath. And so they had a drawer full of special Sabbath utensils to eat with. And that's just one example.

And they had to memorize and keep all those rules plus circumcision. And so what they were saying is this, Paul and Barnabas, we want you to get back on that boat. We want you to train all those cities and we want you to train all those new believers to adapt their entire lifestyle to obey 613 laws and hundreds of extra sub-rules. And they got to eat different, they got to dress different, they got to rest different. And once they've digested all of that and the guys have a little surgery, then they can be part of the church.

Now most of us here are probably not from a Jewish background, although we are a mixed crowd that's for sure, just like the early church was. But if you're from a Gentile background, you're listening to this and you might think, "Oh, well, that's ridiculous." Yeah, before you judge too harshly. Here's where we're going with this. If you've been part of any kind of a religious organization, if you've been part of a church of any denomination, here's this thinking just creeps in slowly.

You know, have you ever in your life looked at the way somebody dressed or looked at all the piercings somebody has or maybe looked at the tattoos they have or maybe you looked at somebody's car and you thought, "A Christian should not live like that. A Christian shouldn't be driving a gas guzzler car like that. A Christian shouldn't be having tattoos all that. A Christian shouldn't be ruining the bride. A Christian shouldn't listen to that kind of music. A good Christian wouldn't do that. Or good Christians do this." It's what I call Christ-plus thinking and teaching.

And it says accepting Jesus is real great. That's awesome. But to move up from kind of like second-class Christianity to first-class, you also have to do this thing here too. You've got to keep these rules. You've got to do this thing Christ-plus. And that is what this argument is about. It is a universal tendency to drift into that kind of thinking.

So after much discussion, here's what happens. Verse 7, "At the meeting after a long discussion, Peter stood and addressed them as follows. Brothers, you all know that God chose me from among you some time ago to preach to the Gentiles so they could hear the what? The good news." That's the gospel. And the good news and believe.

He says, "God knows people's hearts." Do you believe that? God knows people's hearts. I don't know your heart. And you don't know my heart. I don't know your heart. All I know is what you've got on your body. I don't know your heart. All I know is the clothes you wear. I don't know your heart. All I know is the car you happen to drive. I don't know your heart. All I see is your earrings that you wear in your nose. I don't know your heart. I only know the outside. But God knows people's hearts.

And he confirmed that he accepts Gentiles. Watch this now. Giving them the what? The who? The Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them. What a radical statement that was. For he cleansed their what? Their hearts through faith. And the Pharisees had to be going, "Well, he might have cleansed their hearts, but they're still offensive. They have bad, dirty habits that they need to change." And I mean, you got… It's just impossible almost for us to imagine how offensive Gentiles would have been to an observant Jew in those days.

You know, there are Jewish kosher laws. You can't eat shellfish. You can't eat pork and other kind of laws about unclean food. I just went on a website this last week. It was a cooking website. And they talked about what Romans loved to eat. Here's the top three. Number three is shrimp. Number two was oysters. They had huge aquaculture oyster farms. And the number one thing that Romans loved to eat was pork sausages. So their favorite things were all non-kosher. And these people are going, "No, no, they need to change." And Peter's going, "Hang on."

Verse 10, "So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?" Now, this is huge. Now Peter's making it very personal. He's saying, "You know you can't keep the law perfectly." It's like he's going, "Frank, I see you over there. Frank, you able to keep the law personally? Bob, do you ever have to go up to the temple and do a sacrifice to cover your sin? Why? Because you weren't able to keep the law perfectly? So do you really think that... Does anybody in this room really think that we're saved by keeping the law perfectly? Because we can't keep it perfectly? So does anybody think we're saved by that? No. How are we saved? Because God's gracious to us. Exactly.

He says, "We believe that we are all saved the same way by the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus Christ." You cannot find a clearer declaration of the gospel than that statement right there. Now don't miss this. Jot this down. Two huge truths about the gospel in Peter's speech. Don't miss it. First, the gospel is primarily good news, not good advice. Every other religion basically is advice. And sometimes it's pretty good advice. Here's what you need to do to live a fulfilling life. Here's what you need to do to have less anxiety in your life. Or here's what you need to do to accomplish this goal. It's advice.

But the gospel is something different. The gospel is primarily an announcement. It's news about something that happened. That something that God has accomplished. Jesus died on the cross, taking your sin upon Him. It's good news. And then Peter talks about how the gospel works inside out, not outside in. He says, "God who knows their what? Hearts has cleansed their what? Hearts through faith." He says, "They may not seem pure to you on the outside, but God cleansed their hearts through faith and outward behavior follows a cleansed heart.

