It's about the Heart (Luke 7:36-50)

In this message from Luke 7:36–50, we encounter one of the most powerful pictures of grace in Scripture—a sinful woman who courageously lays everything at the feet of Jesus. While others saw her past, Jesus saw her heart. Her extravagant worship reminds us that no amount of shame, guilt, or failure can keep us from the forgiveness and love of Christ.

In this sermon, we explore the difference between religion that judges and a Savior who restores. Through the parable of the two debtors, Jesus reveals that those who recognize the depth of their forgiveness respond with deeper love and greater worship. Whether your struggles seem "big" or "small," every sin points us to the same need: the grace of Jesus.

You'll also discover why shame is never God's voice. The enemy wants us to hide when we fail, but Jesus invites us to run toward Him instead. Romans 8 reminds us that there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ. We don't have to clean ourselves up before coming to Him—we come just as we are, trusting Him to transform us.

At Hope Church, we believe everyone is welcome. Whether you've been walking with Jesus for years or you're carrying the weight of yesterday's mistakes, this message is an invitation to bring your brokenness, your questions, and your baggage to the feet of Jesus. Come as you are—but don't leave the same.

Join us as we discover what it means to surrender completely, embrace the love of Jesus, and experience the life-changing freedom that only His grace can bring.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Special Sunday coming your way this morning. Y'all welcome to the stage. Who's bringing our word this morning? Pastor Monique Williams. Good morning, everyone. So excited to be up here. Um to continue, Luke. Um, one of my favorite stories in the Bible, I actually made Skylar switch me because he was supposed to preach today, and I said, please. Um, and uh, so here we are. Um, so we are preaching on uh Luke we I'm preaching, it's fine. Uh I'm preaching on Luke. This is true in Luke's Luke 7, um chapter 7, 36 through 50. If you'll turn your Bibles, and I'm just gonna read the story just because it's such a good story. My Bible titles it as Jesus anointed by a sinful woman. One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to have dinner with him, so Jesus went to his home and sat down to eat. When a certain immoral woman from the city heard he was eating there, she brought a beautiful alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. Then she knelt behind him, knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears, her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped, she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them. When a Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman that is touching her. She is a sinner. Then Jesus answered his thoughts. Simon, he said to the Pharisee, I have something to say to you. Go ahead, teacher, Simon replied. Jesus told him this story. A man loaned money to two people, five pieces of silver to one, and fifty pieces to the other. But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that? Simon answered, I suppose the one who cancelled the larger debt. That's right, Jesus said. Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, Look at this woman kneeling here. When I entered your home, you didn't offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn't give me a kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not stopped kissing my feet. You neglected the courtesy of oil, of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has anointed my feet with rare perfume. I tell you, her sins, and they are many, have been forgiven. So she has shown me much love, but a person who is forgiven a little shows only little love. Then Jesus said to the woman, Your sins have been forgiven. The men at the table said amongst themselves, Who is this man that he goes around forgiving sins? And Jesus said to the woman, Your faith has been saved. Go in peace. Father, we just thank you for your word. We thank you that we have access to the living word, Father. We ask that it pierces through our soul this morning. Open up our hearts, open up our minds, tear down the walls, Father, so you can speak to us, Jesus. It's in your mighty name that we pray. Amen and amen. All right. So my first point is surrender. Oh, sorry, let me go back. Sermon title is It's About the Heart. Sorry. But my first point is surrender. And it we're gonna go focus on verses 36 through 39. And focus what the woman did, what the woman did for a little bit. First off, she just busted into somebody's home. She didn't care. She wanted to be at the feet of Jesus. She used her tears and her hair to clean his feet. Mind you, they wore sandals, they didn't have paved roads back there. This was dirt. They were walking through mud, feces, everything. How many of y'all are gonna use your hair to wash anybody's feet or anything? Pastor Todd. You're gonna have to get rollout, we got real short hair. You have to get rollout for that one. The highest place is out of your feet. It's a bristle brush. Praise the Lord. You're scrubbing them in between them toes. All right. Sorry. And the alabaster jar that the