We are in the last week of a sermon series we’re doing on The 12 Steps. Now, the 12 Steps are made famous by AA Alcoholics Anonymous. They have something called the Big Book. And it walks through these gradual steps, life-changing steps in order to take an addiction that you’ve got in your life and in order to defeat that addiction. And now, really, we’re not walking through 12 steps so much as we are walking through the biblical principles, the scripture that those 12 steps are based on. Bill W is the founder of AA, and it’s a fascinating story of how it started. It officially, technically, is considered to have started on June 10th, 1935. What’s interesting about that day is that is not the day that you might suspect is that Bill W. Got sober. That actually happened in November of 1934. In November of 1934, he had gone through a whole bunch of different programs.

He’d tried multiple times, but finally, he, he felt like it stuck. He felt like he had gotten to a place where he had kicked his addiction to alcohol. , He went one month, two months, three months. He’d gone six months. He thought he had it beat, and then he was on a business trip. And on that business trip, he was a salesman and he had done pretty poorly. The sales that he thought he was gonna make didn’t actually happen. And so, hey, he was already kinda down in the dumps. It was May, it was the day before Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day was always a really hard day for him because 30 years prior, his mother had abandoned him. And so anytime he hit Mother’s Day, it was always this emotional trigger for him. And so he’s sitting in a hotel lobby, having had a terrible sales weekend, thinking about his mom, and he looks down and he sees the bar.

And every part of him thinks, “Okay, I could just go get one drink.” And then the more he though about it, he said, “Well, I know it wouldn’t be one drink. I, I should just go ahead and get drunk and, and drown all the sorrows that I’ve got, and maybe I’ll just drink myself to death.” A- and as he was sitting there, he had this epiphany and he realized it wasn’t just enough to have gone through a program and taken steps, that he needed to find someone else who was an alcoholic, and he needed to share with him what he had experienced. And so he left the bar, he didn’t take a sip of alcohol. And in the next few weeks, he, he said, “Well, how am I gonna find some alcoholics who need help?” And so he got out the phone book, which for the younger people in the room was a book that we used to have with phone numbers in it.

It’s, it’s, we’re, let’s just move on. And so he gots out the phone book and he opens it up and he starts calling churches. And he would say, “Hey, listen, I want to help an alcoholic that you’ve got in your church.” And so he, he called about 10 churches. Finally, he, he had a church that said, “Okay, we’ve got a guy that, man, he needs a lot of help.” His name was Dr. Bob. And Dr. Bob had been an alcoholic for a long time. He’d gone through numerous programs, numerous treatments that had never worked. And what they consider as the day that AA started was the day that Dr. Bob took his last sip of alcohol. You see, one of the core foundational principles of AA is it’s not just enough to have experienced that transformation. It’s not just enough to have kicked the habit yourself, that in order to help make it stick, one of the things that you’ve got to do is you’ve got to give it away.

You, you’ve got to share it with someone else. You’ve got to share with someone else what has happened in your life in order to help them kick the habit that they have in their life. That leads us to step 12. And step 12 is not an afterthought in the 12 steps. It’s really the mission on the completion of the 12 steps that they have found that what keeps somebody connected, what keeps somebody sober is applying this 12th step. Here’s what the 12th step says. It says, “Having had a spiritual awakening, as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our lives.” , now, there’s really three different pieces to this. , So, so piece one of this is this idea, okay, I’ve had a spiritual awakening. There’s something that is transformed inside of my life.

And step two is, now I need to carry this message to other people. One of the famous phrases that AA uses is you have to give it away to keep it. If you wanna keep your sobriety, one of the ways that you keep it is by helping give it away to other people. And then the third piece of it is to practice these principles in all of our affairs. Saying this can’t just be something that you say, “Okay, well, I fixed this one corner of my life and it’s gonna stay over there in the corner.” No, no, you have to practice these principles and these disciplines in every aspect of your life in order for this to work. And all of these principles we find very, very clearly coming from scripture. If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to two Corinthians. We’re gonna be in two Corinthians chapter five, starting in verse 14.

