Potted or Planted: Confession, Repentance, and Accountability

Morning. I'm Russ.

I get man the great pleasure to be one of your pastors here. And so if I've not met. Thank you, Josh. My heart is full if one of you is happy that I'm your pastor. That's all I'm saying.

Who are you? If you are new here, so glad you walked in here. Here's what I know. It is not easy to come to a place that you're unfamiliar with, with unfamiliar people. And so if you've gotten into this room, well done.

And if you want to know more about us, we don't think we're all that special, but we like us, right? And we'd love for you to know who we are as well. And so if you would like to know who we are or to learn how you can take steps into becoming one of us, there's an info desk right out there. Walk up to them and say, hi, I'm new, and they would love to. To help you learn more.

So we have, over the last month, been talking about us a little bit specifically in the kind of people we want to be. We don't want to be a people, a church that shows up as a bunch of individuals and we come together and then we leave again, like people who are showing up like potted plants and setting them down with. With. With thin, scraggly, small roots that are unconnected from one another. What we want to be is a planted people with roots that go deep together, intertwining with one another, right?

Strengthening and nourishing each other as we follow Jesus together. This is what the kind of people we want to be. And we've taken some concrete action steps. Some of you have in the last several weeks into giving into serving, we have leaned hard into gathering. What do we mean by the word gathering?

Well, we. We are gathering big right now from all over this region. We are all coming together into this room to, as we've learned, spur one another on towards love and good deeds. And we've also leaned hard into going, hey, gather up, small man. Right?

So circle some people up and gather with them again. To do what? Spur one another on towards love and good deeds. To sit with some simple questions and with scripture together. And so many of you, dozens of you have raised your hand and said, we're in.

We're going to do this. Some of you are doing it with people who aren't real sure what you're doing and are nervous. Some of you are doing it with old friends. Some of you doing it with family. Some of you are gathering some, an old group of people together, whatever it looks like I had one new friends say, I have felt God nudging me to do this for a very long time.

And I'm so thrilled that we were able to, with God, be able to create a path for her to begin to do this. So some of you have raised your hand and said, hey, I want to do this. And if anybody else is free and they're close to us, we'd love to have them join us. And so for today only, there are some signup sheets out there with some specific areas because there are people saying, we're leading this. Anybody wants to join us, come join us.

So if you are a man that is out of high school and under 35, there are people for you. Ride out that door, Door B. You'll see balloons that look surprisingly like my head, but more colorful. Look for my head, more color. And you'll find people there who are circling up with men at that age.

If you are in or close to bright Indiana, there are people out there for you. If you are close to St. Leon, the one thing I know about St. Leon is my neighbors from Price Hill, once a year drive to St. Leon for fried chicken. Must be good. So if you were close to fried chicken in St Leon, there are people for you right out there. If you are free to come back here tonight at 6pm, there are people in this building tonight at 6pm if you are in Northern Kentucky, there are people for you.

If you are in Western Hills or Bridgetown or in Green Township, Bridgetownish, there are people there out there for you. And there are those groups that happen every week here, one this morning, right in there, gathered to do exactly the same thing. And then Wednesday nights and Thursday nights, and if you didn't hear your area or your name, maybe that's God going, hey, maybe it's your turn. Raise your hand and say, I can do this. It's not too late to jump in and proactively participate.

It's also not too late to raise your hand and say, hey, we'll get started. We may be a little late, but we are in, right? All that that you need is in this half sheet right here. You can pick it up on your way out. You follow this instruction.

You sign up. I will make sure you get everything you need to do this. Because we want to be a planted people. Okay? So planted, all that means is that, hey, we want to be people who take Jesus and scripture seriously.

So it says to do something, we do it. It says Serve one another. What do we do? We serve. It says gather together.

What do we do? We gather. Right? Because we believe that it is the way that we can live into the good news. That's what the word gospel is, right?

It is good news. And it is not a set of beliefs or rules. Let's get really clear. When we say gospel, what do we mean when we say good news? It's a person.

It's a person. The Bible used the language Jesus Christ. Christ is a title. So in everyday English language we're going to say King Jesus. That is the gospel.

