UNHINDERED - Is Your Christianity Just Witchcraft?
UNHINDERED | Is Your Christianity Just Witchcraft?
Speaker: Justin Gingrich
Sermon date: October 11, 2026
Scripture: Acts 8:9-24
Series: UNHINDERED
Sermon summary
In Acts 8, Simon the sorcerer believes the gospel, is baptized, and follows Philip, yet he still tries to obtain the Holy Spirit through something he can offer. His mistake exposes a temptation that runs through much of our Christianity: treating our spiritual lives like a kind of witchcraft, where the right combination of morality, devotion, prayer, Bible study, or religious effort will produce the outcome we want from God.
Justin argues that our deepest barrier to intimacy with God is not insufficient effort but our resistance to grace. The woman at the well does not approach Jesus correctly. Jesus approaches her where she feels most unapproachable. Peter’s loyalty looks spiritual, yet he repeatedly resists Jesus’ determination to serve and love him.
The gospel reverses our instincts. We are more comfortable with a God who demands something from us than with a God who comes toward us with a gift. We cannot purchase God’s favor with money, morality, loyalty, or devotion. Jesus comes not to be served, but to serve. The invitation is therefore not to manufacture greater closeness with God, but to surrender to the God who has already come close and receive His love.
Sermon transcript
Lightly edited from automatic captions for readability. Some transcription errors may remain; the recording is the authoritative version. Select a timestamp to open that moment on YouTube.
0:00 · Well, happy fall break. I know we have a lot of folks traveling this morning, so if you’re traveling with family, I hope you’re having safe travels if you’re watching us on the livestream.
If you are here this morning, what we’re going to be doing is continuing our series in the book of Acts, where we are looking at how the early church formed.
As we get ready for our five-year celebration, as we get ready for five years of God being faithful to us and kind to us and good to us, what we’re doing is looking at the book of Acts, which is the story of the early church. So much of what they experienced and what they knew speaks to us in our context still today as people who are starting a church.
What we’re going to look at this morning is a story that you and I have a lot more to do with than we may realize. You and I have a lot more to do with Simon than you may realize.
1:05 · I titled this sermon this morning, some of our small group leaders get the sermon title before the rest of you because I send out a small group discussion guide, and the title of the sermon this morning is, “Is Your Christianity Just Witchcraft?”
And some of them are like, “That’s a lot. I can’t wait to see where you’re going with that.”
So hang on. I’m going to walk us through some things this morning.
This has been one of those sermons, and I just want to almost preface it, if you’re a guest or visitor with us this morning, hang with me. Every word that I’ve chosen this morning, I have chosen carefully.
This has actually been a sermon that’s been quite a few months in the works. And I feel like it was timely because we’re on the eve of Halloween, and my kids love Halloween, so we’re already thinking about witches and wizards and all of this.
What I want to do this morning is ask this question: Does your Christianity have some version of witchcraft in it?
So hang with me.
Does your version of Christianity have some way in which you’re like, “I need to add things to life so that God will be good to me”?
Because if that’s your position, which is most of our positions, what I want to say this morning is that all of us have more in common with Simon than we think we do.
There are parts of our Christianity that are closer, more akin, to casting spells or witchcraft than they are to the actual gospel of God.
I’m going to walk us through what I mean by that this morning.
2:38 · As we move through this series, what we’ve been doing is exploring what it means to live loved, to live in the grace of God.
For so many of us, as I argued a few weeks ago, our main Christian barrier to intimacy with God, to knowing God, to having affection for God, to serving God, to worshiping God, is not your sin.
It is not your shortcomings.
If you’ve been taught that, I do not think you’ve actually been taught the gospel. I think you’ve been taught some version of Christian moralism, which I’m arguing this morning is actually closer to witchcraft.
I’ll show you what I mean by that.
The gospel says that God approaches me in my need and in my helplessness and pulls me up and rescues me.