We’ll see all three of these pieces from stealth, , step 12, all taken right from the Bible. Two Corinthians chapter five, starting in verse 14, it says this, “For the love of Christ controls us.” Now, now pause for a moment because I read out of the ESV, and so it translates for the love of Christ controls us. Maybe you’ve got a different translation, possibly it says for the love of Christ compels us. , But it’s hard to translate that Hebrew word for control. The Hebrew word is <foreign>. It, it’s stronger than just to be motivated. So it’s not just, well, the love of God is my motivation. It means something deeper than that. The actual Greek word is this idea of something being held together or, or being pressed in or constrained in such a way that there’s only one direction that it can go.

And so a better way of understanding what it means when it says that Christ is controlling us would be this. The Christ love has taken hold of me so completely that I cannot simply go on living the old way. So when it says that Christ’s love controls me, it’s not saying that, that I’ve become a puppet to God, that he’s controlling my, my, my every action, every though. It’s saying that because I’ve experienced the love of God, and it was so transformative, I can’t help. I am compelled. I am motivated to share that love in every area of my life. So the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this. Pause for a second. And I know it’s annoying when you do every word, so this is the last one. Then we’ll read the whole passage. But, but that word concluded actually comes from the, the Greek word krinos, which means to judge.

And, and so when it says that, that we’ve come to this conclusion, it, it’s, it’s an interesting word translation because here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that, that we’ve judged something or determined something or we’ve looked at, at all the things, what we’ve looked at all the information and we’ve come to a conclusion. , What it’s implying is this, is that Christian transformation isn’t just emotional enthusiasm. It flows from a changed understanding of reality. , When it says that, okay, the love of Christ controls me and I have concluded, , the conclusion he’s about to tell us wasn’t just an emotional conclusion. It was judging based of all the set of facts, looking at everything in front of him discerning what is truth. And what is it that he concluded? That one has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God. Who, through Christ, reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ. God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors. , The, the word ambassador in the first century meant someone has been authorized to carry a message on behalf of the king. Paul saying that we have been authorized to carry a message on behalf of the king for Christ. God making his appeal through us. That’s the message. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

And, and so in the same way that the 12th step has these three different pieces to it that it tries to break down, and that this passage really has these three core movements to it, that the first movement is this, is that God has changed us. That he says that we were dead and now we are alive. And then it moves to that God wants to work through us. So that God is calling us to be ambassadors, messengers for his kingdom on behalf of the king. And that ultimately, that God calls us to give him all of us. Not just a Pete, not just a part. That if you’re dead and alive, it means that you’ve been totally transformed. Your whole life is new. Now, I wanna pause for a moment and, and create a distinction between what scripture is teaching us and, and what you get just by following the 12 steps.

The 12 steps are wonderful. They’re powerful. They, they’ve saved and helped millions of people. And, and I, I mean saved by save them from addiction, but there’s a distinction because the steps do not save us. When you talk about being saved, our soul being saved, being made right with God, the steps themselves cannot do that. Only the gospel can do that. Only the power of Jesus in my life can do that. So the 12 steps are a wonderful tool, but they’re not everything. Part of the reason that they’re such a wonderful tool is because they’re derived from the power of scripture. But scripture goes a step further than just saying, “We don’t want you to be addicted.” Scripture says, “We want you to be set free.” , there’s this beautiful news of the gospel that Paul gives us in two Corinthians. He says that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

That, that’s profound. That’s powerful. Now, now probably like me, you, you’ve been familiar enough with church that maybe some of that language is kind of old hat. Like, yeah, I’ve heard you say that. I’ve heard that read. I’ve heard that passage. , But just imagine hearing that for the first time. Imagine the excitement that you hear in Paul’s voice as he’s writing these words where, where he’s saying, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see that the behold, there’s a new creation in Christ.” That, that language of being a new creation, that we see that throughout all scripture. In the very beginning, in the book of Genesis, God creates the heavens and the earth, and you, you have this moment where God’s looking at his creation, he’s saying it is good. And then in chapter three, sin enters into the equation and it breaks the whole thing.

