Would You Rather?

SUMMARY

Karl Ihfe concludes the "Expectation Gap" series by addressing our tendency to focus on self-improvement rather than allowing God to transform us through His love. Using the fruit of the Spirit passage from Galatians 5, he explains that qualities like patience don't come from willpower but from the Spirit working in us. Instead of asking "How can I be more patient?" we should ask "What belief is shaping my impatience?" This shifts our focus from behavior modification to heart transformation through encountering God.

Ihfe distinguishes between viewing the gospel as primarily redemptive versus preventative. While both aspects are important, he argues that the redemptive nature should be primary - God's love always comes first, and we respond to it. Drawing from 1 John 4, he emphasizes that perfect love casts out fear, allowing us to live differently when we truly know we are loved by God. The challenge isn't avoiding getting lost in our faith journey, but recognizing when we're lost and allowing Jesus to find us again. He concludes with a weekly challenge to practice "MOAs" (moments of awareness) - pausing at meals to recognize God's love and asking "What's mine to carry?" when anxiety rises.

TRANSCRIPTION:

We're in the final stretch of our series, the expectation gap. We've been thinking together about that gap between the things that we believe and what we experience in our daily lives. The last few weeks we've been looking together at three different gaps, the first one being that gap between what we believe. God loves us, that God is loving and he loves us, but we don't always feel loved. We talk some about how so often that voice of God's love gets crowded out in our minds because of that inner critic inside of us.

And so learning to speak a word of truth back to that inner critic and say, no. God's first word, his only word, the living word, says that we are loved. A couple of weeks later, we talked about gap number two. We believe that God is with us, but we don't always see it. And we talked about our anxiety and somehow our reactivity often blinds us from seeing and experiencing God's presence with us all the time.

Last week we looked at the third gap. We believe God wants us to grow, man. We're disappointed in the progress and I thought we'd be further along the road. So we talked some about. It's not about us doing more for God, but allowing God to do more in us.

In fact, I want us to take that gap and take another run at it this week because I think it's really significant as we think about how we hear and how we understand who God is and how God works in our life. Before we do that though, I want to play a game with you. This is a game that I grew up playing with in youth ministry and in college ministry. It's kind of taken another turn and become popular again. But it's this game called would you rather.

Maybe you are familiar with this game, but I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios and just ask you, would you rather and just turn to your neighbor real quickly and answer this question number one. Would you rather eat breakfast food for every meal or would you rather never eat breakfast food at any meal? All right. Would you rather eat breakfast every meal or never eat it again? Ready?

Go. Turn to your neighbor.

All right, next one. Would you rather have a perfect memory or be able to forget anything you wanted at will? All right, turn to your neighbor. Would you rather have a perfect memory or be able to forget anything you want? Will, what do you think?

Alright, who are my perfect memory people who'd rather have perfect memory? Who would rather be able to forget anything at will? Yeah. Okay. All right, almost 50.

50. Interesting. All right. Would you rather be able to travel in time to the past or to the future? If you could travel in time, would you rather go back or go forward?

Alright, what do you think? Turn to your neighbor.

Okay, last one. Would you rather always tell the truth or always tell when someone else is lying?

Would you rather. What do you think?

I'm very curious about this one. All right, who am I? I would always tell the truth. That's what I would want. All right, you are all going straight to heaven right there.

Okay, who am I always tell when someone is lying. All right, you're going to heaven too. Just maybe not.

Okay, here's one we do in church and we don't often say this out loud, but here's one that maybe explicitly but do you think, would you rather, or rather would God rather have our worship or our improvement, Our righteousness? You know, if God had to choose, which do you think God would rather? Have our worship or our righteousness? Our holiness, our improvement? Now, I know it's not really a fair question because God isn't limited the way that we are.

He doesn't have to choose just one. But I ask that simply to exaggerate. Sometimes that question that haunts us, that we feel pressured by. As we thought about last time, we feel this pressure that we're supposed to be further along. We're supposed to be more, one way or another, more mature, more disciplined.

We should have life more together by now. And in that pressure we sometimes feel so much it that we end up trying to do God's job instead of our own. You know, sometimes in our effort to grow into Christ, we. We actually bypass Christ and we find ourselves settling on human effort. I think it's why when we hear passages like this next 1 In Galatians 5, we can struggle with understanding it.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Against such things there is no law. Now I would imagine if you, as you look at that passage right there, a word's going to jump out at you. If you're a parent, maybe it's patience. Or if you have young kids or adult kids, or if you have parents or grandparents, or if you have a job and you have a boss, or if you're the boss, you have co workers or subordinates, if you drive on a street in Lubbock, Texas, if you tried to go to the grocery store anytime recently, patience is something that we need.

