[MUSIC PLAYING] Life is hard, and emotions like anger, guilt, greed, and envy steal your joy and undermine your faith. Join us as we dig beneath the surface and learn to say no to toxic emotions. Well, hi, everyone. There's a lot of attention these days on living clean, getting rid of all the toxins that find their way into our lives. There's clean energy. We're trying to decrease the toxins in our atmosphere. There's clean diets, trying to decrease the toxins we put into our body through processed foods and other things, making sure the eggs we eat are organic and from free-range chickens. And that whole grains are unrefined. Women's makeup and hair products need to be clean and organic. No synthetics, no plastics, no petroleum byproducts. Even things like cleaning supplies around the house or laundry detergents. They all need to be clean. No toxic chemicals. I mean, when I was growing up and I came to cleaning the countertops, it was like the more poison the better, baby. Let's erode these things down to the raw materials. There's no chemicals allowed on yards anymore. I mean, just 15 years ago, my kids crawled around and rolled around and froliced and slipped and slided through so many grass chemicals. It's like, no wonder they're so messed up. I'm kidding, my kids are great. My point is this. We are super conscientious about these things. Clean living, no toxins. And listen, as God stewards of this world and the environment, we absolutely should be concentrating on these things. But this month, we're gonna look at some other toxins that can work their way into our lives. I'm talking about toxic emotions because as diligent as some of you are about clean eating and clean makeup and clean laundry detergent, you're not as diligent about a clean soul, which often involves eliminating the toxins that find their way into our lives under the surface, where no one else might notice. So that's the name of our short four week series that we're starting today. It's called Beneath the Surface, saying no to toxic emotions. We're gonna look at four emotions. Guilt, anger, greed, and envy. And each one has the capacity to undermine your life and to shipwreck your faith. That these emotions are hatched in the broken and secret places of our hearts, which is where relationships are governed and where decisions are made. Your heart is also the command and control of your faith and your ability to follow Jesus. And so these toxic emotions, they have a way of starting off hidden, but they don't stay hidden. Eventually, they come to the surface, coloring our words, coloring our deeds, making it very difficult to follow Jesus and love others well. Did you know your spiritual life and your emotional life are intimately connected? Like you can only be as holy as you are whole. And I also believe that you can only be as whole as you are holy. Like if you're stuck emotionally at age 12, you'll only ever be as spiritually mature as a 12 year old. And so these emotions are not something disconnected over on the side that you only have to think about when things go wrong. That they are central to our ability to become more and more like Jesus, which is what we're all about here. And so in this series, we're asking, how are things with your heart? Listen to this challenge from Solomon in Proverbs 4.23. He says, "Above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it." So we live from our heart, we love from our heart, we parent from our heart, we manage our money from our heart. We do relationships from our heart, our words, our actions, our attitudes, they all flow out of our heart. And so Solomon says, guard it with your life. And so that's what we're gonna explore for these next four weeks. How do we guard our hearts against these four terrible diseases? Four really ugly things that can get lodged in there and then start corrupting us and eventually leak out into terrible ways. And so we're gonna learn this month how to say no to these toxic emotions and how to cultivate something in their place. Each of these emotions that we're gonna deal with has a debt involved, real or perceived. And so as long as these debts remain, they're gonna keep us stuck and debilitated. Andy Stanley that framed them this way. He says, guilt says, I-O-U. Anger says, you owe me. Greed says, I owe me and envy says, God owes me. And so today we're gonna start with this first one, guilt. And here's my big idea. Cultivating grace counteracts the power of chronic guilt. Now, I'm gonna be honest that there's a part of me that thinks we need a little more guilt in the world today. We probably need some more guilty feelings and some more remorse about the things we do and the things we don't do and to help them align with the gospel. It's almost become in vogue to never feel bad about anything you've done. You know, I said it and I believe it and I stand by it and I don't regret anything. It's like, yeah dude, that sounds cool, but do you see the damage you've done and the bodies that are in your wake with the words that you used? It's not as admirable as you think it is to have no remorse. And then others are thinking, oh great, you know, guilt. I came