Now stay on page one for just a second here. Because let me ask you this. In your own life, did God cleanse your heart even before you dropped that nasty habit? When you came to Christ, did God cleanse your heart or did He wait for you to become perfect? He cleansed your heart. And if God did that for you, then He can do it for other people too, right?

Well Peter goes on and at the end of his remarks, James stands up and this is probably the half-brother of Jesus, which would have made quite an impression. Can you imagine that? Somebody gets up and he probably looked a little bit like Jesus. He probably acted a little bit like Jesus and he's now the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And James clears his throat and he's going to weigh in on this. And what is he going to say?

Well he says three things. First he says, "Listen, it looks to me like God is reaching the Gentiles without asking for our permission." So I don't know why we're having this meeting because God's already doing it. But then the second thing he says is when you look in the Hebrew Scriptures, there are all kinds of references to God reaching out to the Gentiles and to God's chosen people, the Jews being a light to the Gentiles and to God's Messiah being a light to the Gentiles.

And James quotes Joel and he says, "Seems to me like we forgot our mission is supposed to be to the Gentiles." And then he says this. He says, "It is my judgment therefore. We are bringing this conversation to a conclusion that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God." He says, "Guys, I have heard the debate and I know there are religious rules and I know that there are ethical standards and I know there are traditions and I know we have a proud history and I know God is a holy and a righteous God of absolutes and I know sometimes it is going to get very messy and uncomfortable.

But here is what I have concluded. As this movement picks up steam, as it travels around the globe, as people get attracted to Christ, we should not make it difficult for people who are turning to God. We should not make it difficult for people who are turning to God and anything that makes it difficult for people who are seekers and want to turn to God, we should remove that if we can.

Do you realize how incredible this statement is? It shows you James' heart. This is about outreach. This is not about who is already here. This is about who is not here yet. And any possibly unnecessary obstacles that we are putting in the path to faith for people, we should get those out of the way. Instead, he says, we should write to them telling them to, to what? And remember, 613 commands plus circumcision plus hundreds of fence laws, he says we should write to them telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, and from the meat of strangled animals and blood.

The guy taking notes is going, "What's the fourth one?" "Oh, that's it." "What?" "That's it." "That's it. That's the end of the letter." Wait, so you've boiled down 613 rules plus all the fence laws to one sentence, and you left out circumcision. Yeah, that's it. And by the way, really, it's only about one thing. And I explain this more thoroughly in the Acts Odyssey book, but I think all these commands are really about staying away from the pagan temples, because all these activities take place at pagan temples.

And I believe James is basically saying, "You are saved by grace, but Jesus is not just some god you got to add to your collection." And this was important for the pagans to understand who are polytheists. He's saying, "You have to make a choice. You've got to call it. You've got to make a decision about who you follow, and you've got to get out of all those things that are taking place and associated with pagan worship, and that's it." That's the end. Seal up the envelope. Take that letter.

And so the men were sent off, verse 30, and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. And I can just imagine the gathering. What a historic moment. All the Gentile believers are there, they're packing the place that they were meeting in, because here comes the letter from the leaders in the church at Jerusalem. And so they opened the envelope, and all the guys in the meeting are like, "What's it going to be? Surgery or no surgery? Surgery or no surgery? We really want to know what's in that letter."

Next verse, "The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message. I bet they were." But listen, this isn't just relevant to some historical dispute 20 centuries ago. You and I need to metaphorically reread this letter to ourselves throughout our lives. Your biggest need is to preach the gospel to yourself over and over and over. We need to be re-gospled over and over, because we tend to forget the decision of the Jerusalem Council very easily.

We can become complicators instead of simplifiers, right, when it comes to our faith, and drift from that simple and pure focus on Jesus that changes people from the inside out by the power of the Holy Spirit. I don't know if you saw this in the news a couple of months ago in August. An oil rig off the coast of Scotland drifted onto the shoreline here. Look at this video. Now, how in the world did this happen? Crazy video.

Obviously, nobody steered the big rig deliberately onto the shoreline. It fell victim to what scientists call slow drift. These huge offshore structures are made to withstand giant waves in violent storms, and they can withstand any pressure that's vertical, but they are vulnerable to slow drift horizontally. The tiny, gentle, yawing motion of the tide that almost imperceptibly increases tension on the mooring, and unless they're constantly measuring that tension, these giant rigs can be such victims of slow drift that they can break free, as you can see, and completely go adrift and shipwreck.

And the same exact thing can happen to your faith. You can withstand giant pressure and great tragedy and huge storms, but your faith gets shipwrecked and your joy is killed by slow drift from the gospel of grace and into subtle performance-oriented religion, and Christianity becomes churchianity. And that's why week in, week out, what we do here is so ridiculously simple. We just try to read gospel to you every single weekend.

