Matt Chandler - The Response of Faith: Repentance

In response to the Holy Spirit illuminating our desperate and helpless condition before God and igniting the living hope that comes through the resurrecting power of Jesus Christ, we step out in faith and repent as act of worship and obedience, entrusting our lives to Christ.

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If you have your Bibles, why don’t you go ahead and grab them? We will be in Luke chapter seven. I have quite a bit of work to do before we get there, but we’ll primarily look at that story as a piece of this puzzle we’re trying to fit together. This is week three of Recovering Redemption, and up until this point, we’ve been discussing the longings of the human heart and its desire to be fully satisfied. We’ve said that we often run to one of four, sometimes all four, crooked paths that do not lead us to where we think they will. We’re looking for fullness of life, satisfaction, and fullness of soul, but it seems so elusive. We have this yearning within us that always wants more but can never seem to get there. We all find ourselves on one of these paths. We try to solve this idea of redemption, this angst in our souls, with ourselves. By and large, the predominant belief in our culture is that a better version of ourselves will somehow satisfy our souls. If I can just make myself better, I will be happier, more joyful, and my life will have more meaning. I just need to be a better person than I am now. Thus, our money, time, and energy are always being poured into the belief that we need to be a better version of ourselves. Now, at nearly 40 years old, I remember saying this kind of stuff when I was 20, and everyone would roll their eyes. So let me lay this before you: you will always be disappointing to yourself. You always will. It doesn’t matter how you transform what you think you’re going to attain. Even if you get chiseled and fit, it will still not be enough. Acquiring a ton of money will not be enough. You will not be able to fix yourself because, as we covered last week, you are actually the problem. If you’re broken, trying to piece together your brokenness with what is already broken only further exacerbates it. That’s one of the crooked paths. Another wildly popular one is seeking validation from others. We begin to rely on others to validate us, to speak highly of us. We need them, whether they are bosses, spouses, colleagues, friends, or, God help us, if it’s our children. We need them to assure us that we have value. Therefore, we place an unfair, sinful, almost wicked expectation on them to satisfy a longing in our hearts that they simply cannot fill. Why? Because human beings make crummy gods. They really do. You’ve never met one who would excel at it. Even the greatest human being you know would make a terrible god. The greatest leaders in human history would be awful gods; many times, they weren’t even great people themselves. Ultimately, you’re not going to find someone who completes you. Please discard that idea; stop it. The other crooked paths are the world. We can either tread the crooked path of becoming a better version of ourselves to satisfy this angst in our hearts or we can search for the mythical one who will satisfy this longing. We often turn to the world. When I say «running to the world,» I mean that we take the good gifts from God, and instead of relishing those gifts in a way that leads to greater worship of God, we abuse them. Then we get frustrated with God for giving us those gifts in the first place. I used what I consider to be big buckets, as well as some provocative examples: food, wine, and sex are great examples, all three given by God. All three are created, manifested, and granted to all people by God. We talked about how lost people can eat good food, right? Someone better talk to me here. Lost people, who don’t love Jesus, can enjoy a great steak and drink a great glass of wine, correct? Do lost people enjoy sex? Yeah. Now, here’s what’s different for believers: all those experiences can culminate in greater pleasure that doesn’t just terminate on the pleasure itself. For believers in God, for those who have put their trust in Christ, the experience of a good meal should not end with just enjoying the meal but should lead to worshiping the God who provided and created the flavors. Dinner with friends becomes a spiritual experience and does not just end with the meal. The same is true for sex, and on and on I could go. This is what happens when we submit our lives to a creator God. When we try to soften that angst in our hearts with the world, we end up abusing the world and then getting frustrated with it.