to church and they're talking about guilt. How typical, you know, churches are like guilt factories. You're thinking, look, if I wanted to feel bad about myself, I'd just go play around of golf. I don't need to listen to a guy preaching at me about guilt. I'm quite capable of guilt myself, thank you very much. And then they take an offering on top of it. Now I'm paying for feeling bad about myself. What a scam, you know, these guys got it going. So anyway, listen, Jesus didn't come to pile on the guilt. He actually came to root out guilt and to set us free from guilt. Here's the truth, we're all gonna battle guilt because we all screw up a lot. And if we don't deal with guilt, it's gonna corrupt our heart. And so God is not trying to bury us with guilt. He's trying to give us a way to deal with it so it won't destroy us. Remember, guilt says, I owe you, I owe you. I've offended you, I've stolen from you, I've lied about you, I've done something wrong against you. And now I owe you. When we sin, we owe, if I lie, I owe you, if I cheat, I owe you, if I slander, I owe you. If I'm cruel to you, I owe you. Whenever you hurt someone, whenever you wrong someone, you create a debt, I owe you, it's guilt. And we don't always feel it deeply, but it's there. And so we try to say things like, well, I owe you an apology or let me make it up to you. What's that? That's canceling a debt. Because when we sin, we create a debt. And that debt needs to be paid back. Now, without giving it a total bad rap, I wanna just say guilt is important to us in a way. It's a gift in a way. Just like physical pain is a gift when you touch a hot stove. It's a warning sign that raises a red flag that something needs to be looked at. And so guilt says, you sinned, you did wrong. And now you have this guilt. But for some of you, you've been carrying around guilt for years and you've never dealt with it properly or biblically. It's become paralyzing to you. You sit there under the weight of it and you think, there's no way God could forgive me. There's no way God could use me. You feel like David did when he said these words back in Psalm 38, he said, my guilt has overwhelmed me. It's overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. David was paralyzed. He committed terrible sins against God and his fellow man. First, adultery with Bathsheba, then murdering her husband. And he sets up his family for generations of consequences for his sin. And the guilt, the debt, it can feel overwhelming. And eventually, it'll start corrupting and corroding your heart. It'll start changing how you treat people, like your spouse. It'll change how you treat them, like your kids and your friends and the people you work with. The guilt you picked up in college can get carried into your marriage. Guilt you picked up on a business trip. You can carry it back home. Guilt you picked up at a store on the internet or in that secret place where no one was looking. You carry it with you. It doesn't go away on its own. And often, it gives other toxic emotions a kind of playground to play in. I like to call it the dangerous cocktail of toxic emotions that accompany guilt. So the first player that comes is condemnation. The condemnation either comes from you or from others, but it's the constant sense of not measuring up, not being good enough. And then there's regret, which is always asking what if? It has you constantly second-guessing yourself. It's the overwhelming sense of remorse. And finally, there's shame. Shame comes along and says you don't deserve to be forgiven. What you did was terrible. Shame wants to define you by your very worst moment. You see, regret and condemnation, they come and say, you did something bad. Shame says you are bad. You're a bad person. Shame tries to take your very worst moments and make them your identity. And now, the devil's got you believing that you're pathetic and worthless, that there's no hope God can redeem you. You're useless. You'll never be happy. You'll never measure up. You'll never crawl out of this hole. This toxic cocktail creates chronic guilt, which makes you constantly feel like there's nothing you can do to make things right. Guilt majors on punishment. It says the IOUs have stacked up so high that you're never gonna crawl out of it. And the last straw then is that this guilt drives a wedge between you and God because you see every sin against someone else is a sin against God. And so our sin creates what David calls a burden too heavy to bear. And into this brood of vipers, shame, regret, condemnation, chronic guilt. The authoritative word of God steps in and says this in Romans eight, starting in one. It says there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh, could not do by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. That is really good news. And once you just notice the language here for a second, it doesn't say that there's a little condemnation or you're gonna receive partial condemnation that's reserved for the really stupid stuff you did. No, he says there's none, no condemnation. And now the reason there is no condemnation has nothing to do with how we really don't deserve it. We