DNA of TLC

Well, let's talk about DNA. I was astonished to read this week some interesting facts about DNA. Did you know that human beings, raise your hand if you're a human being, human beings, I'm talking about you, have 50% of the same DNA as cabbage? That is absolutely true. I'm not making this up. We have 98% shared DNA with gorillas and virtually 100% the same DNA as dolphins. Really, it's a matter of just the way certain sequences are ordered that makes us different than dolphins.

Show of hands, how many of you feel instantly cooler knowing that you're related to dolphins somehow? How many of you, frankly, this morning feel more like cabbage? Can I see that show of hands? How many of you are sitting next to somebody who actually resembles it? No, just kidding. But you look at all this, our DNA is so close, right? I mean, in fact, we all share eyes, we share lungs, we share blood, well, except for the cabbage. But apparently, just a tiny, tiny tweak in the DNA is the difference between a human being and a gorilla, or a human being and a dolphin, you know, in God's providence, right?

But listen, it's the same exact thing, follow me here, with church DNA. All churches have congregations. All churches have pastors or preachers at least. All churches have the same exact Bible. All Christian churches, obviously, certainly. But apparently, even though on the surface, the DNA is the same, a tiny tweak in the DNA can be the difference between a church and a cult, between a healthy congregation and a toxic congregation. And this is why it's so important to look at our DNA at least once a year.

I like to step back and remind us all, what are we really supposed to be all about here? Because it's so easy for any church to get off track. You know, I was reading an article by Philip Yancey, one of my favorite writers the other day, and he says this, "Recently, I've been asking a question of strangers, for example, of seatmates on an airplane. When I say the words 'Evangelical Christian,' what comes to mind? Mostly, I hear political descriptions, strident pro-life activists, gay rights opponents, internet censors. I hear references to the moral majority, which disbanded years ago. Not once, not once have I heard a description of grace." He says, "Apparently, grace is not the aroma Christians give off in the world."

Now, he wrote that a few years ago, and it's only gotten worse. This message comes from a real place of passion for me because I've become so alarmed at how much the church in America seems to be getting off track. It's almost like our DNA as churches has been exposed to something that's caused it to develop dangerous mutations. And so we need to go in for kind of a church tune-up and make sure we are the kind of church that Jesus actually came to start. And make sure that we are the kind of church that our neighbors and friends are going to be drawn to. The kind of church that's going to cause us to grow and not to shrivel.

And so let's discover the kind of church Jesus came to start by discovering the kind of ministry and the kind of person Jesus was. And for that, let's go to the Gospel of John, Chapter 1, Verses 14 through 18. John, as you may know, opens his Gospel with 18 verses that we would call a prologue, kind of like the title crawl at the beginning of a Star Wars movie, right? Here's what happened before this movie started, and this is going to set up the plot for the whole rest of the movie, right? And that's what John does with his Gospel.

His prologue sets up everything that follows in his Gospel. And here's the way he kind of ends his prologue. Here's what he wants us to know about Jesus and who Jesus was and the movement that he came to start. And our DNA comes from this. As Christians, he says, "The Word," that's his name for it, "Jesus as he existed in his pre-existence, the Word became flesh, became human, and dwelt among us." This is John's way of saying, "God entered our world as a human being. The Creator became part of creation. The Infinite became finite. The Eternal One entered time."

And this is really John's theme in his whole Gospel, and John cannot ever get over this. It just completely blows his mind. In fact, much later, John writes in the epistle of 1 John, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, and we have seen with our eyes, we have looked at which our hands have touched." This we proclaim to you concerning the Word of Life. John is absolutely blown away by the fact that he personally has heard, he has seen, he has looked into the eyes of Jesus Christ, who he came to believe is God.

The fact that God didn't leave us alone on this broken planet, that he came into our planet to save us out of his love. You know, you wonder why John refers to himself in his Gospel, not by name. You know, he never calls himself John. He calls himself the one whom Jesus loved, because he never ever ever got over the awe that the Eternal Creator, God, he loves me. And I heard him, and I saw him with my own eyes, and my own hands touched him, and I just can't get over it, it just blows my mind.

He says, "We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father." Now, what does he mean by glory? He's seen his glory. Glory is a way in the Bible of talking about somebody's glorious essence, the core of their person that just makes them shine. Sometimes when I hear Elizabeth of Toronto, another great musician, up here singing and playing, I just think, "Man, I'm seeing them in their glory." Or when I see a parent, you know, playing with their child, I'm thinking, "I am seeing glory right there." Well, on another level, John's saying, "Let me tell you about the glory that I saw in Jesus."

