Most of us think of salvation as transactional or when we have a problem that threatens our health or security and we are forced to think about it.

In Genesis 3:21, Adam and Eve are ashamed and naked, yet God is merciful and covers them with the skin of an animal. In order for them to be covered, life had to be taken to triumph over their sin and give them freedom from shame. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the animal whose blood was shed—skinned— to provide cover for us.

In Isaiah 43, we are reminded that God who created and formed us has chosen to identify with us in our brokenness, even while we create and form our own gods.

Through salvation, we are not given the absence of difficult situations but the power and comfort of God’s presence in the face of our difficulty. God is committed to be present and connected to his people.

God is Yahweh, your God. He is the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. You are precious in his sight, honored, and loved (Isaiah 43:4, ESV).

Read Romans 8:31-32. God is willing to go to this length to be your God. He gave up his son to be the innocent sacrifice for your sin and shame, consuming you with his holiness and giving you freedom from the false and life-draining saviors you find on this earth. This is who he is and why you can trust him.

We are born with a sinful nature, unable to rescue ourselves.

Ephesians 2 lays out for us the journey from spiritual death to spiritual life. While it is easy for us to identify the “unacceptable” forms of spiritual death—murder, abandoning your family, gossip, etc., we have also created “acceptable” forms of spiritual death in our affluent culture: you can be religious, educated, and successful by the world’s standards yet still be just as dead as the person who has no concept of God. The selfishness, pride, and separation from Christ are still the same.

According to Ephesians 2, we are dead in sin when we are born. It is only after trusting in Christ and receiving a new nature that we have a choice of which passions and desires to follow: those of our old, sinful nature or of our new redeemed nature.

Our sin is not on the outside; it’s on the inside, It isn’t just something you do, it is who you are. You can’t rescue yourself from who you are—you need Jesus.

If you have been a follower of Christ a long time, you might find yourself wrongly feeling entitled because of your work and faithfulness over many years. Faithfulness is not the same as regeneration.

Our union with Christ is not just a side-by-side connection; we are in him, and he is in us. We cannot be separated.

Part of our salvation is not about us at all but about revealing God’s great generosity towards us.

We all find ourselves in a place of guilt. Guilt isn’t a feeling, it’s a fact. We are all guilty and without Christ cannot fix our own problem.

The law was not given to us so that we could fix our guilt problem by doing the right thing. The law exposes our problem. It shows:

• The standard of righteousness (reveals sin in comparison to the standard)
• The boundary of righteousness (exposes transgression of going beyond the boundary)
• The straight line of righteousness (shows us our brokenness in comparison, or our iniquities)

The best we have to bring, compared to the standard, is still inadequate and impure (Isaiah 64:6).

No matter who you are or what you’ve done, there is a pathway for you to be made right with God (Romans 3:22).

God retains his integrity and maintains his justice. He actually removes the problem of our guilt without glorifying the guilty. He is both just and the Justifier of those who have faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:26)

Our acquittal is not based on obeying the law but on faith in the person and work of Jesus.

If you are not broken over your guilt, you have not seen yourself for who you truly are, and if you don’t first see your guilt, you will never seek a solution for it.

We can’t move from consciousness of our guilt to consciousness of our justification and righteousness in God without:

• Being in the Word.
• Personal dependence on the Spirit.
• Preaching the gospel to yourself over and over and over.

Quiet our lives -> acknowledge the fact of our guilt -> hear God’s declaration of righteousness -> live in God’s power for his glory.

The consequence of the curse we are under because of our sin is judgment; we have been cut off from God.

The curse is a declaration of our unrighteousness while the blessing is a declaration of righteousness through Jesus Christ.

While we aren’t trying to follow the law in the same way as the Galatians, we often have the false belief that “if I do good things, God will approve of me”.

Our past is redeemable but not erasable; we can’t work it off or prove ourselves to God.

Our instinct that it takes a massive work to fix the gap between us and God is correct, but it’s through the work of Jesus not our own. We have to decide if we will trust God or ourselves.

Jesus’ death on the cross satisfies God’s wrath over our sin—it is substitutionary atonement.

Your sin is not more powerful than the infinite God who became man to come save you.

If our faith is based on performance, we will either swing to despair or arrogance. We have to get away from this measurement and trust in God.

Your sin is not more powerful than his sacrifice.

As believers, when we died to our old lives with Christ’s death, we are done scheming and trying to make something happen in our lives. Because he was raised, we instead get a new life—living for him, surrendered to God, trusting him with our lives on his terms.

In Colossians 1:15-20, we see that what Jesus was doing in his death and resurrection was beginning a whole new humanity and new creation.

