SPEAKER_00: This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about Grand Parkway, visit Grandparkway.org.
SPEAKER_01: Oh Lord, to say dressed in your righteousness alone, faultless to stand before your throne.
SPEAKER_01: That is a great, great thing to say this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us we put on our church clothes, some of us we fairly felt like we had clothes to get on because we just didn't want to get here this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us got on flip-flops, some of us got on boots, some of us got on shoes.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, it doesn't matter because we're all dressed in righteousness today.
SPEAKER_01: So we want to be a people of righteousness that care about your righteousness, that worship you for your righteousness, and that give thanks for the righteousness that you've put on us, that you've put in us, that you put through us.
SPEAKER_01: That's how the world sees us.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord, I pray now that as we gather around your word and we see what it says for us, that the result of it is righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: We pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: And all God's people said, Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You can be seated.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Grand Parkway.
SPEAKER_01: My name is Clyde Copeland.
SPEAKER_01: I'm the worship pastor here.
SPEAKER_01: And it's my privilege to be with you today behind the pulpit.
SPEAKER_01: Most Sundays, I'm uh behind a guitar or a piano, but today I get to uh come to you this morning from uh God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: And uh the title of the sermon uh is The Gospel According to Scorekeepers.
SPEAKER_01: If you're like me, you like to keep score uh against others and sometimes against yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And so we're gonna be taking a look at uh where I get that from today.
SPEAKER_01: This kind of came to me after spending the last few weeks and months uh meditating and praying on just one part of one verse uh that comes to us out of 1 Corinthians 13.
SPEAKER_01: So uh if you have a Bible and you want to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 13, that's where we'll be today in verse 5.
SPEAKER_01: Um, most Sundays, the way that we kind of handle preaching here is what we call expository preaching, where we have a book of the Bible that we're working through right now.
SPEAKER_01: It's John.
SPEAKER_01: Uh we've kind of taken a break from that this summer, and we'll get back into it in the fall.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but today's a little bit different.
SPEAKER_01: Um I've noticed the tendency in my life to dwell on the mistakes of others and to kind of hold a grudge against them when that happens.
SPEAKER_01: And um, and and and one of the side effects of that is I allow that to control me.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Uh when we keep score against others, it's easy uh for us to allow that to build up and to control us.
SPEAKER_01: And and so I want us to see how the Bible speaks to that today.
SPEAKER_01: Uh so if you have your Bible, I'm gonna be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 5.
SPEAKER_01: This won't take long because it's only six words.
SPEAKER_01: Uh it says this it keeps no record of wrongs.
SPEAKER_01: That's the sermon.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what's it?
SPEAKER_01: What?
SPEAKER_01: Love, right?
SPEAKER_01: This is chapter 13, which is the love chapter, right?
SPEAKER_01: This is the one you go to a wedding, nine times out of ten, this is what they're gonna be reading, right?
SPEAKER_01: To this couple that's getting together for marriage in front of everybody else.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, love is patient, love is kind, love does not keep a record of wrongs.
SPEAKER_01: Who here is married?
SPEAKER_01: How many record of wrongs have you kept in the span of your marriage?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's what I thought.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not the only one.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm reading from the NIV because I think the NIV translates this best.
SPEAKER_01: You know, the ESV it says uh love is not resentful, and we'll get to what that means here in a little bit as well.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but the point is that Paul did not write this passage, uh, this chapter of the Bible, for people that are getting married.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it certainly applies to people that are getting married, but it applies to us, the church.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: It applies to everyone in here who is a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Because why?
SPEAKER_01: Paul said that the world is gonna know us by what?
SPEAKER_01: Our love.
SPEAKER_01: Or not Paul, Jesus, excuse me.
SPEAKER_01: Wrong name.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, You the world will know that you're my disciples by how you love each other.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: And so um when we get into this, uh we want to see that this is one of the things that makes us different from everybody else.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I said earlier, I'm I'm wired to keep score.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't mean that necessarily a bad way.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, you need people that keep score, you know, in a game, right?
SPEAKER_01: I used to love to play volleyball uh when I was in college.
SPEAKER_01: We play a lot of volleyball.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the problems we kept running into is nobody would keep the score.
SPEAKER_01: And so it would end up, you know, you'd be towards the end of the game and they'd be like, it's 15-14 game point.
SPEAKER_01: And they're like, no, no, it's 13-15.