do deserve it. It has to do with the fact that Jesus bore the condemnation that you and I deserved. And just like Jesus is condemned no more before God, neither are we. And so our job now is to live like it, to live like we're free of condemnation. That is to live under grace, to cultivate grace. I want you to also notice the urgency in this text. It's now that we have to receive it. Most every Christian I know believes that one day there will be no condemnation for us when we get to heaven because of Jesus' sacrifice. But even though they believe that one day it'll happen, they live right now. Like there's not quite enough grace left for us to walk in during this lifetime. But if you're in Christ, you are free. Now, in Christ, you are holy. Now, in Christ, you are pure. Now, and so many Christians get derailed by condemnation. And I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that we allow ourselves to be deceived by the devil's lies and his half-truths. He's the condemner after all. But there is exactly none of his condemnation left for us. And so how do we live a no condemnation life? I want to spend the rest of my time today talking about how to cultivate a posture of grace. God's grace is the antidote to a life of chronic guilt. But we have to access that grace. And we have to dwell in that grace. And so here's the first way to cultivate it. It's to run to God. This is the starting place. We serve the God of all grace. The key to grace is to find yourself in Christ. And the only way we do that is to run to God. You see, your instinct and your sin might be to run away from God. Don't do that because it's in him that you find grace. That there are these amazing parables in Luke 15 about the lost sheep and the lost corn and the lost sun. And in them, we see that God is happy to love. God is happy to save. God is happy to pursue. He's happy to forgive. And that's exactly what it says here. Jesus looks at the religious people. And he says, you guys don't make God happy at all because you never repent. Isn't that amazing? God rejoices in our repentance. And don't misunderstand. He's not happy about our sin, but he's happy when we come to terms with our sin. Self-righteousness has no good news to offer. What would self-righteousness do in the midst of these parables? It would come up to a lost sheep and say, you're dirty and you're smelly and you're lost and you're beat up and you're bleeding. And the sheep would say, yeah, I know. That's not good news. What do I need to do? Oh, well, here's what you need to do, says self-righteousness. You need to clean yourself up. You need to get your act together. You need to earn karma points or you need to maybe reincarnate one day. You need to do better. You need to try harder. Earn your way back to God and good luck finding him, by the way. That's not what the gospel says. The gospel says, run to God and in him, you will find mercy. A posture of grace starts with running to God, even in our sin. The second is to own what you did. So somewhere along the line we've become experts at dodging responsibility. Have you seen any of these viral videos about guilty dogs? Like the dog's owner comes home and they find the house a mess or whatever, like couch cushions torn apart. And they're like, they say to the dog, did you do this? You know, and the dog won't make eye contact or they'll have this guilty look. And my favorite is that when there are two dogs and the one blames the other, he like puts his paw up on the other, he's like, it was this dude. That's what we do. You've probably spent plenty of time in your life and energy over the years, trying to cover stuff up or denying it or blaming others for hiding it. Often we'll try everything in our arsenal to keep the truth of our sin under wraps because we've convinced ourselves that if people know the full truth about me, I'll be finished. And so instead of owning our sin, we invest lots of energy into image management. But get this, and this is crucial. The moment you own your sin, it begins to lose its power over you. Just a few verses before this marvelous declaration Paul gave us in Romans eight that I read a moment ago that there is now no condemnation. We see him famously owning his sin in chapter seven, starting in verse 19. He says, "For I do not do the good I want, "but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. "Now if I do what I do not want, "it is no longer I who do it, "but the sin that dwells within me." And then he says, "Wretched man that I am." What's he doing? He's owning it. Who will deliver me from this body of death? Spoiler alert, the answer is Jesus. To be honest, it's hard for some of you to do this. It's hard for some of you to own up to your sin and to begin to move on from it because frankly, you've built your identity around that thing in your past. You're like, I'm just an addictive personality. I let my anger really fuel me for good. I had to risk it all to lose it all. That's just who I am. And you're in this martyr complex so deep that you've almost become a victim of your own making. That sin is not your identity. Jesus said if the sun sets you free, you'll be free indeed, but