And so through all of scripture, there’s this, this idea that God is going to reconcile his creation back to himself. Jesus talks about the new heavens and new earth. In the Book of the Revelation, we talk about the new heavens and the new Earth. And, and so there’s this language that someday, the Earth that we are on right now, it will be made new. That, that doesn’t mean that it just goes away and it disappears. It means it’s somehow transformed back to God’s intended purpose in the beginning. And so Paul, when he says that we are a new creation, he- here’s what he’s telling us. He’s saying that the new creation, the new heavens, and the new earth, it’s not just a someday promise, it’s a today promise. It’s a right now promise that when you and I are transformed by the power of the gospel, we are a new creation, that the new heavens and the new earth through us, through the power of God in our life, is being poured out for God’s kingdom today and now.

And that’s powerful. That, that’s exciting. You, you can hear it in his tone that we’re a new creation. And, and then it tells us how. How are we a new creation? It tells us in verse 18, all this is from God. We’re not in a new creation because, well, I, I’ve just been so awesome. I’ve done, done so many great things. I’ve accomplished so much. I did all these steps and now I’m a new creation. No, no, no. What, what Paul would say is I’m incapable of being a new creation on my own. It’s only because of what God has done. All this is from God. And we see Paul with the same understanding, that same concept in Romans chapter five. In Romans five: six, he says, “For while we were still weak.” That can also be translated as while we were still helpless. While we were still incapable of saving ourselves at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

I can’t save myself. I can’t make myself into creation, but that is what God does for the redemptive work. The reconciliation of the cross redeems me back to him. And so if you look at the 12 steps, there’s really the- these four big ideas and concepts. If you really boiled it down, it starts with this idea of being powerless. That, that I am powerless to fix my situation. And that powerlessness leads me to surrender. I can’t fix it on my own. And so now I need to surrender my life. The 12 steps would say surrender to a higher power. The gospel would say, “Well, not just a higher power, the higher power. Surrendering my life to Jesus, that’s going to lead to transformation. And ultimately, that transformation then puts me on mission.” And one of the things that AA found is that people who are on mission, people who help spread the message of what transformation they have experienced in their life, those people are far less likely to relapse if they’re on mission.

Hey, here’s, here’s the, the hard truth. , It, it’s a scary stat that the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells us that 40 to 60% of people battling addiction will experience a relapse. The vast majority of those people will experience that relapse in the first year.

That, that’s something that we see in scripture as well. Scripture gives this warning and we are prone to wonder. We’re prone to go back to the things that entice us, that instare us, those sins that, that so easily bring us down. In Proverb chapter 26 verse 11, it says this, “Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his falling.” Which is a gross verse. And yet, if you own a dog, it’s a very true verse. Like my dog eats all kinds of things that he shouldn’t eat. Like he eats socks and eats tissue paper and he eats all kinds of stuff outside that he absolutely should not eat. I mean, he’ll eat anything. , He’ll eat vegetables if you drop it because he thinks it’s something else. He just snatch it up and he’ll eat it real quick. So he eats all these things and occasionally what happens is he eats something that his body rejects.

His body says, “Uh-uh. Nope. After all the torture you’ve put me through, I’m rejecting this.” And you can see it on our dog or really any dog. You can see it ahead of time. Like you, they start to kind of convulse and like you open the door like, “Get out. Get out of the house.” And then it’s crazy because a dog will throw that thing out up that, that its body said, “This is bad for me.” And then how long does it take that dog to then sniff that vomit? Like instantaneously. It’s not like it throws up saying, “Oh, that was a bad idea.” And it walks off and then someday comes back. Like it comes out and then as it’s coming out, it’s smelling that thing. Gross visual. But, but here is what scripture is trying to tell us. Scripture is saying that sin or that addiction in my life that my body has rejected.