God’s gift of a new life is given to us freely. Receiving gifts freely requires a posture of humility and exposure. If we can’t receive gifts without feeling the need to repay or feeling in debt, we need to examine our soul.

We are Christ’s ambassadors, qualified to represent the eternal kingdom in an alien territory. When we speak, we speak for him.

Jesus brings us into relationship with him and then chooses to make his appeal to others through us. Our personal reconciliation to God comes with responsibility.

It’s possible for us to receive all of this and it be in vain. If the Holy Spirit is not powerful and effective in your life, making righteousness on display through you, you need to just start obeying and doing the work of God.

Sometimes we take too long thinking about why our heart isn’t in the right place when we just need to go and do.

In our church, we have people under the power of sin who think they are “free” but are actually using the grace of God as a covering for sin.

As believers, we must choose daily to die to sinful behaviors (Romans 6:2-4).

Through salvation, we are removed from the penalty of sin, then in our earthly lives removed from the power of sin, and finally eternally we are removed from the presence of sin.

With every sinful temptation, we have to consider (believe to be true, reckon it true) that we are dead to sin and alive to Christ (Romans 6:11).

It is ironic that walking away from the thing that is destroying you feels like death when the thing that’s destroying you, and is death, feels like life.

Instead of having faith and trusting God to get us through a difficult season of learning how to trust him and not just comforting ourselves, we often panic and return to a form of control that feels familiar. Over time, the glory of God should become more important than our comfort.

Relapse after coming out of a world of sin and self-destruction most often stems from keeping secrets and a lack of structure.

Freedom does not mean a lack of boundaries or our own sovereignty. It does mean we have the choice to live the kind of life that keeps us free.

God will not obey himself for you. He gave you a new life, a new heart, and regenerated your soul, so now you have the ability to stop worshipping idols and worship God.

When you worship something other than God, you think you’re in control of sin, but it’s in control of you.

Sin “works” for the moment but leaves us empty long-term, and over time, we will become what we worship.

Idols will comfort us in a way that God doesn’t do for us on command. Trusting in God is an act of faith and obedience—trusting that we will be truly fulfilled on his terms.

When we choose to find satisfaction in things other than God, we lose the awe of God as our savior; we neglect the truth that we have present benefits of salvation in this world—right now.

" . . . it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” - C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

In the Jewish temple, God was present but not accessible to most people. Through the death of Jesus, he’s now present and entirely accessible to those who put their faith in him. Since all of this has been done for us, the way we engage God and people completely changes.

Because we are clean, we can go directly into the presence of God without shame. We have to trust that he does not hate us—that he is for us, not against us, and that we don’t have to be self-protective.

When we are able to trust that we really are clean, we are free to live openly and honestly with others, allowing ourselves to be fully known.

Some of us know that we are clean, but we don’t feel like it. This means you are either 1) not a believer or 2) you are a believer, but you are hiding and not walking in the freedom of confession and honesty that Jesus has granted you.

The people who are able to trust that they are clean are the most spiritually powerful because they are walking in the freedom to engage, confess, and be fully known by others without fear.

Luke 5:13-14 reminds us that our lives are a public testimony, on display and shared with others.

If you waver or fall away from your faith, it usually is not about legitimate doubts about who God is but instead about your decision to trust yourself to get what you want more than you trust God to give you what you need.

Because we are clean, we have a responsibility to encourage and motivate one another towards good works. We need to put ourselves at risk to move people towards reconciliation, service, love, and kindness.

When we neglect meeting with others, we are either independent and prideful, or we are wounded and self-protective.

God sent Jesus to buy our freedom and adopt us as his very own.

As a child of God, we have been both justified (made right with God) and adopted (made members of God’s family).

Justification is the language of the courtroom but adoption is the language of the living room.

God doesn’t just forgive us of our sin and stop there—he brings us into the family.

God is our Abba, Father and we are his beloved children.

Because of your sonship in God’s family, your value and security no longer hang in the balance.

We are not turning away from our slavery to BECOME sons but because we ARE sons.

We do not have to perform for this love.

Slaves believe the lie that their value and security hang in the balance. Sons believe the truth that their value and security are in nothing else except Jesus.

Jesus is a stream of living water for our souls—generously flowing and bringing never-ceasing life and abundance.

Jesus is about bringing shame into the light and transforming it into freedom.

The church is not like a museum where people gather to separate themselves from brokenness but a hospital for the hurting—we ARE the gathering place.

Shame loses its power when our brokenness is brought into the light.

