Fusion: Inside Out 1/27/11

Fusion: Inside Out

Last week we looked at two very important lessons that Paul had for the Jewish-Christians who were dominant in the early Roman church. God does not grade on a curve. Judgment is not a place where grace lives.

These are two concepts that I think are pretty easy to wrap our heads around, and yet they are concepts that are very difficult for us to live out.

In reality, many of us have spent our lives feeling like we can't measure up to the people around us, much less to what God wants from us, and so we learn very early on to fake it. We fake it, or we give up hope all together.

The reason we do this is because we are convinced that God is really concerned with what things look like. We pretend to have everything all together. We give the Sunday school answers. We pretend like we are struggling with sin. We try to say the right things. We try to do the right things. We try to do all of it around the right people. All the while, we are dying on the inside because we are convinced that God can't love us until we clean up all this stuff. So we try and fail, or we fake it.

I think if we peel back the layers of where this thinking comes from we will quickly discover that it is a message we understood from a religious system. An organized system of right and wrong, good and bad held up a measuring tape to us, pointed out all that ways we didn't measure up, and left us more certain than ever that we were too far off, too far away.

This is a place where we need to understand something very basic, but so very important.

Jesus is not a religion. He is not a system of right and wrong, good and bad. Jesus is not the founder of a new spiritual organization.

He is the Son of God. Jesus is where our hope and our victory comes from, and some of us have spent far too long claiming Jesus and then putting our hope in another system.

This is really the crucial issue that the Jewish Christians in Rome were dealing with. They had believed in Christ and what He had done, but they were still trying to cling on to their religious system, and all of the poison that came with it.

We have all been burned or scarred in some way by a religious system, or by well-meaning people who communicated Jesus through a language of earthly organizational kingdoms.

So, I want us, instead, to hear the language of Jesus.

In John 4, Jesus encounters a women at a well near Samaria. This woman is part of a hated group of people to the Jews. Jesus, speaks to this woman and asks her for water. In verse 9, we see her response...

"The woman was shocked, for the Jews refuse to have anything to do with the Samaritans."

As the conversation goes from there, we quickly see Jesus expose all the things in her life that she is trying so desperately to hide; multiple marriages, sexual impurity with the boyfriend at home. Then it get's to the heart of that matter. This woman, a woman who, based on the religious system, Jesus should have hated and refused to speak to, has spent her life confused by the right and wrong of the religious systems. Where should I worship? What should I do? Jesus answers her questions with a profound statement in verse 23...

"But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way."

Jesus' point to this woman who had been left out by the religious systems was that God is looking for people who worship in spirit and in truth.

God isn't looking for people who went to the right church service, who cleaned their lives up so they looked better than the people outside. God is not concerned with appearances.

In Matthew 9, we see Jesus encounter a tax collector. In the first century, a tax collector was the lowest of the low, the worst of the worst, sinners and gentiles were though more highly of than these. Here is how this encounter unfolds in verse 9...

"As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. 'Follow me and be my disciple,' Jesus said to him."

Jesus, here encounters another person who the religious systems had given up on, people that were to far off, too far gone, too messy, too dirty. His invitation to people like this? Follow Me.

Jesus doesn't say to Matthew, "quit your job, clean your life up, start going to temple like you should, and follow the right and wrongs of the law."

Jesus has a simple invitation... Follow me.

Next thing we know, Jesus is hanging out at Matthew's house, having dinner with other tax collectors and sinners. So, not only is Jesus offering an invitation to the sinners, to the messy, to those of us who are so far off, but He wants to come into our house, into our lives, into our relationships. He invites us to let Him in. That is Jesus.

The religious system will always respond in the opposite way, as we see in verse 11...

"But when the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with such scum?"

Character of Jesus= Follow Me, I don't care what things look like on the outside. Let me come in to your home, life, relationships, etc.

Character of religious systems= Why are you hanging around with such scum? Those people are bad, and we want only the people that are good.

Paul had spent the entire first half of his life wrapped up in a religious system, convinced he was doing the right thing. He was doing all of the thing that a religious person should do. Then he met Jesus.

This is what Paul learned from meeting Jesus and leaving behind broken and dead religious systems...

²⁸ For you are not a true Jew (truly religious) just because you were born of Jewish parents or because you have gone through the ceremony of circumcision. ²⁹ No, a true Jew (true follower) is one whose heart is right with God. And true circumcision is not merely obeying the letter of the law; rather, it is a change of heart (transformation) produced by God’s Spirit. And a person with a changed heart seeks praise from God, not from people.

-Romans 2:28-29 (NLT)

Jesus isn't concerned with what things look like. Pretending like we have it all together isn't fooling Him. Jesus wants to transform us from the inside out, as we respond to His invitation to follow. When that is our understanding of grace, we won't fake it for the sake of looking good to others. When that is our understanding of grace, we will go to those who are far off and offer an invitation, not condemnation.

*If you are wanting to dig deeper into this subject, I recommend Francis Chan's book, Crazy Love, and North Point Community Church's audio series Basic:Follow/Believe/Obey.