Let me tell you, I woke up in a panic.
The light was up. The sun was up.
It was light outside. I was like, oh, no, did I miss
church? I was really panicking.
And then I looked and it was, it was actually early.
And I was like, OK, I don't know.
For some reason, I woke up in a panic.
But the next three weeks, we're gonna be spending our time in
the series called Why Are Things So Bad?
Why Are Things so Bad? I don't think it's an accident
that you're here today and a world full of distractions.
You could be doing anything other than sitting in a room.
But you're here. We're talking about the one
thing that can actually fix what's broken.
Every morning I wake up and I deliberately try not to look at
the news. I really don't want to know and
yet somehow throughout the course of the day, I come to the
full conclusion that everything is falling apart.
You guys feel that there are wars?
Every war point to a spot on the map.
There's a war happening. Ukraine, Israel.
Our streets are filled with homelessness and addiction.
A political activist shop for sharing ideas.
My children, my teenage daughters coming home from
school being nonchalantly show the shooting video of Charlie
Kirk. Have you guys experienced this
kind of bad? And maybe you're asking the
question if God is real? If God is good, why does
everything feel so broken? Have you asked that before?
Today I want to show you that the brokenness is not the end of
the story. It's actually pointing us
towards finding the fixer. Find the fixer.
That's our big idea for today. Find the fixer.
The states of everything being bad guarantees that I have, I
will, you have, and you will experience suffering.
But the Bible tells us this was not the way.
There was a time where we had heaven here on earth, a place
that was called the Garden of Eden.
It was beautiful, it was glorious, it was blush and
peaceful and serene. It was filled with God's glory.
A place where we had a complete relationship with God, where we
could hear him coming. And no, I'm about to have a walk
and a talk with God the Father. A place that was stress free,
anxiety free, clothes free, but shame free, disease free.
A place where God loved you so much that he gave us a choice.
A choice to obey him, to listen to him, listen to his
instructions or not to and that disobedience is called sin.
Listen to this choice that would determine the history of the
world will be in Genesis chapter 2.
Join me there as we read verse 16.
It says you are free to eat from any tree in the garden.
All the trees I can just imagine going through and picking and
just enjoying, you know, I wonder if yams grow on trees.
Asking for Pastor Vance, but it says you must not eat from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from
it you will certainly die. They were free to enjoy the
Lord, enjoy everything good that He had given them.
Or they could live on their own understanding instead of God's
instructions. We are experiencing their
choices. Adam and Eve was convinced by
Satan himself that outside of God's control, outside of God's
will, doing what they want to do is good.
You should experience that. You should do it on your own.
It won't really affect your life.
There are no consequences to sin.
A lie that he tells me and he tells you every day.
Adam and Eve disobeyed God and fell into sin.
Not unlike the same thing that we do all the time as we fall
into our sins. Second Corinthians tells us that
righteousness and wickedness can have no relationship.
Nothing the light can do with the dark can't.
You can't put those two together, and that's why God has
a holy hatred for sin. Because of sin, we can no longer
be in God's presence. We can no longer experience God
how we were supposed to. Now we have to have it filtered.
Instantly. We became separated from our
Creator. All right, I know this is big,
so everybody take a big breath in.
Let it out. Let me show you what God is
doing. Our first point of the day.
He brings beauty from brokenness.
Amen. He brings beauty from
brokenness. Genesis chapter 3, flip over to
chapter 3. Let's read this together.
The Lord said, the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have
done this cursed. Are you above all livestock and
above all beasts of the field? On your belly you shall go.
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between you,
your offspring and her offspring.
He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel to the
woman, he says. I will surely multiply your pain
in childbearing, in pain you shall bring forth children you
desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over
you. Then he says cursed is the
ground because of you in pain. You shall eat of it all the days
of your life. Some people may see God cursing
all of humanity, but really this is merely the state of things
when God is absent. Adam and Eve wanted a choice.
A choice to live life without God, to do it their way.
