Well, good morning Crossing church.
How are you doing? OK, so we gotta do something
right now and everybody stand back up.
I know you just got comfortable. Everybody stand back up.
You need to at least high 5-5 other people because you are
here today. Every other location do the same
thing. You can sit back down when you
get done with that. You are awesome.
You're awesome. I mean I was looking at first
service. I'm like, you know what was it
going to look like A small group?
They did a, they did, they did account we had 547 at the the
48th St. location just for first service.
And so it's like, you know, I mean, that's pretty awesome.
You know, that people won't want to be together.
They want to hear the word of the Lord.
They want to be with the people of the Lord.
They want to be changed by the Lord.
And just So what? It's 15 below 0.
Who cares? I want to welcome everyone
that's joining from all of our locations.
Thankful for you. If you're insider online, we're
thankful for you as well. And I'm excited about this
series because it comes from a book called Creatures of Habit
and it was written by Steve Poe and Steve and Sandy Poe are
friends of Allison and mine and I I got to know him.
Oh, I think it's probably been 10 years ago and he is just one
of these guys, OK. He went to a a church that was
struggling through the death of their senior minister in on the
north side of Indianapolis. And that's a really hard thing
to to step into that role a man who was loved and passed away
cancer and Steve did that. And that church now is I believe
the largest Church of any kind in the state of Indiana and has
just done an incredible job at Northview Church.
But it's not because of the growth.
When I first started hanging around with Steve, he's, you
know, Jesus called one of his disciples, behold a man in whom
there is no guile. He is that guy.
Have you ever been around people and it's just like you know that
your spiritual IQ goes up when you're around them not because
of what they know, but just because of who they are and how
they live their out their life for Jesus Christ.
And he's going to be here in the 5th week, the final week of this
series. And I really hope you don't miss
that. Just an incredible, incredible
man of God. So we're in that book and we're
talking about habits. And one of the things he says in
the book is 4040%. And that's at a minimum 40% of
everything we do comes directly from habits.
Now we have good habits and we have bad habits, right?
But when we allow a bad behavior to become a habit, it actually
it becomes a stronghold. It's a biblical word, a
stronghold in our lives like it. It's something that has high
walls that are very thick and they're very hard to get rid of.
We get a bad habit that becomes a spiritual stronghold.
It it can really become a besetting sin.
And I would imagine there's many of you that have those that that
you recognize them and and you'll come to church and maybe
you'll even come forward, get down on your knees, you'll pray
and you'll say God, you know what you and you know and it
just keeps. It's like this nagging thing
that just keeps working on you because that's what it is.
It's a spiritual stronghold that comes out of a habit.
Pamela Meyer in her book Lie Spotting, which by the way is a
very unnerving book because what she teaches you in that book is
how to spot it when people are lying to you.
And I I don't know if I I'd rather probably not know that
you know, because that's just a little unsettling.
But in her book she says that you are lied to somewhere
between 10 and 200 times a day. I I was, I heard, I read that
and I went I I don't even know if I know that many people to to
be lied to that much. And then, you know, I took out
my phone and if I get on Instagram or Facebook and I just
do this a few times, Oh yeah, I'm racking up the lies, right.
Because people are lying on on social media constantly.
Look at the person next to you. No.
So don't do that. Forget that.
And, you know, they can be kind of little innocuous ways where
they can be very serious. Like, do you like my new
haircut? How do I look in these jeans?
What did you do when you went out on the date?
How did that scratch get on the car?
What happened to the cookies? It's really an unfortunate part
of our human reality. You know, even a child will cry.
A little child, like a baby, will cry and then stop crying
long enough to hear and listen if anyone is paying attention to
them, and then start crying again, like maybe they're really
not in distress. They just want to lie and make
you think they are. Or even a grandchild.
I won't say it's my grandchild standing next to red crayon
marks on the wall and holding a red crayon saying I didn't do
that. We lie about everything.
We lie about big things and little things, and some of our
lies can have monumental effects.
Think of all the people who trusted Lehman Brothers for
their retirement. Think about the people that
thought that they were really in a get rich quick scheme with
Bernie Madoff or more recently Sam Bankman Freed.
And all you have to do is watch even media.
