(congregation applauses) - Hey, it is great to
be back with all of you. I love this church. I love being here. I don't know if you know this, but what happens here at this church and through your leaders impacts not just this community,
but all around the country and around the world and so from some of those churches and some of those pastors, I just want to say thank you for what God is doing in you here because what he does in you here, he does through you all around the world and I'm one of those who
has benefited greatly from this church's
leadership over the years. I'm from Kentucky. Right now I have three
teenage girls at home and one son, so I'm not alone. (congregation laughing) But three teenage girls. If you don't mind praying for
me, I'll take those prayers. (congregation laughing) I'm in over my head. I know I'm in over my head. The nice thing about
having three teenage girls is I've learned if you don't like the mood in one room, you just
go to the other room. It's like, you'll find what
you're looking for eventually. I try to stay on top of things as a dad. You know, I want to know what's happening in the world of teenagers. I try to stay on top of technology and the language that they're using and what words mean and not long ago I came
across this article that just listed all these new words that have been added to the dictionary in the past year or so and I was interested. A lot of them didn't apply to teenager. I just, I liked it. I just liked reading new words that have definitions
that are unfamiliar to me and I started playing this game without even planning on it where I would read the new word that's been added to the dictionary and I'd try to guess what it meant before reading the definition. It's kinda fun. Thought you might want to play it. So, here's the first word for you. New word. The word is phonesia. You wanna guess what that means
just kinda in your own mind. Phonesia. It's the combination,
of course, of two words, phone and amnesia so in my thinking phonesia meant, you know,
the leaving your phone somewhere, forgetting where you put it. Here's the actual definition of phonesia. It's the act of dialing a phone number and forgetting who you were calling just as the person answers the phone. (congregation laughing) Like, "Hello, who is this?" "You called me." Yeah, it's phonesia. It's common enough there's a word for it. New word, new meaning. Here's another new word that you can try and guess the definition. This is a tough one. It's disconfect is the word. Disconfect. The hint would be it's something you might use around Halloween time. It applies to candy. Here's the definition of disconfect. It is the attempt to sterilize the piece of candy you
dropped on the floor by blowing on it. (congregation laughing) So there's a word for it. You can use this with your kids. You know, like, make
sure you disconfect that before you eat it. Another new word that I liked that might come in handy at
the office is blamestorming instead of brainstorming. It's sitting in a group and discussing who's responsible
for the company's problems rather than trying to solve them. It's blamestorming. It happens enough there's a word for it. And then another word
that seems applicable especially as we get
ready for tax season here and the word is intaxication. Intaxication. Here's the definition. It's the euphoria from
getting a tax refund which lasts until you
realize it was your money to begin with.
(congregation laughing) So that's a common enough phenomena that now we have a word and a definition. So anyway, I was reading this article and I was just intrigued. I like new words with new meanings. I started thinking, though,
about familiar words with familiar definitions that we kinda use casually. They don't really get our attention. We've heard those words so often we don't pay much attention to them and it's one of those words that I want to talk to you
for a few minutes about today and the word is grace. It's easy just to assume
that we understand grace because it's a word that
gets thrown around a lot, especially in church circles. If you've been in church
for much of your life you've heard about grace. There's a lot of content and scripture committed to explaining grace. In fact, the apostle Paul who wrote much of the New Testament, wrote all these letters to new churches, uses the word grace more
than 100 times as he explains the concept to new believers, to first generation Christians. One of my favorite definitions
or explanations of grace is in Ephesians 1:7-8, Paul
explains grace this way. For the blood, it is for
the, by the blood of Christ you are set free. It's the blood of Jesus
that gives us grace. It's not that you earned it. It's not your religious
rule keeping has caused you to deserve it. It is by the blood of Jesus. It's the price that he
paid on the cross for us where he took his punishment,
our punishment upon himself. Paul explains it's by the blood of Christ you were set free, that
is, our sins are forgiven. How great is the grace of God which he has lavished upon
us, which he has given us in such large measure. And that explanation is helpful, right, but here's what I've learned