What, what does that mean? If I have sin in my life, it is taking its toll in my life, in the relationships of the people around me. And eventually it gets to a point where my life is rejecting the sin. It’s saying, “Hey, I can’t go on with this thing. I need to get rid of it.” And it’s hard to get rid of it. It, it is like vomiting it up. Nobody likes that experience. And, and right after you feel really good. But, but it’s saying, here’s what we tend to do is maybe it’s a day later or a week later, a month later, maybe it’s a year later, that all of a sudden that, that thing that our body had rejected. Our body said, “This is not compatible. We need to get rid of this.” All of a sudden, you forget the pain that it took to get rid of that thing and you start to get enticed by that thing.

Yeah, Gary’s talked a few times about the way that our brain works, that we create these pathways. Neuroplasticity that, that our brain determines that, okay, this is my natural path. So for example, if every time you are sad and you have a bad day, i- if you go to some type of an addiction, so in the past, you say, every time I’m sad, I overeat, or every time I’m sad, I drink alcohol, or every time I’m sad, I go into this unhealthy habit. That even if I kick that habit and move on from that habit, every time I am sad, there’s a part of my brain, because of that pathway that has already been, been woven and created, there’s a part of my brain that says, “Well, this is the answer to this feeling. This is how we get rid of that feeling.” And so if that is a reality, if that is the danger of kicking in addiction and kicking us in, that’s why so many people relapse and go back to it.

How then do I fix it? How, how do I really conquer it, not just for a season, but for a lifetime? , Step 12 says, “And to practice these principles in all of our affairs.” So, so instead of just saying, “Okay, I’m, I’m following it in this small area of my life,” and saying, “No, you gotta take these principles and make it a part of every single area of my life.” I, I hate the store, Ikea. I don’t know if you do or not. , I also love the story, store of Ikea. And so it’s a weird relationship I’ve got with Ikea, , because it’s massive. It’s huge. It’s also a maze. If you go into Ikea, it’s hard to get out of Ikea without passing 19 different sections of things. And they also have Swedish meatballs, which are fantastic. And so that’s, that’s thrown in the middle there.

And great cinnamon rolls, as a side note. Like, there’s weird things that they got there. And so, like, you go to the store and it’s got all these things and all this stuff. And, and here’s, here’s part of my love-hate relationship. The store is great, but then you’ll see some piece of furniture and you’re like, “Hey, that looks nice.” And then you decide, “Okay, let’s get that thing.” And you see this nice big piece of furniture, and then you find the box, and the box is real small and you don’t understand why. And so you get that thing home and you open up the box. And then you, you have the moment that I call the, the, the Ikea regret. And it looks kinda like this where all of a sudden you’ve opened up the package and there’s just stuff everywhere on the ground. And you’re looking around and you’re like, “What, what did I get myself into?” And if you’re like me, when, when my wife says, “How long is that going to take?” I always underestimate.

It, it typically is somewhere between five times and 10 times longer than I think that it’s gonna take. And so she says, “How long is that IKEA bunk bed set gonna take?” I’m like, “An hour tops. I got this thing. 10 hours later, I’m still putting that thing together.” Part of the reason why is because Ikea only gives you one tool. No matter how big or small the thing that you are putting together, they give you this one tool and that is it. <Laugh> It’s like, nope, good luck. We’re gonna give you an L wrench. Your thumb is gonna feel like it’s falling off by the time you put this thing together. And so after, like, 10 hours, you’re almost done. You’re exhausted. You’re tired. You’re looking around for that one missing screw that’s somewhere in the carpet, but finally, you get done and you set that thing up and there’s some part of you that takes pride in that thing because somebody else didn’t put that together.

I put that thing together. And psychologists actually have a term for it. It’s called the Ikea effect. The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which people place a higher value on something they helped create or assemble than on an equivalent item created by someone else.

So here’s how that plays itself out. Like if you buy a piece of furniture, like, like it, it affects some part of your life, your checkbook, you had to pay for that thing. And it goes in your house, but eventually styles change, you change, needs change. And you look at that thing and you think, “Hey, maybe we should get rid of that. I don’t even remember how much I paid for it anymore.” And then you have that same conversation about a piece of furniture that you put together yourself. And there’s a part of you that’s like, “Well, I paid for that, but I also, blood, sweat, and tears put that together.” And so your spouse is like, “I think we should get rid of the bunk beds.” You’re like, “Not the bunk beds.” Like those, I don’t think you realize how emotionally connected I am to the bunk beds.