It is him and it's his kingdom coming. And us arranging our lives around his kingdom, no longer our own. And we want to be a church that arranges ourselves around our King Jesus, that we will get close to him, learn him, learn his way of life, doing more and more of what he does, becoming more and more like him, not just for us, but so that we can help others do the same. See, the whole Bible comes down to being about this. It comes down to this.

Here's the phrase, living in perpetual union with God. All right, that sounded like a mouthful, right? It's a beautiful phrase. Perpetual union with God. What does that mean?

It means the invitation of the good news is that we can live our lives in deep partnership, fellowship, connection with God, both now, forever. It's an invitation into the life that Jesus calls the life abundant, the life full, the life. Right. Doesn't mean easy, but it means best. And over the course of the next couple of months, what we're going to do, See, the Bible's full of these instructions of how we can practice that kind of life.

And so we're just going to kind of walk through one practice from Scripture to another over the next couple of months. And we're starting today with a practice that we're going to see in the book of First John. This is a letter that one of Jesus first trainees disciples named John wrote. John was a fisherman before Jesus came along. Jesus invited him to become one of his trainees.

He leaves his job and Jesus starts to train him. And after Jesus death and resurrection, after he had trained John with the other disciples, he sent them out. He said, I want you to go and make more generations of disciples who will make the next generation and the next generation. He said, you may be familiar. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And John did. John wound up spending most of his adult life and ministry in an area that we call Turkey today. In those days, it was an area around a major city called Ephesus. And here's where John pastored and cared for people. These were people who met up in homes.

They gathered small, they couldn't gather big, and they gathered small all over the region. And John was overseeing and praying for them and pastoring them. The challenge was that Christianity wasn't well liked by the global military superpower of their day, that is Rome. And so eventually, John was exiled. So he's apart from the people he loves.

He's alone, he's an old man. And he's thinking of his people. They're on his mind and his heart. And so he writes to them in collaboration with the Holy Spirit. He writes these words, John 1:1.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched. This we proclaim. We speak concerning the word capital W. He's talking about our King Jesus. Word of life. Life.

The life appeared as we have seen it and testified to it. And we proclaim to you the eternal life. That's a Greek word, a little one called Zoe. It means a rich, full, meaningful life with God, ultimately, that will endure forever. Eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

We proclaim to you that what we have seen and heard so that you also may have what? Fellowship, partnership, deep partnered relationship with who? Us. And our fellowship is with who? The Father and his son, King Jesus.

We write this to make our joy complete. He says the invitation is a relationship is fellowship, partnership, deep connection with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and with us. See, there were teachers that were at work with those people in and around Ephesus who were teaching something that wasn't good news. They were saying that anything earthly is profane, right? Including our bodies.

And so Jesus evidently could not have had a body because he could not have had been profane. So he would not have been human. He would have been a phantom or an illusion. And John's having none of that. Our hands have touched.

He says, this is the message, verse 5. We have heard from him, from Jesus himself. And we declare to you, God is light in him. There is no darkness at all. This metaphor of light all over the Bible.

And here's the thing. When light shows up, darkness scatters, right? Sin, evil, death, Satan defeated by what light?

If we claim to have fellowship with him, if we claim to have this partnership with God himself and yet still walk in darkness, we deceive ourselves, we lie, and we do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship not just with him, but with whom? One another. And the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. We'll come back to that in just a moment.

If we claim to be without sin, he says, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim to have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar. And his word is. Is not in us.

John says, we've got a problem. And it's a little word, three letters, sin. We have a sin problem. He says two things. If we claim to be without sin or if we claim to have not sinned.

He's not saying the same thing twice. He's saying two different things. Because here's our problem with sin. Our problem isn't just that we do sinful things. That is one thing, but we are not without sin.

What is that? That is our propensity, our propensity to do wrong right. It is the thing in us that just winds up doing the thing we don't want to do. Even sometimes. It's a disposition.

See, the sin is to rebel against God. And in that sense, all of us have a rebel spirit.