What I want to argue this morning as we move into this text is that I believe, for each and every single one of us here, our greatest barrier to knowing God is that we are resistant to the love that He is offering us in Jesus more than we may realize we are.
Which is why we may have more in common with Simon than we realize we do.
3:54 · I think often of the story in John 4 where Jesus approaches a woman at the well in Samaria. Many of us know this story.
There’s a woman. She’s sitting at the well. John tells us it’s the middle of the day. So it’s hot, it’s warm, no one goes to gather water at a well in the middle of the day.
There’s an indication that she is alone. She is disconnected from the people around her.
John tells us that Jesus, in this moment when she is avoiding people, some of you know this story, she’s avoiding people and, as we find out, she’s been in multiple marriages. So no doubt she’s become the gossip of the town.
And Jesus approaches her exactly where she feels most unapproachable.
He comes to her and begins to talk to her. He begins to listen to her.
Careful commentators will tell you the amount of respect and dignity and care and love that Jesus is showing her is so intentional that she keeps missing it. She keeps kind of sidestepping, and we’ll see this. She’ll even change the subject a few times because Jesus wants to get close to her heart and she’s not sure if she’s ready for this.
She’s lived her whole life avoiding being approached by people.
And Jesus comes to her and begins to speak with her.
There’s a moment in which Jesus, with almost, I want you to hear the earnestness of Jesus’ words, says this in verse 10:
“If only you knew the gift God has for you.”
If only your heart could grab it.
I am here as God incarnate, God in flesh, giving it to you. And yet you are resistant even to the way that I have approached you.
And what we’ll see is that her problem, like Simon’s problem and like our problem, is very similar.
We are not comfortable with a God who approaches us.
We are more comfortable with a God whom we approach.
6:00 · If I were to ask you this morning, I’ve been a pastor not long but long enough, and as I was going through this, this isn’t indicative of anybody in particular, but as I compiled my list of reasons that oftentimes when I’m meeting with people, we’re having dinner, we’re having coffee, and they tell me, “I don’t feel close to God,” or, “My spiritual life just feels like a wreck right now,” here’s a list of the common things that I hear.
So I want to ask you this morning: How do you get close to God?
Are you close to God this morning?
When you walked in here, did you feel close to God?
Let me rephrase that.
When you walked in here, did you feel pursued by God?
Did you feel approached by God?
Or did you walk in here thinking, “I’ve got to approach God”?
What we’re going to look at this morning, Simon’s big mistake, the thing that this woman wrestles with, that so many of the people Jesus spends time with wrestle with, is that this whole process is flipped.
Some of the things that I often hear from people when they’re wrestling with, “Am I close to God or not?” are things that I feel in my own heart quite often.
I hear things like, “I have a hard time finding time for God.”
I hear this sometimes from new mothers, and I feel for them. “I’ve got a new baby. I’m working. How do I find time for God?”
And I feel like because I can’t find time for God, this is affecting my intimacy with Him.
I hear things like, “I keep falling into the same sin habits. I’ve got some sin things that I just can’t beat, and I’ve prayed over them. I’ve confessed them. Maybe I’ve added more accountability in my life to take them really seriously, and somehow they keep showing back up.”
Maybe you’ve got an addiction that just keeps resurfacing.
For many of us, we think wrongly, falsely, that our sin separates us from Jesus, that this is what keeps us from being close to God.
For others of us, I hear oftentimes, “I don’t spend enough time in Scripture.”
Or the one that really kind of breaks my heart is, “I don’t know enough about the Bible.”
Why that breaks my heart is because we’ve been taught that knowing God, intimacy with God, is involved with knowing the Scriptures.
But look, I can show you guys who have PhDs in Bible who have no more or less intimacy with the living God than you do.
But I often hear, “I don’t know enough about the Bible, and that makes me feel kind of second-class as a Christian. That makes me feel like I’m not as close to God as I could be, so I need to start learning more.”
Sometimes I hear things like, “I need better answers to my intellectual objections.”
Sometimes I hear things like, “My prayer life is terrible. I don’t know how to pray.”
