The War Is Over

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

May 8th, 1945. They call it VE Day, Victory in Europe Day. It's the day that World War II ended. In two weeks, it will be 80 years since VE Day. And I wanted you to see the millions upon millions of people erupting in celebration. Man, I mean, there were people just square dancing for no reason. There were people kissing each other in the street. There were people throwing their hats and not carrying where it landed. There were people just hooping and hollering everywhere. And it wasn't just in one place. It wasn't just in London. It wasn't just in Russia. It was everywhere. It was in America. It was everywhere. These millions of people that are celebrating around the world because there's no more bombs dropping. There's no more soldiers fighting. There's no more kids being sent off to the other side of the world to die in battle. It was the end of hostility. Today, as we celebrate Easter,

the resurrection of Jesus, all over the world, people are celebrating the resurrection of the Son of Man. And they're doing it because the war is over. They're doing it because the hostility has ended. We're gonna be in Ephesians chapter two this morning. If you have your Bible with you, you can turn there. If you don't, we're gonna be putting those verses up on the screen as we read them.

You can also look at them on your phone, however you wanna do it. And as we read these verses, I want you to just listen how Scripture describes the resurrection in terms of kind of the end of hostility. I want you to see it. Look at verses 14 through 16 with me in Ephesians chapter two. It says, for he himself, Jesus himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in the place of two, so making peace. And might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. This Easter, we celebrate the fact that Jesus brings us peace, that he makes peace possible. That's why we celebrate Easter, because the hostility is over. It's killed, it's gone. And this is the message that Jesus preached.

Look at the next two verses in 17 and 18. It says, and he came and preached peace. To you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him, we both have access in one spirit to the Father. Jesus, when he came to earth, he declared this all over the place. And he would say to people, you don't have to be at war with God anymore. The war is over. Direct access to the Father is open. This is Jesus's message. And ironically, as Jesus is preaching that message,

ironically, there are some people openly wondering, asking Jesus even, what war? What hostility are you talking about? What do you mean I now have direct access to God? I'm not at war with him. My access isn't denied. I didn't do anything to God. What's the problem? They don't see the connection. They miss it between what Jesus did on the cross and our sin that made that cross necessary. They don't connect the dots between Jesus's Easter resurrection and our own need for new life. They miss it. And these verses that we just read in Ephesians two and a couple of them after that, they help us see all of this more clearly. And I wanna look at this with you quickly. I wanna focus on two phrases. The first phrase that we read was in verse 16 where it talks about how the cross, through the cross, through the resurrection, that Jesus has reconciled us to God, that Jesus reconciles us to God.

Anytime you're talking about reconciliation, you're talking about some kind of breaking point. You can't say that you're reconciling somebody if you have not had some kind of break with them, if there hasn't been some kind of point of contention. Mother and daughter reconciling, well, it's because they came to a breaking point, maybe with abandonment or with a harsh word, things you can't unsay. These breaking points, sometimes it's friend betraying friend. Sometimes it's husband leaving wife. The most powerful story we have of reconciliation is the prodigal son. All of you know that story well, right? The prodigal son.

And that started with a breaking point where the prodigal son tells his father, give me my inheritance early. I'm gonna be better off when you're dead. Is the breaking point that he had with his own father. See, all of us, we deal with these breaking points because we are born into deep brokenness, right? We all have breaking points because we're born into deep brokenness. And it started way before we got here, but we all still take part in it. And the way that we do that, we all kind of have this overwhelming desire to rule our own lives,

to make our own choices. And even whenever we crash and burn, even when we wreck our own lives, we still convince ourselves, man, we're gonna do better next time. Or we blame our failure, right? So we make a choice, we're trying to rule our own lives, trying to do it our way. We do it and something goes wrong and we blame. Well, it would have gone just fine had that person kept their nose out of my business or had this person done what I told them to do. Right? And this is how we operate. We operate in this brokenness where we think that we can do a good job running our own lives, ruling our own lives.

This is folly, it's brokenness. It's what addicts say whenever they fall again. They say, ah, I'm gonna do better next time. This is what we're all born into, whether we're addicted to something or not. And when Jesus comes and he's preaching peace and he's offering reconciliation, he is saying, he is assuming that everybody that's listening to him, they've all had a breaking point with God. They've had a moment where they don't wanna relate to God the same way.

