UNHINDERED | True Love Waits
UNHINDERED | True Love Waits
Speaker: Justin Gingrich
Sermon date: September 27, 2026
Scripture: Acts 7:1–53
Series: UNHINDERED
Sermon summary
In Acts 7, Stephen retells the story of Israel as a long history of God pursuing people who repeatedly resist the goodness he offers them. Abraham is called, Joseph is rejected, Moses is rejected, prophet after prophet is rejected, and yet God continues to come toward his people. Justin argues that this reveals what may be our chief spiritual hindrance: we do not know how to live loved.
Rather than seeing the Christian life as an endless project of becoming more devoted, overcoming every failure, or making ourselves acceptable to God, this sermon invites us to reverse the order. God has already acted. Grace comes before our understanding, effort, or response. Drawing on Jesus’ words to “live in my love,” the sermon describes Scripture as a story of divine pursuit, or “divine wooing,” culminating in God giving himself to us in Jesus.
The result is an invitation to spiritual rest and receptivity. Instead of making another resolution to improve ourselves, we can trust the goodness God extends even when we are unaware of it. Christian transformation begins not by persuading God to love us, but by awakening to the love that has already pursued us and learning to receive it.
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.
0:07 · Our text this morning is going to be from Acts chapter 7, starting in verse 1. We’re going to jump around just a little bit here.
Then the high priest asked Stephen, “Are these charges true?”
To this he replied, “Brothers and fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran. ‘Leave your country and your people,’ God said, ‘and go to the land I will show you.’”
So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living.
He goes on to say, “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt, but God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles.”
Later, Moses thought his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.
“This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and for forty years in the wilderness.
“But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him in their hearts and turned back to Egypt.
“You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors. You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him. You have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it.”
2:31 · Let me pray for us this morning.
Father, we love you. Holy Spirit, would you be here with us this morning? Would you have mercy on us? Would you have mercy on our souls, Father, as we grapple with this great love that you have shown us in Christ?
Would you help our resistant and stubborn and stiff-necked hearts to receive the goodness that you have for us in Christ? Father, would you help us to cling to it, to hold to it, but most importantly, Father, most significantly of all, would you open our hearts to receive it?
Father, we need your mercy, your love this morning. We pray all of these things in your name. Amen. You can be seated.
3:18 · Well, good morning again. We are in the middle of our series, UNHINDERED, in the book of Acts. And what we did this morning, if you’ll recall, if you’ve been following with us the last couple of weeks, is we’ve been following the journey of these early Christians as they started a church, very much like so many of us did.
One of the things that happened last week that we talked about is that Stephen is this newly appointed leader of the church. We read that the Holy Spirit comes on him. There’s great power, there’s great righteous responsibility that Stephen has. And then all of a sudden there’s this kind of 180, about-face, and Stephen is arrested and brought into custody before this council of religious leaders.
Stephen will give this impassioned speech, basically describing to God’s people their chief spiritual ailment, which is what we’re going to do this morning.
I skipped around because Acts chapter 7 is over fifty verses, so we just didn’t have time to read everything. I did a little bit of a survey so you could see some of the highlights. But if you want to go back and read chapter 7, I would highly recommend doing that just so you can have the context of everything that Stephen does.
As Stephen is dragged before these religious leaders, he will give a diagnosis of the chief spiritual ailment. And he will give, I believe, the chief spiritual ailment of all of us. He will give the reason our hearts struggle with faith. He will give the reason we stay disconnected from God. He will give the reason our faith sometimes stays small and our trust in the goodness of God stays fragile.
5:08 · What I want to do this morning is lay some theological groundwork. And I know some of you are like, when he says that, that means we’re going to be here until 12:30.
Look, I’m really wrapping up sermons. If you go back and look at my livestream, my longest one this year has been thirty-six minutes. So I’m not going to keep us here until dinner.
But what I want to do this morning, and over these next four weeks, is what the book of Acts does here: push us further and deeper into the grace of God and into the goodness of God than we thought possible.