You see all of the diversity of narratives about the Hamas,
Israel war and how people are lining up.
Who's telling the truth, who's reflecting the truth.
Former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay tried to
clean up a response that she made to anti-Semitism, an
accusation of anti-Semitism on campus.
And the the what she was trying to clean up was when she said to
the congressional committee, it all depends on the context.
Later on when she tried to clean it up, she said, well, that did
not reflect, quote UN quote her truth.
Have you heard people say that her truth, my truth, your truth?
Did we forget that there's just truth?
It isn't your version of it or my version of it.
It's just truth. Our culture is full of
conspiracy theories, right? The funny thing is, a lot of
them end up being proven to be true.
The Babylon B, which is a parody.
A parody site, A parody outlet. They like to make up fake news
stories, you know, that are supposed to be funny, to poke
fun at. People like The Onion.
They do that. And Seth Dillon, who's the CEO
of that satire site, said in March of 2023 that over 100 of
their jokes turned out to actually be true.
As I've already pointed out, social media has very little
relationship with the truth. And that would probably include
some of the posts that we post as well, you know, You know some
of those people you're actually are friends with some of those
people not just like fake friends but like real friends.
And you'll see them post something about themselves.
Like you have this really nice family shot.
You know, you got the husband and the wife, get the kids, you
know they're on the beach. They're really nice restaurant.
They're doing something like that, you know, everything's
just great and except and they have some caption that about how
great everything is except for, you know, them, you know, what's
actually going on in their life. Does that ever happened?
When you're like, how could they post that?
It's ridiculous. And think about all the ones
that you're looking at that you really don't know and how much
of that embellishment and ridiculousness is on there.
But it actually does have an effect on you because you start
wondering like, why isn't my life as happy as theirs?
This, or at least it looks that way.
Maybe it's because you're not actually experiencing the truth.
In that same book, Life Spotting, Pamela Meyer says
we're all against lying, but covertly we're for it.
So what are we left with? We're left with a culture that's
virtually without trust anymore. And it doesn't matter if we're
talking about politicians or pastors or the police or the
price of gas or higher education or health care or the news media
or mass marketing or marriage or civil rights or the Bill of
Rights or equal justice under the law.
We just don't have trust anymore.
And it's because we have real difficulty seeing through the
lens of truth. And why is that?
Isn't it because of all the lying that has saturated us in
both big ways and small ways? And where did that come from?
Well, you're not going to like the answer.
Steve Post says in his book that lying needs to be at the very
top of the list of bad habits, and biblically, he's absolutely
right. Do you know how far you have to
go in your Bible to to reach an epic lie?
Page 3, Page 3 right after God says everything is very good.
Page three we read about it. Genesis chapter 3 verses one to
five. Now the serpent.
And we all know if you don't know, this is the devil is more
crafty than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had
made. And said to the woman.
Eve, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the
garden? The woman said to the serpent.
We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say,
you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of
the garden and you must not touch it or you'll die.
You will certainly not die, the serpent told said to the woman.
For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be
opened and you'll become like God, knowing good and evil.
This was the first lie recorded that was ever told and Satan
told it to Eve. Now this is how that lie was
formed. First thing he did was he
planted a question in her mind. Did God really say right?
And then he told her the lie was you won't, you won't die.
But death, the word death in the original language is thanatos,
which means separation. And the moment she ate of that
fruit, she was separated from God, right?
Death entered the world as a result, but she was separated
from God in that moment, and then he wrapped that lie in a
deception of truth or a perversion of truth.
What God really knows is that if you eat of this tree, you'll
become just like him. You'll know the difference
between good and evil. The the the problem with that is
they already were just like him. They were made in the image of
God, right? They were the children of God.
And when they broke that law, they didn't become more like
God, they became less like him. And what was the response?
Most of us have heard the story. If she ate of the fruit, she
gave it to her husband, Adam. He ate of the fruit, right?
And immediately the Bible says they knew they were naked.
And what did they do? Bible says that they gathered
fig leaves and they wove them together in such a way to make a
covering for themselves because they were ashamed of their
nakedness and they wanted to hide their nakedness.