When your life transforms like the Samaritan woman, you become a trophy of God’s grace—honored and on display for others to see. But to be this trophy, you have to be willing to share your story of brokenness with others.

Fear, hiding, and shame is turned to freedom, honesty, and proclaiming in Christ’s name.

Shame tells you to feel defective, worthless, useless, and not good enough. You start creating a negative narrative about yourself and embark on a journey to live that narrative out. It is a powerful beast when you think you can “manage” it without bringing it into the light with a trusted person.

Some of us might be living with shame over harm done to us, like sexual abuse. If sexual abuse has been or is currently part of your story, we want to care for you and walk alongside you. Please click here to contact us.

Jesus’ life is covered in shame. He comes from a shameful family, a town on the “outside”, his friends are known as the worst in society, he is wrongly accused over and over, and then he is tortured in front of crowds and hangs naked on a cross. His entire life is covered in shame. How is that possible? Because it’s not his. It’s yours. It’s ours. He takes it for us so that we can walk in the freedom to be known and exposed for all we are.

The thing that devours us—Jesus devours it.

God takes us from a position of guilt and, through the cross, transforms us to a place of love and glory.

We’re living in the now with the taste of the not yet.

We have to be disciplined in our faith to trust God in both the “now” and the “not yet”.

Our spiritual bodies in the “not yet” are more material than what we can handle in the “now”.

We were cut off from our source of life but through Jesus we get our life back, triumphing over sin and death.

What is broken now was restored through the work of Christ.

Faith reaches out into the things unseen and it drags them into our current experience.

Although a lot of false teaching will tell us that if we have faith then we will always win right now on our terms, we have to understand that sometimes faith means God answers the way we want him. It also means God gives us something we did not ask for but we can still find rest, peace, and hope in him (e.g. 2 Corinthians 12:1-12).

God is going to heal us, but it is not within our power to dictate to the Lord how he should bless us; it is our responsibility to plead, to ask him, and then submit to his purposes.

Don’t saddle those who are suffering with the responsibility of their own sickness.

Proverbs gives us several definitions of a fool and a wise person:

Ignorance and pride breed disobedience and foolishness, while truth and humility equal obedience and wisdom.

Foolishness and wisdom are not intelligence issues but character issues.

Both the fool and the wise person hear Jesus’ teaching, but the fool hears and forgets, trusting in himself. The wise person hears, processes, and responds in obedience because he knows he can’t trust in himself.

Two main reasons we don’t listen to Jesus’ words are that we are distracted or deceived.

It is foolish for us to build our lives on a foundation where we see a false sense of progress just because we can see it and feel it. The solid foundation is found in the unseen work of a heart tethered to Jesus Christ.

We live in a world where there will always be situations and experiences that will test the integrity of the lives we are building—will your foundation hold up?

Storms shake the very foundations of our lives—but it's not about avoiding the storms; it's about letting the storms expose our foolishness and drive us to the solid foundation that is found in Jesus Christ.

We can get disillusioned with our faith when we think that our future glory is supposed to be presently available to us.

In Genesis 3, the curse makes it clear that there will be chaos in creation and that what we need to survive will be working against us in our present world.

Both all creation and believers groan on this earth. Even though we have the Spirit embedded in us, we still wait with eager hope to be free from these bodies and this world.

There is a future day when we will be consumed in full with the glimmer of light inside of us.

Both nonbelievers and believers know instinctively that there is a world better than this one. How would we know to long for that world if there is no Heaven or future glory?

As believers, the Spirit has been placed inside of us as a marker of our future.

Some false teaching claims that our future glory in its fullness is available to us now, but it is not. God is a God of miracles and healing, but he is not on demand to give us whatever we want right now.

When you hear theological framework that aligns exactly with what you want, you have to be cautious and wary.

Although we do not have our future glory in fullness on this earth, believers are not to be shriveled up, weak, frail, and complaining all the time—we have a glorious, certain hope that we can wait for with patience and confidence.

We can endure any moment because we can put our faith and trust in the future moment when we will be consumed with glory in the physical presence of God.

The groaning of this life will drive out our attachments to this world and cause us to crave another world—the one we were created for.

When we are stricken with grief, suffering, and weakness the Holy Spirit intercedes for us in alignment with God’s will.

We have to endure. Continue to release your grip on this world, setting your heart and mind more on the invisible than the visible.

If you are not a Christian, there is a future hope that goes beyond your present world and transcends this moment. God offers you redemption from your greatest problem—not your sickness, your family, your loneliness, or anything of this world—but from the issue of your soul.

If you want to experience the protection of God as your Shepherd, you have to embrace your helplessness as a sheep.

God wants to be your shepherd more than you want him to be your shepherd.