Sometimes I hear, “I don’t go to church as much as I should.”
9:02 · Here’s what I want to tell you, friends, this morning: These are not the reasons that you don’t feel close to God.
Let me say that again.
These are not the reasons.
These are not what keep you from God.
I do believe we have an enemy, the power of Satan himself, who wants to convince us that these are, because I think they keep us distracted.
Because here’s why: If these are the things you have to remedy in your spiritual life to feel close to God, then here’s what we’re saying in all of this.
This is all dependent on your effort.
Maybe if you get up earlier, try harder not to sin, enroll in seminary. I’ve been to seminary, right? I can fix it through some effort of my own.
But the problem is willpower, deeper commitment, and better discipleship, however we phrase it, are not the solution to getting close to God because each one of these is dependent on your effort.
And I know this is, I know, like a pastor is going to stand up here, “Did you just say reading these things doesn’t get me close to God? I thought coming to church was what I’m supposed to do.”
Hang with me, okay?
I’m choosing all of my words carefully this morning.
I actually think that these things destroy our dependence on grace when we treat them this way, and I think they keep us convinced that we are not as close to God as we could be because there’s more effort that we need to be making.
I think our unhealthy, kind of toxic Christianity that we see sometimes enveloping our world and our culture in particular is predicated on this.
“You want to get close to God? You’ve got to get on board. You’ve got to start adopting all the things He wants to do. Start making His values your values.”
We see it manipulated politically all the time.
“This is how God wants you to vote. This is what gets our country close to God. You’ve got to do it this way.”
I think that kind of thinking is the same mistake that Simon makes.
11:00 · So what I want to argue this morning, what I want us to see this morning, is that I think these are all actually just forms of resistance to grace.
Now, do I spend enormous amounts of time praying and in Scripture?
Yes, I do.
I’m not saying these are bad things. Hear that this morning.
However, I do want us to move away from thinking they are the things, as spiritually sound as they may seem, that get God to be good to us.
I want us to move away from thinking, as spiritually sound as they may sound, that these are the things through which I now become a recipient of God’s grace.
“When I start enacting more of these, God will be good to me.”
I think this permeates all of our Christianity.
I’m not going to name names, but a very prominent pastor this week posted something along these lines. He just said, “Listen, if you want to live this way,” and he was speaking of a certain set of values and family structures, “this brings God’s blessing. And if you don’t live this way, this brings God’s judgment.”
He kind of had this attitude of, “Look, I’m just the messenger here.”
And I’m like, that is anti-gospel.
That is anti-grace.
12:12 · There is nothing you need to do. There is nothing you can do to convince God to be good to you.
So this is the mistake that Simon makes.
Let me start in verse 18:
“When Simon saw that the Spirit was given when the apostles laid their hands on people, he offered them money to buy this power. ‘Let me have this power, too,’ he exclaimed, ‘so that when I lay my hands on people, they will receive the Holy Spirit!’
“But Peter replied, ‘May your money be destroyed with you for thinking God’s gift can be bought!’”
I want to point out a few things about Simon.
Simon, Acts tells us, is a believer. He believed the gospel.
Then Simon gets baptized.
So by every definition that we have, he is now a believer, a follower of Jesus.
But here’s where Simon is stuck.
Here’s where we get stuck.
Simon thinks that by buying God’s power, or as Peter says, this gift, what he’s trying to do is be with God without God’s help.
Do you see that?
Luke tells us that Simon, at this point, is not an outsider. He is a baptized believer who thinks that maybe he can still leverage his way into receiving this gift of God, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit.
13:33 · So I asked this morning, “Is your Christianity a little bit like witchcraft?”
Here’s what I mean by that.
I’ve watched all the Harry Potter movies. I know there’s a new one that’s out or coming out, I think, on HBO. I keep trying to get my kids to watch it. They’re just not interested.
Maybe they’re just not old enough yet. I don’t know.
I didn’t read the books. I’ve seen the movies.