In the Bible, when you talk about God's glory, it means something very, very specific. Back in Exodus, Moses says to God, "Now show me your glory." And you can tell Moses thinks he's going to get some kind of a nuclear blast of power. And then in verse 6 of the next chapter, the Lord begins to describe his glory, his essence. And he says, "Here's my glory. The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands." He just keeps pouring his love on us and forgiving wickedness and rebelliousness and rebellion and sin.

He's saying, "This is my--" It's interesting to me. Whenever human beings describe God, we tend to start with the omnis. He's omnipotent. He's omniscient. You know, he's omnipresent. God doesn't start with the omnis, although I believe all those things and they're true. God starts with his personality. He says, "That's my glory. I'm all these things in perfection." And so when John says, "We have seen his glory," he is saying, "Jesus Christ is the incarnation of that description." We saw compassion. We saw kindness. We saw forgiveness when Jesus touched lepers and taught prostitutes and forgave torturers. Man, man, we saw glory and it blew us away.

And he says, "It was the glory of the one and only son who came from the Father full of grace and truth." Not 50% grace and 50% truth. 100%. He was full of both. Now skip to verse 16. "Out of his fullness we have all received grace upon grace." Man, that's a lot of grace for one passage. He's full, full of grace and truth. And we've received grace upon grace. And the word there literally means grace replacing grace. It never runs out to you.

You know what this means? This means God will never say to you, "That's it. You have disappointed me one too many times. You keep asking me for forgiveness for your sin. I've had it. You're out." You ever worry about that? I do. But this says it'll never happen because it's out of his fullness that we receive grace replacing grace replacing grace. God has this infinite reservoir of grace that never runs out. And that means right now, whatever you walked into church with, whatever sin you're facing, whatever failure you're facing, whatever sorrow you're facing, God's grace is all sufficient for you.

Out of his fullness we get grace after grace after grace after grace. And he says, "And I'm not done telling you about grace, for the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth," Say grace and truth out loud. "Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." He says, there was always grace even in the Old Testament, but Jesus is the one who revealed it because he says, "No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son who is himself God and is at his Father's side has revealed him."

Listen, Jesus is the one who shows us what God is like. This is very important because you ever read the Bible and you're like, "Wow, sometimes in the Old Testament it gets pretty violent." Right? Or sometimes, "I don't understand God in this passage." I don't get John saying, "Well, that's why God sent Jesus in human form to show you." I know it's confusing, but this is what I'm like. You know what I love? This Greek word can also be translated, "explained." Jesus explained God to us.

Sometimes I don't get God. For sure. If he wouldn't be God if I got him all the time. But God's like, "What you really need to understand about me, the word became flesh. He came down into our world and said, 'There's a lot about me you could never understand, but let me just tell you what I want you to understand. I love you and I sacrifice my life for you and I'm full of grace upon grace upon grace upon grace for you.'

And you know, honestly, I've told you this before. I got this idea from a guy who used to be a chaplain at Harvard University. It's such a good question. He said when people, students used to come to him at Harvard or professors and say to him, "Yeah, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God anymore." He'd always tell them, "Would you be willing to tell me about the God you don't believe in?" What kind of a God do you not believe in? Because often he would say, "I don't believe in that kind of a God either." The kind of God I believe in based on scripture, because this is what the Bible tells us. This is the kind of God you are to believe in is Jesus.

What does Jesus show about God? And I used to tell that even to my own children as teenagers when they would say, "I don't understand this. I don't like this about the Old Testament or whatever." Well, we're not Old Testamentians. We're not Mosasians. We're not Ten-Camentians. We're Christians. You know, when I'm confused about God, I look to Jesus and that's what explains to me what God is like.

Now, that's our text. But now I want to zoom in on a couple of words that you probably noticed pop up a lot in that passage. These are two foundational values at TLC, key parts of our DNA. And if we stick to these two truths, we're going to be okay. And if we don't, we're in danger. These are like two twin guardrails to keep churches and Christians from going toxic or cultic or weird. They are that important. And yet I see Christians in churches everywhere now straying badly from these two key strains in our DNA that change the expression of our DNA as a church from church to cult.

So we've got to make sure we've got these two things. And as you may have noticed, if you get out your notes or download them at TLC.org/notes, I made the outline today in Roman numerals because it's Super Bowl weekend and you apparently have to use Roman numerals. It's the law. So Roman numeral one is grace. Say grace out loud with me. Grace. A lot of grace in that passage. It's tough to define because it's such a big word, but really grace means giving favor to somebody who didn't earn it and can't ever repay it.