I don't know if you've noticed this or how long you've been here, but has anybody picked up yet that I basically only have one sermon topic that I talk about every week? Grace, right? I just keep coming out of different verses. Occasionally, I throw in a new picture of my grandson, but it's really the same sermon every single week because it's the only one you have to have, because every Christian, every church, every denomination, and every generation all throughout history is going to feel the tug, the slow drift, the same way the church does here in Acts 15, from grace to legalism.

And there have been terrible consequences, shipwrecks. I know people right here in Santa Cruz who are very wary about accepting any invitations to church because they were raised in a church that started out very sincere, but did the slow drift and ended up teaching Christ plus. In some form or another, yes, you can be a Christian, but you also have to obey this strict diet, and how can you say you don't have to? We got it right out of the pages of the Bible. Look, there it is.

And you also have to worship only on Sundays or Saturdays to be a good Christian, and only in a house or only in a church building or only in our commune or only read the authorized King James Version, or you have to speak in tongues or you have to take communion this exact way, or you have to do whatever to be a real Christian. Now there is so much to say about this that we cannot possibly cover it all in one message. So let me wrap up with how to avoid the drift.

Two drifts we got to avoid. First the drift toward insiders and away from outsiders. Every local church from time to time slowly drifts toward insiders, right? The people who've always been there, who know where to park, who know where to take their kids, who know all the songs, who think this is our deal. Every church including this one drifts toward becoming insider focused.

And the second thing we have to avoid is the drift toward law and away from grace. I have to tell you, this is so relevant. Whenever we do our 101 class, our members class, new members, we got another one coming up November 20th, by the way. You can just show up, free pizza, lunch. But every time we do over lunch, I get to know people and I always like to ask, tell me about your spiritual journey.

And every time there will be a sizable group of people who say something like this, I grew up in church, I went to vacation Bible school, I went to summer camp, I even went to a Christian high school. And until five or six months ago when I started coming here, I'd never heard about grace. And I go, I know that millions of churches teach grace, so what do they teach at that church then? And then they say something like this.

Well, they might have taught the gospel, but what I heard, what came across was, don't drink, don't go to parties, don't watch our rated movies, don't listen to this kind of music, don't do this, don't do that, go here, don't go there, etc. So sad. How does that happen? Well let me tell you one way I think it happens. A big church in Texas was once recruiting me to come on staff and they sent me their board policy manual.

And I showed it to my wife and to Mark and some of my other friends here. It was the size of a small phone book, I kid you not. All the policies that this church board had adopted over the years. And when I say policies, they had a position, an official church board position on what colors of nail polish were worldly and which ones were acceptable for Christian women to have on their fingers. I wish I was kidding.

They had a policy on Disneyland, which was don't go because Disney didn't denounce certain groups that also went to Disneyland, so they were boycotting Disney. Official position of the church board. They had official positions on what kind of hair length was acceptable for men and so on. They had on everything and I get why? Because people ask me all the time, I get emails, what is our church position on this or on that? Especially during election years. What's our church, our church position? Tell me how to think, you know?

And so the natural tendency of every local church, every local church pastor is to develop an official position on this and on that. But listen, I know I drive a lot of people crazy, but for 20 years I've been saying, I don't want to have official positions, I want to have conversations. Because that's what Jesus did.

I mean, just think about this. Day one, day one, Jesus is gathering his disciples, he's also got a bunch of, already got a bunch of fishermen and religious people and then he goes over, he needs one more disciple. He goes over to Matthew who's a tax collector, which means he's a Roman collaborator and he's got Simon the Zealot who's totally against the Romans over here and Simon the Zealot's head is exploding and he's going, you can't give Matthew, he's got to repent of that, he's got to leave that, he's got to denounce the Romans first before he can join us.

And Jesus is saying, calm down, Simon. Matthew, I tell you what. Why don't you follow me? Just follow me, just walk along with me and let's see what happens to you. You can't do that, Jesus. And now look what's happening, Matthew's inviting us to his house and he's throwing a party and all of his other tax collector friends are there and all of their friends who are sinners, there's even prostitutes there, oh, what is happening to our movement?

And Jesus goes, yeah, does this freak you out? I'm going to tell you what else, I'm going to call Matthew's boss, Zacchaeus, who is the chief tax collector to follow me and I'm going to go to a woman who's been caught in adultery in the moment that all the Pharisees want to stone her to death and I'm going to say to them, you know what, go stone yourselves and I'm going to say to her, I don't condemn you, now get up and follow me and don't do that anymore.