about the word grace. If you want to understand grace, you need more than a definition. You need more than an explanation. What you need is an experience. Until you've experienced grace, you don't really understand grace. To that end, grace is a
little bit like romantic love. You can open up a dictionary and you can read the
definition of romantic love and that might be helpful. I mean, you can talk to a scientist and a scientist can perhaps tell you the neural and chemical
responses in the brain when someone feels romantic love and that explanation might be helpful, but if you really want to
understand romantic love, you fall in love and you don't understand
it until you experience it and the same is true of grace. Like, when I ask for a
definition of grace from you, what I'm not looking for is an explanation where you quote some scriptures, although that's a foundation and that explanation is necessary, but I'm not looking for is, like, this kind of creative
acronym for the word grace that spells it out. What I'm looking for is a
story, is an experience. That's how you know you know grace is you've felt it, you have
experienced it in your own life and so as I studied the
theme of grace in scripture, what I found is that more often than not, grace is something that is taught to us through stories, through narratives. There's this rule in hermeneutics, the interpretation of scripture, there's a rule that says you don't just pay attention to what is said but you pay attention to how it's said, that he genre matters, the genre tells you something and throughout scripture,
the genre of grace is story where it doesn't necessarily get explained but it gets conveyed through
one story after another. So if you read through the gospels, do this sometime, read through the gospels and you'll find that Jesus
never uses the word grace. So Paul used it more than 100 times. Jesus never used it. And yet did he teach us about grace? Yeah. John says that Jesus was full of grace, full of grace and truth and so it just spilled out on everyone who was around him and so one story after
another in the ministry and in the life of Jesus, it teaches us about grace and there's something that happens as we read those stories where we long for it to
be our story as well. And so you have Jesus
beginning his ministry and he calls the disciples to follow him. This was a normal practice for a rabbi. They would call disciples. The way that they would
get disciples in those days is that it would be an application process so a rabbi would accept applications and then they would go
through the applications and they would pick the
best and the brightest, the people who were at the top, and if their credit was approved and if their references checked out, then they could be a
disciples of that rabbi. But here's what's really
interesting about Jesus. He doesn't, he doesn't
accept applications. He offers invitations. This is huge in what it
teaches us about grace. So he doesn't accept applications, he offers invitations
and he invites people that never would have made the cut had they been applying and so he invites a few fishermen and Matthew tells us about Jesus coming to his tax collector's booth and a tax collector,
socially in those days, below a prostitute and Jesus comes to
Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, "Follow
me and be my disciple." And the crowd would have thought Jesus was being sarcastic or
maybe trying to be funny and he wasn't. He was calling Matthew,
Matthew, because of his name, I mean, we know he most likely flunked out of rabbinical school. His parents had hopes
for him of being a rabbi. He didn't make it. He ended up on the other
end of the spectrum, the exact opposite. He's a tax collector and
Jesus comes to Matthew and says follow me and in that story, we learn
something about grace, that no matter what you've done, no matter what you've become, no matter what people have said about you or thought about you, you
still get the invitation. That grace hasn't given up on you and grace can still rewrite your story and there's something
that the story captures that an explanation can't. One of my favorite stories in scripture is the story in Luke 5
where Jesus heals a leper and in those days if you
were diagnosed with leprosy, it was, as much as anything,
it was a life sentence of never being touched again. No hugs, no handshakes,
no pats on the back, no kiss on the cheek, no one to wipe away a tear from your eye. Never being touched again. That's what it meant to
have leprosy in those days. You're unclean, could not be touched and yet here's what Luke
tells us in verse 13 of chapter five. It says before Jesus healed
the man with leprosy, before he healed him, he
reached out and touched him. He didn't have to do that. He could have stood at a
safe distance and healed him. He could have healed him
and then touched him. But he touched him before he healed him and there's something about
grace that gets conveyed here. You see, the miracle
reveals the power of Jesus, but the touch reveals the grace of Jesus. Jesus doesn't say you need
to get your life cleaned up for it first and when you're
