Recaptured by the Kindness of King Jesus | Lisa Harper | Gateway Church

speaking of family I wanted to show you mine I've got a picture of my daughter and I became a mom through the miracle of adoption the year I turned 50 and so I was uh really scared and really foolish thick as a brick and not in the commodor kind of way I was just scared to death in my 20s and 30s of intimacy and so God in his kindness um allowed me to become a mom late in life I brought Missy home the year I turned 50 and it has been glorious I'm now 60 so I've had her home from Haiti for 10 years she is she is second to Jesus she is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me 10 years into motherhood and I'm still kind of in the honeymoon season and Missy is sweet but she's 14 and um and she is not a morning person and so um we were we were driving to school this was right before Christmas I was driving her school she goes this great little Christian school in Nashville we're driving to school and I am kind of slow as a parent and so it takes me a while to figure out what I should have done it's usually after I do what I shouldn't have done um there's no Daddy in our house so if you know a man between 60 in death who's loves Jesus and is employed uh that would be a preference but anyway it's just me and so you know there's there's Glory but there's a lot of responsibility as a parent so I'm driving her to school and Missy just doesn't like to talk in the morning and God has saddled her with a morning Mama I love the morning I love to sing I love to dance I love Lauren deel I love Shania I don't care I just love mornings and I get on her last nerve in the morning on the way to school and so I just saw you say Amen that makes me so happy got another perky mama so anyway missing our driving to her little Christian school and you know how you know don't say it don't say it again I'd already encouraged her to start eating her Bagel cuz we only have 15 minutes from our house to school and it was just crickets you she just sitting there demon had invaded her face just cuz normally she's like perfect I mean she's amazing but just not mornings and so I was like now baby you need to go ahead and eat your bagel I mean we're just we're going to be at at at school in 12 minutes I'm looking at the clock and you know how your your that little Holy Spirit in your head goes shut up it's okay if she's hungry that'll teacher the lesson but I just I can't stop talking and so I was like baby you really really need to eat that Bagel just crickets and so I wait we wait one song because I think if it's a Christian song It'll soften her up wait about five minutes and then I look over and this is the third time I've talked about the bagel and I knew I shouldn't do it but I said now baby we're almost to school you really need to eat some of your bagel but now the cream cheese has gotten all gooey and so when you take a bite of your bagel you know you hate it when you can tell that's going to come out of your mouth I was like don't say it don't say it I said when you take a bite of your bagel lean forward so the cream cheese doesn't get on your navy blue Christian shirt that I had ironed as all good Southern mothers do and when I said that I another demon entered her I could see by her face she was mad and I thought just let it sit let it sit let it sit let it sit I let it another half a Christian song Go by I look over and my precious Miracle child gift from the Lord has a big wad of cream cheese on her her her navy blue Christian shirt and I was like oh it worried me for a second because I thought the bagel had attacked her and then I noticed that that cream cheese was in a perfect circle Perfect Circle and I'm slow on the uptake it took me a second to realize there's no way it could be that perfect unless she had purposefully undone the bagel and smashed it on her chest and when I realized that was indeed what had happened I did what I bet you a few of y'all have done I pulled the car over to the side of the road and I went we do not do things like that we are Harpers that is so disrespectful fall and then I said a word that's not in the Bible and and I was all Christian and all perky until that moment when I saw all that cream cheese and my precious miracle and done it on purpose I couldn't believe it and that word flew out and when it flew out my child looked at me and With all sincerity said Mom Jesus doesn't like it when you say that [Laughter] word and because I'm a Christian my response was if Jesus was here he'd say the word to so mad every now and then I'm reminded often through my daughter or through Spanx that I need a course correction I need to be reminded I need a little wwjd I need a christological course correction because what would Jesus actually do if he had a kid who went all wild Bagel Rebellion what would Jesus do if you brought your Bible turn to Matthew 18 we're going to have a a little christological review here at first so I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know but if you're like me you need to be reminded of the character of our King so that you don't lose yours Matthew 18 verse 15 if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone if he listens to you you have gained your brother but if he does not listen take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three Witnesses