My Jesus.com I, Vending Machine Jesus

Jesus, as we have already began to focus our thoughts on who you are, I pray that the Holy Spirit now would enlarge our capacity to believe you for more than we ever have in the past. Remind us, God, that this is not just a corporate gathering, but it's a moment when we engage the life of your Spirit. Remind every one of us that you would speak to us today, if we'll listen. You'll speak to our hearts. You'll cause there to be life that's birthed, that's never been there before. Thank you for the possibility of that now, in Jesus' name. And everyone sit. Amen. Let's be seated together. Good morning. Apologize, my voice is just a crack a little bit. So bear with me on that. And I just want to underscore before we start the message what an important day this is. You know, in Scripture, and this isn't the message, but I want to just set the spiritual clock right where it needs to be about how important the action that's about to take place in one hour and 26 minutes really is. Because what we're doing, friends, what you're doing as a church, and your support and your prayers, and if you're guests here, this won't register. But if you're not, and you've been here a while, you understand that what we're doing is basically going probably where we don't have any business going. I mean, we're going into a part of the city where other churches have failed miserably. We're going to the part of the city where there's just an awful lot of indifference toward Christianity. We're going to a place where there's somewhere between 70 and 80,000 students just sort of, you know, who are a little bit testy about spiritual things. But I'm reminded of the words of Jesus when He looked at the centurion, the same Jesus that we saw in that little short but powerful video clip. And there was a centurion who wasn't a Jew. He was a Roman, a leader of a hundred men. That's a centurion. That's what that stood for. And he asked Jesus if Jesus would come and heal his servant. And Jesus said, you know, what's up with this? And he said, all right, I'll come and heal him. And the centurion said, Lord, I don't deserve to have you come under my roof, but just say the word and my servant will be healed, for I am a man under authority, and so on and so on. Verse 10, Jesus said this. He was astonished and said to those following Him, I tell you the truth, I've not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. And I want you to hear that. Jesus Christ loves, is drawn to, commends faith. When you take a risk, you're stepping into the territory where Jesus lives. And I want us to do something together just before we go on. I want us to say a word. I said just say the word. Let's say a word to Oakland today, to be in the grace of God, to be in the blessing of God. All right, so let's just lift our hearts. Father, we speak grace. We speak peace. We speak blessing. We speak favor upon Oakland and that community and all the surrounding communities. Lord, we pray Your favor would be resting upon all of those who are setting themselves. Lord God, against the odds. Lord, taking a risk today. And we, Lord, just speak, we ask You to speak Your Word now upon that congregation. And Lord, we look forward to hearing back next Sunday morning of the amazing launch of this campus and how over the coming months and years we are going to affect the entire community because of the faithfulness of Your Spirit through Your people. I'm excited Lord to be where You are. Thank You now and I pray for the same blessing on this message and on this time in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, I want to invite you with that as a backdrop to get your North Way notes open up and grab your outline. And I thought the little video clip set this up really well. You know, if you've been around here a while, most of you have, at this service particularly, you know that my kind of primary sort of hobby is with cars. And that's something I inherited. So don't look at me like I, you know, like, well, you're a pastor and so pastors, you know, all like cars. That's not really true. A lot of pastors don't care less about cars. They just see some of the cars pastors drive. I would not ride in some of their cars. But my grandfather in his older years sold cars here locally and my uncle owns a couple racetracks and my dad restored cars. And so when I don't have the, you know, the goods, I don't have the knuckles, you know, to do the really hard stuff. I marvel at the way that some men can, you know, make these things out of just raw metal and stuff. I can't do it. But I love to drive. I mean, anything that has wheels, I'll drive. Go-carts, motorcycles, cars. And, you know, I just love to do that. That's why when our youngest son, Jonathan, graduated from college, I said to Carol, hon, you'd look so good in a sports car. Do you have any idea how awesome you'd look just next to me riding in the summer? I mean, you'd just be so, wouldn't that be inspiring? You know, she didn't buy any of that. I bought the car though. And it was awesome. I mean, this was like five or six years ago, something like that. And it wasn't expensive. I mean, it was just, you know, but it was cool. It was just fun to have a great car that, you know, enjoy driving. Weren't a lot of them around here. Here's what I found. I found, someone said, well, you ought to go online and go to one of the forums online where people have that same car and they'll talk about it. Now, most of you are way ahead of me on this. I look around, some of you probably aren't. But it turns out that if you go on your computer and you type in the kind of car you have or whatever your interest might be, the kind of shoes you're wearing, the kind of glasses you have on, the kind of collectibles, the scrapbooks or whatever other stuff you might waste your time on. I mean, it's all in here. And there are people, there are communities of people who love the same stuff that you love. And they