Jesus Doesn’t Care

Last week I preached at my old youth pastor’s current church, and the title of my sermon was “Jesus Doesn’t Care.” I talked about 5 things that Jesus doesn’t care about. Here are my notes:

Do you know what airplane talk is? It is when you sit down and talk about stuff that really doesn’t matter to the other people. I’ve been on 8 airplanes this month, and each time I sit down, I think about airplane talk. It’s the small talk you make with the people that are sitting around you that you don’t really think is all that important. Sometimes, I’m sitting there thinking that I don’t really care about what they are telling me. I am just listening to them to be nice or to make the time pass, but really the stuff we talk about is stuff that I don’t care about.

  1. About your past. – Ephesians 2:1-8; Psalm 103:12
    • Paul – was a murderer and persecutor of the church, yet he became a great apostle who is credited with writing 13 NT epistles.
    • Philippians 3:13-14 – Forgetting what is past, I PRESS ON…
  2. About your family religion.
    • Josiah was a good king, but his father Manasseh was an evil, wicked king. – 2 Kings 21-22
  3. About your wealth (or social status). – Acts 10:34 – (Benz or Bus; Porsche or Pinto; mansion or motel 6)
    • In fact, the more money you have, the bigger the barrier is to living the life God wants you to live. (Matthew 19:23-24)
    • God is not a respecter of people.
  4. About your good deeds.
    • The Bible compares our good deeds to filthy rags. – Isaiah 64:6
    • You are not saved by works – Ephesians 2:8-10
    • Example of Edgar and explaining why we do good deeds.
  5. About your knowledge.
    • The devil believes, too – James 2:19
    • It is not necessary to understand everything about God in order to trust Him.

The Beauty of the Gospel

crawling on knees 2All over the world, people are trying to earn their way to God. All over the world, they are trying to pay an impossible debt.

In Mexico, as we visited the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we found two teenage guys crawling on their knees on the concrete. They had rolled up their jeans, hoping to show even more of their devotion and trusting that this might possibly earn them forgiveness.

Learning 2A few minutes later, I saw a family of four, with a little girl not much older than Nathan. The mother and father were teaching their daughter to crawl on her knees towards the Basilica. As they held her hands and I watched her crawling, I was reminded how much God loves us and the lengths to which He has gone to give us forgiveness of sins.

We cannot pay for our own sins. No amount of crawling or sacrifice will ever pay the debt we owe to God.

Cuba June 2007 166The scene was similar in Cuba, where an elderly man had a rock strapped to his leg. He would kick the rock a ways and then drag it back to his original starting point, hoping to appease a saint and pay back a little of the wrong he had done.

These images will forever be etched into my mind, and they will serve as a reminder of the beauty of the gospel.

The gospel, in a nutshell, is that God has come to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He sent His Son Jesus to pay for our sins because we cannot pay for them ourselves. He validated this payment with the resurrection of Jesus, and we can now have peace with God through Jesus.

All over the world, there are people trying to be good enough. But it is impossible to be good enough. No amount of rock kicking or concrete crawling will pay for us.

Besides, the debt is already paid in full. The old song is true. “Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe.”

Crawling crawling on knees