And then they found a place in the garden where they thought
they could hide from God. And isn't that our immediate
response? When we lie?
We want to hide. As a matter of fact, our lying
is a form of hiding. Why?
Because the truth is just too dangerous.
It's just too damaging. A singer and songwriter named
Mike Guglio Muchi wrote and performed a song for Hillsong
Records called You're My Healer, and it is an incredibly
beautiful song. We've sung it at the crossing
many times. It became a hit among churches
and believers, and part of that came from the writer's testimony
that went along with the song when he performed it.
You see, he had terminal cancer and he wrote the song out of his
cancer experience. As a matter of fact, often times
when he would perform, he would be wearing a cannula so that he
could have oxygen while he performed the song.
Only problem was that his cancer was completely fabricated.
He didn't have cancer at all. He wasn't even sick and he knew
it and he developed that lie to try and make the song popular.
He even deceived his own wife and family with his diagnosis
and they would drop him off at the hospital for non existent
cancer treatments. Now that's just one story, but
there are countless stories of the infamy of liars.
Now, my father, he taught me a lot of priceless things when I
was growing up, and he would put them in little phrases or axioms
so I would remember them. But one of his all time greats
was this. A man is only as good as his
word. If his word isn't any good, he
isn't any good. And I've kept that my whole
life. And I just lied to you.
Although that's a great thing to believe and to strive for, I
can't say that I have kept what my father taught me or I'd be
lying. Lying has a lot of forms,
doesn't it? It might be deception, where we
really emphasize the things that we want people to believe.
We really de emphasize the things we want people to not
believe or to not think about. And so we distort the truth.
That's still a lie. Or it might be gossip, right?
You might have a story that you want to tell about somebody, but
it's a game of telephone, and by the time it gets to the 20th
person, it's nothing like what was originally and originally.
It may have been wrong. So that lie compounds itself as
it goes through those generations.
You've experienced that I'm sure as well.
It might be cheating. It might be whatever you do,
like on a test, or what you might plagiarize.
It might be to your employer where you're lying about, like
the hours that you worked. It might be to the government.
When you talk about how many tax, how much tax you owe might
be flattery or exaggeration, or sometimes even silence might be
a promise that you made that you just failed to keep.
You see, we can lie in a number of ways and there are plenty of
different motives for it. But as we all know, lies
imprison us, and usually the result is telling more lies to
cover the initial lies. And that just increases our
sentence before God. You know, Jesus taught about
lying and he actually connected it to a form of slavery because
it does imprison us. Look what it says in John 832.
Jesus said these words, beautiful words.
You will know the truth. You notice he doesn't say his
truth. The truth and the truth will set
you free. He said that in the context of
enslavement, and when you read the rest of the scripture around
it and the people that were listening to Jesus at that time,
they were believers. These weren't the scribes and
the Pharisees trying to catch him in something.
They were legitimately wanting him to teach them and look at
their response when he says this verse 33, they answered him.
We are Abraham's descendants and we have never been slaves of
anyone. How can you say that we shall be
set free? Boy, they have a bad memory.
What about the 400 years that they were enslaved in bondage in
Egypt, where Moses had to come right, and God used Moses to
deliver the nation of Israel? Forget that.
Did they? Forget the Roman occupation that
they were under right then? And how many things they
couldn't do because of that? And maybe this helps us to
understand the worst of all. The lies, the most insidious of
lies. And those are the lies we tell
ourselves. Maybe it's because the truth is
harder to hear. You remember the scene, Jack
Nicholson. You want the truth.
You can't handle the truth well. Jesus is about to give him a
really strong dose of truth in verse 43 and 44.
Why is my language not clear to you?
Because you are unable to hear what I say.
Here's a great way to grow a church.
You belong to your father, the devil.
That isn't going to win friends and influence people.
Your father is the is Satan himself.
These are people who believed in Jesus.
You want to carry out your father's desires?
Wow. Not only are you saying that my
my father's the devil, but you're saying I'm doing his
bidding. I'm doing what he wants me to
do. He was a murderer from the
beginning. Is that him calling us
murderers, not holding to the truth?
For there's no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his
native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Wow. Well, now we know where lying
comes from. We can trace it all the way back
to that first lie in the garden. So maybe you're going.
