2024 Men's Conference - Session 2

[00:00:00] Hey guys, I'm like I'm not standing behind that. Yeah, there we go. That's me.

[00:00:10] That makes me happy. I just want to let you guys know I just got hired to be the

[00:00:16] new youth pastor here. Very excited about concept. I wanna begin with sharing with you guys a short, just a segment from a letter that I received. I did a men's conference last summer in Eugene. And there was a group at the men's conference,

[00:01:42] there was about 200 guys in the front

[00:02:45] You know, it's funny, we never know how the Lord is using us. And I just want to be an encouragement to all of you.

[00:02:50] The Lord truly does choose the foolish things to confound the wise.

[00:02:54] You're looking at a guy who didn't even come to faith until he was 27,

[00:02:59] never went to college, barely I wrote a book, 10,000 words, like a quarter of a novel. And he said he'd never written before, but he just sat down and had to

[00:04:20] express what he experienced. I want you to share a filthy gutter, a hell-born, I don't know what he means by that. A fellow witness, I love this line, a fellow witness to and participant of the perilous depredations of human evil

[00:05:41] to make it possible for me.

[00:05:43] You are not just a conduit, sir, lifting Jesus on high.

[00:05:46] Oh no, my brother, your emotion, experience and stirring movement

[00:07:01] into all of our hearts. I pray for any me, Josh White. I felt him welcome me. I felt him tell me that I was loved. And there I found much to my great surprise for the first time I also loved him in return.

[00:08:21] It's all true.

[00:08:23] My God, it's all true.

[00:08:25] Eureka, hallelujah. as he is and can he fix my broken heart? And to taste the forgiveness of God is to taste what I would refer to as real liberation, real freedom. The world doesn't understand freedom. We talk about it all the time. We think freedom, I think our understanding of freedom

[00:09:43] is far more akin to anarchy,

[00:09:45] the idea that I should be get to say it's us against the world. There is no us against them if you're a follower of Jesus because Jesus prayed these words from the cross in Luke a way that we now have two different gods. We have one God who is revealed to us in three persons, which means that God and his essence, although it's a mystery, is a community within himself. But he cannot be divided against himself. In other words, the Son only spoke those things which pleased the Father.

[00:12:22] He wasn't asking a reluctant vision for what fatherhood is. And when we talked about the fatherhood of God, yes we are as fathers, there is a shadow of similarity, but there is something holy other about the

[00:13:44] fatherhood of God as the creator can ever imagine. And so the question for us is how do we comprehend then forgiveness? And in our lack of understanding of forgiveness in our current day and our often refusal to give forgiveness

[00:16:21] is a sad revelation of our misunderstanding of the of forgiveness? When I look at TV, well, you think about television, is forgiveness really a theme that you see very often presented?

[00:17:43] That we generally, when you hear the word forgive me,

[00:17:46] it usually comes from like some character I still wouldn't kick him out of my house because he's my son. Because I knew what it was like to grow up where love was contingent. And it was built upon my behavior and it was always, it's not enough. I say that my step dad's nickname for me was half-ass.

[00:19:02] He never understood the power and the best was I said, what about you? And he goes, damn it, Joshua, I'm a good person.

[00:20:22] I'm like, okay.

[00:20:24] I just remember he's like, I gotta go.

[00:20:26] And he hung up on me.

[00:20:27] I was like, all right, that every one of us played a role in that death, that there is much that needs to be forgiven. And until we understand that there are only two kinds of people in the kingdom of God, you know what those two kinds of people are?

[00:21:40] Evil people that said yes to Jesus and evil people that say no. I can't do it, I need help. That's what a saint is. I think we have poor constructs of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. So when we begin to think about forgiveness, we've got to think in terms of this radical heart of God.