And so sometimes people respond differently to that. Sometimes in that breaking point, people run from God. They just had the other direction. They pull a Jonah, right? And they're headed a completely different direction. They're just gonna try to do their own thing, but it's not what's expected of them. They're gonna do their own thing, but it's the opposite of their upbringing. They're gonna do their own thing, but it's not gonna look spiritual. It's not gonna look religious. They're gonna wanna do, they're gonna run. Sometimes people actually, they try to convince themselves that God's not real. So they do kind of this rewind in their head and they rewrite what's happened to them as kind of just religious experiences. Well, I had this religious experience over here, but it's not real. Sometimes people try to perform.

When they're running from God, they try to perform. They try to do really well. They say, you know, like they're kind of feeling this breaking point with God and they think, man, if I'd have just done that a little bit better, if I'd have just gone ahead and done what God told me to do, so you know what, I'm gonna do even better next time. I'm never gonna miss a church service. I'm always gonna read my Bible. I'm always gonna pray. I'm always gonna, and if I do that, things will be better between me and God.

I won't have to deal with that breaking point. I'll just pretend like it didn't exist. Right now, I want you to consider your own breaking point. Consider how you might need reconciliation. Was it a time where you felt like God didn't come through for you, right? Maybe you got caught up in sin or even laziness, your Netflix queue, right? Like you just get caught up in whatever. You don't really engage. For me, I have kind of these breaking points whenever I feel like I'm a big failure, right? When I feel like I haven't done something that I needed to do,

what I wanna do from that point is run, right? I wanna, I feel like I failed and so I wanna just hide. So consider your own breaking points but also consider what you do in response to that. Do you run? Do you perform? You try to make it on your own. What do you do? Jesus came so that we could be reconciled to God. And the question I wanna pose to you this morning is how do you need to be reconciled? What is that for you? And this is our first phrase, reconciled to God. Here's our second phrase and it's back in 18. Verse 18 says that through Jesus that we have access in one spirit to the Father. Access in one spirit to the Father. The next few verses show us what that access is talking about. Look at verses 19 and 20 with me. It says, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,

Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. When Jesus makes peace possible, when the war is over and you can be reconciled to God, the direct result of that, the direct result of that reconciliation is that you have a spiritual family. Jesus says you now have access to a Father. You are not strangers, you are now members of a household. Saying yes to reconciliation with God means saying yes to a Father and a family. And this, on this point right here, is where a lot of the complication starts. Because if most of us are honest, if you're talking about like, hey, I'm gonna go worship Jesus in the woods, just me and Jesus, then we're great, okay, it's cool. But when those other people get involved, that's when things get a little hairy, right? Life's a lot easier without those other people, right? Am I right? Yeah, okay. All over our area, Johnson County in particular,

people have spiritual scars. I've talked to many, many, many of them. I've looked at research actually, county-wide research. There are many people that have spiritual scars and the vast majority of those scars were because people joined a church, walked into a church, started coming to a church regularly, thinking they were going to get a family, but they didn't. They got isolated.

They got ignored or worse. They got manipulated. And when that happens, look, it's more than, and I hear this story a lot, right? Hey, we went one Sunday to this church, nobody told us hello. We left. All of us have been ignored before. We're all adults or teenagers. We're grown in some respect. We've been ignored before. It's not the reason it hurts. The reason it hurts is because we're hoping for something better than a gathering of people. We're hoping for something better than religion. Okay? We're hoping to jump into a family that will receive us. And when we walk into that and get it, instead of that happening, we get ignored or isolated or manipulated, it really hurts. It really hurts, it feels like betrayal. Because you thought you were getting something that you are not getting.

It feels like rejection. I was talking with somebody recently and they said they went, this isn't local, they went to a church. Excuse me. They went to a church and were trying to get involved and they had been, I mean, they'd been going for six months, I think. They tried to get involved and they said, well, I wanna do something. I don't even remember what the service opportunity was, but it wasn't like get up and preach or do something real kind of front facing. It was just a normal service role. And they were told, oh, well, listen, there's a few families here and they serve. They do everything here. We don't let other people serve. And I just thought, man, what a missed opportunity, right? Like, what a hard thing to hear. Because here's what that translates into. Oh, honey, you thought you were family.