The problem is not that God is not willing to bless us; it is that we won’t come to him and receive blessing on his terms.

The Shepherd knows where to take the sheep.

We are called to live every day as though we are on the edge of the desert and we don’t have what we need; our everyday hope is that we have a shepherd who takes care of us.

In a culture that has everything we could want, we are still destroying ourselves trying to find comfort with powerless things of this world.

Wake up every day and first preach your own helplessness to yourself, and second preach to yourself God’s willingness to guide and lead you.

God’s goodness and unfailing love will chase us down all the days of our lives (Psalm 23:6).

The hope and comfort we have is not just that we have a shepherd but that our shepherd has passed through death ahead of us so he can lead us through and is on the other side making a way for his sheep.

If you don’t obey and follow God’s Word, you can have all the physical riches in the world and even live a morally right life while still being ultimately poor.

The man in Mark 10 thinks he is wealthy because of his physical possessions and that his stuff is important and valuable. He doesn’t know the things he has are actually getting in the way of him having real wealth that can only be found in Jesus. He’s not clear that he is actually poor.

It’s easy for us to fall into the lie of physical wealth because it seems available for us to trust in when really it will fail us.

In an affluent culture, we need to teach ourselves to look past our abundant resources and accept that we are poor. Find poverty so you can find true wealth.

As we move from impoverished to wealthy, we receive the riches of having our condemnation removed, the Spirit dwelling in us, future hope, sacrificial community, and being included in God’s mission.

The Holy Spirit is like our personal indwelling tour guide who moves, directs, guides, and confronts us through life.

The nature of our citizenship in Heaven means we are: chosen people (Romans 9), royal priests, a holy nation, and God’s very own possession.

God calls people from what they are doing to what he is doing.

Part of being a citizen in God’s Kingdom is owning the fact that you do not have a right to be there.

Many of us hide our sin out of pride and self-righteousness, believing the lie that we can be good enough. However, our biggest problem is our self-righteous which makes us unwilling to expose ourselves for who we are. That self-righteousness is what will keep us from coming to Jesus, not our sin.

God has given us all good things for our enjoyment, but this indulgence becomes sinful when we use our freedom as an opportunity to satisfy our sinful nature instead of using our freedom for love.

As citizens of God’s Kingdom we live a life of abstinence from worldly pleasures.

We have to live our lives with care and intentionality—living beautiful lives among unbelieving people.

In Genesis 1:26-28, we see that God created us in his image with dominion and reign over the earth—in the beginning this power was good and meant for blessing.

God created us to use our authority for blessing, but in our sin we often look at power as a means to bless ourselves rather than others.

Philippians 2:5-6 reminds us that Jesus had all power and didn’t use it to his own advantage.

The dominion that we lost in the garden—Jesus restores; the responsibility that we are given to leverage our power for good—he models; and the power he was given—he lays down for the sake of those in need.

You might find yourself influenced by power as the oppressor (using authority to get what you want and bringing affliction on others), the oppressed (hurt by someone in power), distant (using your power to create a safe world or comfort bubble where brokenness can’t get in), or frustrated (simmering with anger and withdrawing from relationships). No matter where we are on this spectrum, Jesus has already given us the freedom to use our power to bring blessing to others through his death on the cross.

If you find yourself as the oppressor, remember we will be elevated with Jesus one day, so we are freed from the need to elevate ourselves here on earth.

If you are the oppressed, in Philippians 2:9-11 we are reminded that in eternity there is no confusion over who is in control, and it is our loving Father.

If you find yourself distant and frustrated, consider that there might be people within your reach who do not yet know Jesus and that you need to lean in to their brokenness instead of distancing yourself.

Lay down your attitude about power so that you can pick God’s up.

We can say or think anything about our theology, but it is what we do that reveals what we actually believe.

Mark 8:31 can be confusing for the believer who believes in his head that following the Messiah doesn’t equal suffering. However, in the same way that Peter wrestled with wanting his own agenda, we have to come to understand that God’s agenda doesn’t merge with our own.

Some of us are missing out on what God has for us because we are waiting for God to change his agenda to match what we want.

At some point we have to stop talking about and listening to the things of Jesus and instead do something about it.

If you are spiritually blind, not trusting in Jesus as your Savior, understand that your desire for control is not healthy. You are the creature, and God is the Creator; you were never created for this much control over your life. Do you need to surrender control to Jesus and follow him?

Releasing the right of control to God is freeing.

If you are spiritually half-sighted, you may be learning, but you are not moving. You need to take action on something you have learned in this series and surrender to the call on your life to live holy and set apart.