Over these next four weeks, as we prepare for our five-year celebration, I want to do the same thing. I want to push you farther and deeper into the arms of God and into the goodness and the love that God has for you than you thought possible.
For this is, I feel, my chief responsibility as your pastor, as the pastor of this church. If we get nothing else right, what I want us to know is that we are loved, dearly loved by God. And that love that he has for us blows past our expectations of it, our ability to conceive it, sometimes even our ability to understand it or grasp it. And yet it will not leave us. It will not forsake us. And it can completely transform us.
6:40 · What I want to do this morning, and what I’m going to do over these next four weeks, is lay out what it means to be a church that is transformed by grace. I’m going to lay out what it means to be a church that is loved by God.
So I have two words that I want you to remember.
One of the things I’ve been working on over this summer, really most of this year, is trying to shape our values. Right now our values kind of sit on the wall right here. And I know “Hope” is looking really sad. Someone told me last week, “I love that it’s Hope that’s collapsing,” because every week I come in, it’s like, I hope Hope doesn’t fall. I hope it’ll stay up.
So we have these six values, right? They have shaped our church. They’ve shaped my theology. I use them as bumpers to decide how I’m going to preach, what we’re going to talk about.
But what I want to do is reshape our values some, because we have these six values and they’re wordy and long because I’m wordy. Most people kind of see them but don’t quite know how they impact them. I still struggle sometimes to understand: How do they shape the church? How do they shape my walk with God? As I go through the week and have hard meetings at work, or I’m sitting with my small group during the week, how do these things shape my intimacy with God, my affection for God? How do they make me feel more secure in God’s love for me?
And so I’ve actually reduced what I want this church to embody to two words. Two words. I want these two words to shape our church. If you get on our website right now, that’s the first two words you see on our homepage.
Live loved.
I want everything that we do, every time that we pray, every time that we come together, every time we struggle with our sins and our addictions or our insecurities, I want these two words to define everything for our spiritual lives.
8:46 · Because the chief problem that Stephen will give to these religious people as he’s dragged before them is that they do not understand how to live loved by God.
They do not understand how to grasp his love, how to receive his love, how to worship him [unclear wording in captions: “in spite of his love”]. And what this story that we read is, even though it finishes with some harsh language, is a story of people who do not understand and cannot receive the love that God has for them.
And friends, I believe as your pastor, and I’ve prayed about this a bunch, about how I’m going to say this, and I have no other way to say it other than to say it directly: I believe this is our chief spiritual ailment.
It’s not your sin. It’s not your stubbornness. It’s not your insecurities. It’s not your addictions. It’s not all the other things that we label, like, “I’ve got to get rid of these before my faith gets strong.”
It’s this: I don’t know how to receive the love that God has for me.
The fact that I am his beloved child, in whom he delights, with whom he is well pleased, whom he loves in Jesus, it hasn’t sat in my heart.
And all of those other things that bug us about our faith, our lack of devotion to God, our lack of quiet time, I actually believe those spring up out of the fact that we haven’t grabbed these two words yet. They haven’t transformed our souls.
I want to talk this morning about what I think is our chief spiritual ailment, our chief hindrance to the Christian life, our chief stumbling block: that we do not know how to live loved.
Over these next four weeks, I’m going to talk about these two words and this value. I love that our values are here, but chances are good if somebody’s like, “Hey, what are the six values of Restore?” it would be hard for you to repeat them.
But these two: live loved.
If somebody’s like, “What kind of church do you go to?” I go to a church where we live loved by God. I go to a church where I receive the goodness of God, the overwhelming love of God, the affection of God, and the desire of God. I receive that.
And from that, all of these other things that we want to fix about ourselves or change about ourselves, those find healing and wholeness. But it first comes with receiving what God has for you, which is his goodness in Jesus.
11:05 · What we’re going to do this morning is start unpacking this, because this is what Stephen does in this long and impassioned speech where he gives basically the entire history of God’s people.
What he will repeatedly say over and over again is that you do not understand the love with which God pursues you. You don’t recognize it, and you remain unaware of it. And the deeper problem is you’re even unaware of how unaware you are of it.
