Day 4: God Felt Hunger, what's your excuse?

We challenge the “I’m only human” line as a spiritual loophole that lowers the standard and keeps us from real growth. We use an archery picture and Ephesians 5 to call ourselves to aim at Jesus and choose sanctification even when it feels uncomfortable.
• the “I’m not Jesus” excuse as a back-pocket cop out
• an archery lesson on why we do not lower the target
• the habit of comparing ourselves to easier examples instead of Christ
• Ephesians 5 and the call to be imitators of God
• sanctification as an active daily battle against the flesh
• choosing “Not my will, but yours” in moments of friction
• a concrete action step to name one area and drop the excuse
Our action step today is this identify one specific area today where you've been using the I'm only human excuse. Maybe it's your temper with your kids, or maybe it's pride at work, or maybe it's how you communicate with your spouse. But drop the excuse entirely today. Confess it to God as a cop out and commit to holding that specific area of your life to the standard set by Jesus.

Transcript

Welcome And Devotional Theme

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Good morning. It is Pastor Josh, and welcome to day four of If God Felt Hunger, then what is our excuse? Our weekly devotional field notes. So today we're going to look at this, but I'm not Jesus. It's the ultimate excuse, and we pull it out of our back pocket whenever the standard gets a little too high or a little too uncomfortable. Think about it like this: Teaching a kid to shoot a bow, which is something we do a lot with Mission Sent Outdoors. When you step up to that firing line, you don't tell the kid, hey, just aim for the outer edge of the target. You're just a beginner. As long as you hit somewhere, that's good. No. You teach that kid the proper stance, the proper anchor point, the proper way to draw the bow, the proper hold, the proper release, and you tell them to aim dead center for the bullseye. And yeah, you know they're probably gonna miss, especially at first as they're just learning. But you never intentionally lower the standard to make them feel better about hitting a bad shot. In the church, we have a terrible habit of lowering the target. We look at the life of Jesus, see how perfectly he handled temptation, exhaustion, difficult people, and we shrug and say things like, Yeah, but I'm only human. I'm not perfect, I'm not Jesus. We'd much rather aim lower and compare ourselves to someone flawed like Peter, because he's hot-headed, he's impulsive, he makes a lot of mistakes and he feels a lot more relatable to us. In other words, he's an easier target for us to get to because he did it imperfectly too. But Ephesians 5 doesn't give it like that. Ephesians 5 calls us out and very clearly says this be imitators of God. See, we don't get a free pass to keep our bad habits, our short tempers, or our selfishness just because we aren't perfect yet. We are called to look more and more like Jesus. See, our challenge is this when we fall back on the I'm only human excuse, what we're really saying to God is that we prefer our own way over the hard work of sanctification. We want the truth of Scripture to bend to our comfort level so that we don't actually have to change anything. We want to be affirmed but not transformed. See, but fighting our flesh is an active daily battle. It means looking at a situation where you want to lose your temper, where you want to be selfish, and choosing to say, Not my will, but yours be done. And never forget, everything is a choice. Sanctification is supposed to be uncomfortable because it's killing off the parts of you that don't look like Jesus. When we face friction today, are you going to look for a theological loophole to excuse your behavior, or are you going to step up to the line and aim for the center, aim for the bullseye that Jesus set? Our action step today is this identify one specific area today where you've been using the I'm only human excuse. Maybe it's your temper with your kids, or maybe it's pride at work, or maybe it's how you communicate with your spouse. But drop the excuse entirely today. Confess it to God as a cop out and commit to holding that specific area of your life to the standard set by Jesus.