your freedom begins with owning up to what you did. The third way to kind of just marvel in this grace is to confess your sins specifically. You know secrets lose their power when exposed to the light. The light that exposes our secrets and frees our hearts from the oppressive power of guilt is this thing called confession. There's a promise in 1 John 1 9, this is if we confess our sins, he is faithful and he is just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Notice it says sins confess our sins individually, not just your sin in a generic kind of way. I liken it back to the old days of my marriage before I was the laundry expert that I am today. I didn't really understand in the early days the concept of separating white whites and colors and smaller batches and doing them separately. I would wait until the clothes kind of accumulated into a big large pile. And for reasons of both efficiency and cost effectiveness, I would then just cram as much laundry as I could into that washing machine and do it all at once. But soon our laundry all started looking the same color. Denji, and one day I realized that I had acquired a laundry coach. I didn't remember hiring a coach, but I had acquired one nonetheless named Kim. She is my wife and she didn't even give me a vision board or anything like a normal coach would do. She just one day said it would work better if you didn't wait until the pile was as big as Mount Everest and try to wash everything at once. Clothes don't get cleaned that way and you need to put like colors together. And so it turns out this worked. And this is also good advice in the area of confession. Our natural tendency, you see, is to throw a big bunch of sins into a huge pile and just say, God, you know what's in there. Just forgive all that, please. It's less embarrassing. It's less painful to just throw it in a big pile. Of course, our God loves to forgive. It's so it's not like he's smacking our wrists if we don't do it exactly the right way. But confession, confession is not just a bookkeeping deal. Confession is a relationship deal. It's a character transformation deal. If I just do the, here's a big pile of all my junk for the last year. God, please forgive it all. I'm gonna miss out on so much of the cleansing and the healing power of God's grace. See, when we work with smaller batches of sin, if you will, we can begin to reflect on why, why? Which is the key, which is really the starting place for healing and our own development. Why did I do that? It's important because sin involves, always. It involves an illegitimate way of trying to meet a legitimate need. So you need to identify the need and then find out a God honoring way of meeting that need. Otherwise, you're gonna keep falling into the same sin traps. That's why we need to ask why. And the best shot at this is just reflecting more on our lives and then confessing sin more individually as it comes. See, digging in at this level may often involve even another person, like a friend or a pastor or a therapist, but at the very least, it means engaging in more self-reflection. It's why I'm excited that this whole month we're gonna be practicing a spiritual development tool called the Prayer of Examen. It's an ancient prayer that we've updated and it's perfect for nighttime reflection before you go to bed, but we're gonna be practicing the exam in each week during the month of August. And hopefully you'll include this practice in your personal times with God or in your home and on your own time. But we need to get to the wise of our sin because it's one thing to say, God, you know, I'm sorry I lied today to my work colleagues. I told him I was late because I was stuck in traffic. Really, I wasn't stuck in traffic. I was just procrastinating. I didn't get myself enough time to get to a meeting. So I told a little white lie, but why? Why did I lie in that moment? Well, I lied because I was overly worried about what people would think of me. I want them to think of me as a professional person who has everything together, even when I don't have everything together. So I lied to control their impression of me, to make them think better of me than is actually real. And now the result is I'm living out an image that I need to manage rather than living in reality. In this case, I was more interested in pleasing people than in pleasing you, God, and being honest. So you see how valuable it is to get to the why. We can identify the legitimate need that we're meeting with illegitimate ends. But it's scary, isn't it, to confess? What's God gonna do? How will he respond? Somebody needs to hear this today. There is no mistake in your past that's bigger than God's grace. Remember the passage from 1 John, it says, "If you confess your sin, he's faithful and he's just to forgive your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness." That's an incredible promise. And so this is how he responds to our confessions of sin. God cancels the debt, he wipes the slate clean. Those debts that you owe, they are erased. Jeremiah 31, 34 says, "I will forgive their iniquity. I will remember their sins no more." This is what God says. And I