But I remember in one of the movies the kids are sitting in class. This was kind of early on in the series before it got really dark. It went from being a children’s story to being really, really dark.
In the early ones, they’re sitting in class, and there are feathers in front of them. They’re practicing spells, right?
One of the kids, they’re saying the magic words and flicking their wrist and trying to get the feather to float. And one of the kids doesn’t say it right or doesn’t flick his wrist just right.
What happens?
The feather blows up in his face, right?
And the whole class kind of laughs at him.
But here’s the thing.
14:36 · I think most of us still approach God this way, like it’s witchcraft, like it’s magic.
“I’ve got to do this just right. I’ve got to add...”
That’s why I think, for a lot of us, our Christianity is sort of like a witch’s brew.
My youngest ended up making potions. They must have learned it on a show. He’ll ask to make potions sometimes, and he’ll go into the pantry and get all the spices out and fill up a bowl.
We have no cinnamon or nutmeg or anything in our house right now because he keeps making potions.
Then he’ll do it sometimes when he doesn’t want to eat his dinner. He puts his dinner in a bowl, calls it a potion.
I was like, “That was cute, but you still didn’t eat your dinner.”
But I actually think most of us approach God this way.
What is a witch’s brew? What do you do?
You’ve got to add the right ingredients to get the result that you need, right?
I’ve got to add a little bit of, I don’t know what you make in a witch’s brew, a little bit of slug and cat hair or whatever.
If I add too much of this, or I don’t add enough, what happens?
Like the kid who flicks his wrist, it blows up in my face.
15:39 · I believe that for so many of us, our Christianity and particularly our morality, we treat it very similarly.
For God to bless me, for God to be good to me, I’ve got to make sure that I add enough good behavior in and not add too much immorality in.
And here’s where I want to get serious for a second.
When I sit with people who are hurting, and their hearts are breaking or something has happened in their life, this is why I think we have more in common with Simon than we realize.
Oftentimes, and this is true to this day, I’ve only been a pastor for four years, but the number one question when our hearts break, when we hit trouble, when life gets difficult, is people go:
“Is God punishing me for something?”
“Is God disciplining me for something?”
“Is this something in my past?”
The most common thing when people sit down with me and they want to know why God has done something in their life and they’re in pain, the question they ask is:
“Did I do something?”
What we’re asking in that moment is, “Did I add a little too much immorality to the pot?”
“Was I too wild in college?”
“Was this because I had a failure?”
“Was this because I made that mistake?”
“Did I add too much sexual brokenness to the pot?”
Maybe I haven’t added enough good behavior to the pot.
Maybe if I were a better Christian, prayed harder, went to church more, understood more about the Bible, I’d feel more of God’s blessing.
You see, this is what witchcraft is.
It’s this: Let me add things to it to get the result that I want.
This is Harry Potter.
Let me flick the wrist. Let me say the spell or the magic word just right so the feather doesn’t blow up in my face.
But I think for many of us, we still have this Christianity where we’re like:
“I’ve got to do it just right or life will blow up in my face.”
“God will withhold His goodness from me.”
“This will catch up to me in some kind of way, and God will then discipline me through this kind of thing.”
Our entire Christianity is built on this.
And what I want to argue this morning is that it’s moralism, but it is not the gospel, friends.
18:09 · This is not the Good News of Jesus.
Like the woman at the well, she doesn’t approach Jesus.
Jesus approaches her.
There is no change that that woman makes in her life, and Jesus comes to her and says, “If you only knew the gift that I have for you. If you only knew the profound love that I have for you. If you knew what this would do to your life, you would never come to this well alone again.”
And that’s how her story finishes.
Some of you know that story.
When she meets Jesus, Jesus will tell her, “I am the Messiah.”
Jesus will use this statement in John. She says, “When the Messiah comes...”
And Jesus says, “I am the Messiah.”
That statement, “I am,” is the same statement that God Himself gives to Moses at the burning bush.
When Moses says, “God, who are You?”
God says, “I AM.”