This was God simply giving them their wish.
We do the same thing. We want it our way.
But what I see right here after the curse is a merciful
intervention filled with grace and compassion.
Isaiah puts it this way. God gives us a crown of beauty
instead of ashes, oil of joy instead of mourning.
Even in the curse, he says he's planning beauty.
Imagine your child touching the stove.
Some of our children love to learn the hard way.
Yeah, you could just let him do it.
Go ahead, Let's see what happens.
Again. I wonder if you're going to get
burned. Or you could create consequences
that protect them from greater harm.
God allowed pain. He allowed struggle and death
not as a cruel punishment, but as a built in alarm system where
he's waving his arm screaming. This is not how life is supposed
to be. Come on.
Every struggle, every struggle you face, every injustice you
see, every moment of pain, it's all pointing towards the same
direction, the same truth. We are broken.
You guys feel that we are broken and we need a fixer.
We need a fixer. This brokenness is extending
over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Throughout history, God has sent prophets to show us something
profound that life. Without God trying to navigate
through the laws and the rules and the guidelines alone, this
will never work. But here's the beautiful thing.
Each time someone chooses not to follow God, that is not the end
of the story, Amen? And if it was, this would be a
horrible story. This is where God's beauty is
revealed like no other place. He doesn't strand us in our bad
decisions. Amen.
As a parent, I can't tell you how many times I've told my
children to listen. It's amazing how many times you
can tell a three-year old and a five year old to do something
and it never even gets close to being done.
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to walk, to watch them
make choices over and over and over again, knowing that those
aren't good for them. Even when they stop listening,
even when they don't want anything to do with my wife and
I, we continue to love them, many times to the point of
exhaustion. Parents, you exhausted.
But here's God's beauty. He never gets exhausted.
He continues even in our bad decisions.
When a person turns from Him, he doesn't abandoned them.
He doesn't walk away from their mistakes.
He doesn't leave them in their sin.
His love becomes a gentle pursuit, constant, not a
forceful demand, but a patient and enduring presence.
He continues to offer us chance after chance to accept Him, to
accept His grace. This, this is the profound
beauty of God. This is the profound beauty of
his character. He meets us not at our best, but
He meets us at our lowest, reminding us that we are not too
far gone, that His love will still reach us.
Even when it's horrible out there, God is still there.
He's still bringing us up. Our second point for today is he
creates comfort from chaos. He creates comfort from chaos.
When first, when sin first entered the world, humanity, we
fell so hard it looked like game over.
We now have death. We now have disease, we now have
hatred. Everything was disconnected.
Our direct relationship with God had been severed.
Death entered because SIM separated us from the source,
the source of life, and that was God himself.
With this connection severed, spiritual death was immediately
immediate. It just happened, Done.
And then physical death was inevitable hatred emerge.
It cultivated, It came from our brokenness and a relationship
with God. And every relationship after
that was fractured. The love that should be
naturally flowing from us, knowing that we are loved by
God, was replaced by fear, jealousy, desperation, all
breeding, suffering. But God.
God knew this was going to
happen. You can't surprise God, He knows
everything. He knew you before you were
born. God's redemption plan for
humanity pre existed, sin entering into the world.
He knew this was going to happen, so his comfort that even
in the middle of explaining that life without him is going to be
bad, he's already explaining that down the road there's a
plan to fix this. After all the lessons learned in
life, that the world and life without God is bad, it's evil,
it's impossible. He's still there, right here in
Genesis 315. He announces there will be a
fixer, A Savior, his son, Jesus. Genesis chapter 3 in the NFV
says this. And I will put enmity between
you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.
He will crush your head, Satan. Your head will be crushed, you
will be destroyed and goes on, and you will strike his heel, he
says. Satan, you will get your blows
in. In fact, you will put my son in
the grave, but he will not stay there forever.
You may inflict pain, you may inflict suffering, but you will
not win this war. This is the first gospel.