SPEAKER_01: We still got it.
SPEAKER_01: So I just said, I'll keep the score.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So after every point was scored, I would just call it out out loud.
SPEAKER_01: It just became second nature.
SPEAKER_01: And it worked, everybody was happy.
SPEAKER_01: Well, years later, I was in a tournament uh playing some volleyball, and there was a rule that if you had uh, you know, when you put together your team, you you know, you had a mixture of guys and girls, whatever.
SPEAKER_01: Uh but if you had a girl on your team, if you hit the ball twice on your side, uh, it couldn't just be all guys.
SPEAKER_01: A girl had to hit it if it got hit a third time to get it back over the net.
SPEAKER_01: Because you know, you had a bunch of 6'1, 6'2 guys, and we're just spiking and pounding it, you know, we don't want to kill anybody.
SPEAKER_01: So you had to have a girl hit it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, we played a team of all girls.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they they didn't have to worry about the rule, right?
SPEAKER_01: And they killed us.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was a bloodbath.
SPEAKER_01: I think we scored maybe two or three points because they didn't have to worry about you know who hit the ball, they just got it back over the net.
SPEAKER_01: Well, the guy who organized the tournament and made the rule later on in the tournament, he faced the all-girls team.
SPEAKER_01: He changed the rule.
SPEAKER_01: And I the thought that went through my head is he didn't just cheat, he cheated on me.
SPEAKER_01: You know, that wasn't fair.
SPEAKER_01: We we we should get to go back.
SPEAKER_01: And I thought about that today because um, you know, the wrongs that we count the most, the wrongs that we count the hardest, are always the ones that are against us, right?
SPEAKER_01: Not the ones that are against everybody else so much, but the ones that are against us.
SPEAKER_01: It kind of sounds like this, the thought that goes through my head is, you know, don't just break, don't break the rules, but even more so, don't break my rules, right?
SPEAKER_01: It gets very personal.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so, you know, our rules obviously are not the standard for morality.
SPEAKER_01: We kind of we we get that from the Bible, and so I want us to look in the Bible and see how what does it speak to about this idea of keeping uh a record of wrongs?
SPEAKER_01: And so the first thing that comes out of the text uh to today is we don't have all the facts.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have all the facts.
SPEAKER_01: And that's gonna be these first three things I want to put up here.
SPEAKER_01: Um we don't have all the facts of any situation.
SPEAKER_01: When somebody sins against us or we see somebody doing something wrong, we rarely know everything that's going on in the situation.
SPEAKER_01: When you look at the world with how messed up things are, we rarely know all the facts.
SPEAKER_01: But when we get on social media, you put a post up, it's like boom, oh yeah, I think that person knows what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: I found I came across this uh tweet from a guy named John Chris.
SPEAKER_01: He said this uh back in 2008, you go to school, you complete an internship, you finish a residency, you take an entry-level job, you undergo years of training, you publish research, you write a book, you become an expert.
SPEAKER_01: In 2018, you watch a documentary, you're an expert.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Watch Ken Burns on Vietnam.
SPEAKER_01: You know everything about Vietnam.
SPEAKER_01: You know why we got in and got out.
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way it works.
SPEAKER_01: But in our day and age, that's so driven by social media, that's so driven by what we're looking at on a screen, we think we've got it all right.
SPEAKER_01: We think when we see something, it's automatically true.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: How many times have you had to change your opinion on something because you found out later, oh yeah, I was wrong about that?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: One of the problems with our, I call it our hyper information age that we live in is that we are quick to think we've got everything understood in any given moment, that we have all the facts.
SPEAKER_01: I came across this quote from a guy named Alistair Roberts.
SPEAKER_01: He said this our use of mobile phones and the internet, it collapses boundaries between social groups and conversations and break down generational, educational, and social distinctions.
SPEAKER_01: We're all brought closer to each other in a way that disguises and is hostile to pronounced differences of competence, authority, and right to honor.
SPEAKER_01: Our media tend to flatten out our social spaces in an egalitarian way, falsely suggesting that all voices merit an equal part in the conversation.
SPEAKER_01: As conversations that would previously be clearly separated from each other start to eavesdrop upon, to intrude in, and to become entangled with each other, the results can be volatile.
SPEAKER_01: Now, what this has to do with keeping score is just I'm really pointing out something that is a tendency in a lot of us, and that's to think that everybody's voice is equal.
SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
SPEAKER_01: If you need uh advice on spinal surgery, don't come asking me for my opinion.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: Go see Jeff Wood.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you need an opinion on music or something about that, great, I'm your guy.
SPEAKER_01: But the the the point is that we we live in a culture where if you're writing something on a screen or you're reading something on a screen, it's easy to jump to conclusions that A, that person knows what they're talking about, or to do the reverse, to get mad and go, that person has no idea what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: But we really don't know because that's not a good environment to have a conversation.
SPEAKER_01: And so what we do is we just get hot and angry about it.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just look at the last few weeks.
SPEAKER_01: I've been reading your posts.
SPEAKER_01: You all have immigration and the Supreme Court justice, you got all that figured out, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because you're you're hot about it.
SPEAKER_01: But but the point is, is what is that really solving other than making us angry at each other?
SPEAKER_01: That's what I usually see from those kind of conversations, as opposed to sitting somebody down face to face over breakfast and having a conversation.
SPEAKER_01: That to me is where it usually happens better, and you're able to do what it says in James 1.19.
SPEAKER_01: James says this, take note of this.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard to do that when you're on social media.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when you're staring somebody in the face, I'm not saying you don't get angry, sometimes you do, but it does force you to slow down and think before you type, right?
SPEAKER_01: So that's the first thing that we kind of see here.
SPEAKER_01: Another aspect of this that when we work to not keep score, what we're doing is we're acknowledging that there's probably more going on than just what we see on the surface.
SPEAKER_01: And this is this is something that I think we can just end this with with thinking about God Himself.
SPEAKER_01: What does the Bible say about God?
SPEAKER_01: He does not remember our wrongs against us.
SPEAKER_01: It says in Psalm 103, as far as the East is from the West, that's how far he's removed his transgressions from us.
SPEAKER_01: And God does have all the facts.
SPEAKER_01: God does know everything in the situation, and yet he does not count wrongs against people that have trusted in him through Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So we need to be aware of that as Christians.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing we see from the text is that it's a sign of immaturity.
SPEAKER_01: That when we hold grudges, when we keep score against someone, it's a sign of your immaturity.
SPEAKER_01: And this comes from earlier in the book of 1 Corinthians, chapter 3, Paul says this brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit, but as people who are still worldly, mere infants in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.
SPEAKER_01: Indeed, you were still not ready.
SPEAKER_01: You are still worldly.
SPEAKER_01: For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly?
SPEAKER_01: Are you not acting like mere humans?
SPEAKER_01: Those last two words get me.
SPEAKER_01: Next time you get in a fight with somebody, just say, You're being a mere human.
SPEAKER_01: Talk to you later.
SPEAKER_01: You know?
SPEAKER_01: Nobody says that, but it's true.
SPEAKER_01: When we allow a grudge to get you know wrapped up in our heart and we hold that against a person, we're just being merely human.
SPEAKER_01: We're not living by the Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: And what we're doing is we're marking ourselves as spiritually mature.
SPEAKER_01: My uh youngest daughter, she's pretty much on an all-liquid diet due to some um issues she has with her body.
SPEAKER_01: There's some diseases that have caused issues with her stomach and the way she processes food through her mouth.
SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes we have to hook her up and give her a tube feed, but she still drinks a bottle.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's pretty much all she can handle.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, uh she's pretty tiny for a two and a half year old.
SPEAKER_01: Um but there's some of us in this room that's the way we are spiritually.
SPEAKER_01: You know, we are on a spiritual, liquid diet because of this disease that's in us.
SPEAKER_01: This this fact that we cannot let some wrongs go.
SPEAKER_01: We cannot pursue peace with some people because we think it's easier to hold a grudge against them than it is to actually speak up and have a conversation about it.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, we stay spiritually malnourished.
SPEAKER_01: And so when we act like mere humans, keeping score, we show that we're really not ready for the good food.
SPEAKER_01: We're really not ready for the rich, rich deep food of biblical Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: We're not ready for the meat.
SPEAKER_01: We can't stomach it.
SPEAKER_01: So instead, what do we do?
SPEAKER_01: We keep ourselves on a spiritual, liquid diet.
SPEAKER_01: So here's a question for us.
SPEAKER_01: If there's, I want to think through if there's an area of your life that for years or for the last few months, you're like, man, why am I not experiencing growth in this area?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe one question to ask yourself is is there a grudge I'm holding against someone?