don't know if you know this about God, but he's generally not super forgetful. He's not usually like, "Now, where did I leave my phone?" He's not forgetful. And so when it says he doesn't remember our sins, that means he's choosing not to remember that the ever-present, all-knowing God makes a choice of his will to limit his memory forever. I will remember their sins no more. He's saying, "I'm choosing to forget and I'm choosing to not hold those things against you." The debt has been canceled. So listen, when you hold on to those things, when you hold on to those things that God has chosen to forget, when you decide to keep wallowing in guilt and punishing yourself, again and again, for that past mistake, you're essentially saying to God, "I'm sorry, God, but I don't think your grace is big enough. I don't think what you did on the cross was quite sacrificial enough to cover over this thing." So I'm just gonna keep it over here because I'm not sure you are powerful enough that you are loving enough or compassionate enough for this one. This isn't a front to God. Here's the fourth way to cultivate a posture of grace. It's to make it right. I wanna be clear now. Here's what I don't mean by make it right. I don't mean to try to go out and sav your conscience by doing a bunch of random good deeds. Sometimes we try to make up for the wrong we did by doing good deeds to pay this thing off. A friend betrays a friend and then you try to buy that friend tickets to the Aris tour so she can't, the tickets you can't afford to try to assuage your guilt or your dad hurts his kids. And so he tries to buy their love back with extra Christmas presents or whatever. But try as you might. Here's the deal. You'll never repay the debt. You can't. Think about it. How do you return a reputation that you ruined? How do you fix a marriage that was destroyed? How do you go back and fix what you broke five years ago, 10 years ago or 20 years ago? You don't. You don't even remember half their names anymore. How do you undo all the unintended consequences of your selfishness or greed or thoughtlessness? You don't. But since guilt is a debt first between you and God, you confess your sin to him like we just said and you ask forgiveness from him. But once you've done that, it's no longer about what you did. It's about what you do next. And if there are people who were caught in the crossfire of your sin, and you can make it right without adding harm or chaos to their life or others' lives, part of walking in a posture of grace is to take the next right step. The word repentance just means to turn away from your sin and walk the other direction. It's not a one-time word. It's a trajectory word. You were going that way. Now you're going the other way. You can't change the past, but you do have an opportunity to do things right going forward. We've often used language of do the next right thing. So what is the next right thing that you need to do about that action for which you have carried guilt for a long time? Paul says it this way in Romans 12, 18. He says, "If possible so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Notice you can't control them, but you can control you. So with what you can control, make things right. And it usually starts with apologizing. By the way, there's a wrong way to apologize. Don't ever do this one, okay? Can we just hands in the middle agree? Don't ever do this one. If I did anything to hurt you, I'm sorry. That's not an apology. That's a load of crap. That's a cop-out. You might as well say, I'm sorry you feel that way and you got your feelings hurt, you big fat baby. That's not an apology. Just like the pile of laundry, you need to get specific. You need to get to the wise and even beyond apologizing. What is the next right thing that you can do to make it right? As far as it depends on you. Maybe begin to do the work to slowly rebuild trust in relationships. Maybe try to restore what was broken somehow. But this is one of the ways we posture ourself in grace. Fifth way is to accept any consequences. For time's sake, I'm not gonna hunker down here on this one other than just to mention this. But when you sin against someone else, you hurt them, you betray them, you let them down, there will be consequences. And it's natural to want a side step or to evade those consequences. But one of the keys to moving forward in grace is to accept them. If you've gossiped about or slandered about a friend and that friend is slow to trust you again, don't be surprised. That's one of the consequences. If you're a kid and you lied to your parents about what you were up to and then they found out and yes, you apologize and yes, they forgave you. But when you're grounded for a month, don't whine and cry and be annoying. That's the consequence of what you did. You're lucky it wasn't three months. See, part of cultivating grace is owning up to the consequences of your sin. I love the psalm of David who was wrestling through the depths of his own sin, his adultery and his murder of Uriah. And God forgave him, but there were generational consequences for his sin that did not magically go away. But in Psalm 51, 17, we read