no longer afflicted with this then I'll touch you. Jesus touches the leper
right where he's at and this is huge because I hear this all the time from people in church where, I'm gonna come back to church, I'm gonna turn back to God, I need to get this area
of my life in order first. I need to get some control
over this struggle, this addiction. When this relationship is right, when I get this cleaned up then I'm gonna come back to God, but I need to get this fixed first. That's not what grace does. Grace touches you and then heals you. You don't have to get clean. You don't have to get washed up. You come just as you are. Grace meets you right there. Another example is in John 8. Jesus is teaching early in the morning and this group of religious leaders comes into the courtyard. They throw this woman into the dirt at the feet of Jesus
covered in a bed sheet. One of the accusers kinda
lays out the accusation and says to Jesus, we found this woman in bed with another man, literally she was caught
in the act of adultery. The law says we stone her. What do you say? She was caught in the act. They've got their rocks
in hand ready to stone her then Jesus looks at her and he knows her. He's known her since she
was in her mother's womb. He knows her name, he knows
the number of hairs on her head and Jesus says to her accusers, if any of you is without sin,
you can cast the first stone. And somehow they know that he knows. (congregation laughing) Right? Like somehow they know he knows what they didn't think anybody else knew and so they stop, start
dropping the rocks, and Jesus is left alone with this woman, a very tender, grace filled moment where he says to her,
"Neither do I condemn you. "Go and leave your life of sin." And there's something in that story that teaches us what an
explanation never could. You take the same amount
of real estate in scripture and you just commit that to
an explanation about grace and I don't know that
you would understand it as completely as you do in just reading that story and as you hear, that
story, there's something, if you're like me there's
something within you that says well, maybe if it's true for her it's true for me. And this is just true
throughout the life of Jesus. He never used the word grace, but he's constantly
teaching us about grace up to the point where he's on the cross and soldiers have nailed him to a tree and all of Heaven's
armies are kinda watching this unfold and they're just waiting. Jesus, you just say the word and we will put an end to this. And Jesus is on the cross,
he clears his throat, he has something to say. All of Heaven grows silent
waiting for the command and Jesus says, "Father, forgive them," and he teaches us about grace. And so when I ask you to
define a word like grace, what I'm asking for is a story of how God's grace has
been great in your life. There are a few phrases I hear people say that I think keep them
from experiencing grace in their own story and here's one phrase that I hear people say sometimes. Something along these lines
of not after what I've done. Not after what I've done. And so they look back on their life and there's this moment that they can't undo, there's this season that they look back on and though they may understand grace, though they may be able to
explain grace to others, it doesn't seem like it applies to them because of this and so after a service a woman comes up to me and
she kind of confesses a secret that she's kept. She's embezzled thousands of dollars to fund her alcohol addiction and nobody knows about it and she doesn't think God would want anything to do with her and she feels like she
shouldn't even be in church. Almost apologetic about her presence. And it's not that she needs to
have grace explained to her. It's that she really
needs to experience it but in her mind, not after what I've done. Or a man confesses that in his first, he's been married about 10 years, and in his first year of marriage he was on a business trip and
he was unfaithful to his wife and she doesn't know about it, he's never told anybody. Not long after that happened, he stopped going to church. He doesn't remember the
last time he prayed because, again, God would want to
have anything to do with him. Not after what he's done. That's how he thinks and so
he might understand grace, but he hasn't experienced it because it just feels like it's too much, there's not enough
based on what he's done. And so here's what happens. As we start to study grace in scripture and we read these stories, we become aware that no
matter what I've done, grace is great enough but it's not just the
stories in scripture. It's our own stories that
allows grace to spread. When you and I are willing to share some ways that grace has been great other people start to think, okay, well maybe that's me too. Maybe that can be for me as well. It was a Thursday night and I was laying in bed next to my wife and she had fallen asleep and I was awake staring at the ceiling thinking about my sermon
for the upcoming weekend. I was gonna be preaching
on dealing with regrets. It can be difficult. We have done something