SPEAKER_01: Is there some scorekeeping that I'm doing that's that's keeping me uh from growing to be who God wants me to be?
SPEAKER_01: The third thing uh today is is this um it turns a road into a highway.
SPEAKER_01: Y'all are looking at me like, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it comes from a guy, a guy named Travis Meadows.
SPEAKER_01: He wrote a song called Sideways.
SPEAKER_01: And in this song, he he describes what he heard at a rehab institution one time.
SPEAKER_01: He was sitting in on a group session, and this woman was telling her story and why she used drugs.
SPEAKER_01: And the counselor asked her, you know, what do you feel when when you when you when you do that behavior?
SPEAKER_01: And she said, I don't feel I don't feel nothing.
SPEAKER_01: I don't feel anything.
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to feel anything.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I do it.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm so angry at what I've been through, what my father's done to me, what my mom did to me, what the world's done to me.
SPEAKER_01: And the guy nodded his head and he said, Yeah, you you can do that.
SPEAKER_01: But when you push all that down, it's gonna come out sideways.
SPEAKER_01: And and he and he wrote that song sideways.
SPEAKER_01: And I thought I could quote the lyrics to you, uh, but since I'm your worship pastor, I might be able to get away with it.
SPEAKER_01: I thought, can I play it?
SPEAKER_01: Would that be all right?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: That's very nice of y'all to clap.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't clap in the first service, so it was an awkward transition.
SPEAKER_01: But that's alright.
SPEAKER_01: I don't mind a little bit of awkward.
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's obvious, especially some of us adults in here, but I know we got some younger kids in here, and um, you know, what's the difference between a road and a highway?
SPEAKER_01: You know, a highway carries a lot of traffic, right?
SPEAKER_01: A highway gets you where you want to go a lot quicker.
SPEAKER_01: A road as a as opposed to a highway that was smaller.
SPEAKER_01: You got stop signs, you got stoplights, it's got turns.
SPEAKER_01: It's gotta slow you down a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: And it's it's a great analogy for what we experience that he talks about in that song and what we're really talking about today of keeping a record of wrongs.
SPEAKER_01: That's what happens when we keep a record of wrongs, is you allow one thing to start off as a wrong, and it starts off as a little road, and then over time becomes a two-lane highway, and then it's a four-lane highway, and before you know it, you got I-59, you know, going through down to Houston.
SPEAKER_01: And this is personal for me because I've done this in my own life.
SPEAKER_01: I'm 32 years old, and so half my life ago, um, when I was 16, I was sitting at my dining room table in Martinsville, Indiana, and my mom was explaining to me that my dad had just lost his job because of some bad decisions he had made.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, my dad was bipolar.
SPEAKER_01: For those of you that don't know bipolar, it causes you to do really, really crazy stuff sometimes, the manic side of it, and then it causes you to get really depressed sometimes.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I was just learning about this aspect of my dad at this season in life.
SPEAKER_01: But um, so yeah, he he had lost his job, and my mom's telling me this, and she's crying, and I'm crying, and we're both holding each other at the kitchen counter.
SPEAKER_01: And I remember just being ticked off, you know, because I thought, hey, dad, how could you do this to us?
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're gonna lose our you know, our source of provision.
SPEAKER_01: My mom kind of became the you know the main breadwinner, but but more than that, I was angry because I felt like my dad had let us down spiritually, as a spiritual leader of our household.
SPEAKER_01: I felt like I'm doing my dad's job right now by comforting my mom.
SPEAKER_01: Where's he at?
SPEAKER_01: You know?
SPEAKER_01: And so what happened, I think, in that moment, and and and this isn't, I didn't, I didn't say this in my head.
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't until years later that I really realized this is what was going on.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I made a vow, you know, to myself, really, uh, about my dad.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'm not gonna ever allow my dad to hurt me this way again, because my dad's crazy, and I can't trust my crazy dad.
SPEAKER_01: So as a result of that, I'm gonna protect myself.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna distance myself from him.
SPEAKER_01: I'll trust my mom.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll I'll tell my mom how I feel, who I am, how I'm growing.
SPEAKER_01: But my dad's not gonna have any part of that.
SPEAKER_01: Um and anytime my dad made a decision that I thought was crazy, and he trust me, he made it a lot.
SPEAKER_01: Uh he did a lot of great things.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, don't get me wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Uh my dad was a Christian, but he got a lot of things wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so anytime he did that, I reserved the right to challenge that decision and to kind of protect myself.
