To view the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5e2rS92tXk
SHOW NOTES
On today's episode of the Hope Rescue Podcast, Tim and Kimberly introduce their series on God’s heart for the messy, the wounded, and the broken. They start by discussing the Parable of the Lost Son from Luke 15:11-32. In the next few weeks, Tim and Kimberly will be discussing the five different ways that God embraces, loves, and accepts messy and wounded people. Tim reads from Luke 15: 1-2 “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” The three parables Tim and Kimberly will be discussing in the next few episodes show Jesus’s response to this accusation that He welcomes and eats with sinners. Jesus’s response gives us an understanding of how we should see sinners in our own lives.
They go on to discuss the importance of befriending non-believers. One of the problems with ignoring non-believers is that it prevents us from knowing what’s going on in the world. Tim says “You can find yourself completely irrelevant to a world that needs to know that God loves them.” Kim explains that the tragedy is that people are struggling with the same issues inside and outside of the church, but the ones inside the church are afraid the Church will reject them so they pretend like they are not struggling. This is exactly how the Pharisees acted as they looked down their noses at Jesus for being friends with sinners. Although they had a list of sins of their own, the Pharisees pretended like they were sinless. To be more like Jesus, we need to be people who are committed to having friendships with non-believers.
Tim and Kimberly continue by discussing the first messy people that ever walked the earth, Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2:17, God tells Adam and Eve, "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die." He wasn’t talking about a physical death but a death to the soul. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve first sinned, Tim describes the passage as “the most powerful redemptive statement.” The first thing that God says to them is “Adam, where are you?” If you have just sinned and God asked “Where are you?” you are going to feel exposed, but when you dig into the passage, you discover that these are actually redemptive words.
After Adam and Eve sinned, they were immediately changed. In Genesis 3:7, it says "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves." This is significant because, at the end of Genesis 2, it says “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” After Adam and Eve sinned, their first response was to notice their nakedness and feel ashamed. Tim explains that fear is the driver of shame, and you can’t have shame without fear. The feeling of shame drives us to hide and causes us to lose intimacy. The amount of fear we have will decrease the amount of intimacy we have in our relationships. As fear rises, intimacy decreases. So for the first time, sin entered into the world, and the first psychological response was fear based shame. As a result, Adam and Eve hid themselves from each other and from God. But when God says “Where are you?” he is actually saying “I love you and I am in pursuit of you.” When God asked “Where are you?” it wasn’t to increase their shame but to make them take ownership for what they had done. Back to Luke 15, this is why the Pharisees had it wrong. Their philosophy of spirituality was “you clean up your life and then you can be one of us,” but God’s philosophy is “I will meet you where you are, and I will love you through this change.”
Tim wraps up the podcast by quoting John 3:17 “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” We are already condemned by our own behavior, but He came to bring us life and salvation.
Join us next week to hear about how God pursues the lost! We love you guys!
QUOTES
“God’s heart for the sinner is one of pursuit. He is in hard pursuit of people who have made a mess of their lives.” -Tim
“The beauty of our relationship with Christ is not that we are sin free but that we have been forgiven of our sins and we have access to eternal life through Jesus Christ.” -Tim
REFERENCED SCRIPTURE
Luke 15: 1-2 “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
2 Corinthians 5:21 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Genesis 2:17 "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Genesis 3:9 "But the LORD God called to the man, 'Where are you?'"
Genesis 3:7 "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves."
Genesis 2:25 “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
John 3:17 “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
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