Amen. This is the good news in the
world that just been eternally separated from God.
Now, I know some of you might be thinking this is just wishful
thinking, but how do we know this is real?
That's a great question. Look at all the alternatives
we've already tried. We've tried education.
We are more educated than ever. Yeah, we are more divided than
ever. Yes, we've tried technology.
We can instantly connect to anybody with anyone in the
world. And yet our loneliness, our
depression at our all time high. We've tried politics, we've
tried political solutions, but every cycle promises that we're
going to fix what happened last time.
We've tried therapy, self help, medication, meditation, and all
these things are good. They can't help, but they can't
heal the fundamental brokenness. Every human system, every
political solution, every technological advance, they will
eventually real reveal the same thing that we can't fix
ourselves. We tried, it doesn't work.
But there's something different about Jesus.
People don't usually lie when they know that something is
false. The disciples went from hiding
in fear to dying for Jesus message.
Something changed everything. Think about that for a moment.
Humanity disobeyed God. He did they we did exactly what
we were not supposed to do. God, the one who laid out
everything, gave us everything. This beautiful place, We messed
it up. And that here is God immediately
speaking into our redemption. While Adam and Eve are still
covered in their shame and their failures, God already had a plan
for their restoration. That plan, that plan is for you.
That plan is for me. It hasn't changed.
It's still the same plan. And that rescue plan?
His name is Jesus. All right, take a second flip
all the way over to Romans chapter 8.
I'll let you take a second. Get there.
We're going to be with Paul, Paul who's gone through a lot of
things. He's going to help us get
through this. Our Third Point for today is he
ransoms rebels to righteousness. Let me say that again.
God, he ransoms, rebels to righteousness.
The gospel tells us that the summit of man did not come to be
served. Jesus, He did not come here to
be served, but he came to serve and to give his life as a ransom
for many. This word ransom he used to mean
paying for someone else's debt. Jesus paid our debt with his
blood. It was the price required to
free rebellious humanity from the bondage of sin and the
penalty of eternal death. He ransoms rebels from
righteousness. Life can absolutely be a wreck
at times. Whether it's losing a loved one,
whether it's your dreams falling apart, you have chronic pain,
you're battling depression, financial ruin, or just living
in a broken world. Suffering is real and it hurts
like hell. Jesus himself told us in this
world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the
world. That's not denial of your pain,
that's not denial of your suffering.
That's not denial that it is really bad out there.
That is promise of victory. Romans 8, verse 18.
Paul starts with the bold statement.
He says For I consider that the suffering of this present time
are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to
us. He tells us that our current
pain has an expiration date. This will not last forever.
Amen. What's coming next is so
incredible that it makes everything that you're looking
at small in comparison. Now this isn't a guy that's in
the ivory tower. This is Paul who's been beaten 3
times, who's been shipwrecked 3 times.
He's been imprisoned, he's been in stoned, and eventually he's
beheaded, martyred for his faith.
He knew suffering. He knew it intimately.
He needed us to realize that knowing God, have a real
relationship with God, pulling our full trust in God, allows us
to endure pain and suffering, Paul discovered.
When you put your current suffering on one side and then
God's glory on the other side, there is no comparison.
For those of you have been walking with Jesus for a long
time, you know this isn't theology.
This is life experience. You've seen that.
You've seen God taking the worst moments, the biggest problems,
the things you just don't know how we're going to get resolved.
And you see God weaving his way and making them into something
beautiful. Yes, this is not a coincidence.
That's the fixer at work. Even when you can't see him,
even when you don't know what's going on, he is there.
He is involved. He is working in our lives.
It's like comparing a paper cut to winning the lottery.
A bad day versus a lifetime of paradise, a temporary haddock
for eternal joy. The ratio is so overwhelming.
It's so one sided that changes have you see every current
situation and you and I, we're not the only ones waiting for
things to get better. Verse 19 says this for the
creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the
sons of God. Verse 22, it says, for we know
that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains
of childbirth until now Paul says this creation is waiting
and eager longing and the groaning together in the pains
of childbirth. The whole universe is like is
like a woman in labor experiencing intense pain but
knowing something beautiful is about to come.