We don’t need the bunk beds. There’s not two kids in that room. I don’t care. What if we have neighbors come over? Like somebody, what if they wanna jump from one to the other? Like I’m not. It took me so long to put it together. It’s permanent. It’s a part of the house now. We’re passing this on to our grandchildren. That’s how much I love this bunk bed. ‘Cause It affected so many different areas of my life. I paid for it. I, I, I, I had to, to feel it. I had to, to sweat for it. Like, like it is now an investment. And here’s what psychologists have figured out, that the more areas of your life something affects, the deeper it means to you. And the same is true for your faith and my faith. And here’s the challenge sometimes in our life. That cultural Christianity has this idea that Christianity can just be a part of your life.

Like, hey, just, just put it right over here. And, and it means that on Sundays, you gotta go to church. And, you know, maybe more than once a month. Like maybe you do it all occasionally, maybe twice a month or three times a month. Okay. And, and then maybe for real serious, we’ll add in a Bible study and then, hey, that’s, that’s where my faith lives in this circle right here. It, I’m not gonna let it get out of that circle and into my workplace circle or my friends group circle or my family circle or my though circle. I’m just gonna keep it nice and tidy right over here. And here’s the problem with that kind of faith. It doesn’t touch enough areas of my life and therefore my faith never grows deep. That if I want faith to grow deep, it needs to affect every area of my life.

And that’s why in two Corinthians 5:15, it says, He died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him. It’s this idea that he, he didn’t die for just part of my life. He died so that I no longer live for myself, but instead, I present my entire life to him as an offer. God, you get all of it. You get all of who I am. Oh, what does that mean? That means that Jesus claims all of me. What, what is all of me? All of me is my marriage. All of me is my sexuality. It’s my money. It’s my ambition. It’s my temper. All of me is my thought life and my schedule and my relationships and my leadership. It’s my private life. It’s my public life. It’s my phone when no one else sees. It’s when I’m scrolling on my phone.

It’s my body. It’s my future. It is everything. Nothing gets excluded from it. And, and, and so here, here’s the difference between just 12 steps and the gospel, that the goal of the gospel is not just to stop doing the thing that you shouldn’t do, whatever the sin is or the addiction is. Instead, the goal of the gospel is life transformation. It’s dead things coming to life. , Jesus did not come just to make bad people behave better. No, that’s not the gospel. He’s not just trying to say, “Hey, some bad people, they’re gonna become good people.” No, he came to make dead people alive. That’s radically different than just behavior modification. And, and that’s why Paul says that we should carry that message. That’s what 12 steps picks up on. 12 steps. The 12th step is that we carry this message. It’s this idea that if you wanna keep grounded in the truths of these steps, it’s not just you finish the 11 steps and you move on with your life.

No, you gotta carry that message to the world around you. You’re far less likely to relapse. In the same way spiritually, if I want a depth in my relationship with God, I’ve gotta carry the message of the gospel around me. , Look what he says. Paul writes, “He gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. And there’s something powerful there. Where, where Paul’s saying that God’s appeal to the world around us is in my life. It’s in your life. It’s in how I live. It’s in how you live. It’s in me as a Christian demonstrating to the world around me that I was dead and now I’m alive.

And, and now the problem is, most of the time, we don’t actually live that way. Like, I, I just want to pretend this for a second. Pretend that you go to a funeral and halfway through the funeral, there’s a casket down front. And the person that is inside the casket that is dead, not a little bit dead, but dead dead. Like that person flips open the top, gets out and says, “Woo, I’m alive.” That’d probably freak you out. Like, like you probably would never forget that for the rest of your life. That you probably would be on the phone moments later saying, “You would not believe what just happened.” That probably makes the news because why? Dead people are not supposed to come back to life. Like that’s not how that is supposed to work. And so that’s a world changing experience when dead things come back to life.