chat about it. So I went to the, you know, I typed in my sports car and found this forum. And there were guys telling all these, of course, untrue stories about how they were racing cars and stuff like that and what kind of tires were best and a hundred different ways to modify just the exhaust systems. And I mean, you could spend hours, right? Hours just reading through all the different things that were said. Well, that was my first venture into this whole idea of what was online, what was available online where people could communicate what they thought about something. And you could communicate back with them. Millions and millions and millions and maybe now probably billions of people. I mean, I understand that that just wasn't possible. Not that long ago. And now with MySpace and YouTube, I mean, it's getting more and more personal, isn't it? I mean, people are showing weird things and very personal things. And what I read is that it just needs to get more intense and more personal and more available. And, you know, the personal communication explosion is going to continue. Now, it should come as no surprise to us then when it comes to God, there are enormous numbers of forums and blogs and spaces where you can go to find out what other people think about God. And you can read about their view of God. And they'll tell you what their experience about God was like and what they think about God. And it's all got just, you know, different perspectives about it. People, some of which you've heard, some of which you've never heard of. And you could spend hours of your whole day in and out reading about what people think about God. We've even established a little site called myJesus.com. You go to Blogspot and you can get in on that. And you can just talk about your experience. But you know what? Here's what I found. As I started to really look at this stuff, I found more and more people were just writing about God, telling us their stories. And, you know, it was interesting because as they did so, they did exactly what mankind has done from the beginning of history. They started to talk about God. And they defined God in their image. They talked about God the way they thought He should be rather than the way He's truly revealed Himself to be. They talked about the God who was nonjudgmental, you know. The God who was tolerant of all other kinds of different ways of approaching Him. I mean, every road leads up the same mountain, doesn't it? They talked about the God that would never punish. The God who was loving and understanding. And the more I looked at some of these spaces, and the more I saw, I mean, you know what? People that you would be amazed about. People that you would know by name. Have this increasingly, here's the word, increasingly inclusive sense that everybody who wants to follow God is really on the same path. And the possibility of this sort of one world religion is not that far off, loved ones. What are you trying to do? Absent any source of objective authority, how do you challenge that? How many of you have had a conversation, like I've had probably hundreds of times in my ministry, over lunch or over coffee, that ended with something like this, with words, something like this. You've shared your heart and you've shared what you believe about God and about Jesus and so. And then they'll say something like, well, that's fine for you, Gary. But I think, and then they tell you their whole sort of twisted idea of what, you know, the God, it has nothing to do with the God that you know. Right? You've had that conversation? What do you say then? I mean, this is what Gary thinks. All right? Great. And this is what Scott thinks. And absent any other authority, there's no reason to believe Gary's any more correct than Scott. And Scott's ideas might be 180 degrees off or different than yours. And friends, that's why North Way Oakland, North Way Wexford, and wherever else God sends this church will always have the Bible as the authority upon which we build what we believe. If you're new here, you've got to understand the centrality of the authority of Scripture. This is what Jesus taught from. He taught the Word of God to people. That's what He taught. The apostles saw and heard Him. And so they, it says, passed along what they saw and heard. And here's what I want to say to you. It doesn't really matter what you think when you talk to somebody. It matters what God's Word says. And I know that some people say, well, that's just the Bible and I'm not sure I understand. And that's a different subject. And I've had whole messages on how to respond in that way. But you have to understand, this Scripture is the basis of our authority. Without it, all we have is an opinion. All we have is our Jesus. And our Jesus can be just whatever we want Him to be, just like anybody else. And you know what? That's a sad thing because it just doesn't work. It just doesn't convince anybody. Interestingly, I want you to turn with me now on your notes to Matthew 16 because way back then, it was the same sort of thing. And I'm just going to read a few verses, beginning in verse 13 of Matthew 16. It's on your North Way notes in the top of your outline. You can read it there with me from the NIV or if you have your Bible, it's always good to read along there and mark it. Here's what it says. When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, Who do people say the Son of Man is? Now right there, I love that because, you know, He's basically saying, Hey, kind of, what's out there? What's out there on the blogs and on the forums about me? Fill me in on this, guys. What are people saying about me? Who do they say that I am? Who do people say that I am? And very interestingly, they, the apostles or the disciples that were following Him, we don't know if it was 10 or 50 at that point. And by the way, Caesarea Philippi is an area about 20 miles north of where Jesus grew up and about 80 miles north of Jerusalem. So He's