if he refuses to listen tell it to the church and if he refuses to listen even to the church let him be to you as a gentile and attacks collect I came about my yelling in church very honestly I grew up bapticostal and a lot of the youth pastors my my mama is still alive she's Baptist to the Bone my daddy started as nazarine but he had a hard time with monogamy and so he went Nazarene eventually got to Assembly of God because we embraced him and so I'm much more costal now but I've I've got kind of a lot of the denominations under me and I went to a lot of different youth conferences and it seemed that the really really good communicators yelled a lot and so I just thought if I ever get to talk about Jesus vocationally I'm going to be a yeller and and I want to get the veins popping and everything going so I came by it this is in my spiritual DNA one time Pastor Robert I thought you had to swing your Bible too and I was a young Bible teacher and I slung my Bible in a church and Genesis flew out hit somebody in the front R it's wonder I wasn't sued but anyway um this passage in Matthew 18 that's a christological passage it's about Jesus it's about what Jesus would do in the case of rebellion uh the the first time I don't know if it was the first time but it's the most memorable time I heard this preached heard a Pastor Ed exog this passage I was at a youth conference I grew up in Orlando Florida I live in Tennessee now that's why I talk correctly but I was at a youth conference I was 13 years old we were in a uh National Guard Armory probably about 2,000 kids this youth pastor gets up he starts preaching on Matthew 18 about the character of Christ the authority of Christ he's swinging his Bible around and he says so if someone doesn't repent let him be as a gentile and a tax collector I remember sitting in the back of the Armory thinking I hope I'm never a gentile and tax collector and then he started to detail what our our sins might be and he didn't talk about Bagels but he talked about heavy petting I was 13 years old and he said any of you been involved in heavy petting he said we were going to be treated as Gentiles and tax collectors and I'm sitting in the back of the Armory and I thought I'm not sure if I'm a heavy pet but we um got this dog sweetest dog her her name was Smokey she was half hound dog and half German shepherd and my mom only let us watch one television show a week and so I watched a is enough and sometimes I'd get so engrossed in a is enough I would rub Smokey the wrong way I'd rub her fur back just cuz I wasn't paying attention and I thought maybe that's heavy Petty and I thought I'm probably guilty of heavy Petty and so when he started yelling and the veins started going I ran to the front and I repented cuz I didn't want to be treated as a gentile I mean I thought of God as this unibrow librarian who would respond to us the way I responded to my precious daughter when I yelled at her and said words that weren't in the Bible that's what I used to think our God was like with Rebellion I want to quiz y'all for just a minute who who wrote The Gospel according to Matthew this is not a trick question Matthew right Matthew wrote The Gospel according to Matthew do y'all remember what his vocation was before he became an evangelist he was a tax collector Jesus is speaking through Matthew now I want you to think of all the encounters Jesus had with Gentiles in the gospels the gospels are those first four books at the beginning of the New Testament Matthew Mark Luke and John the word gospel comes from the Greek word yuang gelion it means the good news they all are kind of a a little different vantage point but they're all telling the stories of Jesus Earthly life and Ministry so Matthew is telling the good news about Jesus to a group of mostly Jewish people he was a a a dieh hard Jewish guy a lot of Jewish flavor in his gospel it's segregated into five accounts to match up with trat with the penit so Matthew's forly a tax collector you think about Jesus encounters through Matthew and Mark and Luke and John Gentile do y'all know what that means in the Greek non-jew all it means is somebody who's not a Jew how did Jesus engage with non-jews and Matthew Mark Luke and John every single time with compassion every single time with compassion how did he engage with tax collectors if y'all grew up like me going to Vacation Bible School you remember about a wee little man in a sycamore tree he invited himself to zakus home and after having lunch together zakus was so undone so transformed by the encounter he didn't have to study Systematic Theology to repent he just said I want to be closer to you Jesus turned my life upside down Jesus it was stunning to me when I began to study this passage a few years ago I went back to school I thought it'd be cool if I was in school while Missy was in school so I went back to samary for a doctorate and I had a professor who turned to this passage of all passages to talk about the compassion of Christ and I thought I always thought that passage was about church discipline I always thought it was about yelling and veins popping and an Angry God do you think possibly Jesus is saved and get your arms a little wider around people who can't repent quite yet treat them like Gentiles and tax collectors right after he says that we've got the parable of the