that cannot be undone so how do we deal with regrets? As I laid there, I suddenly heard a crash
come from our bathroom and I got up and I went into the bathroom and I saw where this full length mirror that had been hanging on
the door of our bathroom had fallen off the door
and it hit the tile floor and had shattered into pieces and when the mirror fell, it exposed something that represented a very significant regret in my life. Behind that mirror there
was a hole in the door. How did it get there, you may ask. (congregation laughing) One night, years ago, I say years ago like it was a long time. I've only lived in the house four years so I'm, not that long ago. But one night years ago, I
got angry and I lost my temper and I punched a hole in the closet door. It's embarrassing because
it's just not at all who I want to be, you know, and I really wish I could go back and be a patient and
gentle husband and father. I want to be a man of
humility and self control but sometimes I'm not and that hole kind of represented the reality of that in my life and after it happened, I hoped my wife would forget about it and my kids wouldn't find out about it and so I dealt with my regret
the way a lot of us do. I covered it up. For me, though, I, like,
literally covered it up. I went to the hardware store and I got a long mirror and I covered that hole in
the door with this long mirror and I just pretended like it didn't happen and as I stood there after
it had broken on the floor, I stood there and I looked
at the hole in the door and I looked at the broken
pieces of mirror on the floor and I could see my reflection
in the broken pieces and it was hard, you know, it
was hard to miss the metaphor. I was feeling pretty broken
myself in that moment and I got on my knees, I started picking up this broken glass and my wife heard the noise
and she came into the closet, she found me on my knees
picking up this glass and she saw the tears in my eyes and I thought in that moment, I realized that I never
really apologized to her or to God, not really
repented of that sin. I just covered it up and tried to pretend like it hadn't happened and I confessed to both of them. I'm sorry. My wife came over and she put my head up against her stomach
and she just kind of ran her fingers through my hair and didn't say anything, but I felt grace. We started cleaning up
those broken pieces together and the next morning, it was Friday now, and I was getting ready
to preach on Saturday and I told her, you know,
I'm supposed to preach about dealing with regrets and I feel like maybe I'm
supposed to share this story because it feels a little bit like God flicked the mirror off the door and if I didn't tell this story it was gonna get worse
before it got better so I felt like I need to be honest. I don't want to be a hypocrite up there, talking about how we cover up, some of you cover up your sin. Well, yeah, it felt like I
had to just tell the story but I didn't want to. I was hoping she would, I was hoping she'd say no. Right, like 'cause I knew
it'd be embarrassing for her if I got up and shared that story and needed to ask for her permission. I was hoping she'd say no and I'd be like, "Well, God,
what do you want me to do?" It's not that I'm not willing, but I want to honor my wife. (congregation laughing) Feel like I should put
her needs ahead of my own and, you know, she didn't say no. She said, well, I feel like, you know, she said if you feel like that's what God wants you
to do then you should. I told her the truth. I'm just afraid of, I'm afraid of what
people will think of me. And she said, with a little laugh, she said trust me, we're not the only ones with a hole in our door,
or hole in our wall. (congregation laughing) So that weekend, I stood up in church and I told them the
story of their preacher losing his temper and
punching a hole in the door and when the first service was over, I saw one of our church
leaders walking over to me and I just kind of
instinctively looked down, you know, feeling embarrassed and I didn't know what he was gonna say. He walked over to me and he gave me a hug. He's not, had not typically been a hugger. Right, I mean there's people who hug and there're people who don't and he didn't. He was always a fist bump guy. And so now he's giving me a hug and he just says loud
enough, just above a whisper, he says to me as he's giving me a hug, he said I've never
told, no one knows this, but there's a hole behind
a picture in my bedroom. (congregation laughing) And I talked to him for a few minutes and his eyes were welled up with tears and then after we finished talking I noticed that a line had formed. (congregation laughing) And there were no women in this line. Just a bunch of men and we all had one thing in common. We had a hole in our door or in our wall or one guy in his dashboard which is a little bit more impressive. (congregation laughing) When my wife had told me, hey, we're not the only ones
with a hole in the door I thought she meant that metaphorically like, you know, we all have
our hole in the door moments. We all have this moment we regret. But no, like literally, I think I got up to over 30 guys who had shared this story with me and most of them began it with, "No one knows this," or "I