And so this woman goes from being alone to receiving this kind of revelation that is just like the glory that Moses experienced.
Moses says, “God, who are You?”
And God says, “I AM.”
Jesus says, “I am,” to this woman. He’s embodying that conversation.
She goes from being alone to hearing Jesus express who He is in this way in the Gospel of John.
What we see in this moment is God will approach her in a way that she wasn’t ready for and empower her in a way that she wasn’t even looking for.
And that story of the woman at the well finishes with her running and standing up in front of everybody and saying, “Come meet the man who told me everything I ever did.”
Do you see what she’s doing?
The very thing that she was avoiding talking to people about, which was her relational brokenness, is in fact the thing now that she is no longer ashamed of.
It no longer holds any captivity over her soul. It no longer holds any shame or power in her life.
Because “I am the Messiah” gave her a gift.
“If you only knew what this gift I have for you would do to your soul, how it would free you, you would never come here alone by yourself again.”
That’s what we see.
She doesn’t go back to the well alone again. She goes back to the town and stands in front of everybody she knows without shame, without fear, without disconnection.
Love takes her life from isolation to courage.
And this is what Jesus is offering us this morning.
20:51 · We see this happen with Peter, who is Jesus’ friend.
That story that many of us know where Jesus washes Peter’s feet, Peter will do what?
When Jesus comes to Peter and says, “Let me wash your feet,” Peter is resistant to it.
What actually looks like humility, it looks spiritual, is in fact Peter resisting the love that Jesus wants to give to him.
Peter will do this at multiple times.
He actually does this again in Matthew before Jesus washes his feet.
When Jesus tells Peter, “I am going to the cross,” which John describes as, “I’m going to love you to the end. I’m going to love you all the way through and through and through, all the way to the end. I’m going to love you to completion,” Peter steps in and says:
“Not You, Lord. This cannot happen to You.”
What is happening in this moment is what looks like loyalty, real religious devotion, is in fact Jesus telling Peter:
“This is getting in the way of Me loving you.”
Your devotion to Me here, listen to this, your devotion to Me is getting in the way of the way that I am to love you by laying My life down for you.
22:06 · We read this here:
“But Peter took him aside and began to reprimand him for saying such things.”
That’s Jesus talking about going to the cross.
“Heaven forbid, Lord,” Peter says.
Listen. This is religious devotion. This is going to church every Sunday. This is reading your Bible. This is praying.
“This will never happen to you!”
Jesus turned to Peter and said:
“Get away from me, Satan! You are a dangerous trap to me. You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.”
22:38 · And so what I think happens is that we are more comfortable with a God that we are required to approach correctly than a God who approaches us.
Even in that story of the woman at the well, when Jesus starts to get close to her, He goes, “Hey, go get your husband.”
And she says, “I don’t have a husband. I’ve had five husbands.”
Jesus says, “You have spoken correctly.”
And what happens in that conversation?
The woman will change the subject.
She will change the subject to, “How do I correctly worship You? Is it here or is it over there? The Jews say it’s worshiping over here, but the Samaritans say it’s worshiping over here.”
Do you see what’s happening?
She’s like, “You’re getting close to me and the parts that I keep from everyone else.”
And she changes the subject to:
“How do I correctly worship You?”
Just like Peter says, “I’m not going to let You. I’m going to serve You, Jesus. I will protect You. Not You serving and protecting me.”
23:37 · This is what happens when Jesus tries to wash Peter’s feet in John 13.
Right as Jesus is about to go to the cross, Jesus replied:
“You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.”
To the woman at the well He says, “If you only knew the gift that I’m trying to give you.”
To Peter He says, “You don’t understand quite yet.”
“No,” Peter protested in verse 8, “you will never ever wash my feet!”
And listen to what Jesus says here:
“Unless I wash you, you won’t belong to me.”
Unless I love you, you won’t belong to Me.
24:09 · And so we are more familiar, I think, with a God who demands from us than a God who serves us.
Let me say this again.