Hey, if you hadn't noticed, Jerry, it's 9° below 0 outside,
and I came to church looking for a little hope.
Man. Could you help me out here just
a little bit? Give a guy a break.
All I've heard at this point is that lying is a big problem.
It's the root of why there's no trust in this world.
I'm guilty of it. We're all guilty of it.
We lie to each other. We lie to ourselves.
And that means that our father is the devil.
Well, happy New Year. Now go back to John 832, because
this is the point of what Jesus is saying.
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
He sees us imprisoned, enslaved to all of these habits and
strongholds in our lives of which lying is a part.
And he wants us to be set free. And he's willing to pay the
price so that we might be set free.
You see, lies enslave us, but truth sets us free, not.
Your truth has no power. My truth has no power, but the
truth does. That's why Jesus came to set us
free. Now he teaches us about this a
little bit later in John 14, same book, a little bit later.
And the setting is this. Jesus is celebrating Passover
with his disciples. It's the last Passover that
they're going to celebrate together, because within 24
hours Jesus will have died on the cross.
OK? And they're in the upper room in
Jerusalem and they've, they've set up this Passover meal.
And then Jesus begins to teach and he changes the meaning of
the emblems that they're that they're eating and drinking.
When he says, this bread is my body broken for you do this in
remembrance of me. This cup is the new covenant in
my blood. Drink.
All of it. It's shed for many for the
remission of sin, You know, he says this to them.
And then you know he he has these beautiful words that go
along with it. Let not your heart be troubled.
You believe in God. Believe also in me, my father's
house, or many mansions. If it weren't so, I would have
told you I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go to prepare a place for you, I'll come again receive
you to myself. That where I am, there you may
be also where I go, where I go, you know, in the way you know.
And Thomas said, hold on, Jesus, we don't know where you're
going. And how can we know the way?
Totally confused. And then we read John 14-6.
Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
Jesus doesn't come to show us the way.
He is the way. Jesus doesn't come to teach us
the truth. He is the truth.
Jesus doesn't come to help us find a new life.
He is life. He's identified Jesus.
And when we are in Jesus, we are in these things.
First of all, Jesus is the way. The way to where?
The way to heaven.
The way to the Father. The way to eternity.
The way to salvation. The way that leads me away from
all that I am and all that I've done into all that He has
prepared for me. The fact that He has adopted me
away from the slavery of my sin and the other strongholds of my
life and all the things that I have done to myself.
He is the way. He's the truth.
He gives me an unfiltered understanding of reality so that
I know who I am, what this world is, what eternity holds.
He answers my deepest questions. Who am I?
Where did I come from? Where am I going?
And by the way, everybody that's trying to tell you something
else is just selling you something because he's the truth
and Jesus is life. He shows me my place in this
world. He fills me with meaning and
purpose. He shows me that he designed an
upper story for my life, that he wants me to walk in and he has
overcome death to give me eternal life with him.
So my answer is not running away from lying.
It's running the truth. And by the way, running the
truth is running to Jesus. It's embracing the freedom that
only he can give me. And it's walking with him on the
shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Now some of you are going, what?
What does that mean, walking on the shoreline to see a Galilee?
Well, why don't you, along with me, think of probably one of the
most epic lies that was ever perpetrated, and it was by a man
named Simon Peter. Because when Jesus was done with
that Last Supper, that communion, they went down to the
garden of Gethsemane and they prayed.
And Jesus stood awful ways and he was praying by himself.
And the others went to sleep and soldiers came to arrest Jesus in
the middle of the night. You you may remember this.
And and Jesus was arrested and a lot of the disciples scattered.
But Simon Peter followed along. And when they took him to the
House of the high priest Caiaphas, Simon Peter was in the
courtyard. And somebody looked at Simon
Peter in the fire light and recognized him.
And he said, aren't you one of his disciples?
And what did he do? He lied.
I I don't know. I don't know him.
Someone else noticed him and called him out for the same
thing. He goes, I tell you, I don't.
I don't know him lied again. And then someone else called him
out, and the Bible says that this time he was so incensed
that he cursed when he said it. I do not know him.
And you know what he did after that?
He hid. Sound familiar?