11:45 · So what I want to do this morning is invite you to do something that feels a little counterintuitive.
I haven’t been a pastor that long, but I’ve been around ministry and counseling before this long enough to see different ideas and leaders come and go. I’ve seen lots of discipleship programs. I’ve seen lots of spiritual techniques. I’ve seen lots of models for things that people are like, “This is where the Spirit is moving.”
Here’s the thing. I think we commit to those things hoping they’ll fix our sin problems, save our marriages, heal our wounds, help us silence our inner critic, maybe give us some comfort in our grief.
And most of us, I think, if we described our spiritual life, it’s sort of like this cycle in which we try a new thing. I try a new thing to make God the center of my life. I try a new thing to get my devotion to God better or bigger or greater. I try to deepen my faith.
Our spiritual lives, I believe, are characterized by our efforts to improve them. And it ends, friends, in this very damaging spiritual cycle.
Because here’s the thing I’ve seen years and years later: nothing really changes underneath.
And I think nothing changes underneath for us because we haven’t grabbed ahold of these two words. We haven’t learned how to live loved by Jesus.
By the time we get to the end of our new effort and realize, “I’m kind of back where I started,” we’re usually either more burned out than before, we’re more over it than we were before, or we’re less convinced that God could change anything for us. We’re less convinced that he wants to change things for us.
13:32 · So I want to look at Jesus’ words here in John 15:9. This is part of where these words get their inspiration. These are Jesus’ words themselves: “As I have loved you, I have loved you the same way the Father has loved me. So live in my love.”
Depending on which translation you use, it might be “live,” it might be “abide,” it might be “stay,” it might be “remain.”
Live in my love.
This is Jesus’ command to you.
And this is the problem. This is what we hear Jesus saying: “Change for my love. I’ve loved you just as the Father has loved me, so change and I’ll love you.”
Or we hear Jesus say, “Improve to increase my love. Grow your faith. Have less sin. Try. That’ll increase my love for you.”
That’s not what Jesus says either.
Or sometimes we hear, “Don’t stumble so you don’t lose my love. Don’t rebel against me or you’ll lose my love.”
It doesn’t say that either.
What Jesus says is, “I’ve loved you as the Father has loved me. So live in my love.”
Because this love that Jesus is calling you to live in, I believe, is the thing that will transform your soul. It is the thing through which all these other things that we wish would change about us can change. It’s the thing that will transform us.
14:56 · John 4:10. This is the context: Jesus has just encountered a woman who’s very much outside of the religious system. Some of you know this as the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman whom he meets at the well.
As Jesus has this conversation, there’s almost this, I want you to hear the angst in Jesus’ voice here. Jesus replies to her at one point, “If only you knew the gift that God has for you and who you were speaking to.”
If only you knew. If only you could grasp. If only your soul could trust this love that God desires to give you, for you to live.
That’s what I want for you, my dear friend, my dear woman, my dear daughter. If only you could know what God is desiring to give you.
15:45 · And what we see in this story with Stephen as he talks to these religious leaders is, I think, a God who repeatedly, over and over and over again, says to his people, “If only you knew. If only your soul could grasp. If only your heart could uncover and trust what I desire to give you.”
Jesus’ words: “If only you knew the gift that God has for you.”
Ellen Davis says something here that I think is very worth noting. She says nothing else but God’s intense, unslaking desire for humanity makes sense of the biblical story.
This story that Stephen just gave: there’s Abraham, who followed God, and there’s Joseph, whom you rejected. Then there’s Moses, whom you rejected. There’s this series of rejections, right? He finishes with, “How long are you going to keep resisting the Holy Spirit?”
What she says here is that nothing else but God’s intense, unslaking desire for humanity makes sense in light of the biblical story, from the calling of Abraham, which is where Stephen starts, to the incarnation of God in Christ, even to Jesus’ death nailed to a cross.
Of course, the covenant can only really work, she says, if love is strong on both sides.
So the recurring tragedy, this is the tragedy that Stephen is communicating in the story of biblical history, is that human love and responsiveness to God repeatedly weakens and fails.