tried to cover this up," or "I tried to hide this," but what I found and stumbled onto is that, you know, I didn't want to do it, when I was willing to kinda share about how God's grace had
been great towards me, then other people heard that and they wanted that to be their story too and I could have, in that sermon, I could have talked about how do you deal with regrets and I could have given a
lengthy explanation about grace and people could have
understood some things maybe a little differently, but when I told the story then other people wanted to tell a story and that's what God wants to happen. He wants this to be a safe place where you can be vulnerable, where you can just say, yeah, God's grace has been great in my life. I'm a trophy of grace. Story's not so much
about what I did wrong. It's what God has done for me, the grace, the forgiveness
that I didn't deserve he's given in such large measure. Another phrase that I
hear people sometimes say that I think keeps us from experiencing the greatness of grace in our stories is this phrase, "Not after
what's been done to me." Not after what's been done to me. In other words, I like the
idea of God's grace for me no matter what I've done, but God's grace through me, that's not great enough not
after what's been done to me and so instead of dealing
with guilt and shame, it's dealing with this
bitterness and anger and we've just been hurt too deeply, we've been betrayed too significantly, the pain is too much, and
God's grace doesn't seem to be great enough. It might have seemed that way before what happened to you happened to you, but now it just seems like there's just not enough grace there and so you live with this
bitterness and anger. You don't want to, but you
have become an angry person and little things bother
you and set you off. It's not how you want to be, but that's how anger works. It just spills over. And you don't want to let it go. You don't want to release it because if you do it feels like you're letting that
person get away with it and they owe you something. I get it. They owe you money or they owe you a marriage, they owe you a childhood. They owe you, at the very
least, an explanation and if you just let it go it's like they got away with it and yet Paul tells us in Ephesians 4 to get rid of bitterness,
anger, rage, resentment. He says if you don't do that, if you hold onto it, it grieves
the Holy Spirit, he says, because the Holy Spirit is trying to grow the fruit of the spirit in our heads and in our lives, love and
joy and peace and patience, kindness, goodness,
gentleness, self control. The spirit is trying to grow
these fruits in our heart but this bitterness and
anger is just choking it out and Paul says if you don't
get rid of those things then it gives the Devil a foothold. It gives him a staging ground. It gives him a base camp where he can reach into these
other areas of our life. He says you gotta get rid of it. It's not that we don't want to but it doesn't seem fair if we do and so we have this DVR in our mind and different things trigger it but when it gets triggered, we just push play and remember the offense that was committed against us and we don't want to let go of that because we don't want the
person to get away with it and for me to get up and say,
hey, you gotta let that go, feels offensive because in our minds we think letting it go means we're letting it into
thin, go into thin air just some magical moment where it's, like, that
doesn't bother me anymore. That's not how it works. Instead what we're saying is it's so significant I can't
carry this weight anymore. It hurts so deeply, I
can't go on like this. It's been too many years and that weight has become too heavy and it's affecting too many people. I gotta let God. I gotta let God deal
with this 'cause I can't. A few years ago, I had this, there's this influential,
fairly influential blogger who decided that he didn't
care very much for me or my writing and he wanted to make sure that everybody knew how he felt and I had never met this man, he never tried to contact
me to express his opinions, he never attempted to reach out to me as a brother in Christ
to express his concerns and he seemed to have something
against me personally. His review of me was pretty harsh and kind of surprisingly hostile and I thought he took
things out of context and made sweeping assumptions and turned those into unfair accusations, not that any of it bothered
me, but I'm just saying. (congregation laughing) And I know that that's
just kind of part of life on the internet these days and usually I'm okay with those things but if I'm being honest I would just tell you that I kinda wanted this guy
to like me and he didn't and it was hurtful and
it was embarrassing too. My dad would tell me, like, son, the secret in these situations, the secret is to have tough
skin and a soft heart. I don't know how you,
like, make it that way. My dad would also say son, the dogs bark but the caravan keeps moving and I don't know what that means, but-- (congregation laughing) I like the idea. You just, you keep going and you just don't let