SPEAKER_01: And here's where the road became the highway is I didn't just do it with my dad.
SPEAKER_01: I did it with any man that was in authority over me.
SPEAKER_01: So, my bosses, you know, other men I looked up to.
SPEAKER_01: I would I would put all this feeling, all this emotion that I had towards my dad, and guess what?
SPEAKER_01: It was a highway.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going 80 miles an hour toward him when I had all this feeling that was coming out towards them.
SPEAKER_01: And it reminds me of Hebrews 12, 14 through 15.
SPEAKER_01: This is what it says.
SPEAKER_01: The author of Hebrews wrote, Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy.
SPEAKER_01: Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God, and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.
SPEAKER_01: I had a bitter root that had grown up in my life.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you, you've had a bitter root that grows up in your life.
SPEAKER_01: You know what it tastes like.
SPEAKER_01: You know what that bitterness feels like, and how it controls you and how you relate to other people.
SPEAKER_01: And in one of the cases in my life, it's just that yeah, that bitter root for me became a highway with my dad.
SPEAKER_01: And on that highway, I could hide myself, I could protect myself from my dad by justifying all my actions towards him.
SPEAKER_01: But what I did not do for years was pray for my dad.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't pray for him, I didn't seek him out, um, mostly because I was afraid of what he could do.
SPEAKER_01: Um I would I would say my my thermostat was kind of set on suspicion, you know.
SPEAKER_01: You're just just suspicious, you don't trust him.
SPEAKER_01: And then, I don't know, probably about eight years into this behavior, God started to convict me.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Clyde, just pray for your dad.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, but what do I pray for?
SPEAKER_01: You know, I've I feel like I've prayed for him before.
SPEAKER_01: And he just gave me two things to pray specifically because I started reading about his sickness, and and um there's two things that have been clinically proven to work with people with bipolar disorder, and that's one, getting on the right medication, and two, getting counseling.
SPEAKER_01: You can't have one without the other.
SPEAKER_01: They have to both be working together.
SPEAKER_01: And so I started praying for those two things.
SPEAKER_01: Every time I was on the phone with my dad.
SPEAKER_01: Dad, have you thought about getting medication?
SPEAKER_01: You've thought about getting counseling.
SPEAKER_01: You don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Click.
SPEAKER_01: I'll try it again.
SPEAKER_01: Dad, have you thought of can I just pray with you?
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
SPEAKER_01: Dad, I want you, I want to pray for you that you get on medication, get on counseling.
SPEAKER_01: You don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Click.
SPEAKER_01: On and on and on.
SPEAKER_01: Months turned into a year of this.
SPEAKER_01: And folks, I'm just gonna tell you, God answers prayers because Dad got on medication and got on counseling.
SPEAKER_01: It was amazing.
SPEAKER_01: And in the last few months of his uh life, God started to repair our relationship.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't make it perfect.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying he did, you know, everything right, not everything right, but where there was once a highway, God changed that highway.
SPEAKER_01: He shrunk it down a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying everything that was in there went away, because trust me, I still have issues with people that are in authority when they disag when I disagree with the way they're doing things.
SPEAKER_01: And that's a statement about me, not them.
SPEAKER_01: But uh prayer, prayer works.
SPEAKER_01: And and and one of those things that we'll see later, I'll talk about this, is how keeping score affects our prayer.
SPEAKER_01: So, uh, which brings us to the fourth thing.
SPEAKER_01: The fourth thing is uh how keeping score affects our relationship with different people.
SPEAKER_01: So uh with others, uh with God, uh, and and and then also with ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: So, first with others.
SPEAKER_01: Um, when you keep score, one of the things this does is uh it kind of gives you a false sense of security.
SPEAKER_01: That when somebody's wronged you, you can use that knowledge against them, right?
SPEAKER_01: At the opportune moment.
SPEAKER_01: Uh rarely, when somebody ticks us off or does something wrong against us, do we say something to them in the moment, right?
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you do.
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of times we don't.
SPEAKER_01: What we do is we go, hmm, all right.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna remember that bringing up at the right time.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: That's that's what it looks like usually.
SPEAKER_01: And then we do that once, and then we do it twice, and then it builds up, and it builds up.
SPEAKER_01: And what we do is we kind of build this sense of justification towards that person that.