Think about that image. Childbirth is so excruciating,
but women labor. Don't think this pain is
pointless. She knows that it's producing
something credible, producing new life.
All the suffering, everything that's happening, all the
brokenness, the injustice, it's all labor pains.
Something magnificent is coming. It's going to change the world.
The mountains, the oceans, the animals, even the stars, they're
all waiting for the same thing. Verse 23.
And not only through creation, but we ourselves, we have the
first fruits of the spirit grown.
And really, as we wait eagerly for the adoption of the sons,
the redemption of our bodies as believers, as people have put
our full faith in Christ, we're not just waiting.
We're already a part of the victory, Paul says.
We have the first fruits. It's like getting a taste of the
feast before the banquets. Every moment of peace you feel,
every experience of God's love, every answered prayer, every
glimpse of joy. It's just a tiny preview of
what's coming. Amen.
Just like in the very beginning when we experienced heaven on
earth, while we had a perfect relationship with God, amazingly
He brings beauty from brokenness.
His beauty is there. When sin entered the world, God
didn't abandoned us. The pain, the difficulty, the
brokenness, what we are experiencing serves as that
warning sign. It points us away from sin's lie
and towards God towards we need to find the fixer.
He creates comfort from cast. God wasn't surprised about this.
He wasn't surprised about humanity's fall.
His redemption plan existed before sin entered the world and
he's announcing that there will be a fixer.
He says My son Jesus, he ransomed rebels righteousness.
Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, give his life on the
cross as ransom for so many. The entire creation is groaning
like a woman in labor, knowing that significant change is going
to take over the world. So how, how do we live this out?
What do we do with this? I'll tell you #1 is to hate sin.
Hate sin. This week I identify one area in
your life where you've been tolerating something God calls
destructive. Maybe it's the content you're
consuming, maybe it's the conversations you're having.
Maybe it's the thoughts that you're entertaining or playing
with. Ask God to give you His heart
because our hearts are not the same.
His heart hates it with the Holy Hatred.
Before our society stops accepting sin, the church has to
stop first. Amen.
Before it gets any better in our neighborhoods, in our schools,
in our homes, we have to stop accepting sin.
I'm not telling you to hate people.
Actually, I'm asking you to love people but hate the sin.
Don't be OK with it. Don't go along with it.
Call it out for what it is, but please, please be gentle and be
gracious. And if I'm being 100% honest,
this is so easy for me to say and it's not easy for me to live
out. The first words that come to my
mind are often not gentle. I don't think of people in the
best way the first time. My sinfulness of being harsh and
cynical. Often it just flows out of me.
I'll tell you that I would enjoy it.
I enjoy being sharp and I enjoy being to the point and fast with
my words. I would make excuses.
Oh it's OK, this is how friends talk to each other.
Even if that was 100% true, what a horrible example it is to
speak harshly, not to be gentle, not always thinking of the best
of someone. This week alone, I have messed
up this so many times. I'm repeatingly apologizing for
my sarcasm, for my cynicism, for hurting people with my words.
And that was just on Wednesday. But that's just me, right?
No one else falls for that sin. We don't start to hate sin by
focusing on hating sin. This is super important.
We don't start to hate sin by focusing on hating sin.
We start hating sin when we fall more in love with Jesus.
When you truly fall in love with someone, you don't force
yourself to stop doing things that would hurt them.
You don't. You naturally, you want to
protect them. You want to protect what you
love. You find yourself thinking, how
do I not damage this relationship?
It's not about gritting your teeth and white knuckling
through your temptations. It's about your heart.
It's your heart being so captivated, so captured by God
that the thing that is controlling your life, the thing
that's taking over you, the thing that's really messing you
up, you start to lose your grip on it.
This is the same truth with Jesus.