those things get to ya but then at night, you know, even if you don't want to sometimes you just remember some of those hurtful words and so a few nights after
this guy's blog came out I was up late and feeling
some angst over it and I wrote a response to his comments that I was gonna post on his blog, but when I finished writing the response, before I posted, I read it. I'm like, I sound defensive and insecure. It's 'cause I am, but I
didn't want to sound that way and so I thought I'm not
gonna put that out there and then I thought I'll just
send him a personal email so I write this email, start
writing this email to him, and at some point I start feeling like the kid on the playground
who says to the bully, "Why don't you like me?" and
I don't want to be that kid. I don't want to be that kid so I decided not to do that. I should have been in bed sleeping, but I was just sitting there
feeling a little bit hurt and a little bit bitter and then this new email
popped up in my inbox and it was from someone
that I respected greatly and the subject line of this email just said "Kyle, I defended you." I opened up the email and the person said, "I never respond to my critics "but I do speak up for those I love." And then he went on to tell me what he had posted on this guy's blog who had been ripping me and here's what my defender had put on this guy's blog. "It's sad you feel compelled
to pick apart Kyle's message "and find some stylistic fault "or note that something was left out. "Book reviews reveal more
about the reviewer's bias "or ego than the quality of the book. "So now I've given you, "and your commenters, a gift. "You can all write about why I'm wrong "and your group will love
that and that's fine with me. "I'd rather have you aim your darts at me "since God grants me more grace and power "every time I sincerely
pray for God to bless you. "May God and hopefully
others continue to show you "far greater grace than you offer to those "who are not in your group." Signed Rick Warren. (congregation applauses) You know what I did? After reading that, I
wiped away a few tears, shut my laptop, got in bed, kinda had the Eye of the Tiger theme song going on in my head (congregation laughing) but I just went to sleep. I just went to sleep. I didn't need to hang onto it anymore. I didn't need to keep thinking about what I was gonna say
and what I was gonna do and how I was gonna respond. Somebody else took care of that for me. The bully on the playground
had met his match. I could just go to sleep. It was fine. And there's this moment
where, as a follower of Jesus, where you just say, God,
you know what I can't and you see what I don't and so I'm just gonna let
you take care of this. I know in my mind what
I think should happen but you're big enough and
you've been so gracious to me that I'm gonna go ahead and pray for grace towards these people who've hurt me. I don't have it
necessarily to give myself, but God, I'll pray for you to give it and you just let God handle that and when that DVR begins to
play what happened to you you start pushing stop and you start playing what God did for you and if you can replace
what happened to you with what God has done for you then you start to find that
you've got more grace to give than maybe you thought because what God has done for you is greater than anything you will ever be asked to give to others. One other phrase I
sometimes hear people say that keeps them from
experiencing the greatness of grace in their own
story is this phrase. "Not after what my life has become." In other words, it's too late. You know, things are too messy and things are too broken and things are too complicated and I like this for other people and I'm glad you're giving this message and it would have been
helpful to hear years ago but the reality of my
situation is it's busted and I just don't know how
grace can get me outta this. I don't know how grace can redeem this, whatever life has thrown at you. So one more story. This one's one of my favorites. I received a message on
Facebook, a private message, in 2009 from a man named Wes who, at the time, was in his early 40s and he lived in Virginia. I'd never met him. Here's what he wrote. He said, "Kyle, I don't know if you have "any good Facebook stories, "but I think you might
after you read this. "I'm not exactly sure why, "but I feel compelled by
God to tell you this story." He said, "I have known I
was adopted all my life. "I was raised in a Christian home "by two terrific people who could not "have children of their own." Wes says, "I'm now happily married "and I have my own children
whom I dearly love. "I never had the desire to
seek out my birth parents "until a few years ago." Wes says, "I was attending
a Christian retreat "and one of the speakers was an older man "who told about getting
his girlfriend pregnant "and then secretly giving
the child up for adoption "and in his story that
he gave at the retreat "he explained that he had
lived with constant guilt "that eventually caused him to develop "a hard heart and a bitterness towards God "but he said that one day