This is what Stephen is trying to get his people to see. God sends you rescuer after rescuer, redeemer after redeemer, prophet after prophet. And each of these times, the love communicated to you that God has for you grew cold in your hearts. You rejected it.
17:28 · So what Stephen gives us in this biblical narrative is a story I call divine wooing.
Wooing is a funny word, but it is the story of this divine desire, this holy intimacy. It is a desire for holy communion with you.
It is a story of God waiting.
Most of us feel like, “I need to understand God’s plan so I can get on board with it.” That’s how most of us approach faith, give or take.
But this entire story is God waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for God’s people to open their hearts to the love that he desires to give them.
18:22 · And I think here lies one of the chief problems.
What we’re going to do over the next couple of weeks is I’m going to walk you guys through some of the theology that forms me and has formed Restore. Because I know on Sunday mornings you’re like, “Jesus says all these crazy things. Where’s he getting it from?”
There’s real theology behind the statements that I make. I’ve prayed and read and done more reading than I usually do to really make sure that our boxes are checked here, that we remain within Christian orthodoxy and Christian teaching.
But I want to push us farther and deeper into the arms of grace than we thought we could go. I want us to, like Paul says in Ephesians, grasp how high, how long, how deep, and how wide. Even if you don’t quite understand it, I want us to wrestle with that love.
For most of us, we think God’s plan is about us trying to understand what he’s doing so we can respond to it. It’s about the efforts that we can make to secure God’s salvation for us.
But the story that Stephen is telling is one in which God moves despite how his people actually respond to it. God will repeatedly, over and over and over again, respond with kindness and mercy and love toward his people.
One of the chief things I want us to start feeling secure in, in our relationship with God, is seeing that God is working.
This is what Stephen is trying to tell his people: God has been kind to you from the beginning. You have no concept of it, but it is indeed God’s goodness toward you.
And what I want that to do for us is I want us to begin to trust what God does while we are sleeping. I want us to begin to trust the love and the grace and the goodness that God extends for us even in our unawareness of it.
I don’t want us to feel like, “Okay, what do I have to do to get on board with God’s plan?”
Because I think this creates an enormous amount of spiritual anxiety. And frankly, I actually see this abused quite a bit. Manipulative people do this all the time. I see it online. I see it in politics, right?
They go, “Here’s what God’s doing. Get on board.” And you’re like, there’s some self-serving interest here. It’s very obvious.
Well, sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not. And that’s sinister and evil.
Instead, what I want us to do is start going, “Man, God is good to us even when we are unaware of it. God is good to us. I want to learn to trust the goodness that God has shown me in Christ, even while I was sleeping.”
For some of us, how much might that actually change how we sleep and rest? How much we toss and turn at night? Learning to trust that God is working when we can’t see it.
20:58 · So J. Louis Martyn, he’s one of those theologians who has formed a lot of my theology. We’ll talk a little bit more about him, especially over on Vision Sunday.
But he says this: “We keep imagining that the Christian life is becoming sufficiently attentive to God that we can cooperate with what he’s doing.”
You see how this can get manipulated and abused? You see how this happens sometimes?
Apocalyptic theology, and we’ll explain a little bit more about what that means, not this morning, reverses that order.
God has already acted.
Grace has invaded our lives before we understood it, asked for it, or knew how to name it.
Here’s why this matters. Because for so many of us, our faith feels like this thing that is constantly not good enough. Our sins, our failures, our insecurities, all the things that we wish we could change about ourselves, our marriages, all of this starts to pile up, and we start to wonder, “How is this going to impact how God is responding to me?”
And what this story of Stephen is, what I want us to see this morning, is the answer is an unequivocal no.
This provides real spiritual safety for us because, look, if you could not persuade God to be good to you from the beginning, and some of us have heard these narratives, and I love evangelism. I’ve given my life to talking to people about the love of God. That is my greatest single desire.
Yet I’m afraid that so much of our evangelism is centered around, “You’ve got to do this in order for God to be good to you. You’ve got to say yes, and then God extends salvation.”