woman have. I did some studying, some Googling, and it said that it was worth about $45,000. It was her life's ooh, I heard that. Ooh, yeah. $45,000. Who would break something that was worth $45,000? Exactly. All she wanted to do was sit at the feet of Jesus and worship him. She didn't care who's around her, she just cared about Jesus. We don't have a lot of detail about this woman. We don't know all that she was an immoral woman. We don't know what other sins she had, what she was going through. We don't know if she might have hit rock bottom or anything else. We just know that she heard where Jesus was and she knew she knew where she needed to be. A lot of the times we feel shame of our own sins, and we don't feel like we deserve to be at his feet, let alone in the same room with fellow Christians. And we live in a judgmental world where people like to bring others down just to lift themselves up. And that gets very hard for people, especially when we're in a small city like Cleburn and you want to go to church, but you know you see somebody there from your past, or like, oh my gosh, what if they bring up that one time or how much of a party animal I was, and we start getting really in our brains, and that causes us to sit in the back of the church, not engage, not let anybody notice us, and we're just like, okay, we're in church, this is good enough. That is shame from the enemy that is trying to keep you from the feet of Jesus. The woman gives us a great example. I saw this from April, thank you, April. The woman gave us a great example, which I hope causes a pause for us that feel frozen in our seat during worship and paralyzed by the Holy Spirit. Our shame is the only thing keeping us from Jesus' feet. You have to recognize that shame and rebuke it. Shame does not come from the Lord. Shame is a powerful emotion caused by doing something wrong, a feeling of low self-worth or a cause for regret. It makes a person feel flawed as a whole rather than just a bad choice about a specific action. Who has something they regret in their past? Oh, everybody. And praise the Lord that he doesn't hold it against us, amen. We're saying for the blood of Jesus. And like I said before, it is not from the Lord, it is the life from the enemy to keep us from Jesus, to keep us from redemption. Because if we can if the enemy can keep us away from Jesus, we're gonna get further and further and further away. Because like, oh, I don't deserve that. Oh, I or my favorite thing, well, I'm gonna catch on fire as soon as I walk in that church building. As Pastor Todd says, we have great insurance, right? We have good insurance, okay. But it's yeah, it's it's it's not gonna happen. The only thing that's gonna happen to you is you're gonna get set free. Nothing else. If someone, if if a friend of yours or you come in and someone's judging you, let me know. Like Pastor Todd, now let staff know. We'll fight them. We want you, we want you, we want you to know that you belong here. We want your friends, your family, that they belong here, not just at Hope Church, but at any church. You belong in this building, regardless of your past, regardless of what you did even the night before. We shouldn't run and hide when we sin. We should run towards Jesus. One of one of my things that my grandpa taught me was to always tell on myself. There are several times that I always always go telling myself, because it's better to come from my mouth than some story that someone else is gonna make. And one story that I always remember is we were at church one day, and this um this little boy kept messing with me. And me, who I thought I took karate classes, I didn't. I was just looking through a window, um, mimicking them, and he kept messing with me, so I turned around and I went like this. Didn't make a sound, I didn't go or nothing. I just hit him. His nose started bleeding really bad. I immediately ran to my grandfather, who is the pastor. So if he knows, nobody else can do anything to me, right? But that's how it should be with our father. Confess your sins, and he's gonna forgive you. The more that we sit with that sin, the more it's gonna fester, it's gonna turn to shame, it's gonna turn to regret, and we're not gonna walk into this building, we're not gonna come into the altar, we're not gonna raise our hands to worship, we're not gonna do anything because we don't feel worthy. We don't feel like we're good enough. Romans 8:1 says, For there is now no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. This means there is no guilt. God does not hold your past mistakes against you. So if you feel condemnation, you feel shame. Pause for a second and say, Lord, I know this isn't from you. I know this is from the enemy. I rebuke this shame right now in the name of Jesus. I confess my sins to you, Lord. And that's it. You don't have to pray seven times a day, face a certain way, or anything like that. Just confess your sins. So that brings me to my neck uh my next point: the love of Jesus. And he goes into that parable of the two debtors, where he gives somebody, uh gives one person five pieces of silver and the other one fifty pieces of silver, and understandably the one who had the bigger debt, of course, they're gonna be the most thankful for that. And