SPEAKER_01: We have the right to feel this way towards them.
SPEAKER_01: Because we almost always do this inside here.
SPEAKER_01: We rarely process it outside.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why going back, I said, you know, I'm using the NIV translation today, but the ESV translates 1 Corinthians 13 5 as love is not resentful.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what this leads to, really.
SPEAKER_01: When we keep score against others in our relationships, it leads to resentment.
SPEAKER_01: You know, this is probably nowhere clearer for me than in my own marriage after the birth of our second daughter.
SPEAKER_01: The thought that went through my head, and husbands and dads, you probably never felt this at all after the birth of a kid.
SPEAKER_01: But the thought that went through my head was, what about me?
SPEAKER_01: When's she going to start caring about me?
SPEAKER_01: That baby's getting all the attention.
SPEAKER_01: What about me?
SPEAKER_01: And my poor wife is over there thinking, What about me and the baby?
SPEAKER_01: Like, what why is he so worried about himself?
SPEAKER_01: And to really get down more specific, you know, like I said, our daughter has a lot of health issues.
SPEAKER_01: And for my wife, she doesn't even remember the first few months of her or Mabel Grace, our youngest's life, because it was just so overwhelming learning all this.
SPEAKER_01: It's she has this, oh she has this, oh, she has this.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and learning how to work through the medical system, it was just overwhelming.
SPEAKER_01: And she had a lot of emotion and feeling that she was not able to express towards me, and I wasn't able to receive because she didn't think I felt all that, because I didn't show the emotion the way she felt it.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and one of the things I had to learn to do was speak my truth, to say how I'm feeling.
SPEAKER_01: And she had to learn to say to me, here's my truth, here's how I'm feeling.
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
SPEAKER_01: Just because you say the truth doesn't mean the other person's gonna like it.
SPEAKER_01: So there were a lot of fights that came out of that.
SPEAKER_01: But guess what?
SPEAKER_01: That's where the peace came from.
SPEAKER_01: The peace came from the conflict.
SPEAKER_01: The peace did not come from avoiding it.
SPEAKER_01: The resentment was gotten away, got got done away with because of the hard conversation.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing we see here is we'll keep score with God.
SPEAKER_01: We'll keep score with God.
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times this comes across as we're frustrated at God because we don't feel like he's come through the way he should, especially when we're fighting sin.
SPEAKER_01: You know, people love to quote, you know, be killing sin or sin's gonna be killing you, and you can kill sin because God's giving you the Holy Spirit to fight sin with.
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I was in the ER the other day and I saw this sign that said, God never gives you more than you can handle, and I just thought, it's terrible theology.
SPEAKER_01: If God doesn't give you more than he can handle, why are we reading out of this?
SPEAKER_01: Because all I see is a bunch of people that got stuck in situations where God had to show up and help them with something that they couldn't handle.
SPEAKER_01: But then I think through that old phrase, how is humility learned through many humiliations?
SPEAKER_01: How do we overcome temptation?
SPEAKER_01: By facing many temptations.
SPEAKER_01: God reveals his power when we go through the valley.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: There's no plan for us to, you know, just sit up on the mountain the whole time and enjoy the victory.
SPEAKER_01: God takes us through the valley so we can learn what victory really looks like and what victory really means.
SPEAKER_01: And so when we don't understand that, what we do is we tend to view our faith in God as a transaction.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: We'll look at God and say, God, if you do this, I'll do this.
SPEAKER_01: But what it should be is, God, you have done this.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna respond to who you are.
SPEAKER_01: That's what faith should look like in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And so what we do when we have this kind of transactional view of God is it this thing, it kills our intimacy with God.
SPEAKER_01: It kills our prayer with God.
SPEAKER_01: And what we'll do is we'll start looking to other people to meet that need of intimacy and to meet that need of making us happy.
SPEAKER_01: And then those things will let us down eventually, right?
SPEAKER_01: And that's why we complain when the sermon wasn't the way we wanted it to sound, or the music wasn't good, or it was too loud, or he didn't do the songs that I wanted him to do, or the children's program.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't do the activities we wanted to them.
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm gonna do?
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go and yelp and leave a bad review about that church.
SPEAKER_01: Which has happened.
SPEAKER_01: I just think we live in a review-happy age, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
SPEAKER_01: What are we gonna start doing next?
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna review that kiss from your wife?
SPEAKER_01: You know?
SPEAKER_01: Just help me, please.