And I'm going to go to a Samaritan woman who is living with a guy and who's had five husbands and she's going to become a missionary. And the legal is that just, again, they just have to be going nuclear over this. But Jesus is saying, here's the way it works, they start to follow me and then as they go along the journey, they change by the power of the Holy Spirit from the inside out and churches that are okay with that, churches that are okay with the messiness of grace and the potential of being misunderstood because you're emphasizing grace, those churches are the churches that get to experience the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit changing lives from the inside out.

And I can give you hundreds of examples of this. One time I, I could give you a hundred examples but I'll never forget one, a guy comes up to these steps after one of our services and he has a backpack with him and he says, I got something I just got to leave here at the altar and he thrusts his hand into his backpack and I'm thinking, what's happening? And he takes out all these baggies, his whole stash of pot and he just puts it right here on the steps.

And I go, what's this about? And he says, man, he goes, I've been listening to your sermons and I've been coming here for a few months and I'm just giving this up. I said, so what sermon about pot are you referring to? And he said, no, no, no sermon about pot. But he goes, the way you talk about God and the way you talk about Jesus and how much he loves us, I accept that Jesus and what happens is it's true.

He said, it's true that the Holy Spirit comes in and he starts to change you. And he said, I've heard the Holy Spirit say, yet now you call Jesus your Lord and savior, but your Lord is pot because you're a slave to whatever has mastered you. And so you got to be a servant of Jesus, not a slave to that chemical anymore. And he said, this is what God is telling me to do. You see? You start following Jesus and then he changes you from the inside out.

If we made position papers on everything people were asking me to make, here's a position paper on issue A, here's a position paper on issue B, here's a position paper on issue C, and you know what? Those position papers become, they become a paper wall that people perceive and they go, oh, I can't become part of that church because I don't believe those things yet. They're not even believers in Jesus yet.

And a church that's okay with saying, come and follow along with us as we follow Jesus, that's a church that is going to see some amazing things happen. So two commitments. Let's close with this that I think we need to do to try to counteract the drift. First, to be bold in reaching out. That's how to overcome the first drift to being insider focused. Invite people who don't consider themselves church people to church.

Because you know what happens when you invite your friends? You start seeing all of this through a different lens, not from an insider's lens anymore, but from somebody who considers themselves an outsider and you go, oh, we should make this more clear and let's change that and let's change the way we do this. And boy, I need to be friendlier to people. I don't recognize it. And you start to see every, and it stops the drift toward insiderness.

And then second, let's make a commitment to err on the side of grace. Now stay there for just a second because let me just say, I believe in our culture this will become increasingly difficult. But when there's a person who's rough around the edges and hard to love and far from holy, but who needs God's love, if we can say to each other, what should we do about that person? I don't know what to do. And I don't want to make a mistake, but if we're going to make any mistake, I'd rather err on the side of grace than on the side of legalism.

If we're going to go too far either way, let's go too far on the side of grace. Because aren't you glad God went toward the side of grace in your situation? Aren't you glad he didn't say, I'm going to love and accept you, but here's 613 things you've got to do first? Aren't you glad that God is the one who knew your heart and long before you cleaned up your act?

You know how grace works, don't you? Long before you cleaned up, long before you walked into the door of a church, long before you stopped smoking or shooting or drinking or clicking on or going to or hanging with or doing whatever it is that you were doing that was self-destructive, long before you stopped that, God heard you cry out, "God, help me. Help me." And he even worked in your life before you even said that little prayer to enable you to have the faith to say that prayer.

So God's grace worked in your heart on the inside first, and then he starts to change you from the inside out. Do you believe that's true of what he did in your life? Yes. I believe it's true of me. Then why should we not err on the side of grace with others? Why would we not first want people to know Jesus and say, "You know, politically and a lot of other ways, we don't see eye to eye, but let's walk together with Jesus and then let them grow in him."

Let's not be a church that does the slow drift because I believe James was right when he said, "We should not make it difficult for those who are turning to God." And listen, if we can be intentional about that as a church, that all this exciting acts stuff, it can happen again. Amen.

Loving Heavenly Father, God, thank you so much for your grace. And God, help us to get this church thing right. It's so hard to know what to do sometimes, but God, we just want people to not get the wrong impression that following Jesus is primarily about a list of rules, but it's about you changing us by the power of your Holy Spirit starting with our heart.

God help us to believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, to create new things in us and to create new things in other people. God, we know you are a holy God. You are a righteous God. That righteousness and holiness will never be achieved through just outward appearances. It must be from the inside out. And so God, I pray that if there are people here this morning who are thinking, "I want to receive that free gift of grace right now that they just open up their hearts to you in this moment and say, 'I receive you, Lord. I don't understand all I'm doing, but please purify my heart through faith. Save me by your grace and then begin to change me.'" Thank you for your mighty salvation. In Jesus' name, amen.