No, you're not family. You don't get to be here like that. Man, what an arrow through the heart, man. What kind of pain is that? It's hard. I realize many of you came this morning, God bless you, I'm glad you're here. Many of you came this morning for a morning worship service. And again, I'm glad you're here. I truly hope you find more than a worship service here. I'm glad you're here. Hope you find more than a worship service. Because at South Burleson, we are not a bunch of nice people. We're not, the ones that are laughing, no. We're not nice. We're not nice people.

Nice people probably go to different churches. I don't know, bless them. We are, we're more than that, different than that. We're a family, right? Nice people greet you at Walmart. Okay, you hope they're nice. Most of it, they're nice. Yeah, most of it, 90% of the time they're nice. That's not us, man. We're family. We fight for each other. We go to the mat for one another. We pray for one another. We encourage one another. And look, we're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We are a heavily dysfunctional family. Okay, amen. There you go. We are dysfunctional, God bless us all.

We are dysfunctional. But we are a family nonetheless. Here's my challenge to you this morning. I want you to think about doing it. I want you to think about what it's gonna take for you over the next six weeks to become involved in a church. Listen, we don't benefit from people coming to a church service. Like the Baptist denomination doesn't send us money, the more people we have in a service. Okay, that's not how it works, promise. Okay, we don't do that. We don't play that game. That's not really how we roll. I'm just trying to tell you, man, there's nothing up my sleeve on this. We don't gain a darn thing. This is just for you. In fact, here's my encouragement. Try a church for six weeks, even if it's not ours.

Try a church, be involved in a church for six weeks in a row. Best you can, I mean, whatever, people get sick and happens, it's fine. Do it for six weeks in a row and see what happens. Because look, we can talk about reconciliation all day. I can give you like biblical definitions for it. I can tell you Greek words for it, it's amazing. It's really cool. But sometimes, man, you just gotta feel it. You just have to experience it. You just have to see what kind of family we are. And maybe you have to laugh at the dysfunction just a bit. It's fine. But we love each other hard. We love each other well.

Some of you need to see that reconciliation in real time and you need to feel it. You need to experience it. This Easter, we celebrate Jesus Christ dying on a cross and rising from the dead. And this is good news, this is the best news because without this news, we all stay alienated. Without this news, the war is still on. Without this news, we don't have a family. We don't have something in common. We all stay at war. And when you say yes to following Jesus, when you say yes to true Christianity, not religion, when you say that, that reconciliation comes with a family included. In light of all this, I wanna give you a chance to respond. As we sing, and we're gonna sing a little bit more after this, I want you to consider things. I want you to consider maybe some breaking points that you've suffered. Just some moments when you felt like God was supposed to come through and didn't.

God was supposed to make good on something, but didn't. You put effort into something, expecting a result, and did not get that result. Somebody might be getting a bad result right now, is what it sounds like. That is not okay. Sounds, makes me all anxious. Okay, sorry. Consider some of the breaking points that you suffered. And then really, excuse me, consider how you've responded to that. Maybe you're running, maybe you're performing, maybe you're antagonizing, maybe you're just headed the opposite direction. I wanna challenge you to respond to God's offer of reconciliation, and I'm gonna ask you to just pray where you sit.

If you wanna come talk to me after service, that's great. But what we believe in our church band is that decisions, decisions like this are intense and they're personal. Sometimes people need some time to think about them. So think about it. Begin to pray where you sit or where you stand whenever we're singing. I want you to respond to God's offer of reconciliation. I want you to consider, lastly, I want you to consider what the Spirit may be saying to you about a church family. Because the reality is you're gonna have to start thinking about what you're gonna do differently this week in order to adjust your schedule to be a part of a church family. Now you could say something like, well, hey, I don't, you know, I normally work Sundays, or I work super late on Saturday night.

I would just tell you simply, there's a way for you to be involved in a church some way or some way somehow, even if it's not with us, over the next six weeks. This Easter, let's remember the resurrection. Let's celebrate it. The war's over. The hostility has ended, yes. But let's also hope to experience that new life ourselves with a father and a family. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for this morning. We ask that as you continue to speak to us, as you continue to draw us out, Lord, make that reconciliation real to us. Lord, make our desire for a spiritual family. Let that drive us into your arms. Let that drive us into reconciliation. Lord, we know that you have a plan that we can trust. Help us to do that, help us to rely on you. It's in your name that we pray, amen.