The more we understand His heart, the more we see His
kindness, the more we see His patience, his relentless pursuit
of us even in our mess. That's how our hearts change.
We stop asking, how can I avoid this sin?
What barriers can I put up? So I stopped doing whatever it
is. And we start asking, how can I
honor the one who loves me so much, the one who gave me life,
the one who gave me everything I have?
Application #2 Live like the fixer is real.
When you're in a time of joy, a time of peace, when you're just
living a great life and you're excited about it, write down
those experiences. Write them down how you felt,
the way you felt, why you felt that way, who you felt it with.
Put them in a journal, put them in some sort of notebook and a
Google doc. Build a bank account of God's
love, of the experiences that you have had with God because
there will be a time where you're going to need to reach
into that bank account and remember when everything gets so
hard, when everything is bad, when you realize we still live
in Bakersfield. Remember how you once felt loved
by God, how He was there for you.
Why? Why you felt loved, who you felt
loved with. That person, that person that
you felt loved with may be able to come alongside with you.
If not our community groups, our ministries, they are all filled
with people who are going through similar things, have
experienced or are experiencing what you're experiencing.
Don't do this alone. God gives us the body of
believers. Look around, you guys are
amazing. He gives us so we can come
together. Do that Come Together
application #3 help others find the fixer.
I don't know about you, but I can't keep this to ourselves.
I can't keep this to myself. We can't keep this to ourselves.
If you look out there, people are drowning in the chaos,
desperately trying to fix their situation, their circumstances,
fixing with everything that they know how except the one solution
that actually works. Your family, your friends, your
classmates, your Co workers. They need to hear about the
fixer. This doesn't mean being preachy
and obnoxious. It means living so differently,
with such hope and peace. In the middle of your suffering,
in the middle of your your problems, in the middle of
getting to know that you have cancer, whatever is going on in
your life, living with joy that people can't help us.
Why? What makes you different?
Why are you still joyful in this situation?
When that door is open, tell them about Jesus.
Application #4 is find the fixer.
Some of you have come here in this morning feeling broken,
feeling that there's no other way, that there's no hope.
Others have been carrying guilt and shame, thinking I have gone
too far, I have done too many things, I've dipped too far into
this world. I want to tell you that God,
what God told humanity in the darkest moments, that there is a
fixer. His name is Jesus.
It's the same thing He's telling you right now.
He's not looking at your failures.
He's looking at what His Son did on the cross.
He's not asking yourself to clean up first.
He's asking you to trust Him with your mess, with your
situations, with your pains, with your sufferings.
This is the same power that the universe was spoken into
existence with, and it's being offered to you.
I want you to take the opportunity to start a
relationship with Jesus. You can do that by praying what
we're about to pray. This isn't about perfect words.
It's not about getting the right formula.
God just cares about our hearts and that we're actually
surrendering to Him. You can pray this quietly.
You can pray this silently. You can repeat after me, or you
can declare in your own words that you fully trust in Jesus.
But this is a moment between you and Him.
Let's bow our heads in prayer. Right now is the time for
someone in this room to surrender their life to God and
tell him you're putting your full faith in Him.
Let's pray Jesus today I choose to follow you.
I know I'm a messed up person and lost on my own.
I know I can't save myself. I've tried.
I can't follow you perfectly. But I trust you to save me
today. I give you my entire life.
I surrender to you. I accept your love.
I accept your peace. I accept your forgiveness of all
my sins, all my problems. I look to you, God, Jesus, be my
savior. Head still bowed.
If you prayed that prayer for the very first time, would you
be brave and raise your hand for me to see?
I see your hand. I see your hand.
You put your hands down in the name of Jesus, Amen.
Listen, if you prayed that prayer for the very first time
and meant it, something incredible just happened.
You didn't just say some words. You stepped from death into
life. You stepped from darkness into
life. You went from lost to being
found. Welcome to the family of God.
This is just the beginning of the greatest adventure of your
life.