out in sort of a remote area. And notice what they say. They reply, verse 14, Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. And so they're saying, Jesus, as we go to the forums and the blogs, they're saying, You're some dead guy brought back to life. Isn't that rather interesting? It never struck me, and all the times I've studied this passage, that they didn't even once consider the possibility that He was the Messiah to come. They said, Everybody out there thinks you're a dead guy brought back to life. Now, that made me think of two things. It said, number one, what He was doing was so amazing that people had no explanation except to say, Well, they thought back to Elijah, who had laid himself over the widow's son and he came back to life. They had no frame of reference except that the things He was doing and saying were so incredibly powerful. You must be one of these amazing prophets that's come back to life. And you want to know why they said that? Because Jesus had been teaching and doing miracles. Jesus had been out there fulfilling everything that they needed. Jesus had been delivering the goods. Jesus was kind of like their favorite vending machine. Have a need? Go to Jesus. Have a problem? Go to Jesus. Are you sick? Go to Jesus. Do you need delivered from some kind of demon? Go to Jesus. Now, let's fast forward to 2007. How many people do you know that go to Jesus when something goes wrong with their life? You know, they can go on for 5, 10, 15, 20 years and suddenly something happens. They get really sick. I mean, really sick. They lose their job or a series of jobs. They lose their marriage. One of their kids gets really, really addicted and has a horrible drug issue or whatever. And you know what they do? They go to Jesus and they say, Jesus, please help me. And you know, they put some kind of prayer coin in. They say, Jesus, if you'll just come through. Just please, I'll, you know, whatever. And they pray and lo and behold, Jesus answers their prayer. And I've seen people, haven't you? And for a while they're just amazed and they're humbled and they're thankful and they say, Jesus gave me a new job. My marriage got restored. I got free from an addiction, whatever it is. And for a while they're fine. And they keep on just sort of living the life just for a while. And then something else comes along and they go back and say, Jesus, please. You know, I fell but I really meant it. And they'll push buttons, you know, and they'll say, please, please, Jesus, please. But they don't get anything. Well, you know, I'm just not praying sincerely enough. And they'll put another one. Please, Jesus, please. How many people do you know that go to the vending machine, Jesus, a few times and when they don't get their prayers answered, you know what they want to do? Kick that dumb thing, right? Say, I knew that Jesus didn't care. How many people do you know that grew up in church, maybe even heard of some kind of experience in their life that you've heard of and yet when it came to really needing Him at some point, He didn't, quote, come through. So, you know what they did? They just said, forget it. It's the vending machine, Jesus. It's the Jesus you go to when you have to get something done. But if He doesn't come through, well, all that's left to do is just to say, the heck with that. I don't need that anymore. The problem with the vending machine, Jesus, is this. It's always about me, my needs. In fact, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I have to say to you, if you're here today and you have an addiction issue, or you have a marriage issue, or you have something really terribly sort of just bothering you, maybe you're depressed, maybe life's just hard on you, let me tell you something. I want to encourage you, cry out to Jesus today with a prayer, because, you know, you could do that today. And the Jesus I know, sometimes for reasons I can't explain, hears the prayer of an honest person who just says, I need you. So I'm not dissuading you from praying. But I am saying, if that becomes the norm for your life, then it's all about you. And here's what happens, generally speaking, over the years. Look at this. As we go on in this passage. This is very important. This next couple of sentences. Verse 18, but what about you? I'm sorry, verse 15. What about you, he asked. Who do you say that I am? In other words, okay, we heard what the other people thought. Elijah, John the Baptist, one of the prophets, Jeremiah. Who do you say, Jesus says to the disciples. And Simon Peter, just a simple fisherman, an untrained, you know, not a rabbi, not a teacher of the law, he says, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. You're not a vending machine. Vending machines don't always work, do they? You must be more than that. I had my greatest vending machine experience ever about two months ago. I went to one of the local restaurants with my two grandsons. And when we were waiting for the hamburgers, and the first thing we come across is this big vending machine that has all these dolls in it and stuff like this. And you know, my almost four year old grandson loves dinosaurs now. And he knows, I mean, he knows the difference. Now you look at this, and I know it's really kind of a small, you can't see in the back, but here in the front, you think this is what? It looks like a T-Rex, right? You know, two dinosaurs. But it's not. It's a Terrasaurus or something. My four year old knows, I mean, he knows all of them. So we walk over to this vending machine, and this thing's upside down with its tail hanging out, and it's like all these dolls. And he sees the thing. He says, J. Paul, that's what I want. I want that dinosaur. Now, remember, this is one of those vending machines where the thing goes around like this, and then the clamp comes down and grabs. And how many times does that work? How many times does that go around, and it would clamp down, and you know what happens, right? So we lift