So we decide, I'm going to be more patient this week. I'm going to intentionally do some things in my life, order my life in such a way that I'll grow in patience. So I choose the slow lane when I'm driving. What I've learned is I don't even have to make that choice. I'm just always in the slow lane.

So if you want to know where the slow lane is, just follow me. Or I'm going to choose the longest checkout line in the grocery store. I'm going to make myself wait. And by the end of the week, I've gotten a little bit more patience, mostly by willpower. Now, like we said last time, it's not a bad thing to want to grow.

It's not a bad thing to want to grow in patience. In fact, there are people in your life, you may be sitting next to them, you don't have to look at each other, but they may want you to grow in this. It's not a bad thing. The challenge is this list that Paul gives to us. It's not a result of human, human willpower.

Paul tells us the fruit of the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is not the fruit of willpower, not the fruit of trying harder or of working more or working less. It's the fruit of the spirit in us. And we can try by our own power to get a little more patient. But what we end up finding is we may be a little more patient legalist, maybe a little more patient obnoxious person.

So this distinction matters, right? We know our job is to die to self. Jesus tells his followers, if you want to follow me, take up your cross.

God's job is to form or transform or reform us by his Spirit. And so if you want to grow in patience, rather than asking, well, what's, what's a better way? What's maybe another trick? What do you do? What line do you stand in?

Instead, you might ask a question like this, what belief is shaping my impatience? Now, just a word of warning here. Be careful with this question. Some of you know, I grew up with an attorney as my father, and he taught me two really important things about asking questions. Number one, he said, carl, don't ask questions you don't already know the answer to.

And number two, don't ask questions you don't want the answer to.

So as we come back and think about this question, what belief is shaping my impatience? That's a dangerous question because it forces us away from, well, if my kids just, if my parents just. If my co workers just. And it focuses back into my life, you know, Steve Cuss in his book is great. He gives an example of just kind of being a father.

And he said, if I'm honest with this question, it says my impatience has less to do with my children's behavior and more to do with my view of who I am as a father. And I say, hey, keep it to yourself, Steve, okay?

See, that knowledge doesn't come through self improvement. It comes through Revelation, through encountering the living God who shows me who I really am.

He says, it turns out spiritual disciplines aren't designed for self improvement as much as we might wish they were. They're actually designed to help us encounter the Holy Spirit, to engage with our Heavenly Father who loves us so much. So let me ask again. If God were forced to choose, which would he choose? Would he rather our righteousness through worship, without worship, rather, or our worship that leads to transformation?

This question is meant to confront our obsession with growth and self improvement.

So maybe this week the invitation for us is more encounter and less improvement. Now, it may seem a little odd. Just hang with me here for a minute. Why do we drift toward improvement more than encounter so easily? I got a chance to spend a week with several preacher colleagues as we were wrestling with this idea of repentance and thinking about the season of Lent that we're getting ready to enter into.

And the speaker was. Was challenging us on a few things. But one of the things he said, that's kind of stuck with me. He said, you know, it's much easier to give something up than to pray about. So, you know, in the season of Lent, the idea is, I'm gonna give something up, that it might draw me back into my reliance upon the Father.

And he says, you know, what I found is it's much easier just to give something up than it is to pray. So that's why sometimes we can go through a season like Lent where we're giving something up, but it actually doesn't draw us closer to God. But at the end of that Lent, we go, oh, I didn't eat meat for 40 days. You're like, yeah, but did you pray about one? No.

It takes a little more effort, takes a little more intention. I have to be more vulnerable. And so we ask ourselves, well, if Steve, as he says, our challenge with this may be our primary view of the Gospel. He said, if it's easier just to give stuff up rather than to draw closer to God, what's that about? He said, I wonder if it has more to do with our primary view of Scripture.

So he gives us one last little. Would you rather, he says, is the gospel, would you rather it be primarily redemptive or preventative, which is our primary view of the gospel? You see, a redemptive gospel says, no matter what happened, no matter what's happened to us, no matter what we've done, we can always come home. This gospel that's built on forgiveness and restoration and new creation, the preventative gospel is a gospel that says if we live within God's way, his order, his life will avoid a lot of pain. So there's a lot of focus on faithfulness and obedience and wisdom and integrity.