But what J. Louis Martyn is saying here, what I think Stephen is saying, is God extended his salvation long before you even knew that you needed it.
Which then reassures our weary and tired hearts and our faith that if I could not do anything to get that invitation, then I can’t do anything to send it away.
Okay?
And this is where I want to push us some, because I see Instagram preachers all the time: “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to get your life in line with God. We’re doing here, and God’s doing there.”
I think it’s the exact opposite of what grace is.
That’s not grace. That’s just another contract.
If I hold up my end of the bargain, God holds up his. I don’t think that’s grace at all.
23:08 · Willie James Jennings is another commentary I’ve been using through Acts, and I’m loving his perspective.
He says this is a story of God waiting and waiting and waiting, and he is waiting for that love to take root in the hearts and flower into genuine desire in his people.
“I sent you Moses.” You didn’t trust him.
“I sent you Joseph.” You guys betrayed him too. The patriarchs betrayed Joseph.
“I sent you all of this, and you keep sending them away. But I’m not going to stop sending them. Next, I’m going to send my own embodied Son. I’m going to send Jesus incarnate.”
And so what Stephen will say, what Jennings is saying, is this is a story about God waiting for that love to take root in our hearts. It’s us learning, and God waiting for us to learn, how to live loved, to receive this so that we can live loved.
24:01 · There’s this finishing in Acts 7:51–53.
Stephen says, “You stiff-necked people, your hearts and your ears are still uncircumcised. You’re just like your ancestors. You always resist the Holy Spirit. Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute?”
We hear anger.
I want to hear anguish in Stephen’s words.
Is there ever a time when God sent his goodness that you didn’t slap it in the face, that you didn’t push it out?
And so what is this harsh-sounding conclusion, I actually think, is draped in tragedy. It’s draped in heartbreak that God has over his people.
It’s almost like an anger that’s induced by intimacy.
“God, I want to know you. I want to love you, but you keep chasing after smaller, lesser things than me.”
25:01 · So I’m going to say something that got me in a lot of trouble online.
I make no apologies for my words here.
Sorry. Okay, that sounded more defensive than I meant. When I get insecure, I start to sound defensive because I’m like, I don’t want you to see how insecure I’m feeling. So I overcompensate.
But really, let me just say: I stand by the words that I say here.
Look, I want you to ask the question: Is it true that God could desire me like this?
Is it true that my presence, is it true that your soul, that he is held captive by your beauty?
I made a post like that a couple months ago. People didn’t like it. Theology police came for me.
But here’s the thing: Could God be bound to you?
I’m choosing my words very carefully this morning.
Bound to you by the need that his love creates for you.
26:08 · In Song of Songs, which is this imagery of love, lots of people are like, “I don’t know what to do with Song of Songs.”
I think there’s an imagery of God loving his church that’s kind of embedded within the songs. It’s like, how does God love us?
There’s a line in here that’s captured the imagination and hearts of theologians. This is the king speaking to the one whom he loves, his bride:
“Your head crowns you like Carmel. Your hair is like royal tapestry. The king is held captive by its tresses.”
The king is held captive by the locks in your hair.
I want to land here for a second.
When you imagine yourself standing in the presence of God someday, from the bottom of my heart, I believe that we all will. We’re in his presence right now.
Can you hold a God who is held captive by the locks of your hair?
I can’t, but that’s for different reasons.
Thanks. All right. Some of you are like, “That was not a time for a bald joke. That was a really deep moment.”
But can you imagine a God who is held captive by the intricacies of your life and your soul, who delights in your beauty, who desires your beauty?
This is what it means to live loved.
This is Stephen’s chief diagnosis. You guys can’t grab that by the efforts of your own hands.
We didn’t read that part, but you keep doing things to try and put God in these categories that make more sense to you. You’re trying to show up for God in the way that makes sense to you.
But can you imagine a God who is held captive by you?