Luke up, and the thing goes around, and I push the button, and it comes down like this, and it stops, and it looks like it's going to miss, and it opens up just enough to grab the tail. So it's holding it like this. I'm thinking, oh my gosh. But then you know what's going to happen because it's got to go over to the bin, and it does, and he's like, and almost always it falls out, right? And I'm thinking, okay, it's going to happen, and it didn't, and the thing held it, and I said, okay, now it's going to drop in the bin door. Something's going to happen, and I dropped it down, and it fell, and I got the ceratherosaurus, you know. There it was. Luke's eyes, which were already pretty big, just got as big as like melons, and he said, J. Paul, you got the ceratherosaurus, and we opened it up, and he ran over and showed his mom, and I'm thinking, man, what a hero, you know. One quarter, you know, and I'm like, my two-year-old grandson, who could care less, you know, he doesn't know anything about dinosaurs, he says, oh yeah, I don't know. I pumped about 85 quarters to get the next thing in, to get this done. It just kept going and dropping, and he did exactly what you thought, and you know, in a way, I mean, total value is about 15 bucks, I guess, when you get down. But really what happened was this. I was walking back to the booth to get ready to have dinner, and it struck me that that's exactly how life is for a lot of people when it comes to Jesus. Some people seem to get exactly what they need, and for others, they just keep popping in the prayers. Why? Because they haven't discovered who He really is. Who do you say that I am, Jesus said. And Peter answered back, that question, loved ones, is the most important question of your life. Your answers to that will determine not just the course of this life, but your eternal destiny. Peter answered back, you're the Christ. That word means Messiah or Anointed One. And listen, everyone listening knew. I bet there was this moment when you could hear a rock, just a little pebble drop and hit the dirt. Because listen, if someone claimed to be the Messiah, and there was a Jewish authority listening, that was grounds for being executed. In fact, that's why Jesus was executed. And when Peter answered, you're the Messiah, Jesus did say, no, no, no, no. See, what did He say? Let's read on. He says, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. For this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. Do you get the power of this? I mean, we don't quite appreciate that. I was watching some ABC show the other day, and there's some guy from Columbia who's claiming to be Jesus incarnated again. Anyone see that? It was on a couple of times. And this guy literally says, you know, I am the second coming of the Jesus that you've been looking for. And then they go back and they show Him partying and, you know, He's got all these ridiculous just, you know, just incredibly contradictory things going on in his life. And I'm thinking, that's why people don't want to believe our message. Yet, yet they're still showing up in Dallas, Texas and, you know, celebrating this guy because he, for whatever reason, you know, he can talk slick or whatever. Back then, he'd have been stoned for saying that. Jesus said, I'm the Messiah. And here's what happens. When that took place, and Peter admitted that's who He was, what happened in Peter and those disciples is what's happening in some of your life, even today. You realize this. There comes a time in our lives. Now watch, friends. This is really the pivot point of the whole message. There comes a time in every one of our lives when we no longer see Jesus as the vending machine that we go to to have a prayer answer. But we see Jesus who has a call on our life, who has an agenda for us, who has, listen, who has something for us that we have not really submitted ourselves to. And until we do, we will never know the intimate presence of God. The competing agendas will fight back and forth. And until you surrender and say, Lord, what you want for your life is what I want for my life. But watch, until you do that, all you'll do is just keep coming back to the vending machine. And sometimes you'll get your prayers answered and sometimes you won't. You know what I've come to believe? I failed to say this last night. I've been kicking myself since then. I've come to believe where you and I live, Cranberry Township, McKnight Road, West Deer, wherever you're from. I don't think people in our part of the world just don't know about Jesus. I think they know about Him. And they just don't want to have to submit to His agenda. That's what I believe. I think they know who He is. I think they know. It's sad to me that people know more about their favorite athlete or rock star than Jesus. It's sad to me that most people have done less reading about the greatest figure of human history indisputably than they have about, you know, some model or fashion person or movie person or whatever. But you know what I've come to believe? People are pretty smart and at the end of the day they realize hey, if I follow this Jesus, it means that I've got to decide that it's not just about me. That I've got to be willing to put His agenda first in my life. And when He looked at Simon, He said, Simon, you say I'm the Messiah. That didn't come to you by human deduction. That came to you by revelation. I want to end with this this morning. Let me end the message with this. How do we move from simple human reasoning to revelation knowledge? Now, as I say that, let me explain something. I understand that reason is important and I don't ever believe that if you're an honest student of the Word of God you'll ever find something that is unreasonable. In other words, God doesn't tell you to deny your reason. People just use that as a smokescreen. In fact, as I sort of deduce things, you've got to decide a couple of things in life. I mean, there's three options as I see