I call it the love of Jesus because Jesus put Simon in his place at this point when he was talking about the woman. He calls him out for not being a good coast while the woman did all of those things. In the Bible times, it was customary when you had a guest over to give them a water basin to wash their feet, to anoint them with oil, letting them know that they are welcome and they are valued, and to offer them a kiss. And that was the first thing that woman did. Forty-five thousand worth dollars worth of perfume and oil was poured at his feet. She used her hair to clean his feet. Jesus saw the woman's heart unlike the Pharisees. She had no concern for anyone except for Jesus, even though she was known for being a sinner. We sin every single day. I I get in, I get in a habit of on social media when people call me a sick, like, oh, you're probably just one of those Christians that sin all the time. I'm like, no, yeah, yeah, you got that right. Yes. Next question. And they don't reply because they think I'm gonna come back and say, no, I'm perfect, I'm not perfect. I'm the furthest thing from perfect. But God's love is perfect. If we just confess our sins and devote ourselves to Him, and it says in 8 Romans 1, those who belong to Christ Jesus will not feel condemnation. And I don't want to disqualify what we call a small sin. We all know sin is the same, but some something about us being human, we like to say that one sin is worse than the other. Lying versus someone being unfaithful in their marriage. Sin is sin which needs to be forgiven. We can't hold things against each other because God doesn't hold things against us. And my last one that I'm probably gonna spend the most time on is come just as you are. One thing about one thing I love about Hope Church, that I'll always love about Hope Church, is we always say, come as you are. New clothes, old clothes, party the night before or had a Bible study. We just want you here, getting closer to Jesus. We don't cast people out, but we embrace them as if they have always been here. And I want to give a shout out to the connections team because you guys are the front lines, you are the first thing that people see. You guys have smiling faces, you're greeting people, you're giving hugs, and you don't know the kingdom impact that that has. People that have felt lost, that have been kicked out of other churches because of how they are or what they do or their past or anything like that, they can come here and not feel shame because of our connections team. So, April, I think you're doing a fantastic job for the connections team. Yeah, give it up. So, one common misconception that there uh that people think at that there's a scripture that says, Come as you are, but there isn't. Um, the one that comes closest to that is Matthew 11, 28, and that says, Then Jesus said, Come to me, all who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Come to me, all who are weary and carry heavy burdens. And this isn't saying heavy, like, oh man, I got a lot of stuff going on. If you have one little thing, one little thing can be the heaviest thing in the world. Bring it to the feet of Jesus. But here's the catch. You gotta leave it there. We bring it to the feet of Jesus, and we're like, thank you, and we leave with it again. He wants to take that from us again. There is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And then verse 2 says, and because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. Because there is redemption in Jesus. This is not saying that the moment you accept Jesus, sin will leave your life. It only makes it easy uh it makes it easier to not sin, but the temptations come harder, and we're gonna trip up and we're gonna sin again. People always think that, oh, if I become a Christian, I'm life's gonna be easy, breezy, beautiful cover girl. Not at all. Sorry, I don't want my prayer. It's not gonna be like that at all. If anything, you just put a big target on your back. And then he was gonna attack you because he's like, oh, why are you in church now? You were I had you hooked on drugs, I had you hooked on alcohol, I had you hooked on same-sex, I had you hooked on something else, and now why are you at the feet of Jesus? Okay, well, let me start throwing these at you. Let me let me throw some friends at you that used to hang out with to reconnect with you, and those temptations come. But if we stay in the presence of the Lord, if we stay connected to Jesus, it's not gonna be as hard. Don't wait to ask for help. There is no problem in our lives that God can't handle or didn't see coming. The scripture says, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. It didn't say they wouldn't hurt. That's another misconception people think. Oh, no weapon formed against me. Okay. You can still get slapped around a bunch, and it's gonna hurt. You know, it's it's it's Sunday, praise the Lord. So again, come as you are, but don't leave the same. And I'll say this until I'm face to face with my savior. Don't leave this place the same way you came in. You're here for a reason. It's not, you're not here to check off, oh, beginning of the week, check off my Sunday. Maybe you've hit rock bottom. Maybe this is the last attempt to save yourself. I'm telling