Most of us have been conditioned to think that the first thing that God sees when we’re in his presence is our sin. We’ve talked about this before. I’m not going to go on this morning. I think it’s terrible theology. It’s sensationalism. That’s not actually what the Scriptures say, because God himself begins to actually identify himself with you.
28:23 · Let me read a quote from Exodus. This is when God calls Moses. Stephen brings up that calling in this speech.
But I want us to hear this in Exodus 3:15:
“God also said to Moses, ‘Say to the Israelites, “The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.’”
Here’s what God is doing here.
“I am the God of Abraham.”
He is associating himself. He’s not just saying, “Abraham belongs to me.” He is actually saying, “I also belong to Abraham.”
So I’m not going to ask you to do this out loud, but I want you to say your name.
“I am the God of Justin.”
Have you ever felt that kind of connection to God? That kind of ownership? The way that God wants to associate with you, like your stories are intertwined?
There is this holy intimacy that God desires to have with you.
God says, from now on, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, all of these deeply flawed people, “I am their God. When you say my name, you associate me with them.”
Despite their rejection of me, despite sometimes their little faith in me, I belong to them.
I’m held captive by the tresses in their hair.
This love that I have for them creates a need to be with them that I have as their God.
30:03 · There are quite a few theologians who really wrestle with this. One of them was Karl Barth.
Here’s what happens. Whenever I say stuff like this, people come in like, “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Are you implying that God is insufficient?”
That’s where I really got in trouble.
“Wait, hold on. Are you implying that God needs me? God is all-sufficient. That’s part of his character.”
To say that is not heresy. It’s not, because love creates need.
Here’s what I think we do. I always heard this kind of growing up: “God doesn’t need you, but he wants you.”
If I told that to my kids, how would that feel to them?
Really, would we express love to our children that way?
I don’t come to my kids like, “I didn’t need you, but I really wanted you.” Like they’re going to feel any affection from that.
I have a three-year-old now. He loves to help us cook. He calls it making potions. I don’t know what he’s watching.
If I’m like, “Hey, I don’t need you, but I want you to pour all of our spices out into this bowl,” that’s not love. We know that. Parents know that.
Karl Barth said this. I’m going to use some technical language here just so you understand I’m not making this up.
Barth said: “He does not will to be God for himself nor as God to be alone with himself. He wills as God to be for us and with us who are not God.”
Here’s what Barth is saying. That was long. I know Barth is very long. There are times you read him and you’re like, that was one sentence? It was a paragraph long. And you guys give me a hard time sometimes.
Here’s what he’s saying.
God’s holy communion with us, this intimacy that I’ve been talking about, becomes an attribute of his love. This need that he has to call you back to himself.
Part of what Barth says is it starts to change how we understand who God is.
This love that God has for you, this need that’s created out of his love for you.
I like how Ellen Davis says it. There’s no other way to explain the biblical story than to explain this God who is feverishly and fanatically captivated by you and in love with you.
And that love, and that desire that God has to be in your presence, becomes part of how you define his nature and his character.
You’re not making a heretical statement about his character. What Barth says is that’s actually part of the attributes of who he is. That’s how we understand his love.
32:54 · Fleming Rutledge says this, and this is where we’ll close as I invite the band to come back on the stage this morning.
This whole story of God’s people is a story, she says, where the emphasis is almost exclusively on what God will do whether his people make the right choices or not.
Reject prophet after prophet after prophet after prophet, right?
And so you would think, if you were God, you’re sending and sending. There’s actually a parable that’s kind of similar to this. You send money, you’re investing in something, and they keep squandering it and squandering it and squandering it.
Eventually, I should stop sending money, right? My investments are losing here.
The whole story of Stephen is God keeps sending and sending and sending and sending, and losing and losing and losing, until he makes the greatest investment of all, which is himself.
He gives you everything that he has in Jesus.
The story isn’t that people didn’t respond right, so God is like, “All right, I’m going to send them fifty instead of a hundred this time. And then if they reject that, I’ll send them twenty-five, and eventually they’ll be out of options.”
But God actually does the other way around.
God sends fifty, they squander it. God sends one hundred, they squander it. God sends two hundred, they squander it, until God sends his own Son.