Sin. The very first time sin shows up in the Bible is Genesis 3. And what is it? We have bought a lie from Satan. And we decide we want to be like God.

We want to decide what's good and evil. That is still our problem. I know this deep in my bones. It's true of me. And it's got to be true of every one of us in this room that we have this deep set desire to have the whole universe revolve around me.

And that influences every choice I make. This is why it's so easy to ignore God until we have a real problem.

Tell me if this doesn't ring true. Because in essence, we just sort of bend things around where God exists for us. Like he's there to make my dreams and desires come true. And that's all going great until I have a need I can't fix. And then I wonder, God, where are you, God?

Why'd you let this happen to me? Because I only think about God in terms of my joy, my happiness, my needs. That's what he's there for. And if he's not operating in a way that's conducive to me getting what I want, advantageous to me, I'm now angry and upset with him. It's a sin problem.

It's a desire to be God, not under God.

And some of those teachers in those churches that John was apart from, they were teaching that the body and spirit are separate from each other. They're not interconnected, and that the spirit is good and pure and the body is profane. But you can do what you want with your body because it's not connected to your spirit. And your spirit can still be unmarred. And John is saying, it's not the truth if you claim to be without sin.

You are deceiving yourself. My dear children. He says, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father. Who is that advocate?

Here he is again, King Jesus, the one who is right, the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of who whole world, everybody, everywhere. You see, for those teachers, the answer to the problem is information. They believed you just need to be enlightened. You need information.

John saying, no amount of information can change you. What you need is transformation. You need a renovation of your heart and your mind and your being.

And I got to stand with James just now with his two daughters, Kylie and Ava, as he looked at them before he walked in that water to baptize them. And he said, you know, the change in me you've seen over the last five years, this is what he's going to do in you. You know what he was proclaiming testifying gospel. This is the good news, that the renovation of our hearts is what God is offering us. And we don't have it in ourselves to make that change by our own, on our own.

So God handles it for us. Love always cost us something.

Somebody has a child and suddenly they're making decisions that are very different than the ones they made before. Because now you're not making decisions primarily based on your well being, but it's about their well being. And it cost you something. Any of you in here who's ever forgiven someone of something deep, you know what it's like to in some way pay a price for them. Love and forgiveness always cost us something.

The ancient people knew this. And so we had. They had these processes for forgiveness and atonement that involved a price, a sacrifice. God himself set this up for his people. And it happened in the temple.

And the death and the blood of an animal represented the price paid. And what Jesus taught John was that he himself King Jesus himself would be that sacrifice, that he would pay the price once and for all, because love cost. And he would pay the cost once and for all, for all of us, for all time. That's what the cross is all about. That out of his endless, endless love for us and desire for us to experience and enjoy life with him now and forever, he did not leave us in the trouble we caused for ourselves.

That he moved into the world we broke. That he moved towards us to become one of us, and then paid the price for us so that we could be healed, restored, renewed, transformed. This is the good news. And this is what we remember every Sunday when we take communion together, the Lord's Supper.

And it is often a thing we treat as somber because it's serious. But this is the reason that the news is good. Because here's what it means. We're going to take this in just a second, and then I won't be done warning, but we are going to take it kind of in the middle here. But here's what it means.

Here's what this means. This means we don't have to make ourselves acceptable to God.

There is a lie that so many of us believe, and that is, if I just do the right things, he'll accept me. This is not the good news. The good news is this. The good news is this, is that he accepts you. Therefore, you begin to live in and align your life around him and what he wants.

Right? This is a recognition that we are deeply loved and that he is for us and with us. So if you picked up communion on your way in, you're welcome to take it with us. If you didn't and want to raise your hand, there's some lovely folks that will make sure you have it. And I'm going to walk us through this.

Here's the thing. God hung on a cross, and there he took on all of your wrongs, everything you've done or will do, he took on your propensity to do wrong. Now, not just yours, but, but every person in this room, every person around the globe, through all history. So imagine all of the wrongs that you've done and all the pain that's caused you and other people, and then multiply that across the globe and through history. And in some way, Jesus on that day, took all of that and wadded it up and ingested it into himself so that he could pay the cost of love for you.