unforgiving servant so you've got this other contrast where Jesus compares the audacious forgiveness of Father God with our tendency as image Bears to be stingy with forgiveness we kind of treat forgiveness sometimes like carbs and we're on keto we're we're stingy we want to give forgiveness to those who deserve it and so Jesus tells a story and he says our creator Redeemer isn't like that y'all God's love for us is forgiveness it's so much bigger and it's not just a new testament thing we tend to think of Jesus as the kind facet of God the Son of God and God the father is kind of a divine policeman with a unibrow who's mad that's not biblically defensible Our God has always been a good god he's always been for us we just spend so much more time on social media than we do in Scripture that a lot of times we don't get the context of scripture but if you go into the Old Testament even there you see that our savior is compassionate holy perfectly holy but he condescends to be compassionate not to yell at his kids he's not a God who waxes us over the head with a 50lb Bible turn backwards if you brought the word with you I know this is Gateway so most of y'all have it memorized but if you don't go to Deuteronomy chapter 22 one of my favorite passages in Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 22:28 if a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and they are found and the man who lay with her shall give to the Father the young woman 50 shekels of silver and she shall be his wife because he has violated her he may not divorce her all his days doesn't that sound like a verse we wouldn't share at first I mean doesn't that sound really Jerry Springer because if you read between the lines it's saying if a woman is is abused by a man then he puts a ring on it and she has to marry her abuser and you're like ooh gross that's one of those Old Testament passages needs to stay in the Old Testament oh my Heavens y'all we miss out on the love of God because we want everything fast we want instacart spirituality if you spend time soaking in in this love letter we call the Bible you will find over and over and over and over again our God is good and he's for us he's a good god he's holy and he's kind those are not opposite ends of the Continuum he is so holy and perfectly compassionate Deuteronomy 22 takes place right after God's people have been rescued remember who rescued them out of captivity Moses or Charlton hon and so he brings them into the promised land and there God says we've got new parameters you've been under the first iteration of sharia law when they were in Egypt the law said that any woman any woman over the age of 12 who's not married or engaged to be married can be violated by any man and guess what the consequence was for the Violator nothing not a traffic ticket not not a slap on the wrist but the woman who's been violated is considered forever damaged dirty and unmarriable so God effectively vaults over the fence of culture and says I'm not willing for my daughters to be abused anymore this is 3500 years before women March for the right to vote let me tell you how kind our God is he changes culture and he says from now on any of you Yus who are thinking about abusing one of my daughters you have to give her father not a bribe you're giving her 50 shekel so she can begin to be financially independent because nobody else is going to marry her women aren't allowed to hold property at this time in ancient culture so it has to be in her daddy's name he's saying you're going to set her up because you took everything from her then you're going to give her a last name you're going to give her respectability and then big boy if you decide to divorce her and not provide for her and not take care of her You Get Stoned by the community we read this at first glance and we think of God as is an Angry God like I was in the car with Missy it's not at all that way y'all he has always been a kind God from the very beginning he's been for us we are first to him he loves us we matter to him he has always been redeeming and restoring our inherent dignity as his sons and daughters he's always been mitigating evil jump to the right one more page to Deuteronomy 25 we don't talk about this usually in church but man I love this passage too if there is a dispute between men and they come into court and the judges decide between them acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty then if the guilty man deserves to be beaten the judge shall cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence with a number of stripes and proportion to his offense are y'all encouraged yet 40 Stripes may be given him but no more lest if one should go on to beat him with more stripes and these your brother will be degraded in your sight you go ooh gross Lisa that's another hard passage I'm not going to Instagram that I'm not going to tattoo that that is just ooh that just sounds like an Angry God y'all consider the culture again they've just been rescued from Egypt in Egypt it was legal to beat someone 200 times you could beat them 200 times and you could cause five open wounds God says no no it was never my will that y'all abuse each other some begin to mitigate the evil that y'all are are causing to each other because I love you and if you love me I want you to love each other so here's the