Your best Pathway to Health 2016: His Transforming Love

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Your best Pathway to Health

Daniel Jackson

How Far Will God Go?

2 things, a confession and a profession made every time that I speak these days.

Without the amazing grace of God and my Lord Jesus Christ, I would not progress, but rather regress.

And just in case you hadn't noticed, y'all are just like me.

A man came to me 1 day, said, Pastor, I want you to take my name off the church books.

And when I come to church, everyone can smell my sin.

And I said to him, I don't want you to take your name off the church books because there's only 1 difference between you and the person sitting next to you on the pew, you can't smell their sin.

But wouldn't it be great if God would attach an odor to every sin?

Then when we came to church, we would say as we walked in the front door, my name is Dan Jackson and I am a sinner.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

All of us need to be healed from our brokenness.

I don't say that because I'm trying to put on a humble act.

Secondly, within the context of the Seventh-day Adventist church, there is only 1 true north, and His name is Jesus.

He must be the center and the substance of what we preach and what we teach and how we act and how we relate to 1 another.

Because He said, by this will all men know that you are my disciples, in that you have love 1 for the other.

You know, I'm going to offend some people here in a moment, and I'm really sorry, but I have to tell you that sometimes when women prepare, they look weird.

Now, you're going to understand this in just a moment, and it's not really meant to be an insult, but you know what I'm talking about?

When I was a kid in my house, my mother and my sisters always looked weird on Friday night.

They looked like they were getting ready to get on the next spaceship, right?

Audience laughs 1 Friday night, I made a decision in my foolish youth that I would sneak out of the house and I would go to a dance.

I didn't know how to dance, but I went to the dance anyway to dance.

And I remember, I will never forget, I was standing with this young woman trying to move, and I was standing directly in front of the entrance door to the dance hall.

There were steps leading up to the dance hall, And I will never forget the appearance, 1 step at a time.

And the farther up they went, they were attached to my mother's head.

And she came into the dance hall, way out of her comfort zone on a Friday night.

And She stood there, and she did the most effective thing that any person could do.

And so effective was that treatment that I have never gone back to another dance on Friday night or Saturday night, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, or Thursday night.

A woman who loved her son went way out of her comfort zone to bring him back.

How far will God go to develop eternal friendships with people?

We read as our Scripture reading, Luke chapter 15, verses 1 and 2, and this is an amazing statement.

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus.

But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

It was about 2 months before the time when Jesus would be crucified and he was in a place called Perea, and everywhere he went he was followed by publicans and by sinners, by those who wanted to trap him in his words and take the report back to headquarters.

The Pharisees, as you begin to look at the Scripture and the history of the Scripture, the Pharisees and the Sadducees basically looked down, They branded and labeled everyone.

It was the only way that they could maintain their own self-conceived superiority.

But what they did not realize in this statement, he fellowships with sinners and he eats with them was that their very condemnation of Jesus was an affirmation of his ministry.

He did not just come to hang around with goody-two-shoes.

He came to deal with every person with all needs at any time.

I was preaching a sermon similar to this 1 day, and as I was preaching a man jumped up in the balcony and he said, the church is filled with hypocrites.

I looked at him and I said, brother, why do you think I joined?" Then I went on in my sermon and the same guy jumped up again, and when he jumped up he yelled this time, you're trying to save everyone!

The people who came to Jesus felt that in His presence, even for them, there was an escape from the pit of sin.

The Pharisees had only scorn and condemnation for them, but Christ Jesus, your friend and mine, greeted them as children of God, estranged indeed from the Father's house, but not forgotten from the Father's hearts.

He did not pick and choose those to whom He would extend His grace.

I appreciated what Don McIntosh said last night about grace and the boundless grace of God.

Every person, regardless of his or her situation, found grace in Jesus.

Sometimes, humanly speaking, we think we can whip people into shape.

Maybe we can put a little pressure on them, call them to our standard, criticize them until somehow they see the light.

I want to read Romans chapter 2, verse 4, where Paul makes this statement.

He says, God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.

It is not the judging and the condemning that do the work of conversion, people don't change because they are damned either by us individually or collectively.

It is God's goodness, Paul says, that leads to repentance.

That is not to say that there aren't times in our lives or in our collective experience where we do not need to act discreetly based upon the Word of God to deal with issues.

I am not talking about throwing out the Bible and the teachings of Scripture.

But so, this experience happens, it develops in a context of criticism and unhappiness, and Jesus begins to tell 3 stories, 3 parables found in Luke chapter 15.

The parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the lost son.

And before we dig into these stories, I want to make some observations.

Observation number 1, And you can follow through with this.

If you're writing it down, write it down.

But the lost sheep are lost, but they don't know it.

The lost coin is alienated, represents the person alienated right at home, right at home.

The lost son represents people who have just dismissed God from their lives.

And each of these stories, fascinatingly enough, God is portrayed in different ways.

In the story of the lost sheep, God is portrayed as the shepherd who seeks.

In the story of the lost coin, God is portrayed as the woman who sweeps.

In the story of the lost son, God is portrayed as the father who waits and then embraces.

I want to make this statement plain today, that these 3 stories, These 3 representations that Jesus makes are an introduction to who God is.

The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, immutable, and eternal God says to the human family, look at me.

This is not some kind of soppy, substandard Jackson interpretation of Scripture.

When you read those 3 stories, you look into the mind of God.

We too often attempt intellectually to put God in a box, A box of art devising, but God can and will never be defined by human terms.

The parable demonstrates the character of God lived out within the context of human brokenness.

Listen to these scriptures, Romans chapter 5 and verse 8, but God commends His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Jesus died for us.

You don't get the impact of that until you begin to dig more deeply into the text, And you basically could render it this way, but God shows His love to you and me, in that on the very worst day of our lives, at the very worst moment of that day, When we had rejected Him, Jesus died for us.

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How Far Will God Go?

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