these incredible words that help us in our understanding of our posture. This is the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart God. You will not despise. And so the way to cultivate a posture of grace in the face of guilt is that one, run to God to own what you did. Three, confess it specifically. Four, make it right. Five, accept any consequences and here's the sixth. Replace all lies with the truth. Guys, you are not your mistakes. You are not your sins. You are not your shame. You are not your worst day. You are not your dumbest decision. You are who God says you are. But guilt, laden thoughts and memories, sometimes don't just go away. And the longer you give them residence in your mind, the longer they will keep you in bondage and keep you living in the past instead of pursuing Christ's future. The answer is to replace those lies with truth. Shame is combated with truth. Regret is combated with truth. That's why Paul says in Romans 12, one and two that the key to true transformation, be transformed, he says, by the renewing of your mind. I remember years ago talking to a woman about this, she had a past that she really regretted and she told me that the lies that would come into her mind and they would say, you don't deserve this and what makes you think good things will come to you after all you've done and you know better than your mistakes. And I asked her what she did to combat these guilty lies and she said that she had a spiritual discipline of writing down and memorizing the promises of God when she would come across them in scriptures. The Bible is filled with promises. And so as you find your chair, as you read scripture, you will come across so many truth statements about who Christ is and about who you are in Christ. And when you find them, they're worth writing down. They're worth memorizing. Here are a few. God's word says he will blot out your transgressions and remember your sins no more. John 59 says you are loved by God as certainly as Jesus is. 1 Corinthians 6, 17, you are united with the Lord and you are one spirit with him. 1 Corinthians 19, 20 says you have been bought with a price. You belong to God. Ephesians 1, 5 says you have been adopted as a child of God. Colossians 2, 10 says that you are complete in Christ. When you are cultivating God's grace, you see in your life it is critical that you preach the truth of the gospel to yourself as often as you can because the lies will always be just around the corner waiting for a weak moment to pounce. Paul says we need to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. It's just such a great image of wartime object lesson. What do you do to an enemy and take them captive? Will you chase them down and you wrestle them to the ground and you disarm them, take his gun. You bind his hands and feet and then you march him off as a prisoner of war. That's what the Bible says you need to do with deceptive thoughts, the lies in your head. And as much as our enemy, the liar would like to convince you that you are defeated and that you are no good and that you are nothing but the sins of your past. Jesus comes and he says you are who I say you are. And so can I encourage you today to take one very specific next step this month? Will you make a plan, a commitment to come back to church for the entire series in August? Especially if you're a guest today. You don't have to commit for the rest of your life or for a year. Just a month, four hours during the month of August will you prioritize your soul? Will you put church in your calendar before anything else? I just think God honors that so much. And our main takeaway in just a moment at our physical locations is to teach you and to kind of practice with you this examine tool. But I want to end today where we begin. Pastor Kyle Eitelman did an exercise with some of his friends and family and colleagues and he asked them to send him five word sentences of condemnation and shame and guilt that represented lies that they had believed in their past. And it moved me to tears as I read these five word sentences that were submitted. Maybe you'll relate to one or two of them as well. Listen to these. It's too late for you. You messed up too much. No one will want you. It's never going to happen. You will just fail again. You're never going to change. You'll always be alone. You failed as a mom. You're just like your dad. God doesn't love you anymore. It will be like this forever. You've wasted too much time. You are on your own. God is done giving you chances. And just saying those out loud, I can almost feel the crippling shame and the chronic guilt. Our big ideas is cultivating grace counteracts the power of chronic guilt. Some of you need to make the decision today to cultivate grace. If I provided some time this morning, I'm sure we could all come up with a damning five word sentence of some lies we've believed in our past. Maybe for some of you, you're actually still believing them even today. I want to give you five new words. If you're a follower of Jesus, this is the truest thing about you. There is now no condemnation. May we live like that's true because it is. I love you guys.