deal you can't abuse each other anymore if you go back to Exodus he's already set up an emancipation program so that slaves can be free he says you can't cause death anymore by beating this is actually why Jesus was beaten by the Romans 39 times because they knew this law and then he introduces as we skip over this but this is extraordinary he says you can't degrade your brother he introduces Integrity he says you actually all have inherent value we didn't have inherent value as human beings until God entered the story until we have this love letter called the Bible do you know Murder was not considered a negative cultural ethic until we had to ra you wouldn't murder somebody in your clan but if some guy dissed your wife across the valley you could murder him didn't matter then God says no I love you and I want you to love each other we don't have an angry unibrow God in the Old Testament and and Jesus with hair extensions in the New Testament that's not who he is we have a perfect trinitarian God who has always been for us what would Jesus do he would love us he would love us holy calls us to repentance but he is a loving God he doesn't want to kick us to the curb some of y'all have been laboring at the beginning of the year under the idea that you have to clean yourselves up first you came to first because God has been wooing you you think I just got to get it all together some of y'all still smell like smoke and you sprayed yourself in for Breeze in the car cuz you think I can't be walking up in the Gateway smelling like smoke that's not what Jesus is going to Fus focus on he's not going to focus on your bagel Jesus is going to say I know you're not a morning person how can I love you how can I help you he's such a good God one of my favorite pretend theological boyfriends his name is helmet Tia And he says this unless a theology works at the margins of life it's not worth anything even if it makes sense at the easy sentence in other words Our God isn't just good when our life is good when there's no wars and rumors of wars when our skin is tight and our metabolisms are high that's not the only time God is good Our God has always been good he will always be good and he will always be working for our good he's a good god he's a holy God perfectly holy but he's for us I'm telling you when you talk about first things first we've got to start at theoy we've got to start at we have a good god who's for us he sees you he loves you he's for you he is not mad at you being mad at you and being holy are not the same thing in his Holiness he chooses to be kind speaking of messy midds I came to know Jesus as my savior when I was 5 years old my dad had left us for another family and I was devastated thought it was at least partly my fault that if only I had used my inside voice more maybe Dad wouldn't have left and uh after my dad left some men came and went from our family and there was a lot of sexual molestation in my story and so I knew I was dirty I didn't have to have a pastor tell me that I was dirty I felt dirty and damage from my earliest memory so it was very very natural for me as a kid when Mom moved us to a new church after the divorce very natural for me to ask God to make me clean to beg God to make me clean that was natural for me what was not natural for me was to was to believe that Jesus was for me I knew it was God I didn't doubt in his divinity I just thought he was ashamed of me I didn't think he liked me very much I'm 60 which means I get discounts at fast food restaurants I can wear pants with zippers anytime I want to but I've also learned at this point of my walk with Jesus that I need course Corrections often because I get crooked in my christology really really quickly I've been a Believer for 55 years spent eight years in seminar and I still have to unlearn bad theology I still have to have Holy Spirit course correct my christology every year at this time of year I'm like Jesus what would you do what would you do remind me of who you are and who you've called me to be in light of that last passage Mark 15 took me a while to love this passage and it's become a passage that I would tattoo I've got enough skin now to tattoo I'm just afraid it would morph into something I didn't intend it to be Mark 15:33 and when the sixth hour had come there was Darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour and at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice ELO Eloy Lima saachi which means my God my God why have you forsaken me and some of the bystanders hearing it said behold he is calling Elijah and someone ran and filled the sponge with sour wine put it on a re and gave it to him to drink saying wait let us see whether Elijah will come down to take him and Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed as last and the C curtain of the temple was torn into two from top to bottom and when the Centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last he said truly this man this man is the Son of God truly this man do you know the Centurion is the very first person who called Jesus the son of God you the disciples spent three years hanging out with Jesus missed it believed in him as the Christ as the Messiah were still really confused about his kingship do you remember there just a few days before the cross remember how James and John argued about who