[00:23:02] I mean, look what it says in John 14, 9, 10, if we think at the heart of the heart

[00:23:05] is that at the power of his deity,

[00:24:24] surrendering it for that time so that he could reveal to the world what it looks like

[00:24:29] to live in total dependence upon the Father by the power of the Spirit. but he played fair. Dorothy Sayers once said, whatever game God is playing with human suffering and the dilemmas that we are confronted, he has played fair and he has taken his own medicine. People always ask me, what do you think that there's a, what about human suffering? And the questions around human suffering

[00:25:41] is a question of what we call theodicy.

[00:25:44] How do we understand God's goodness And what does he say? Were you there when I created? No, you were not. So we're always being speculative about why we suffer, why we hurt. I would say it would be far more beneficial for us to look to the one who said, Father, forgive them. Because it's there that I find, I don't find the answer for why I suffer,

[00:27:01] but what I find is the suffering God who says,

[00:27:04] I care about your suffering and I am willing

[00:27:07] to enter into it. God is holy, he can't be in the presence of sin. So God turns his back on humanity. And now there is a rift, a division between God and man, an inescapable rift, and we are lost. And Jesus comes and he, as the humble son,

[00:28:25] takes that holy anger and hatred of the father and absorbs it into himself.

[00:28:26] So he becomes, it's the face of sin. It says, Adam, where are you? It is God who begins to reveal out of the gate that he is by nature a forgiving God because he is love, is my point. And so the question, you know, questions arise, there be forgiveness if there wasn't the cross.

[00:29:40] It's a stupid question because the cross

[00:29:42] is God's final solution to the human dilemma.

[00:29:45] But I think it's us, what we have to understand then, okay, if this is God's heart toward us, and God's heart is to forgive, well then we've gotta deal with the darker spot, which is there's a much that we've done that needs to be forgiven. And this is what I refer to in my book,

[00:31:00] it's the law of mixture.

[00:31:02] And I hinted at it last night,

[00:31:04] but I think it's something that we have lost sight of.

[00:32:01] I mean, it gave me a love for scripture.

[00:32:09] It gave me a deep conviction and a passion

[00:32:12] that revival is possible and that I'm tired of hearing about the Jesus movement

[00:32:15] because I want my own Jesus movement.

[00:32:18] I think that I believe God is going

[00:32:21] to bring one great revival, just a personal conviction,

[00:32:24] speculative maybe at best. I would say keep in mind if you have the message it's awesome. It's not a Translation it's an interpretation But there are moments that are genius in it because it's one man's translation of the scripture all translations that you use are like hundreds and hundreds of people Examining how how words are being translated?

[00:33:43] But there is a lot of beauty in the message and this is my favorite of the whole book Psalm 14

[00:34:49] easier concept. It's climb your way to heaven. Get better. And don't think for a second that just because we're good, you know, evangelical Protestants who believe in the gospel of grace,

[00:34:56] that we don't abandon grace and misunderstand it morelustful look. Because if you're a dude with the parts that make you a dude, I promise you that's far more complicated than you think. And you can't escape.

[00:36:21] The sin in our world is one of my favorite theologians

[00:36:25] of all time. Satan loves to encourage believers to turn back to. And that is this false belief that this is how Satan's attacks work. The first punch is the temptation. Hey, it's not that bad. God will forgive you. You're up too late. You're looking at your computer.

[00:37:41] You're feeling like you deserve some sort of escape.

[00:37:45] And it's right to go but up. But see when we actually think our lives are somewhat pulled together and we still are in the business of wearing masks and hiding our own brokenness and pretending to live

[00:39:02] an ideal that we ourselves can't keep.

[00:39:04] Because if you even knew what I thought for five minutes by the Holy Spirit, the closer you get to Jesus, the more you see your sin, not the less. Because Jesus is light, and you cannot come into the light without being revealed. And so I always say, when someone says, I think I've actually conquered that sin, I would say, you're not drawn close enough to the light.

[00:40:23] Because I promise you, there are closets

[00:40:25] that you have't doing enough. He wasn't, that he didn't have enough freedom from his sin. He writes Luther in all this anxiety, what, like, I'm still having lustful thoughts, I'm still struggling at times with drinking too much, I'm still struggling with these things,

[00:41:40] and Luther writes this insane letter.