Went out and wept. Bitterly lied.
We call it denial, but it was just lying.
But maybe you recall, after Jesus had paid his debt, and my
debt and your debt on the cross, and then rose from the dead to
prove that he had power over death, Simon Peter after a while
decided to go back to the sea of Galley, back to his fishing
business. And one morning after they
hadn't caught anything, someone yells from the shore, as the
dawn was breaking, they cast your Nets on the other side of
the boat, which is something Jesus said at the very beginning
of his relationship with Simon Peter.
And they did. And there were so many fish that
they could hardly take in the catch.
And Simon Peter comes to the shore, and they had breakfast
with all of them together. And then Jesus said, Simon, we
need to take a walk. And they took a walk on the
shore of the Sea of Galilee. And when they did, Jesus didn't
call him Peter. That was what he renamed him to.
He called him Simon. And matter of fact, he said,
Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Use the word Agapeo, which means the ultimate self sacrificial
love. And Simon answers him, Lord, you
know I love you. But he uses the word filet O in
the Greek, which means brotherly love.
It's a lower kind of love. And Jesus said feed my sheep.
Simon's son of John do you love me, says it again.
Agapeo. Simon Peter says, Lord, I do
love you. Phileo lower kind of love feed
my lambs. Jesus says third time Jesus says
Simon son of John do you love me this time?
Jesus says Phileo, brotherly love.
The Bible says that Simon Peter was hurt, cut to his heart
because Jesus asked him the third time because he knew what
was going on, right? He knew that he denied him.
He knew that he lied three times.
And this was the third time Jesus asked.
But he also knew that Jesus used the different term, the lower
term. Phileo, do you love me?
And he said, Lord, you know all things.
You know that I love you feed my sheep.
You know what I love about that is that comes from an old
quartet song I used to sing. He came down to my level when I
couldn't get up to his. With a strong arm, he lifted me
up to know what living is. You see, I'm just like Simon
Peter. So are you.
And what we need is a walk on the shoreline of the Sea of
Galilee. What we need is a little quality
time with Jesus. And let me tell you what that
looks like. It starts with owning it.
Own it. Don't let that lie that you've
let saturate in your own that you tell yourself have dominance
inside of you. Acknowledge it.
It means an intellectual understanding without
rationalizing. It's the first beatitude of the
beatitudes that Jesus talked about in Matthew chapter 5.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. What does it mean to be poor in
spirit? To be spiritually poor?
To realize that you don't measure up spiritually.
Own it. But it's not enough to just know
that in your head, and that's why the 2nd Beatitude is blessed
are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Because you're not just an intellectual person, you're an
emotional person too. You don't just think things, you
feel things right. And so we need to have an
emotional response to an intellectual understanding.
We need to repent of our sin, which means to have a godly
sorrow over that. That's what it means to own it.
And when you do that, you begin to experience your spiritual
freedom, and then it moves to practical reinforcement that
needs to be reinforced in your life.
When the stronghold comes down, you need to replace the bad
habits with the good habits, right?
Be honest with each other. Speak the truth, but speak it
with love and with grace. Make yourself accountable to
people. People that you trust that you
can show your dirty laundry to and they won't reject you for
it. Avoid situations that push you
back to the bad habit and embrace situations that
reinforce the good habits. If you're a drunk and your way
home from work goes by three bars, find another way home.
Because I guarantee you Satan will have people out in the
parking lot going, hey, dude, come on right, Reinforce the
good ones. Avoid the bad ones.
And finally I want to close with this.
Celebrate the winds. How do I do that?
How do you celebrate the winds? Do you remember?
Some of you may? I preached A sermon quite a
while ago and I ended it by saying I, I, I take this
medicine. I call it my my 290 twos.
Do you remember my 290 twos? Maybe not.
If you don't, this will be great, because it'd be the first
time you heard it in Psalm 92, the first verse and the second
verse. It says it is good to praise the
Lord, to make music to your name almost high.
And then it says this to proclaim your love in the
morning and your faithfulness at night.
Those are my 290 twos, to proclaim your love in the
morning and your faithfulness at night.
What does it mean to proclaim his love in the morning before
you ever get out of bed? And I'd love to.