could sit at his right and who could sit at his left because they still thought King Jesus would usher in some kind of higher archical Reign and they wanted to Curry favor with King Jesus so they said let us sit at your right and at your left you might as well ask the Messiah to use his omniscience to pick your Powerball numbers for you how audacious to ask Jesus if you could sit in his right and his left they they still didn't get it then you've got a centurion he's Roman he's not Jewish and the word Centurion means he started as an enlisted man so he didn't go to Prestonwood high school he he didn't go to Highland Park he went to a big old State School school didn't go to college went straight into the military centri was an enlisted man who worked so hard who had so much guts in gumption that they Rose through the ranks and they eventually became a military officer it's a big deal so he's a military officer there and all he's doing is supervising the crucifixion he's only there to make sure that they cross every tea and Dot every eye during that period of History Roman coinage had a an imprint on the coins and the coins said Tiberius Caesar son of the Divine Augustus that means Roman citizens even when they jingled the change in their pocket only thought of the reigning Caesar as Divine so the only person this Roman military officer would call Divine would be Caesar himself and all he's doing is watching Jesus die he didn't see him walk on water he didn't see him heal a leper he didn't see him hang out with the disciples all he watches is Jesus hang on a cross and die that's all he sees is Jesus suffer that's all he sees and after he watches Jesus hang on the cross he says that right there is the king of all kings that right there is a Son of God it was heresy for him to say that as a Roman military ruler but he was so undone by a king who would lay down his life so that the people under his authority could have life his eyes were open to the deity of Jesus he is perfectly kind and it's that perfect compassion that makes him the only true king the only King willing to lay down his life to take his Royal scepter and lay it down and pick up a wet towel and wash our feet knowing that we're going to betray him knowing that we're going to miss it knowing that no matter how often we come to church and worship sometimes we're going to miss who Jesus is and what he does when I first brought Missy home from Haiti uh my friends who are in adoption circles said Lisa she's really going to struggle with consistency she's been beaten while she was in Haiti she didn't have a mom and a dad who loved her well and so you can't just tell her you love her you just got to be consistent that's what's going to be safe for her so they said you need to come up with some things that you just do over and over and over again so that she knows you are not going to change your love for her is consistent so the first thing I started doing first day I had her home from Haiti April 14th 2014 I started rubbing her feet with lotion because she didn't wear shoes in Haiti so she had just these beautiful little brown four-year-old feet and they were just all cracked so I'd rub her feet with lotion and I'd say baby utre brav you're very brave utre Bell you're very beautiful utre intelligent you're so smart and I'd say that over and over and over again as I rubbed her feet work up to her hands utre bra baby you're so brave I can't believe what you endured in Haiti you were so hungry and you were so sick and a lot of people would have given up I'm so proud of you you're so brave honey you are so beautiful her teeth were mostly black she had been so malnourished missing a lot of her hair she had um all kinds of medical issues when I started the adoption process every time I went to Haiti I would get scabies um that's full body lice the first time um I went to Haiti to be with her I came back to the States and spoke at a conference in Oregon right after that and I was so preoccupied with Missy I couldn't even think and at the end of this three-day conference you know how you'll have have those balloons in your head and and I'm I'm teaching and I thought I wonder why all these women are itching it took me h a minute to realize I'd given everybody full body lies from Haiti but I was like you know we can go to Walgreens and get get cream to put on it it's good for us to be reminded of how some people live but I was like baby you're so beautiful nobody had ever told Miss see she was beautiful you're so intelligent at the orphanage they told me she'd never read or never write she's in the seventh grade have y'all done seventh grade math recently utay bra B Tre intell the first week she couldn't even look at me second week she'd kind of glance at me and she'd Look Away third week she'd look for a second and still look away couldn't quite make eye contact after a month of saying ell bra intell Mama love Sho she called me Mama blonde white mama mama loves you and Jesse Jesus loves you more he loves you so much more after a month of saying that I will never forget it almost exactly 30 days in Missy turned and looked at me we were lying parallel in her little twin bed and she went mama love Missy was a form of a question and I said oh baby I love you more than I can than I can articulate I I I don't know to tell you how much I love you and