He sends everything that he has.
And her point is: this is not a story of what his people do and the right choices they need to make. It’s a story almost exclusively about what God will do whether his people make the right choices or not.
34:25 · What I want to do this morning, as we prepare to take an offering and move into our final time of worship, is over these next few weeks invite us into this kind of grace.
I’m going to have some things to do with that over the next couple of weeks, but I want to invite us to open our hearts to this idea that God has this divine desire, this need for us. That’s part of how he longs for you.
I want us to wrestle with this.
I did this this week. I don’t ever want to ask you guys to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself.
But in your quiet time, I want you to wrestle with a God who is this excited to be around you. There is no other way you can explain his pursuit of you except if that was compelled by a love like this for you.
35:33 · As we get ready to take the offering this morning, as the baskets are passed, if you’re a guest or visitor, feel no obligation to give.
But if Restore is your home, your family, this is an opportunity for you to help make the life change and the impact and the safety that you see here happen every single week.
Your generosity helps be the embodied goodness of God to the people around you.
I invite you to consider: How do I become an expression of God’s goodness toward others? This is one of the ways that we do that.
36:16 · The other way I’m going to invite you over these next couple of weeks is to spend time with God living loved.
This is why I love where we’re going to settle on this statement. Over these next few weeks we’ll talk a little bit more next week, but this is where I’m going to close:
Make no resolutions to improve yourself.
Really. I want you to grow in your faith.
Make no resolutions to start changing things.
I’m going to say one, and I’m pushing this morning, but I’m going to say it intentionally:
Make no resolutions to improve your devotion to God.
Okay?
36:45 · Wait for the Spirit.
Because the actual story of Acts, we’re getting ready to read about Saul. Some of you know him as Paul. And we’ll hear from Paul himself: “I had great devotion to God.”
It turns out it was actually really destructive and hurtful and damaging to the church of God. I thought it was devotion, but it was really the effort of my own hands and the efforts of my own soul to save myself.
And so Acts will show us a God that even in those moments when Saul is living in this active rebellion and harm against the body of Christ, God will extend kindness and goodness to him.
And it’ll start this story over again with the character and the person of Saul.
That’s what we’re getting ready to do.
37:25 · But what I want you to do, and I’ve prayed about it, thought about it, reworded things over and over and over this week, is I want us to practice receiving.
The way I do it is when I pray, I pray with my hands open.
But this week, do this:
“God, would you just help me receive your love?”
That’s it.
Make no resolutions to fight your sin or prove to God that you’re more devoted to him.
As we’ll see in Acts, sometimes that devotion that we think we have toward God actually becomes quite destructive and damaging.
Instead, what I want us to do is sit with hands wide open.
I am absolutely convinced that the Spirit of God is moving with the same kind of power that raised Jesus from the dead. We’ll talk about that. That transforms Paul’s life.
It can transform yours.
We want to stop being a stiff-necked people.
Let’s quiet our souls to receive the love, the kindness that God has for us in Jesus.
38:29 · Let me pray for us as we move into our final time of worship this morning.
Father, we need you.
We are so unaware sometimes of this great love that you have shown us in Christ.
God, we live our whole lives chasing other things, trying to improve ourselves, trying to make a standard, trying to fix what we think is wrong with us.
But we are your beloved children.
So this morning, Jesus, would you help us to do nothing but live in your love?
Not improve for your love. Not change for your love. Not stop failing so we don’t send your love away.
Father, would you help us to simply live in your love that you have shown us in Jesus?
Father, would you guard our hearts from our instincts? They are instincts to pay our own debts, to prove our worth, to change and fix ourselves.
These are not the gospel. No matter how spiritual they might sound, they are not your love.
So, Father, I ask this morning that you would help us to trust your kindness and your goodness toward us through no effort of our own, through no work of our own hands, but simply because you have pursued us.
You were held captive by the intricacies of our lives.
Father, help us to know your delight, to know your desire that is born out of your love for us in Jesus.
We pray all of these things in your name. Amen.