it. Either you're the God of your life and you have complete responsibility for the outcome of your life. And you answer to no one but to you. And by the way, that's the number one God in America. The number two God is some other person or some other sort of compilation of gods that people put together. It's like number one but it's number two in a way because it's sort of different. I'm not God but I've sort of created a God that I follow. And then number three is you're willing to say, you know what? There's a God in this Bible that I can't explain any other way. And it's the only God that claimed to live on the earth and die on the cross for my sin and come back to life to prove that what He did was true and validated by our Father in Heaven. Those are the three options. And you're pretty smart if you can get it down to that. And when you have a conversation with people, if you just sort of just push them a bit, you'll find that most people, they'll balk at it because they'll say, well, you know, if I do number three, that has some implications. And it surely does. But revelation comes when you simply say, you're willing to say to God, Lord, Lord whatever you require of me I want to give to you because you gave everything to me. Friends, the difference between, watch now, the difference between a casual Christian and a follower of Christ and our vision here at North Way is to free people to follow Jesus. That's all we're doing in Oakland. That's all we're doing in Wexford. That's all we're doing is we send people out around the nation. We're following Jesus. We're followers of Jesus. We're not just believers in Jesus. We're following Him in our lives. Friends, the difference is simply this. We put His agenda When you wake up in the morning, do you say, Lord, I'm here for my busy day. Would you bless it? Or do you say, Lord, I'm here for you. I've got these things to do, but if you say to me to do any different thing, if you say, stop what you're doing and go do this, Lord, I will obey your voice. And when you come to that point, you make Jesus Lord of your life. That changes everything. He now has set the agenda for your life. And He goes on to say to Peter, when that revelation happens in your life, that's the foundation for this new group of people that I call the church. That's what we are. The called out people now say, Jesus, you're Lord. Your agenda is first in my life. And on that revelation, I'm going to build this church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. At the end of the day then, Jesus takes responsibility for what happens in your life. If you follow Him, He'll take care of you. If you live for Him, He'll provide for you. If you give to Him, He'll supply for you. If you keep things under control, then you're responsible in the end for your own. You know, I'll have to say, as I talk about this, I know it comes out of my mouth fairly easily, but it is a crisis, really. There probably today, just listening in this service, there might be a hundred or more of you, that if in your mind believe that Jesus is God, and you believe the cross story and all that stuff, but what I'm talking about today, you've never done. I remember when I was a student in college, and I believed that Jesus, in fact, I believed that if I didn't have Jesus, I probably would go to hell. So I had a compartment in my life. If my life was like a pie, there was a slice of my heart, my little pie, that said Jesus on it. Because, you know, there was no better option out there that I could find that would protect me from my sin than that, so that's what I believed. And somebody came to me, and looked me in the eyeball, man to man, you know, and said, hey wait, is it your agenda or his? Are you living for him, or do you want him to be living for you? And I pushed him back for a couple of years, until one day I realized it was just my pride and my stubborn will, and my desire, watch, my desire to live life my way, that was keeping me from saying, Lord, I surrender to you. Loved ones, listen, if you come to church sort of in and out, or if this is good for you one week, and then there's a few weeks it doesn't work, you know what the key is? You need to do what Peter did. You need to look at Jesus and say, you're the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God, and I put my full trust in you, I submit my life to you. And once you do that, you can still come to him and bring your prayers and requests, and you know what? I have found sometimes he answers before I even ask, but that's not the reason anymore. I serve him and I love him because he's worthy. He's my God. Just stand with me, please. Jesus, it's my day to say once again to you, be glorified in me. And Lord, we as a church, and church, with your head bowed, please, I want to give some of you an opportunity right now just to maybe honestly confront the words you just heard. And if the basic approach of your life has been to come to the vending machine and say, Jesus, I just answered this prayer and I'll do my best. If you've been living the life that says, Jesus, I need you, but you know, I've got my own life and my own things to take care of. Right now, I want to challenge where you are. As your pastor, I want you to hear me say this to you. You won't know the joy of communing with him. You won't know the blessing of belonging to him. You won't know the moments of intimate personal communion with him until you say, you're the Christ, the Son of the living God. Every head bowed, please. Let's bring the lights down, please. If today, the Holy Spirit's just been speaking to you about where you are, and you say, Lord God, it's been about me, and I want it to be about you in my life. I'm willing to surrender to you afresh today. I want you just to lift your hand right now and say, that's me. That's me. All over the room. Hands are up all over the room. Father, I see that, and I just rejoice in my spirit because that's who you are. That so pleases you.