I don't know about you, but I don't know how not to love a God like that.

So this represents his body. He paid the cost for you. Broken. Take it and eat.

This is his blood poured out for you. He paid the price for you. Take it and drink.

All right, that was the introduction.

What does all this tell you about you?

That the God of the universe would be willing to pay the price for you. It means you are deeply loved, infinitely, unconditionally loved by the Creator and Lord of the Universe. And nothing you do or say can change that.

And that some of you here have just, honestly, just way too high of a view of yourself where you're like, I know I'm not perfect, but I'm a good person.

Others of you are really struggling in the other area. You have way too low of a view of yourself where you're like, there's no way God could ever love or accept a person like me. In fact, you're shocked that you're here and he hasn't caused the roof to fall on you.

Neither of those things are true. Here's what we know. You are deeply flawed. You know it better than anybody else. You are deeply flawed, yes.

But you are also deeply loved.

You are deeply flawed, and you are deeply loved. To be deeply flawed is to say, I sin and I have sinned. I have a propensity to do wrong.

It's what God paid the price for us. But it's still alive in here, right? We still want the universe to revolve around us. We still want our kingdom, not his, our will, not his. And then the problem compounds because we sin, and that results in shame.

And shame is when we begin to believe that what we've done defines us. It reveals something about who we are, and it is corrosive to our identity in Christ as his beloved sons and daughters. We sin, there's shame, and then we keep secrets because of our shame. Our shame says, people would never accept you if they really knew, so they should never know. And we keep all our wrongs to ourself.

And that's like pouring fertilizer on weeds, right? And that shame just keeps growing and growing. And I am speaking to you as a brother in this. I know what this is like. I've mastered hiding in my life.

I told a story here a couple of years ago from this stage, how I kept secrets for more than three decades. Thirty years. That was 30 years of me believing in my bones that if people really knew me, they would leave me. And that is a crushing weight. So if you are there, if you are there right now, I am here to tell you you are not Alone.

I'm here to tell you that there is hope. Because, yes, you are deeply flawed, but you are also. What? Deeply. Whew.

Let's do it again. Deeply. Come on. What if we could live like that all the time? What if you could, day after day, get up knowing.

Imagine this. Knowing how completely aware you are, 100% aware of how broken and flawed you are, and yet simultaneously utterly convinced of God's unconditional and limitless affection for you. Imagine the freedom and confidence not in you, but in him, that you could live with every day. And that is not wishful thinking, friends. It is the invitation of the gospel.

It is what it looks like to live into and to live out the good news.

And how do we do that? It is not by sheer willpower. That is a thing we try far too often and it does not work because we want to stop the thing. We want to stop making critical comments about other people, or we want to stop our porn addiction or our drinking problem, or our just need for more and more money and stuff, or our self medicating. We feel the ache of our sin and we feel the ache that it's causing in the lives of other people.

And if all it took to stop sinning was just to stop, stop, you just stopped a long time ago. One Bible writer says, hey, the good things I want to do, I don't do, but the evil I don't want to do, I wind up doing. I'm so glad that's in our Bible because I recognize that person.

Willpower is like mowing a field of dandelions, and they just keep growing right back over and over and over. The answer is not willpower and it's not tolerating our sin. Too many of us do this where we secretly tolerate it, or maybe it's not secret, we actually identify with it or celebrate it. Sin leads to shame. Shame leads to keeping secrets.

And John gives us the answer. He says the way forward is to go after the secrets. We read this a minute ago. First John 1:9. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Some of you heard that word confess, and you're looking around for the confessionals, right? You're like, well, there's a room we go to and you talk to somebody like Russ and you tell them everything and you get absolved. There is actually a beautiful practice underneath that, and it's right here. Except the difference is this is that you don't need somebody in some kind of official capacity to confess to Jesus. Own brother also became a leader of the church in Jerusalem.

And we have a letter he wrote inspired by the Spirit, by his name, James. And he says this. Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy?

Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise them up.