the daughter he had given up "for adoption contacted him "and told him that she forgave him "and God forgave him too "and the speaker of this retreat "explained that this changed his life "and that he found this
freedom and healing "and it brought him back to God." And Wes says, "That story from that man "made me think of my own situation "of being given up for adoption "and I wondered if it
would help my birth parents "to know that I was doing okay. "I was able to find the
name of my birth father "and I contacted him and
it became clear to me "that I was right about
the guilt and the pain "that could follow a
person after making such "a difficult decision. "He had never told anyone about my birth. "It seemed that it was probably best "that I not interfere with his life "or complicate things for him "but then something happened. "Recently my family
changed cable providers "and one night," he says, "I
was lying in bed with my wife "and, Kyle, one of your shows came on. "I was already half asleep." It's fine. I don't take that personally, but ... (congregation laughing) He's just telling me what happened. "I was already half asleep but
my wife was watching the show "and suddenly I was startled "when my wife exclaimed, "'Oh my gosh, I think that's your cousin!' "and she was talking about you, Kyle. "She knew a lot more about
my birth family than I did "because she's the one
who did all the research "and I didn't believe her "but after a little Google search "I realized she was correct. "I hope you're not too shocked, "but your uncle, David
Idleman, is my birth father. "I picked you to contact first "because as a pastor I thought you might "be used to dealing with
difficult situations like this." (congregation laughing) "I know that I also have a sister." It's my cousin, Sarah. "But I don't know if she knows about me." And she didn't. "I don't want to stir the family pot "or create problems or
difficult situations "but, like I said, I
feel like God compelled "me to reach out." And when I read that Facebook message, immediately a lot of things
started to make sense to me with my uncle. I'd grown up living in
close proximity to him but we weren't necessarily close. He taught me how to water ski and gave me some karate lessons as a kid but I just remembered him not
necessarily being very happy. I remember many, many times over the years praying for him as a family but he just didn't have much
interest in spiritual things. In hindsight, I can see that he was a man who carried a heavy
burden, a heavy weight. I think keeping a secret
like that for so long, the longer you keep it,
the heavier it can feel. He never told anyone and had been through some broken marriages and he always kept that to himself. When the secret came out about his son, it was fairly traumatic and
overwhelming for him, really. You keep a secret like that for so long, what are people gonna think? What are his parents,
what are my grandparents, what would they think? What about his siblings? My dad? They never knew. What about his daughter
who had wanted a sibling. What was she gonna say? So it was just very overwhelming, but over the next few months my Uncle Dave and his son, Wes, began
to talk more regularly and eventually they
decided they wanted to meet and Wes lived in Virginia and
my uncle lived in Missouri and so they decided to meet
at my house in Kentucky. And we decided to turn it
into a little family reunion and we invited a lot of people, aunts and uncles and
cousins from all over, my grandparents were there and we were all there when
Wes pulled up in his minivan with his wife and kids and he got out with his beautiful family and starts walking to the house and I watch as my uncle
walks towards his son for the first time and I watch as the two of them embrace and we're all just kind
of wiping away tears. I was too far away to hear the words that were exchanged, but
Wes gave my uncle a gift. I didn't know what the gift was. I found out later it was a watch but it triggered a really
strong emotion in my uncle. I'm not used to seeing that in him. I'd not seen him cry before but this gift just
triggered this very strong emotional response from my uncle and I didn't understand why a watch, I mean, obviously it
was an emotional moment but there was something about the gift. Then later, my dad brought the watch over and he showed it to me and I looked at it and it looked like a nice
watch but my dad said, "Turn it over." I turned it over. Two words were engraved on the back. Pure grace. And I'm telling you,
just like that 40 years of shame and guilt and bitterness and anger and resentment
just melted off of him and he has become a different person. He's turned back to God, he's gotten connected and plugged in to a local church. He and the pastor have
actually become good friends. I was talking to him not
long after that on the phone and he ended a phone
conversation by telling me, "I love you," and I
about fell on the floor. I never heard him say anything
like that to me before. What maybe surprises me the most is that I'm getting to tell you the story. Just think about that. He kept this secret for 40 plus years, never told anyone about it, and now I'm telling