Here's the truth. The gospel of Jesus is both. It's redemptive and preventative. But the real question we have to wrestle with is which one's primary in our experience of following Jesus? You see, Steve argues that most of us would say redemptive, but if we followed you around on any given day, would say, actually looks like preventative.

Now, here's why that matters. I think he says we view it that way because redemptive is kind of past tense for us. We can think back to when God changed our lives and we became a follower of Jesus. Kind of like this past tense that happened. And now I've kind of changed my direction.

Now I'm trying to live right.

But Scripture reminds us that God's mercy is never ceasing. It's not scarce or finite. In fact, we sang this song just a moment ago. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

Did you think about those words as they were coming out of your mouth? The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

He didn't run out of grace yesterday or the day before. And it's time to wait for it to slowly build back up again. It's new every morning when we make the preventative gospel primary, especially after years of following Jesus. And maybe this is something especially notorious for preachers to do or folks who've been following Jesus for a long time. What happens is we set that preventative gospel right as the primary one.

Then we find ourselves in the center of the story.

We begin and act as if faith starts with us and living right and doing the right thing. But the gospel says God's love always comes first. Always. We respond, and we do it continually, every day. But as Tracy read for us just a moment ago, we love because he first loved us.

This passage is so powerful. If you haven't read it in a while, I invite you to dive deep into 1 John 4 and we listen for how John reminds us of this beautiful picture of love, of God loving us first, that there's no fear in love. And as we think about it, when we are most unafraid, we find ourselves in places we feel safe and secure. And John says that's the power of God's love. When God loves us and when we know, not just here, but we know God loves us, there's no fear in that.

And if we don't have to live in fear, then it allows us, he says, to live differently in the world to the people around us. And it's amazing. We love because he first loved us. Now, that order, it's significant. It matters.

When you think about, as parents, we're trying to raise our kids to know and love and follow Jesus, and that's a good thing to do. What would it look like if we raised our kids to begin with? God loves you fully, to the max, to the extreme. He doesn't love some future version of you when you grow up and get a college degree or get married or have a job or. No, no, God loves you.

He loves you to the max right now, as you are. He's not content to leave you there, but he loves you there, and he's going to keep loving you. And nothing can ever separate you from that. I mean, if we emphasize loving God more than being loved by God, we may unintentionally form a little bunch of legalists because we get focusing on, well, us, right? We have to follow this tightrope.

I hope you don't fall off. I mean, honestly, how many of us are trying to unlearn that mentality?

See, if the path of faith is a tightrope, then we live afraid of falling. John says, in love, perfect love, there's no fear. And so faith is more like a journey. And maybe it's easier to recognize those times when we get lost. See, it's incredibly hard to admit you're lost.

If you've been a Christian a long time. Have you ever noticed that that's a hard thing? Kind of makes us uncomfortable. Feels like we're being very vulnerable and being exposed. It sounds ominous.

Especially if we grew up with this question. Like I grew up with, if you died tonight, do you know where you'd go?

Maybe we talked more about how. I've tried to reframe that question a little bit and say, if you got up in the morning, do you know where you'd go? If you didn't die tonight and you actually got another day, do you know how you would live it.

See, in that first question, there's not a lot of space or room to go. I don't know. I've been struggling and I find myself challenged to live out the things I say I believe. But in this world around, in this climate around with the conversations going on around me, with the things I'm seeing in the world of people who claim to be Jesus followers, and I'm wrestling with what does that look like for me? How do I live that out?

See, here's the thing about getting lost as a follower of Jesus. Jesus finds you, you get found again. That's grace. God continues to find us and bring us back. You see, the real danger of being a follower of Jesus is not that you would get lost.

The real danger is you would get lost and you don't know it. Or maybe even worse, you won't admit it. We all get lost.

That's part of being a follower. But see, we also can be found by the one who loved us first. Now, to be clear, the preventative gospel, it's really important. It's a really significant part of the Gospel. And Scripture gives us clear writing and teaching on this.

In fact, if you read through much of Paul's letters, you'll read about the churches that he planted in Acts, and then you get to read letters that he wrote to them, and a couple of them in particular Ephesians and Rome, right? He had to talk with the church about it's not just good enough then to be found, right? Because the Roman Church was like, man, this grace thing, it's pretty cool. It's pretty great. I mean, so should we just keep getting lost?

Because, man, it feels great to be found again. Paul has a word. He says, don't mistake grace for impunity. That means we aren't understanding that love for us, he says, what then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?