SPEAKER_01: So when we keep score with God, what this leads to is entitlement.
SPEAKER_01: First thing we saw is that it leads to resentment with others, but what it can lead to with God is entitlement.
SPEAKER_01: This feeling of, hey God, you owe me.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, uh, we keep score with ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Keep score with ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: When I was a uh student, one of the things my choir teachers kind of drilled into me was you have to be your own worst critic as a musician.
SPEAKER_01: You're never gonna be the best unless you can be your own worst critic.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: So you have to really sit down, listen to yourself, record yourself, pick yourself apart.
SPEAKER_01: That's how you're gonna get better as a musician.
SPEAKER_01: You know, on some level, that's true.
SPEAKER_01: You've got to learn to be honest with yourself and criticize yourself.
SPEAKER_01: But that had a really funny side effect that I didn't realize until years later, which was this.
SPEAKER_01: Um, when people have criticism about me that I hadn't thought about before, I reserve the right to disagree with it.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm my own work best critic.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you get that.
SPEAKER_01: The thing is, when we keep score against ourselves, it's really not enough.
SPEAKER_01: Because if we kept score of our sin, we couldn't keep count.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why it says God doesn't keep count.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because he sent his son to die on a cross.
SPEAKER_01: If we're going to keep score against ourselves, why do we need Jesus on a cross?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: What we do when we keep score against ourselves is this leads to self-hatred.
SPEAKER_01: And those three things, resentment, entitlement, self-hatred, are all things that they might not show up right when you see them, but they're always there under the surface when we find ourselves keeping a record of wrongs.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm on my last, y'all still with me?
SPEAKER_01: I'm on the last thing.
SPEAKER_01: The fifth thing that we see today, I think responding to this text is just to make peace.
SPEAKER_01: Don't keep the peace.
SPEAKER_01: Make peace.
SPEAKER_01: Don't keep the peace.
SPEAKER_01: This is how you feed you you fight keeping score.
SPEAKER_01: Um you have to embrace difficult conversations.
SPEAKER_01: You have to.
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, you're just gonna resent people and you're gonna be angry at them.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be angry at God, and you're gonna be angry at yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And you have to learn to have conversations in those three arenas.
SPEAKER_01: You have to have conversations with people, which for some of us that's the hardest thing to do.
SPEAKER_01: You have to have a conversation with God, but then you also have to have a conversation with yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying talking to yourself like you're crazy.
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: Talk to yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Marcy McClinnan, our women's pastor, she has a great phrase that she said, Clyde, you need to learn to just sit down on the inside.
SPEAKER_01: One time she told me in our staff meeting one day, yeah, I think you have unseated anger issues.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Whoa, what?
SPEAKER_01: In front of the staff and everybody, which is one of the great things about your church.
SPEAKER_01: You should go to your uh job this week during your business meeting and say, hey, we're gonna go around the room and say what kind of problems we have with each other, because I'm in a fighting mood today.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: That's happened more than once in our staff meetings.
SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of church you go to, and we're better for it.
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, Marcy said that to me, and I had to circle back around and say, hey, tell me what you meant by unseated.
SPEAKER_01: And she just said, I don't think you've sat down on the inside with some of the things that you feel towards the people in this room sometimes.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, hmm, okay.
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what it means.
SPEAKER_01: You've got to learn to have that conversation with yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And the result of this conversation is it's always towards peace.
SPEAKER_01: That's why it says in Hebrews earlier, that passage I read from chapter 12, pursue peace with everyone.
SPEAKER_01: Another translation says, strive for peace.
SPEAKER_01: Peace is not kept, peace is made.
SPEAKER_01: Peace is not kept.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say blessed are the peacekeepers, for they are called sons of God.
SPEAKER_01: It says, blessed are the what?
SPEAKER_01: Peacemakers.
SPEAKER_01: A peacemaker can embrace conflict in order to produce peace.
SPEAKER_01: A peacekeeper just wants to avoid conflict for a temporary comfort.
SPEAKER_01: A peacemaker will heal a situation.
SPEAKER_01: They'll bring healing.
SPEAKER_01: It might not be fun up front, but at the end, there's healing is the goal.
SPEAKER_01: A peacekeeper is an enabler.
SPEAKER_01: You just enable more wrongs, whether you're the one receiving them or the one giving them.
SPEAKER_01: Being a peacemaker requires courage.