thousands of people about it. I asked permission. "Hey, do you mind me,
you know that secret, "that one secret that you kept "from all of us for four decades? "You remember that one? "You okay with me just getting on stage "and telling that to as many
people as are listening?" I mean, I emailed that. I didn't ask him that. There are some things you don't, like, you email those things, right? (congregation laughing)
So I asked him on email. I said, "Is this okay with you?" Here's what he said to me. Listen, here's what he said. His response. Emailed me back. "Please feel free to share
my situation in any way "that will express God's
love, mercy and amazing grace "to anyone who needs it." And maybe you do. Maybe you need your own story. I've taken seminary classes
on systematic theology and studied grace and I've read numerous theological and doctrinal books about the subject of grace and I've listened to all
kinds of sermons on grace but that email, man, I understood it differently and so I just wanna be real clear that grace needs to be
a part of your story and if you can't define
grace by telling me a story then you don't know grace. And grace is greater. It's greater than what you've done. It's greater than what's been done to you. It's greater than whatever
you're going through. Grace is greater than the
diagnosis you were given and it's greater than the
abuse that you experienced and it's greater than the
secrets that you've kept and it's greater than the
addiction that you've battled. And, listen, grace may
not heal your husband but grace will hold you up and grace may not cure your cancer, but grace will carry you through and grace may not rescue
you from your circumstances, but grace will redeem your circumstances. No matter how far you've fallen, no matter how often you've failed, grace is greater. No matter how many times you've relapsed or how often your resolve has collapsed, grace is greater. And you may say to yourself, well yeah, but it's not for me, not
after what I've done, not after what's been done to me but grace is greater
than whatever you've done not because of anything you'll do but because of what
Jesus has done for you. So the most important thing about my story and about your story is this. It's that grace is greater. The most important thing about your story is not that you cheated. The most important thing about your story is not that you were cheated on, it's no that you dropped
out or got kicked out or were locked up or slept around. The most important thing about your story is not that you were addicted or that you got convicted. The most important thing about you and the most important thing about me is that the greatness
of God's grace is real and it's true and it's for you and no matter how broken thing may be that because of Jesus, God
can make all things new. So grace is powerful
enough to erase your guilt and grace is big enough
to cover your shame and grace is real enough
to heal your relationships and grace is strong enough to
hold you up when you're weak and grace is sweet enough
to cure your bitterness and satisfying enough to deal
with your disappointments and grace is beautiful enough
to redeem your brokenness and you may have given up on grace, hey, grace has not given up on you. It is no accident that I
showed up to speak this weekend and that you happened to be sitting here. It's not by chance that
you're listening to this. It is God's grace at work
in your life right now. His grace is chasing you down and his grace will help you up so no matter what your story has been and no matter what you've done
or what's been done to you and no matter what your life has become then the story of your life
can still be grace is greater. Let's pray. God, I just pray that we would not just be able to explain a word like grace but that could tell a story, that we'd be able to experience it and I know that there's some people who came in here today and you just don't want them to leave the same way they walked in and they're carrying a heavy weight. Maybe it's the guilt and the shame or maybe it's the bitterness and the anger but God, you want to give them your grace, you want to lavish your grace upon them not because they've earned it or not because they deserve it, because Jesus, you paid the price because, Jesus, you gave your life so that we could receive this gift and so, God, would you let this church be a place where stories are told of your great grace and where others can come and know it's a safe place to
experience it for themselves? It's in Jesus' name we pray, Amen. - [Announcer] Thanks for checking out this week's message on YouTube. We would love to get you connected with our online community. There's three easy ways
to get you involved. First, learn about belonging
to our church family by taking Class 101 online. Second, you can join an online small group or a local home group in your area and third, check out our Facebook group to engage with our online
community throughout the week. To take these next steps,
visit saddleback.com/online or shoot me an email at
online@saddleback.com. I hope to hear from you soon. (upbeat music)