By no means. I mean, how can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we've been buried with him by baptism into death. So that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Paul has a word for us to say. Look for those who have been found, who understand the depth of the grace that's been shown. How could we not respond to it, to the Church in Ephesus who were facing all kinds of ethical and Moral conundrums, challenges. He gives this warning. He says, you were taught to put away your former self, to take off that old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

See, it's never wrong to brush up on our moral code. It's never wrong to take that self assessment and say, am I living in a way that if people saw me, it would reflect Jesus back in the world? Am I living differently? Do I sound different when I engage with someone who disagrees with me or who upsets me? Do I look different in how I solve problems and handle situations that are tricky?

See, for some of us, that may mean we need to dust off that moral question and ask it how are we doing with the preventative gospel? Do we really understand what God has done for us and are we living in light of that? In other places he would say in Philippians, he would say, a life worthy of that. This week we might simply come back to this passage in Romans or Ephesians and invite God to search our hearts. But be careful not to reverse the order.

Behavior doesn't lead us to love.

Love leads us to transformation. Love leads us to changing our ways to God changing our hearts. So our weekly challenge this week we've tried to have one each Sunday. And this is mine for you this week. Look for God's love this week and maybe a couple of different ways.

First, one, practice. Three MOAs. Does anybody know what a MOA is? It's a moment of awareness. And so I put morning, noon, night.

When you sit down for a meal this week, just invite you to just stop for a moment and ask, how have I seen God's love today? How have I experienced his love today? It may be as simple as I'm sitting across the table from someone I just treasure and I'm so thankful. I've got a friend, I've got a spouse, I've got a grandparent, parent, whatever. I'm just thankful.

Or I get to do a job that I love doing, man. I'm thankful for that. And how have we seen God's love? Just take a moment each meal and stop and ask God, where have you been present in my life today and showing me your love. Or maybe when anxiety rises in you this week, you might just stop and ask this question, okay, what's mine to carry?

Is this mine or is it God's? God, help me to recognize what's mine to carry. There are times we've talked about anxiety is kind of this warning, like something's going on. God, what do I need to pay attention to? Or, God, is this something that you have to take care of?

You see, the gospel doesn't begin with what we do for God. The gospel begins with God's amazing love for us. It begins, always has and always will what God has done and is doing. Which is why I think it's so powerful that in this passage in Romans 6, where Paul's saying, hey, listen, we're not going to take advantage of grace. That's not how we're going to live.

He ends like this, you see, because at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, while we were still stuck, while we were out in the wilderness wandering. God loves us and Christ died for us.

God, I pray that that truth would. Would sink deep into our hearts this week as we think about the lives that you are calling us to live. In a moment, at least in the United States, God, where there's this crisis happening, what does it look like to be your church? That some want to use it as an opportunity for power, to tell others what to do and how to live?

God. Others want to use it to allow folks to just get away with whatever, that we don't hold anybody accountable. How would you help us to see your truth? That it begins with your amazing love for us, that while we were still stuck in sin and struggles, you died for us, Jesus. And because of that, you created a way, a way to live differently, to live with hope instead of despair, to live with courage instead of fear, to live with amazing love instead of anger or resentment.

Oh, God, our world needs that. Our church needs that. Father, would you help us to take our next step in following you into the way of love?

As we think about what you would rather us do, that you would help us to choose the way of love this time and every time, that you long for us to give our hearts fully to you, that you might transform us and that we could live differently? So, God, wherever we are on our journey, would you remind us of your love? For those of us who are lost and who are wondering, would you invite us back in?

Like the prodigal son story, that beautiful image that Jesus gave to us, that, father, you are one who runs to us and you restore us back into your family and you call us back to that life worthy of that kind of love you got. Some of us are like that, older brother. Not sure. God, would you help us? Would you soften our hearts?

Would you remind us that love is only the true power that will change our world? Not more anger, not more power, not bigger weapons or guns, but greater love?

Father, thank you for this church that has tried to be a witness of that love right here in Lubbock, planted on this corner, as we anticipate in a couple of weeks, partnering with our friends around the world to keep demonstrating and showing this love. God, would you make it more real to us? Would you help us to walk in it in power and strength by your holy Spirit? This is not something we can do for ourselves, God. This is transformation that only you can do in and through us.

So, God, would you do that transforming work that only you can do? Help us to remember that we love because you first loved us. In the name of the one who made love real, who showed us the way. Jesus Christ, help us, Father. Amen.