SPEAKER_01: It requires work.
SPEAKER_01: But when we do it, we're called sons of God.
SPEAKER_01: So, wrapping up, just you know, we started, I call this the gospel according to scorekeepers.
SPEAKER_01: And what that sounds like is just this I'm entitled to remember wrongs, to resent others, and to hate myself.
SPEAKER_01: But if we were to flip that and say, well, what's the gospel according to a peacemaker?
SPEAKER_01: Say, I'm free to forgive.
SPEAKER_01: I'm free.
SPEAKER_01: Not entitled, I'm free.
SPEAKER_01: I'm free to forgive, to forget wrongs because someone greater has judged me rightly and he's paid for my wrongs and for the wrongs of others.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_01: As we're entering this time of prayer, I just want you to take a moment.
SPEAKER_01: Lindsay's gonna come and she's gonna play.
SPEAKER_01: I just want us to ask the Lord, what what had your name on it today?
SPEAKER_01: What'd you hear that you were going?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was for me.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, some of us we've uh we've grown weary.
SPEAKER_01: We've grown weary and and and we've lost heart.
SPEAKER_01: And so, Lord, if that's if that's someone here today, I just ask that you would strengthen them.
SPEAKER_01: Strengthen them through the power of your Holy Spirit, through your word, so that they can be reminded that you don't give up on us.
SPEAKER_01: Even when we give up on others and we give up on you, we give up on ourselves, you're there to say, I don't give up on you.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord, give us the strength to remember that, to feel that, to know that.
SPEAKER_01: And Lord, give us hope.
SPEAKER_01: Give us hope that there's always a way towards peace.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to carry a root of bitterness in our souls.
SPEAKER_01: There's always a way to pluck that out.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard work, but it's worth it.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us in this room, I want you to think: who is someone that you're keeping score against?
SPEAKER_01: And what would you say to them in order to pursue peace with that person?
SPEAKER_01: So maybe just take a minute right now and pray for them.
SPEAKER_01: So, Lord, I pray for your grace over your people today.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us we carry deep wounds because of the sin that we've committed and the sins that have been committed against us.
SPEAKER_01: And Lord, I pray that we would find that you have a deep fountain of grace that goes deeper than any of those things.
SPEAKER_01: I pray that you would remind us we're never to stop growing.
SPEAKER_01: And as we grow, Lord, I pray that we would all here be hungry and be thirsty for this rich, solid food that you give us from your word.
SPEAKER_01: Because some of us, that is a tough piece of meat to swallow.
SPEAKER_01: The idea that we're commanded not to keep wrongs against each other.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, I pray that you would get that in us today.
SPEAKER_01: Break down some hardness and give us some soft hearts.
SPEAKER_01: Because our desire is to be obedient, to be free, and to be who you made us to be.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to thank you for being here today.
SPEAKER_01: If this is your first time with us, thanks for uh checking out our church.
SPEAKER_01: On the chair in front of you, there is a connect card.
SPEAKER_01: We'd love for you to fill that out.
SPEAKER_01: Drop it one of our offering boxes by any of our doors so that we can answer any questions you might have about the church.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, if today is the day that you worship through giving, uh that is where you'd put that as well.
SPEAKER_01: Speaking of giving, we wanted to give you an update.
SPEAKER_01: Our Romania team uh is on the ground.
SPEAKER_01: They've been there since uh Friday.
SPEAKER_01: Uh they have been going door to door doing evangelism.
SPEAKER_01: Uh so please be sure and remember to pray for our team.
SPEAKER_01: Uh know that when you put money in these boxes by the door, it goes to support things that we can do like this for a video and a Dina who support pastors and who are building the church in an area where the church has uh been persecuted over the last few decades.
SPEAKER_01: Um, the second thing we want to make you aware of is this coming Tuesday is our women's Bible study uh begins.
SPEAKER_01: So if you've signed up for that, uh be sure and come.
SPEAKER_01: Marcy McClinnan, our women's pastor, will be teaching that.
SPEAKER_01: It's for women ages 15 and up.
SPEAKER_01: That's all we have for announcements.
SPEAKER_01: Let me invite you to stand together.
SPEAKER_01: Hold your hands out like this.
SPEAKER_01: May you not be anxious about anything, but in everything, with prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Let your request be made known to God.
SPEAKER_01: And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, all old wounds, all new wounds, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Bless you, you're dismissed.