What Did I Just Say 'Yes' To?

Josh Herrera

It's Not Complicated • Sermon • Submitted a year ago

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Philippians 3:10-14

I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.

I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.

Introduction

Have you ever said yes to something without having all of the information available to you at that time? So you made a decision based on what you knew, but later you found out more information and now you wish you would have known that before.

Chances are you have, and so let me tell you about the time that this happened to me.

I had just graduated from High School, and I was on my way to San Diego State University after I completed my English entrance exam. One of my closest high school friends was going to the Bay Area for a graduation party with his family. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I was in. I like the Bay Area and I thought that a post high school trip was just what I needed.

The problem was I had already scheduled my entrance exam for that weekend.

No big deal. I’ll take the next one!

So when I got back from our trip I drove up to the University and asked if I could take the next exam available. The lady looked at me without any emotion and said to me, “That was the last one. I’m sorry.”

All the feelings slapped me like a ton of bricks. So I asked, “Well, what happens next? What are my next steps?”

She said, “You can reapply for entry next fall.”

And that’s when it hit me… I was on my way to Junior College.

Harvard on the Hill, here we come!

I wish somebody would have told me what I was saying yes to when I decided to go on a trip rather than take my exams. But that’s how life goes. You don’t always have all of the information available to you when you say yes to something.

Transition

And that is exactly why I wrote this book, “It’s Not Complicated.”

I’ve seen so many people raise their hands at the end of a service, like we so often do, and they are not sure what to do next. They said yes to something, and shortly after have no idea what they just said yes to.

So that’s what we are going to unpack together.

Your Great Decision

The reason that we lead people to a prayer to receive Christ after hearing the gospel is rooted in this passage in a book written by Paul called Romans.

Romans 10:9–10 (NIV)

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.

Paul gives us two fundamental truths, or declarations, about the decision you’ve made.

Here is the first one, Jesus is Lord.

What does that mean?

Well first, let’s unpack what it meant then and what it means today.

When Paul wrote this statement he was speaking to a group of people, Romans, who are steeped in paganism. At the time of this writing, Roman mythology is a system of specialist gods that people worshipped in order to bring purpose and fulfillment into their lives.

Said differently, there were a lot of little ‘g’ options for a god.

Paul busts onto the scene and says, there are no other gods. Your little ‘g’ gods are not real. There is only one Lord, and His name is Jesus.

Your gods are statues that you worship in distinct locations.

But the one that we worship, He isn’t a lifeless statue, but he is God come in flesh. He walked among us. He taught us in the person. And when he identified the greatest threat to our existence, he took care of it for us.

Paul is telling them that they needed to renounce all of these other Gods, and declare that Jesus alone is Lord.

Now let’s apply that… because you may be thinking, Pastor Josh that has nothing to do with me today. I don’t deal with worshipping anything else or anyone else...

Well let’s take a closer look.

Many people have made a god of money.

Sure, you don’t put it on the desk and bow down in front of it like you are Scrooge McDuck, but every single decision in your life is ran through the filter of your money. You care more about the condition of your finances than you do the condition of your family.

You think you are in control of your money? The truth is your money is in control of you.

Money is your god.

Ok, let me go with another one…

Other people’s approval.

We get so consumed about what people think about us that we can’t even be who we are! We are constantly flowing what we do through, “what will people think?”

We post pictures to social media and if it doesn’t get enough likes in enough time we take it down.

We are victims of the approval of other people. We have made the approval of others a god.

And of course, there are addictions.

Alcohol, drug use, pornography… when we are consumed by these things, they are gods in our life.

Idolatry is when we make anything else the Lord of our life.

When you say Jesus is Lord we are saying that none of those things will have priority in my life anymore.

None of those things are seated in the first chair of my life.

I’ve made a decision that none of those things are going to control me, they aren’t going to control my family, I am leaving these things behind…

I love Paul’s words, he said “I am leaving those inferior things behind so that I could know Christ personally.”

And when we do that, it takes us to the second point that Paul makes, and that is we will be saved.

I Am Saved

What does it mean to be saved? Rescued from Danger.

Paul says that when you make Jesus your Lord, He comes and he saves you from danger. What danger?

First, and most foremost, he saves us from eternal damnation.

Listen, heaven and hell are real places. And it’s the desire of Jesus that none of us are eternally separated from Him.

But what he doesn’t do is force his will on you. If that were the case you wouldn’t be in a relationship with Jesus, you would be a prisoner of Jesus. That goes against His nature. That does against your nature.

It is His will that no one is ever separated from Him.

But let me go beyond eternity for a moment. We are not just rescued from the danger of eternal separation, but we are also rescued from the consequences that follow the bad decisions that we make.

As I said a minute ago, when we make other things our god, when we live selfish lives, when we are controlled by substances, or when we are controlled by the approval of others, it will lead us to painful consequences.

So I’ll say it differently, Jesus saves us from ourselves.

For many people our natural bend is to let these things that look so “fun” control us.

Turkish Delight

My son is reading through The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. How many of you remember that book?

We had some discussion around it and I explained to him that the Turkish delight that the queen gives to Edmund is simply an analogy of the enemy actively working to get us to not make Jesus our Lord. The enemy presents sin to us, and sin always looks good.

It is always appealing. It appeals to our fleshly desires.

But sin will cost you more than you want to pay and it will keep you longer than you intended to stay.

But, Jesus rescues us from ourselves.

So as I said at the beginning of this message, sometimes we say yes to something without having all of the information, so let’s apply this in the other direction.

What if you knew that your casual drinking with your boys would blow up into full blown alcoholism and one day you get behind the wheel drunk and suffer irreversible consequences, would you do it?

What if you knew that the casual flirting with your coworker would turn into an affair and you lose your family, would you do it?

Obviously the answer to these questions are no… and so we turn to Jesus.

But can I tell you what you are going to find when you turn to Jesus?

He Was Pursuing Me

Paul gives us a beautiful picture of what it really means follow Jesus...

“But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me.”

I have this visual that I have seen so many times with my own children.

Paul is saying, I was running in a direction with my life that was in reality running away from Jesus. Meanwhile, what I didn’t know, is that he was running after me. He wasn’t just sitting on a cloud that can’t be reached waiting for me to get my stuff together, but he was pursuing me! In His grace, he put people on my path that were point me back to Him. He used things in my life to point me back to Him.

He is not indifferent with me, He so loves me!

And right when I turned around and reached out, there he was, and his arms were already open.

You see, He loved me before I loved Him.

He accepted me before I accepted Him.

When I turned around and opened my arms to Him, He didn’t stiff arm me and say that He would hug me when I cleaned myself up, no that’s not who He is. When I turned around to embrace Him, He first embraced me.

This is our Jesus.

This is our Savior.

And today, I am asking you, would you make Him your Lord? Would you make Him your Savior?

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