And what Paul is saying is Paul is saying, “Your life and my life. We were dead and now we’re alive.” Like, like that should be so dramatic to the people around me. Th- those people should look at me and say, “Hey, I know who you used to be. I know who you used to run with. I know how you used to act. I know your addictions and your habits. And now I know who you were. And that’s not who you are anymore. Like, what happened?” And our response should be, “Well, I was dead. And now I’m alive. And that changes everything.” Like, what would it look like if our lives as Christians were so radically transformed that people said, “Man, I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s like you were dead and now you’re alive.” And, and that’s what we had in the early church.

In, in Acts chapter four verse 20, , there’s this powerful moment where the disciples, , they’re preaching the gospel and they’re being told, “Hey, we’re gonna beat you and we’re gonna kill you if you don’t stop preaching the gospel.” And here’s what their response was. They said, “For we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” And they said, “You can kill us. You can beat us. Like nothing you can do could stop us from sharing the truth that we know. And the truth that we know is that Jesus was dead and now he’s alive. And through him, I was dead and now I’m alive. So do whatever you want to me. I cannot help but share that truth to the world around me.” I remember when I was in middle school, , we had this room in our house called the big room.

I’ve talked about it before. It was this, this kind of. It was supposed to be a garage and then they made it just a big playroom. And so me and my brother, and then there was a, a church intern that lived with us. , His name was Mark. So me, Mark, and Steven were, were sitting there and we’re playing video games. And we had just gotten a new TV. To put it in perspective, our new TV, which we though was ginormous, was about 30 inches, which is like a TV in your bathroom nowadays. Like they’re, they’re like nine times bigger than that. But we thought a 30-inch TV was like mind-blowing amaze. So we’re sitting there and we’re playing video games. And th- this is not a matter story. This, this actually happened. We’re sitting there playing video games. And all of a sudden, in the back right, there’s a sliding door.

That sliding door opens up. My dad runs into the room. He is carrying. We, we all turn around because he’s screaming. He is carrying a trash can that is on fire and flames are going up like five to seven feet. And so he comes in the sliding door, he runs across the room screaming behind us, “Ah.” He opens the outside back door. He leaves. We all stop and we look at each other. We’re like, “Whoa.” And then we went back to playing video games is what we did. <Laugh> Now, I know that seems weird, but for, for very few of you in the room, it was Gold and I. So like there, there was a reason you don’t stop that game, okay? And so it wasn’t till later that night that we got the full story of, like, what happened? What was this thing? And so when we’re sitting there at the dinner table, and this is what happened, that my older sister, her name was Marie.

, Her name is Marie. She’s still alive. Marie. <Laugh> She is up in her room. She’s in high school. And she decides she wants to light a candle. And so she goes and she gets a box of matches, and she lights a match, and she lights that candle. And then she thinks that she, she blows it out or shakes it out and she tosses it into her trash can. And then she sits down on her bed and she starts listening to music, not paying attention. Well, in that trash can, and that trash can hadn’t been cleared out in a long time, so there’s a lot of trash in the trash can, but at the very bottom of the trash can, , maybe a, a few days before, a week before, I don’t, I don’t remember which. At some point, she had removed her nail polish.

And so she had used nail polish remover and she had put it onto some Kleenex. And so she had a whole pile of Kleenex. That was soaked in with nail polish remover and now nail polish. And it was at the very bottom. Now, now here, here’s just a public announcement. , Nail polish remover is flammable. So if you didn’t know that, that’s, that’s an important thing to know. So it’s at the bottom and she’s not paying attention. All of a sudden she looks up and the trash can is smoking and, and, and she sees a fire. And she’s like, “Oh gosh.” And so she gets up, this is how it was described to me. She gets up, she walks down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom and she knocks on their door. <Laugh> And then eventually they said, “You can come in.” So she comes in, but they, they were talking to each other.

And my sister was raised right, so she wasn’t gonna interrupt their conversation. <Laugh> And so she just kinda stood there waiting for them. She just stood there. And then eventually my parents turned to her and they say, “Hey, what, what, did you need something?” And she goes, “Oh yeah, , I think my trash can is on fire.” Now, now point of reference, she did not own the house. The person that owned the house responded a little bit different than that. And so he ran as fast as he could down the hallway to her room. He opens it up. At this point, the fire is now really going and, and the fire is licking the ceiling of the house. And so, , he just kinda panics. He’s not sure what to do. So he literally picks the whole trash can up. He runs out the, the room, down the hall, down the stairs, through the kitchen, through the living room, out the big room, that’s where I was playing video games, outside, chunks it, and then uses a hose to put it out.