If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins. To who? Each other. And pray for each other so that you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. There is supernatural power released into the world when we pray, not by us, but by the Spirit. And he has the power to heal what? To put things back together. And when we confess and pray with each other, restoration, healing, transformation comes.

There's a lot more in this little passage that we would want to be clear on about what he is and isn't saying. But one thing is really clear. Confession leads to transformation, leads to wholeness. Because the minute I can admit how flawed I am, I can begin to recognize, oh, I'm arranging my life around the wrong thing. I'm arranging it around me.

What does it look like to begin to arrange it around him? That rearranging is called repentance. The Bible. And when you and I begin to do this together, suddenly now there's this mutuality and accountability that happens when it's confess to each other.

And it is the path towards healing and wholeness and freedom. And I walked for three decades.

The language I would use was like I was carrying around a 50 gallon drum of shame on my back, feeling broken by the weight of that. And one day I was sitting with a friend and he shared something honest. He showed me how he was flawed in a way. And I told a story I'd never told before in three decades. And he treated me like I'm flawed and I'm deeply loved.

He said, thank you for sharing that with me. I'm with you. Give me enough courage to tell another story and another story slowly over time, and then tell another friend and another friend. And soon I had many friends who were learning how specifically flawed I am. And yet they continued to treat me as though I'm deeply loved as they are.

And eventually God broke that thing open. It's like he punctured that 50 gallon drum of shame and it ran out. And I'm here to Tell you, I don't know. Fifteen years later, I can tell you in these 15 years, I can still feel shame because I think and do shameful things. But it doesn't stay in the bucket.

It runs out. This is transformation. This is a taste of perpetual union with God, man. This is what he wants for us. And I can stand in front of you today knowing.

And some of you know, some of how I'm flawed. I know how deeply flawed I am that sin runs deep in me in the areas of pride and lust and sloth. So much sloth. And I'm learning. Like, now, as I've gotten older, man, I got a lot of anger that I never thought I had.

And I know, you know, if you don't like those things about me, that's okay. I don't either, right? But I kind of don't need you to like them because Jesus took those things on for me. He paid that cost, and he sealed this truth in me that I am deeply loved and I can stand in front of you today, unworthy to ever be trusted with a microphone. I mean that.

And yet graced Grace to be one of you, to play my part.

All right, so how do you do this? How do you live without secrets? How do we step into the light? That's the invitation. You heard it in John, right?

To walk in the light as he.

As he is in the light. How do we do what seems unthinkable? Here's a simple thing you can do. It's gonna take practice, but it's not hard. Practice being the kind of person somebody else would trust with their secrets.

Just start practicing being the kind of person that other people will say things to. So ask people how they're doing and then wait. Am I making you uncomfortable? Sorry. Just pause and let them know you mean it.

And listen. And when they tell you something, something that you know feels precious and hard, just say what was said to me. Thank you. I'm with you. There will be time, as you grow in your relationship, to affirm and maybe lovingly challenge.

But they already know they're deeply flawed. Remind them they're deeply loved.

Listen, respond. And then whatever they tell you, keep it to yourself. And if, because this can happen, sometimes somebody tells you something and you want to freak out, don't freak out later. And then come talk to somebody else and go, should I be freaking out? And we can talk about it.

But a vast majority of the time, you can just say, you're not alone. I'm with you. And when you do this, you'll find somebody who's willing to do the same for you, and they'll trust you with something, and you'll have a strong sense that you can trust them back and suddenly find yourself confessing to one another. And you may know somebody trustworthy right now in your life. It's a gift.

A friend, someone you know from our church, a pastor, counselor, whoever it may be.

And so you can do it just simply the way that I did. I trusted my friend with one secret. I didn't dump everything in the first conversation. So just one little thing. After a time, and before I knew it, I was surprised that I was standing in the light and I was free.

Here's a goal for you. Ask for this. God, give me the opportunity to do a total life confession, to come to a place in a relationship. And you may know that person right now, or you may go to them right now and go, hey, can we sit down and spend some time? I'm gonna do a total life confession.