you right now, walking in these doors was the best decision you've made. But you have to bring that mess to Jesus. And I get it, it's tough. It feels like, oh, this is too much for God. Nothing is too much for God. He split the sea, he shut the mouth of the lion, he stood in the fire with us. There is nothing too big for our for our God. Amen. You have to bring that mess to Him. Or maybe your whole life you've done church every single Sunday and it feels weird to just stay at home. Sunday is not something you check off of your list for the start of the week. Let's be intentional when we come to church. Let's be intentional with our prayers. Let's be intentional about how we worship. Let's be intentional when we listen to sermons and apply these things to our life. Again, this is just a checklist. This is this is something that should be changing our lives daily. We should be growing closer to Jesus. The things that used to entertain us that we used to love should disgust us now. There's this, I always see this picture. It's this it's a picture of this little girl, and she's looking at Jesus, and Jesus is on his knees, and he has this giant teddy bear behind him, and she has this little small one, and she's like, But it's my favorite. And he's like, Oh, but I got something better for you. That's what that's what Jesus has for you. Bring your favorite teddy bear, bring all your baggage, bring everything to the feet of Jesus. And I want to tell you right now, your baggage, your problems, your addictions are not your identity. Your identity is in Jesus Christ. So when you bring your problems to him, when you bring your baggage to him, leave it with him. That emptiness that you feel is because that fake identity is no longer there, and find your identity in Christ. Leave your baggage with the Lord. I rushed through this because I wanted to have a lot of altar time today. So if the babe wants to go ahead and start coming up. And I only have two questions for you today. Knowing that Jesus will forgive our sins, why are we not running to Him daily? Why aren't we stopping in that moment and saying, oh, Lord, forgive me. I'm so sorry. Forgive me. I repent right now in the name of Jesus for the things that I said, for how I treated this person, anything we know the Bible says he will forgive our sins if we just confess them. That's another thing about intentionality. It's not just about like the Lord will forgive me, it's fine. No, be intentional about that prayer. Lord, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry I did this, please forgive me. And my second question: are you trying to clean up before you come to Jesus? Or are you coming bruised and battered, dragging your baggage to him? We have to bring everything to Jesus. The good, but especially the bad. No problem is too small. Youth, if you got a math class you're struggling with, call on the Lord for help. If you got a family member struggling with cancer, bring it to the Lord. And then I I just I just feel like I have to share this. Um I shared it with uh the staff and leaders this morning. Um it's out of um the book of Daniel. It's Daniel chapter 3, verse 18. And everybody knows the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, where the King Nebuchadnezzar was like, if you don't worship our gods when you hear all this music going on, we're gonna throw you into the fiery furnace. And they're like, okay, but please understand, even if he doesn't show up, we're not gonna worship your idols. So the beginning of chapter 3, verse 18 says, but even if he doesn't, and that's been wrecking me all day this week, every single day. Because even if Jesus doesn't come in the middle of my storm, I'm still gonna worship him. If he if he doesn't come and solve my problem immediately, I'm still gonna worship him. I'm not gonna turn to something else. But even if he doesn't, I'm gonna worship him. So I just want you to think about that this week. If you're having an amazing week, if you're having the worst week of your life, he is still worthy of our praise. Amen. Would you stand with me? I'd love to pray for you. Heavenly Father, we are here. We came as we are, wide awake, tired, just ready to be at your feet. Father, I am sorry for the sins I have committed. I'm sorry if I have shamed anyone else just to make myself look better, Lord. I am sorry. Nothing compares to the love of Jesus. And I want everybody to see that this morning. Whether if you had the perfect week or the worst week, the love of Jesus solves everything, the peace of the Lord solves everything. If we have to, we just need to focus on Him. So these altars are open. If you need prayer, we'll have some prayer partners on the side. We got plenty of time for altar today. Any single problem you have, bring it to the feet of Jesus. Small, medium, big, large, exponential, bring it to Jesus. He is waiting to redeem you. He is waiting to set you free. He is waiting to lift the weight off your shoulders. So again, Father, we just thank you that we have access to this freedom. That we can just sit at your feet. And nothing will change. And everything will change. Lord, we thank you for your presence here this morning. You're mighty to be praised. It's in your mighty name we pray. Amen. Jesus, Jesus.