Like saw this headline yesterday, man who won tickets to the Super Bowl gives them to friend with stage four cancer for a bit of joy. And the article tells the story of this man, Sean Farrell. He won two tickets to the Super Bowl and a trip to Arizona as part of a prize, a raffle or something that he was in, completely didn't deserve it and didn't earn it. All grace to him. But then he gave his prize to this man, Rob Oakley, who's going through cancer treatment. They met on their dodgeball team in Baltimore. And Sean wrote him and said, I'd like to offer you something that I hope gives you and your family a bit of joy.

You'll understand that's not a religious thing, but it's still a picture of grace. Sean won the tickets, didn't deserve them. They were just a gift to him. And then he overflowed with grace and gave them away to somebody else. And that's what happens when you and I get, get God's grace to us in Christ. It just starts to overflow. You know, I got an email Friday that once again, praise God, TLC raised the most meals for the food bank, second harvest of any organization or business in Santa Cruz County last year. Praise God for that.

But you know, if you attend here, that's never something that we guilt anybody into doing. It just kind of happens as an overflow of living in the grace of God. So grace in the Bible starts with this. You're saved by God's grace toward you in Christ, not by your good deeds. I've told some of you how I was recording some radio station liners in my career as a broadcaster. Before I became a pastor, I was in broadcasting and I still is kind of a side hustle. Sometimes I do little liners for radio stations and liners are those things they play out of commercial breaks like tune it in and lock it in. AM 1080 KSCO, that kind of thing. And yes, that's me.

So I'm in a studio recording like dozens of these liners and the producer comes on to talk back on the other side of the glass and he goes, I hear you're a pastor. I said yes. And he goes, well, I don't believe any of that bull. And he went on to use a very descriptive word about how terribly thought churches were. And then he just keeps going, telling me all the things wrong with church. And I'm starting to wonder, you do realize you're paying me by the hour, right? But he's on a roll. And he says things like, I grew up in church. And he says, I can tell you something on the walls of our Sunday school class was the Ten Commandments and the message was loud and clear. Try real hard to do these things and God might let you into heaven when you die.

But then as an adult, I became an alcoholic and I learned something that is another unprintable word, you know, that he gave me because he said, I learned that trying harder to be good doesn't work. He said, let me tell you something. The answer is not to try harder to be good like you churches tell us it is. The answer is to admit that you are powerless over your self-destructive behavior and to let go of self-effort and striving and let God. Not what you churches teach. I said, but that's the gospel. We admit they were powerless over our sin and we let Jesus be Lord and he transforms us. It's all a gift of grace.

And we got into a great conversation and he began coming to this church until he moved away from the area. But he had had a misconception that many, many Christians do that trying harder to be better is Christianity. The truth is on the cross, Jesus paid our sin, our karmic debt as it were so we could have new life. Now, honestly, I totally understood that part of grace growing up in church. I fell into another common fallacy, which is this. I'm saved by grace. I accepted Jesus. But now it's up to me to try real hard to be good. And I became a miserable performance oriented Christian. It was all about the shoulds and the ought tos. I should be praying more, reading the Bible more, helping more. And I never felt like I was doing enough.

And then one day I was reading the book of Galatians in the Bible. When this verse hit me right between the eyes. Chapter 3, verse 3. How foolish can you be? After starting your new lives in the spirit, are you now trying to achieve your goal through your own human effort? It was like the forehead slap moment of my entire existence when I was like, you mean that's wrong? You just described my entire life. I accept Jesus, but then I just try real hard to be good, right? And the Apostle Paul's like, no, that's totally foolish because that doesn't work.

And I kept reading and I found that what the Bible actually teaches is not just that we're saved by grace. We grow by grace. And when I finally got that, I felt like I went from living in a rowboat, trying to slog ahead in my spiritual growth through my own effort to a sailboat just propelled by the wind of God's grace. Just living in the breeze of grace, thinking about God's grace to me, receiving God's grace to me, meditating on God, rejoicing in how it's poured out on your life. That changes the way you see yourself. It changes your motivations, changes your actions. It changes the way you see other people.

And the real genius of grace is that it frees you from an obsession on sin and on yourself and on your own performance to contemplation of the beauty of Jesus. And then you start seeing God's gifts of grace everywhere in creation. And then new vistas start opening up in the Bible. You start wanting to read it out of joy. And then you start treating other people with grace because you see how much you've been graced. It's just a complete game changer. And so to double down on this this year to help you more fully discover grace, we have this pre-Easter series, "Seven Days, The Last Days of Jesus and the Gospel of Mark." You're going to see how the way of grace is in every day of that week.