And so as we hear all this, there’s just one natural question that comes to our minds as we’re sitting at dinner with Marie. Unfortunately, nobody was hurt and the, the house was totally fine. But, but it brought up this one question and that is, “Hey, hey, Marie, like, why would you not respond a little more enthusiastically? Like, like your, your trash can was on fire. Like why, why would you wait? Like why didn’t you start yelling and screaming and crying for help?” And, and here was her response as, as just a high school girl. She was like, “I just didn’t think it was that big of a deal.” <laugh> And can I, can I just, can I just turn it towards us for a second? And, and can I just point out that as Christians, here’s what theologically we would believe. We would believe that the world around us is broken and dying and on fire.

And that we are called by God to be his ambassadors, to bring that message to the world around us. But so often our response is very similar to Marie’s response with the trashcan. Like eh, it’s just not that big of a deal. Like we should be yelling and waving our hands and say, “Okay, there’s a problem. We gotta do something about it.” But, but so often we don’t. We just say, “Oh, hey.” Hey, here’s what AA figured out. AA figured out that following the, the steps is not enough. You’ve gotta share. You gotta bring somebody into the journey with you. And there’s something about that that makes your belief so much deeper and stronger. And can I tell you the same thing is true in our relationship with God? That, that when my faith grows stagnant and I say, “Well, I don’t know. I, it doesn’t feel like I’m hearing from God, doesn’t feel like I’m, I’m learning anymore.” The big step that we’ve gotta partake in is being ambassadors for Christ.

Sharing his message, his compelling message with the world around us, that we’re controlled, we’re influenced, we’re motivated by our love for him because he first loved us.

A- and here’s the good news, that, that we’re not told that we have to convince people like, like that’s not the job. The job is to simply be an ambassador. So I bring the message of the gospel to people. It’s not my responsibility whether they’re, that they respond to it or not. That’s up to them and God and the power of the Holy Spirit. I can’t change anybody’s life. But I am responsible for bringing that message. It’s a clear, clear scriptural command to me and to you is that that’s what I’m supposed to do. And he, here’s the beauty of it. In doing that, in doing what God’s asking me to do, it will deepen my faith unlike anything else can deepen my faith. And I’m not saying that we need to stand on the street corner and yell at people, but we need to live lives that look like dead people that have come to life.

And we want to share that life with a world that is dead. I wanna end this series with just three simple questions. Question number one is this, is what has God done in me? What, what are the things in my life that God has done and transformed? And the number two is where do I still need to practice this new life? What are the areas of my life that I haven’t quite given over to God? What does it look like to let him into every single area of my life?

And then maybe the hardest one is who needs to hear what God has done? Who is that person that I need to share, be an ambassador and share the message of the gospel with? Simply share my story. Hey, let me tell you, I was dead now I’m alive. And here is how that happened. What would it look like if we were a church that lived out and proclaimed that we were dead, but now we’re alive? Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, God, I pray that we can be a church that has urgency for the broken world around us, or that we can recognize that the world is dying, that you have made us the beginning of the new heavens and the new earth, that, that you have regenerated us in order that we might be ambassadors to the world around us. And so Lord, Lord, help us to not take it lightly, but to live it out each and every

Day. God, I pray for those, , that this series is shored up inside of them. Gotta pray that they will complete the task. They’ll take this step. They’ll get plugged into a program, a region, or a counselor, and, and start working through the addictions that they’ve struggled with. God, I pray for people that have relapsed, people that have messed up, people that have fallen back into it. God, I pray that they will see that there’s always hope. There’s always a page to be turned, a fresh start. That’s the transformation that you promise us, the forgiveness, the grace, the compassion, the mercy. If we just keep coming back to you, we pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.