We are more familiar with a God who demands from us than a God who serves us.
And I think this is why so much of our Christianity is built around us serving God.
You’re like, “Is the pastor up here saying, ‘Don’t serve God’?”
Wait. Hold on.
We’re going to talk about that, and we’re going to talk about it next week too.
What I am telling you wholeheartedly is serving God is not the path to knowing God.
It’s not the path to getting His approval.
Your morality, however little of it or as much of it as you have, is not the way in which God approaches you.
That’s not why He approaches you.
That’s not the thing that gets Him to be kind to you.
And it is not the thing that He goes on to punish you for.
That, I believe, friends, is anti-gospel.
24:58 · This is why Paul, when he’s talking about the gospel to his Ephesian church, and this devotion that I’m writing, this thirty-day devotion that we’re going to be giving as a gift at our five-year celebration, we’re going to essentially work through that prayer over thirty days that Paul prays for his people.
For those of you who like to memorize Scripture, it’s one of the ones I always recommend starting with.
It’s this prayer in which Paul says:
“I want you to know the power of the resurrection.”
And this is what Paul says:
“I am praying for you that you will have confident hope that you are God’s rich and glorious inheritance.”
Do you see what Paul just calls you and then says, “I want you to have confident hope”?
He says, “I want you to have confident hope that you are God’s rich and glorious inheritance.”
I lost my bracelet there.
I want you to have confident hope that you make God rich.
Okay, I’m going to stop there for just a second.
You make God rich.
That’s the words that Paul’s using.
You are God’s rich and glorious inheritance.
You are the delight of His heart.
Your presence makes God rich.
Your presence blesses God.
This is what Paul says.
I want you to have confident hope in this.
26:27 · What I want us to do this morning is see Simon in our lives.
I want us to see Peter in our lives.
I want us to see this woman at the well in our lives.
What do we think, if we’re making our pot, our little witch’s brew, our little potion, whatever, we’re practicing our spell for getting God to be good to us or believing God to be kind to us, what do you feel like you’ve got to add?
For many of us, our guilt and our regrets are sometimes the thing that we think has kept God’s disapproval on us.
That means that somewhere along the way we feel, “I added a little too much of this to the pot.”
A few too many mistakes.
Too many affairs.
Too many addictions.
Not enough devotion.
Not enough what?
Loyalty.
Like Peter.
Jesus in this moment says, “This loyalty is getting in the way of Me loving you.”
And then again, when Jesus washes Peter’s feet, Peter resists again.
Jesus says, “You don’t understand yet. I’m here to serve you.”
Right?
This is where this quote comes from:
“The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.”
27:37 · And so one of the things that I want to highlight for us is that our path to knowing Jesus is by surrendering to His will to serve us.
Not for you to correct behavior.
Not for you to increase devotion.
Do these things come?
Yes.
Jesus will tell the woman at the well, “The worship is coming, but that worship is coming through the gift of the Holy Spirit,” which is what Peter will tell Simon:
“Hey, you can’t buy this gift.”
So I want to ask you this morning, I want you to ask yourself:
What do you do in your life?
Where in your life do you feel like you buy God’s favor?
Simon offers money.
Some of us offer morality.
Some of us offer a clean conscience.
Some of us offer real devotion.
And I remember, even in my own heart as a pastor, I wrestle with this.
There are moments, like when the church is going through something hard or we have low attendance one week, when I’m like:
“God, I deserve more than this. I planted a church. Look at all the things I’ve done.”
That’s me trying to buy the goodness of God.
But it’s me trying to do it through starting a church.
That’s what I offer to God.
I don’t offer money. I offer a career.
But each one of us has something that we feel, if we offer it to God, then He’ll be good to us.
29:04 · And friends, this is what Peter says:
You cannot buy the gift that God has for you.
The only thing that you can do is receive.
This is why often when I pray, when I pray for us in the morning, when I invite us to worship, I like to pray with my hands open because it reminds me that there is a posture of receiving here in which I am utterly and completely and entirely dependent on the grace of God to give to me.