And of course, culminating at the cross and the empty tomb. And then after Easter, I'm so stoked about this, the book of Ephesians, it will blow your mind on the topic of grace. You think you know grace? I don't think you... I mean, if you really dig into every single verse in Ephesians, it's going to just change your life. When you get grace, then it just overflows naturally.

I was talking this week to Viji Kamov, one of our global partners here during "Wow! Viji" directs the children's home called Little Flock in India that TLC supports. Well, she told me about these two women. Paramala on the right is HIV positive. And many years ago, when her husband, who also was HIV positive, died, Paramala and her two little children were kicked out of the family house, and they were living on the streets. And in desperation, she brings her kids to Little Flock children's home.

Paramala, the mom, had to find work many miles away, but she would come back and visit her kids occasionally. Well, one day, Viji sees her, and Paramala just looks awful, and Viji thinks, "She's going to die soon. I need to tell her about Jesus." And so she starts, and Paramala says, "Stop!" And let me tell you what happened the last time I visited. She said, "Oh, the Little Flock children gathered around me, and enthusiasm told me about Jesus. And I trusted in Him. I prayed with the little kids to receive Christ. He has saved me. It's changed my life." And Viji tells me what's interesting is they never really taught evangelism to the little kids. They just love Jesus, so it just overflowed naturally and compellingly.

Now, listen to this. Paramala says, "What I find so compelling about Christianity is that in my tradition, it's all about me laboriously climbing up to the next level of spirituality, maybe over lifetimes, me going up by my own efforts. But I discovered that Jesus climbed all the way down to my level." An HIV-positive woman in India living on the streets, the word became flesh. And here's the rest of the story. Paramala is still alive. She is thriving. Standing next to her in this picture is her now-grown daughter, Raja Shwari, who just finished her bachelor's degree in nursing. She entered the medical field to help people, she said, like her mother.

And it gets better because Raja Shwari now is both a financial supporter and a volunteer for Little Flock. She received grace there when she and her sibling and her mom had nothing living on the streets. And now Raja Shwari overflows with grace. You see how it works? It's grace that changes you. And that's why it's such an important part of our DNA. Say grace again. Grace and Roman numeral number two is truth. Say truth. Truth.

John says Jesus was full of grace and truth. Can I be honest with you? It astonishes me how much of what passes for Christianity is just not in the Bible. Your faith isn't based on your feelings. Your faith isn't based on what some pastor tells you is true. Your faith isn't based on whatever the latest hot Christian book tells you is true. It's based on the Bible and often times those are not the same thing. So we have to be discerning.

This is so important. Years ago I got an email from a woman in our church named Amy and it's still one of my favorite emails I've ever gotten. This is so good. She says, "When I became a Christian, I bought many Christian books on the topic of being a godly wife and mother. For years I toiled at being this ideal Christian woman that I read about. But I measured my performance as a Christian on the feedback I received from my husband. If he was happy, I was being a good Christian. If he was unhappy, I needed to try harder." It began a very unhealthy cycle which ultimately led to despair, resentment, depression.

On the outside everything looked perfect. On the inside I was slowly dying. And it was then that the Lord showed me of course being a loving wife and mother is important. However, it should not be the measure of who you are. Jesus truly is the only measure we need and we are told in Scripture that we're his bride and that there's nothing we can do or not do to change the way he sees us. It's grace upon grace, his beloved precious ones. And she wraps up with this. She says, "I remember reading one very popular book and the author said she never let her girls be idle. They were not allowed to watch TV unless they were accomplishing something. Polishing their nails was the example she gave. And it suddenly dawned on me, 'Not all Christian books are good.' This was a revelation to me."

She says, "I used to want to teach a class on how to be a godly wife. Now I want to tell women, 'Burn those books and focus on God's grace.' Thankfully our amazing Lord has worked it all for good." What set her free? Grace and truth. So this is why we want to double down on truth. This is your application. This year commit to really getting rooted in God's Word. We've got midweek Bible studies coming up here. We've got a Bible conference coming up. The Saturday before Mother's Day. We're bringing in professors from Christian colleges and seminaries all over the nation to answer questions like, "How can I trust the Bible? What does the Bible say about this and that?" A fall series on exploring God, answering the top questions about God and the Bible.