then she said it in the form of a declaration Mama love Missy and then she took all 10 toes she has the cutest toes you have ever seen in your life she's perfect little toes and I grew what I call the valley of affection right here just for her and so I have this little fold in my in my belly I actually got it from Chick-fil-A I thought since it's a Christian company thought it wouldn't have any calories because it was Christian so I ate all those waffle fries and I got this little Valley right here and Missy just went she just stuck all 10 toes in that crease and then she just said Mama love Missy our Jesus is kind perfectly kind perfectly compassionate you can't outrun his love his love for you is higher and wider and deeper than you can wrap your mind around he loves you he sees you you matter to him you are precious to him he's not mad at you he's a kind savior perfectly kind and he's perfectly King absolutely authoritative and in that perfect kingship he set his favor on us My Hope for all of us this year is that we wouldn't just lean into Jesus but we would lean so fully through through through coming to church through worship through marinating in This Love Letter it's not a rule book y'all it's a love story that we'd marinate it that we'd see things we haven't seen before and we would move so much further into his Embrace that through Holy Spirit we would miraculously be able to take our proverbial human toes and stick them right into the miraculous Valley of his affection and his authority he's not a far away God he is transcendent perfectly holy but he condescends to be close to us he's kind and he's King do you know both of those things tonight do you know his kindness even when you're in Rebellion do you trust his Embrace do you believe that he is the only true God he's not a way to be reconciled with God the father he's the only way the only king the king of all Kings I'm going to ask y'all to stand up and I know I don't have any Authority in this house I'm so Beyond honored to get to be with y'all just can't quite believe it and so forgive me for taking a liberty that I have not earned but when we were praying about an hour ago just praying that God would have his way tonight I know most of you know Jesus but I sensed in my spirit that some of y'all are laboring under that lie labored under for so long and you think you've got to get yourself cleaner and you think that he kind of lowered the bar to let you in that there are other kids that he's lavishing with grace and favor because you're just such a messy one that's not biblically defensible y'all that's not who he is his kindness is is not subjective his kindness and his compassion and his unconditional love all of us get to be lavished by that if you need if you need to be held by Jesus there's distance in your relationship with God maybe because of something you did or something that was done to you I want to ask you to just come to the altar tonight um all the campuses you've got your campus Pastor is going to Shepherd this moment but I want to just open the altar tonight some of y'all came here because you didn't know how to get out of the invitation it was your mother-in-law and you just didn't know how to get out of it and and God's been wooing you for a while and you're able to gut through Christmas services but now you're face to face with a kind King who loves you if you want to encounter Jesus can I ask you to just come forward I how you stand up isn't going to be hard if you're standing next to somebody and you know that they really need more Intimacy in their relationship with Jesus they need more forgiveness they need more hope they need a a bigger knot at the end of their rope would you just say I'd love to come forward with you to encounter Jesus if you need more of his kindness if you need more of his authority maybe the authorities in your life have not been kind and you've been Running Scared wondering how in the world you can engage with a holy God would you just come forward he loves you he loves you he loves you he loves you Pastor Matthew is going to Shepherd the rest of this moment and so I'm going to turn it over to Pastor Matthew but um and I'm at a time I apologize I already confessed that I was long-winded concise has never been my gift um but y'all let's not rush so fast to Uncle Julio's that we miss Jesus he loves you he loves you he loves you he loves you do not settle for religion when you can have an intimate relationship with Jesus do you have the same Joy you had when you were first in Christ do you have the same hope you had when you were first in Christ do you have a desire for God's word that you used to have after last year's conference if you need to encounter Jesus will y'all come forward tonight

Channel: Gateway Church

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Keywords: gateway church, robert morris, gateway worship, dfw church, gateway people, robert morris church, pastor robert morris, pastor robert, james morris, gateway church ministry, gateway church texas, bible teaching, online church, church online, church live stream, worship, church near me, dallas church, blessed life church, Lisa Harper, lisa harper 2024, women of joy, women preaching, Gateway First Conference

Id: o15YHYVMcz0

Length: 39min 32sec (2372 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024