A few days ago I was given the opportunity to speak to Godfirst Fourways as part of the series that G1 is doing at the moment called Life Verse.
Last night I sat with the elders and got feedback on my preach and since they didn’t mention any huge heretical errors, I thought I would share the content of it here. I know this is a deviation from my normally all tech oriented posts, but this is my blog so hey I can do what I want!
You can get the mp3 of the preach here: Life Verse: Jaime Lopes
The concept of the Life Verse series is is that various people from GodFirst will speak about about verses that have inspired them or been particularly important to them at times of their life. Check out the promo for the series:
https://vimeo.com/77962272
My life verse is one that I feel has defined my life at several different points:
Romans 6:23
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
To make this verse easier to understand, I’ll break it down into three sections and then talk about how my life followed the formula…
SIN (doing your own thing, breaking Gods law…)= DEATH
but
GOD = LIFE (eternal life, so right from the beginning, to now, and forever…)
in
JESUS our LORD (our master, the centre of our life…)
I grew up going to church, which I hope to show you has very little to do with actually being a Christian.
I went to church every Sunday, read my bible most days and followed all the rules. I di my best to obey the 10 commandments. Things like ‘Do not steal’ ‘Do not kill’ ‘Do not lie’ and ‘Do not commit adultery.’ That last one was pretty easy when I was 8 years old!
On the outside everything looked like I had this thing called life, jacked!
Maybe that’s you? – You feel like you are a pretty good person. you pay your tax, stick to the speed limit, maybe you are so righteous that you have even bought an e-tag! (for the non South Africans read this about e-tolls)
I don’t know about you, but if i’m honest with myself, I actually lived for myself and not for God. I did follow his rules, but I did it because it made me feel good, it made me feel like I was good enough for him, made me think I was better than everyone else…
The truth was that In my mind I was more important than God, he wasn’t first, I was
Then came high-school! I wanted to fit in, be accepted, hang with the cool kids, thats what made me feel good. So I did what everyone else did, watched pron, went to night clubs and house parties, smoked cigarettes, swore like a trooper… no like a working class Englishman!
I just didn’t think or care about right or wrong. I did what… my heart told me to do, I did what made me happy cos lets face it, sin is attractive… pleasurable!
Maybe that’s you, whether you go to church or not it doesn’t matter, but you don’t think about what’s right or wrong, like me you just choose happiness.
For several years I was going along singing Limp Bizkit, “Its MY WAY, MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY”
But I wasn’t actually getting any happier I was actually just ‘dying,’ not physically, although i felt tired and worn out, but emotionally and spiritually. Eventually got to a place where I was crying my self to sleep every night, saying to God “WHERE ARE YOU!!!???” I had tried to please everyone around me to get their love, their respect, their affirmation… but all I got was rejection… I was alone. This quote sheds some light on my circumstance:
CS lewis –
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
When the verse says death Its also talking about hell & although I was still alive, I was tasting a little bit of what it felt like to be separated from God, the hard part to swallow was that infact I had chosen it. I couldn’t blame God for what had happened to me. I think as humans we somehow refuse to believe in cause and effect. To use simple examples, we eat too much and get fat, stay up too late and get tired, and then when we are experiencing the result of our choices, we don’t want to take responsibility for them, we just want to blame someone else and that usually ends up being God.
Going back to the verse at that time in my life was painful, because it says God = LIFE, and what I was feeling then did not feel like life at all! The problem was, I felt like I had already tried God, obeyed all his rules, done the right thing but I just couldn’t keep it up! I was just so tired of trying, and felt like I couldn’t fake it… sing and pray till it goes away.
I think many people looking in on the Christian faith, or just looking at Christians only see the first part of the verse when really the last part of the verse is the crux of what we believe ‘…the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord‘
We need Jesus!
Maybe you think you know about Jesus, well let me tell you what I know about him. He is so NOT like us!
We try to become God, we elevate ourselves to the master and commander of our own lives, we do what we want, even those of us that know him and claim to love him. We often think that we know better, that we can make better choices for ourselves and others than he can. Jesus, who didn’t just think he was God, he actually WAS, came down from heaven and made him self like us, became a man. Instead of telling us not to sin, He came to earth and HE did it. He lived a perfect life, followed every rule, every time. He gave up all the power and comfort he could have had since he was, and is God. He didn’t sin, so he didn’t deserve death. The formula, Sin=death didn’t apply to him, but we murdered him anyway, we put him on a cross and he bled out and died in our place.
Bethel Music have a song on a recent album that articulates this story much better than I can, check it out:
The lyrics say this:
His body on the cross, His blood poured out for us
The weight of every curse was broken
The ground began to shake… His perfect love could not be overcome
Now death where is your sting? Our resurrected King has rendered you defeated
Death couldn’t hold him, so three days after they buried him in a tomb, he rose again! Victorious over sin and death, Jesus changed everything!!!
In Romans 5 it says that Jesus died ‘while were still sinners’ and therefore ‘we have now been justified’
I felt like I was dead, like I couldn’t pick myself up and pursue life and happiness, and that is exactly what that verse says… we are ‘dead’ we can’t help ourselves, we can’t earn righteousness, as my life verse says, its a ‘free gift’
You know, if you accept that free gift, there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to make God love you more!
No amount of good works, obeying the rules, going to church, reading your bible, praying whatever… nothing can increase his love for you.
AND at the same time, there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to make him love you any less, no amount of bad works, breaking the rules… nothing…
Later in that same chapter in Romans it says ‘we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.’
The Grace of God that I have just tried to describe should not leave us complacent or lazy. It shouldn’t leave us saying that we are free to sin if we want, it should leave us grateful that we are free to LIVE. It should make us eager to serve Christ… and as the verses say, make him lord. It makes me want to surrender my life to him and choose to say:
MY LIFE IS NOT MY OWN
To recap:
You cannot get closer to God by obeying all the rules, you will not find happiness or satisfaction by breaking all the rules, and there is no sin too great for Jesus to rescue you from, so give your life to him today, and everyday!