This is because grace and truth, when they work together, answer what I think are the two most popular misconceptions about God in American culture. A lot of people think of God as what you could call the strict librarian God. And God's always going around shushing you and pointing to the rules and saying, "You're fine and no backpacks and quiet." And those who grow up in kind of a rule-based Christianity and see God this way, what happens is two things. They either become rule or verse. They run from church and they become wild. Or they become overly committed to rules to the point where they become like little librarians. They love going around catching people, misbehaving and shushing people and pointing out how people are wrong.

And by the way, in our culture, it's not just religious people that are little librarians. We have a culture right now with little librarians who love to go around shushing people and wagging their fingers at people. Somebody once said, "You know, America never really did escape fundamentalism. We just keep getting new kinds of fundamentalists." So some people think of this strict librarian God. Other people think of God as kind of a vague cloud. You know, he's this indefinable cloud and God's good in some kind of a vague way, but I can't nail it down. He's just like whatever I define him to be.

And the problem with that is you're never challenged. You're never grow. And you don't really even have any solid foundation in times of trouble. Grace and truth answer both of these misconceptions. To the strict librarian legalist, the Bible says, "No, Jesus was a person of grace. He showed us the face of grace and love." And to the people thinking of God as just sort of a vague cloud, know God revealed himself to us in truth in God's Word so we can know him and have a firm foundation and know his will for our lives. Grace and truth go together. Say grace and truth with me. Grace and truth.

But let me wrap up with this. If grace and truth are what we are all about, how do we know we're succeeding? What's our goal at TLC? You know, think about it this way. If you're a salesman, you know that you're successful because of your sales metrics. Back when I was in broadcasting, I knew I was successful because of ratings. How does a pastor know that he's successful? I used to think it was maybe attendance or like number of people baptized. But you know, the Bible actually doesn't propose that. But it does talk about one thing. One word, fruit. Say that word with me out loud. Fruit, the fruit of the Spirit.

The Bible says the fruit of the Spirit, if we're teaching grace and truth correctly, then what's going to happen is we're going to become people of love and joy and peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We're not successful if we just get a bunch of rule followers, a bunch of people who can quote Bible verses, a bunch of people who know the right doctrine. It's if this is what we are exuding. Really, that's the glory of God through individual personalities in your own life and in your leaders' lives too.

Sadly, I'm seeing so many Christians today following leaders who they may be charismatic, they may even be teaching truth, but they're so combative and so negative and so aggressive. You know, Jesus said, "Be careful, false teachers will come among you." Here's how you can tell. He said, "By their fruit, you shall know them." He didn't say, "By their skill, you shall know them." He didn't even say, "By their doctrine, you shall know them." He didn't say, "By their following, you shall know them." He said, "Fruit, if they are not people of peace and patience and kindness, if after listening to somebody's teaching, you feel like you just had three red bowls of anger and you feel all combative and aggressive, stay away because that teacher is poison.

Because that's not the DNA of the church, that's going to lead the church astray into some kind of a cultic weirdo stuff. Listen, for my 30 years as a pastor here from day one, I've been praying that these two things would be part of the DNA of our church, grace and truth, God's word, not some Christian fad. I pray that this would be part of our DNA from front to back, top to bottom, inside the nucleus of every cell, of every part of this body, that our DNA would radiate grace and truth and counter the people who are saying these days that Christian churches should be about something else.

I believe Twin Lakes right now is right on the edge of some really powerful growth. We're growing, there's so many more new people coming in right now, it's so wonderful to see the growth. But if we don't double down on these twin guardrails, we can go weird. If we stay with this emphasis, then our DNA is going to be expressed and we're going to look like the body of Christ in Santa Cruz. So church, let's double down on these two things. Let's pray for these two things. Let's commit to these two things, grace and truth. Say them together again with me and say it like you mean it, grace and truth.

What are we about here at Twin Lakes Church? We are about grace and truth. Lord, help us in a world where churches can be led so astray and where Christians can get so angry and where people sometimes see the worst examples of Christian behavior. Help us as a church to be known for grace and truth, even though imperfect. Help us to just be a fountain of those things like clear water in a polluted world. And God, I pray that if anybody here today has maybe been under the impression that they need to try harder to be good to earn your favor now they're hearing the message of grace and maybe it's clicking for the first time that they would right now, right now, just say, Jesus, I don't understand it all, but I want to receive your amazing grace. Thank you for paying my kind of karmic debt on the cross and I receive it, rejoice in it. Help me to be transformed by it. In Jesus' name, Amen.