I'd love to tell you I do this every day, but if I did, I would
be lying. But to proclaim his love in the
morning means before you do anything else, before you goof
yourself up and anybody else up and make a mess of life and face
the challenges and all that you need to tell yourself.
God, no matter what, I know that you love me.
I absolutely know that you love me.
I don't hope that you love me. I don't want you to.
I just know it's a fact. You love me.
And if I ever wondered about that, all I have to do is look
back at what your son Jesus did on the cross.
Because that's a perfect picture of the fact that you love me
even while I'm still a Sinner. Romans 5/8.
You love me and you love me today.
And I know no matter what I face today.
I know that you love me. That's going to make your day a
better day. I guarantee it.
But you don't know what that day is going to hold, right?
So what do you do when it's the end of the day before you close
your eyes and go to sleep, to proclaim his love in the morning
and his faithfulness at night? You get to the end of that day.
You want to look back on that day.
All the challenges, all the failures, all the misses, all
the wins, all the glory, all the good stuff and all of it.
And you say, you know what, God, here we are.
We're still together. You've been faithful to me.
You didn't leave me. You didn't forsake me.
You're still here. You are still here.
And it'll celebrate those winds, the things that happened, that
that gave God glory that day. Because God is a faithful God.
And even when we're faithless, the Bible says he's faithful
because he cannot disown himself.
And I guarantee you it's going to make tomorrow a better day if
you ended this day with that 92. The question is what are you
going to do right now? We're moving to a time of
decision. You know, I don't think that you
get up on a day where it's 15 or 16 below 0 and make the effort.
Hopefully your car started. But for whatever reason, you're
here. And I know some of you are
online right now and you said probably not a good idea for me
to get out. It's all right.
That's OK, because I'm glad you're hearing this.
That no matter what, our God loves us and is faithful to us.
And Jesus is the perfect picture of that.
And I want you to hear me. You need Jesus, and I need
Jesus. I mean really bad.
Some of you have been trying to manage your life, control the
things that are strongholds in your life.
And if you were honest with yourself and not lying to
yourself, you'd have to honestly realize that you don't do a very
consistent job of that You really struggle with it.
And that's why we need a Savior. There's a scripture that says
come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you a rest. And I think that Jesus looks at
us and pities us because we're working so hard and we're trying
so hard and we fail over and over again.
And he wants you to understand that he did all the heavy
lifting when he died on that cross, that you don't need to
trust in yourself anymore. You need to just trust in him.
He's the way. And if you want life, real life,
he's life. So you need to respond to the
truth which has come to Jesus. And if you're here today and
you've never entered into an intimate, personal relationship
with Jesus, I'm not talking about going to church, Although
I'm really glad you're here. Here's an opportunity for you to
come to Jesus. There's going to be somebody
right over there by that baptistry loved nothing more.
And to talk to you about what your next steps could be, Pray
with you and we sing in a moment.
Just go up there. Be vulnerable for a moment.
God won't disappoint you. Many of us here today have a
relationship with Jesus that we're thankful for and we rely
on. But that doesn't mean that you
don't try so often to sit in his seat.
You know what I mean? Like the throne of your life and
things get goofed up and you start trying to hold it all up
on your own and trying to manage all of the difficulty and you
just get exhausted. I remember one time somebody
said, why do you have people come up and get down on their
knees? Doesn't that humiliate them?
And I'm like, no, they're just kids going to their dad and
they're saying I need help and he gives it to them.
Why wouldn't we want that? Maybe you.
It may be somebody that you love and care for.
But whatever burden you might be carrying today, why don't you
bring it up to the Lord and let him have it?
Just let him have it. He'll hear that prayer.
Would you stand with me? Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, in Jesus name, please, please.
I pray that you would that you would remove any stronghold
around our heart right now. Just so that we cannot.
Not vulnerable to me, not vulnerable to anybody in this
room, but vulnerable to just you, your presence, your Son,
Jesus, your Holy Spirit. Father, I pray that we'll just
be vulnerable enough to you right now to hear what it is
that we need to hear that still small voice and then respond so
that we can have rest. We can lay our burdens down.
Trust in you, I pray, in Jesus name.
Amen.