29:35 · And so what we read in John 13 as we wrap, and as I invite the band to come back up on the stage, in John chapter 13, verse 1, before the Passover celebration, this is what John tells us right before the cross, right before Jesus washes Peter’s feet:
“Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to the Father. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now he loved them to the very end.”
30:09 · What I want to ask you this morning is:
When you think of your life, where have you not let God love you to the very end?
Because Peter stops Jesus right at the end.
He’s like, “Don’t wash my feet. Not You.”
Peter is uncomfortable with this idea that Jesus has come to serve him.
And friends, I actually think that so much of our spiritual angst, sometimes even the ways that we’ve been wounded by the church or someone has made you feel outcast from the church, underneath all of that motivation was this problem.
I think it’s a chief ailment.
It serves like a toxic root in our church and in our Christian lives because we think:
“In order for God to be good to me, I’ve got to clean up. I’ve got to change before He approaches me.”
But careful commentators will tell you, even with the story of Peter, Jesus will tell Peter:
“You are clean.”
Knowing that Peter is going to deny Him three times later.
What Peter does or doesn’t do is irrelevant to the love that Jesus is washing over Peter.
This gift that God desires to give you, that He wants you to live your every day with.
“If you only knew the gift that I had for you,” like He says to the woman.
Is God inviting you to see and to surrender, to open your heart to the grace that He has for you, to the love that He has for you?
Listen, friends, to the desire that He has to serve you, to hold you, and to come close to the places in your life where you have deemed yourself unapproachable.
32:10 · So what I want to ask you this morning is:
Where in your life, where in your spirituality, does it look more like casting a spell than it does receiving?
Where in your life, in order to get close to God, are you convinced it requires your effort?
Simon is a baptized believer.
This woman wants to talk about the correct place to worship.
Peter has loyalty that says, “I will not let any harm come to You, Jesus. I will defend You.”
How many times do we feel like we need to defend God?
And how many times does that get us in trouble in our world?
How many wars and how much violence have been waged because people felt they needed to defend God?
32:59 · Later, when Jesus gets down on His knees, and I want to do this for a second, and I hope I’m not being... But I want you to picture, look, listen, listen.
This is why Jesus is uncomfortable.
Imagine Jesus at your feet right now on His knees.
What would you do?
Would you think about all the mistakes you’ve made?
All the ways you don’t deserve this?
Would you let Him come close?
Would you let Him wash all of you with His love?
Would you let Him see the deep recesses of your soul?
Would you offer Him all of the guilt and all of the weight and all of the mistakes and all the shame, all the fear?
I think for so many of us, we think:
“I’ve got to approach God in the right way.”
I think it makes us really uncomfortable.
I think we, like Peter, like this woman at the well, like Simon, think we have to buy the gift.
Jesus says:
“You don’t understand. Can I serve you like this?”
Right?
If Jesus were here this morning and He starts this way with you, would you let Him?
What would happen in your soul?
Would you be afraid?
Would you push away?
We see over and over and over again in the Scriptures Jesus’ friends do.
34:31 · What I want to invite you to do this morning is to let the Son of God serve you.
Let me pray for us as we get ready for a time of offering.
Father, would You forgive us for the ways that we take Your love for us and Your kindness for us and Your grace for us and Your goodness toward us as something that we must, through our own correct behavior, receive?
Father, would You help our hearts where we are resistant, where we are afraid, where we are guilty?
Would You help us to see that none of this persuaded Your goodness toward us?
None of this initiated Your kindness to us.
You have approached us where we feel most unapproachable.
So when that happens, Father, don’t let us change the subject.
Don’t let us start trying to get it right, but let us receive.
Help us to receive.
Our hearts are so resistant.
And we need Your help, Father.
We need Your kindness, Your goodness, Your grace, and Your mercy toward us.
We have done nothing to initiate it.
We can do nothing to send it away.
And all that’s left for us, all that’s left for us here this morning, is to receive it.