[00:41:42] Very controversial, I love Luther.

[00:41:44] Luther was the first punk rock Christian.

[00:41:47] I promise you. Now most of us when we hear that phrase sin boldly, you're like, wait a minute, isn't that the very thing that Paul said don't do? Should I sin that grace may abound? But Luther doesn't end there, and that's not what he meant. He said sin boldly, but cling to the mercy

[00:43:03] of Jesus even more boldly.

[00:44:21] What he meant is this, is that even as a spirit filled man of the greatest blights in Christian history is Luther's letter against the Jews at the end of his life when he was clearly having some kind of manic break, when he actually challenged Christians to burn all the Jewish temples, and the Nazis themselves used that letter as an excuse for the extermination of millions of Jews.

[00:45:42] Yikes.

[00:45:44] What do you do with that?

[00:45:45] Do I believe that Luther loved Jesus?

[00:45:47] Absolutely. you've got a vasectomy, you know? I'm like, I guess I'm gonna sin, Augustine, when I just keep on sinning until I can't. I heard a great, great joke. You guys know that Christian counselor,

[00:47:01] oh, what's his name?

[00:47:05] Cloud, oh, it doesn't matter. But he told my friend,

[00:48:02] You're listening to Mixture right now. I just need to give you a commercial break for a second.

[00:48:04] But here's the thing.

[00:48:06] Sin is there.

[00:48:07] It's at play.

[00:48:09] It's not escapeable.

[00:48:10] So it's not about sinning less.

[00:48:14] I like to say it's about loving more.

[00:48:18] That's the law of Mixture.

[00:48:19] They know not what they do.

[00:48:21] Sin is there.

[00:48:22] We don't even know where of all the ways that we do it.

[00:48:24] But then there's the suffering of forgiveness.

[00:48:26] And this is where I want to close. before him. Do you know what the joy that is set before him is? It's you. You're the joy set before him. The costliness of when I was trying to be a rock star in my 20s before I met my wife. And I realized early on, and I close with this story, that I did not truly forgive my father until I got close enough to him

[00:52:23] to truly absorb the wounds that he caused.

[00:53:40] I flew to Alaska, my aunt called me in hysterics And the stench was unbearable. And I have a really hard time with bad smell. So I'm like, oh, I just remember just feeling queasy. And I walked in the room and dad goes, you look good son. And I said, you do not look good dad. And I'm like, and you smell so bad. And he just goes, F you.

[00:53:43] And I said, it's good to see you dad.

[00:53:45] And he's like, it's good to see you.

[00:53:46] And I went over and sat by him and he got teary.

[00:54:47] bathroom. So I'm like, well, let me help you. He goes, I got it. And the nurse said that he could get up and go to the bathroom. And he was connected to all these IVs and carrying

[00:54:50] the post and he wouldn't let me help him. I said last night, it's much easier. It's

[00:54:55] much easier to give than it is to receive. And he stood up and he got like two feet in

[00:55:01] front of the bed and it's like the back of his gallon was open and he's in my arm and I felt him accept, even need that embrace in that moment. And that was the moment that I was able to truly enter into my dad's life and begin to actually be a conduit of grace for him rather than the victim's son with the bad dad

[00:56:25] because he had a bad dad and his dad had a bad dad. You orb the wrong, but there is freedom in it when you allow love to cover a multitude of sins. His love has covered. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The forgiving God is asking us to accept his forgiveness,

[00:57:42] not just so that we can be forgiven,

[00:57:44] but so that we can be conduits

[00:57:46] of that same forgiveness to others.

[00:57:49] Amen? that needs to be done has already been done in Jesus. In Jesus, we come to you empty-handed, and we ask that your forgiveness would be real for us. And we accept and receive your forgiveness and your love. And we pray as our hands are open, Lord,

[00:59:00] that you would fill us,

[00:59:02] which means we are surrendering to you and to your goodness.