Because imagine a life secret, free. And when you do that, be specific. Like when you name your flaws, be specific. Cause you could say, hey, I'm such a sinner. I'm wicked, and I'm a stain on God's good creation.

Have I said anything about what that looks like? But when I say, hey, I've learned recently I have a tone that nobody else will hear except the one person on earth I love the most. 30 years of marriage, and she hears me speak to her in a tone that is nasty and angry and rude because I don't want to deal with my anger issues. And so they come out on her, and I don't want to be that guy. That's a confession.

Be specific. Choose somebody you trust, take a step, and just be the kind of person that you want to have in front of you. So your practice this week is just to begin to identify a person. Who do you think might be somebody you can trust? And just ask God to show you and maybe give you enough courage to try just a little.

And if you want to get around some people who know how to do this, come back to this building on Wednesday nights. And our celebrate recovery crew, they live this life, and they will walk with you in this.

So James says there's prayer and confession, right? So if we were having this conversation one on one, and you came to me and said, I got something heavy and hard, and I just. I need to get it out, I would pray for you. And what I want to do today as we close, is I want to do that Kind of for all of you. This isn't something I do as a. I'm not wearing my pastor hat when I do this.

I don't have to be a pastor to pray for you. In fact, I learned this from wonderful everyday followers of Jesus, which really I am almost all the time when I'm not having to put a pastor hat on like this moment.

And what I would simply do is let them say it. And then I'm going to pray for them eye to eye and I'm going to remind them that they're forgiven and I'm going to kind of name any lies they may be buying because here's the deal, our sin is often born from lies because Satan is the father of lies. This is what he wants to do, get us by the lie, right? So we'll name those things and we'll speak biblical truth into their lives and bless them, real simple. And what I do is just do that as best we can in a big giant room.

Now, I'm not going to ask you to confess out loud, right? That would be wrong. But you can in quiet in just a minute be able to confess with God and to give him your secrets, to take what is in your 50 gallon drum of shame and to tell him quietly inwardly. And then from there I'm going to begin to pray for you. So let's just take a breath and we'll let things get quiet.

And Holy Spirit, we're trusting you to work right now.

Search us and know our hearts, God, test us and know our anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in us and lead us into the way everlasting.

So right now in the quiet, you can hand your secrets over to our Father who loves you.

It can be as simple as saying, God, I'm sorry.

Okay, you may be praying with your head down and that feels like shame. Your eyes are on you. I want you to look up and look at me. If it was just you and me, we'd be looking eye to eye. And I'm still praying and I'm going to say to you what is true of you because of our advocate and the atoning sacrifice.

I'm going to say to you and I would want you to this to be seared and sealed into the back of your skull, that you are forgiven, you were forgiven, you were forgiven, you were forgiven.

And that behind that thing there is probably lies. Like you are working so hard to try to get it right and you're exhausted because you're trusting you, because you think it depends on how hard you work.

Or maybe there's a lie in you that just says, I am as rotten as a human being could ever be and nobody could ever love me and I'm worthy of nothing, and that's a lie. Or maybe you're doing everything you can to try to let people know that you're okay and you know you're not. And you are so tired of pretending that whatever that lie is, it is not what is true of you. What is true of you right now. And I'm just going to, like I've been praying scripture right in front of you.

That in this moment, in Colossians, you are wholly chosen and dearly loved right now.

That there is no condemnation in King Jesus for you. That in fact, the love of God, there is nothing. Height, death, depth, nothing that can separate you from God's love. This is Romans 8.

This is what's true. You are forgiven. You are deeply loved. Yes. Deeply flawed.

We know. You are forgiven and deeply loved. And let those truths of you, truths born out of who our God and who our King Jesus and the Holy Spirit is, be sealed deep into your being.

And may you move today. Blessed. Blessed. To live a blessed life with God. A life abundant, which means a life free.

Free as one who knows what it is to have a God who has deep affection for you, his beloved daughter and son. And in all of this, we pray, not based on anything that I have, but the authority and power of our King Jesus. It is in his name that we pray this. And we count on it, and we trust it. It is in his name we pray.

Amen.