I wanted to start off talking about something that I know every single person in here has experienced. And you guys can, you know, try to get one by me and say that it's never happened to you. But I know that it's happened to at least each one of us at least one time. What I'm talking about is when you guys go out into public or maybe you're in a group and you guys do something super embarrassing. You guys do something that you didn't mean to do. There's only one thing you can do in a time like that. Walk it off, right? Just play it off, right? Try to save face. Act like it didn't happen. That's the only thing you can do in that scenario when everyone's looking at you. You're just like, oh, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. And just keep walking. It's like you go to work in the morning and you get dressed in the morning. It's dark and you get to work and somebody's like, “Yo, you got two different shoes on!” Right? You guys know. You look down and there's two different shoes. What happens? You start sweating. Your face turns red. You start making up excuses that don't even make sense. Right? Like, “Oh, yeah, I polished one. And, you know, the other one I left in the sun and it didn't take.” And, you know, everyone knows you're lying. Right? Everyone knows that that's not the truth. They're totally two different styles! But you just go with it, right? And then you just misdirect. “So how's your family? Your kid was sick, right? Oh, yeah, okay, all right, I'll see you later, man.” And you just walk away as fast as you can, right, and get out of that situation. We've all been there. You can act like it never happened to you, but it did. We all know it. So, you know, there's only one thing to do is just to roll with it. Just go with it and act like it didn't happen. So if you're like me, I find these situations hilarious, especially when they're happening to someone else. So I came up with a video of some of the times where you just got to walk it off, right? You just got to keep going. So you guys can go ahead and play that.

What do you do in those situations, right? They're the worst. You just got to walk it off, right? And just act like it didn't happen. As funny as it is to watch these things happen to other people - as much as I enjoy watching stuff like that happen and laughing about it - you know, the truth is that when I looked at these videos and I was going over what God and the Lord started to speak to me a little bit and saying, There's a time where we do this with God, where we try to play it off and act like it didn't happen. It's funny to watch it, you know, on videos, and it's funny to recount in our minds how that's happened to us in the past. But the truth is that when we try to do that with God, when we try to save face with God, it doesn't work out so well. We, as people of God, face situations every single day. We're in our day, we're in our workplace, we're at school, wherever, we're at home with our family. We face these scenarios every day where we have a decision to make. They come up fast. They come up quick. And they happen inside of the heart. And there's a pull on the heart. And you have a choice to make at that point. Do I go left and follow God and go into more intimacy with him and follow him? Or do I go right and try to save face, act like it never happened, and just kind of go our own way? You see, these scenarios, they happen every single day.

I think of our relationship with God kind of like marriage. Your marriage with your husband or wife, it's not based off of how good of a marriage you have. It's not based off of whether you guys live together. That just makes you guys roommates. Your marriage is based off of how much intimacy that you have with your partner. A good marriage and a bad marriage is defined by how much intimacy, how much closeness you have with your spouse. It's the same thing with God. Our relationship with God isn't judged off of whether we go to church or not. Our relationship with God is judged off of the intimacy, the closeness that we have with God. This intimacy is bred every single day. People think that they're just going to walk into church one day and they'll go down and pray and all of a sudden they'll get zapped and they'll have this great intimate relationship with God. That's not how it works. That's not how it works in your marriage. How does it work? It's the every-single-day things. It's the times that maybe you wake up in the morning and something happens inside of your heart. There's a pull inside of the heart to do something nice for your wife. You don't have to think about it. You don't go through your mind and list the pros and cons and try to think, “Well, you know, it’s the benefits of doing this for my wife and the negatives of doing this for my wife.” That's not how it works. It's a pull inside of the heart. And you get up and you feel it and you have that one split second to say, do I follow it, get up even though I'm tired and do it? Because I know it'll lead to more intimacy in my marriage. Or do I go to the right and just act like it never happened, and just say, “Well, you know, I never really felt it.”

You see, that's what we do with God. Every day we're faced with these scenarios. Every day we're faced with these situations. They come up so fast. They're inside of the heart. They're not necessarily in the mind. And there's a tug inside of the heart. Do I go to the left to God, or do I go to the right on my own, and act like it never happened? It's inside of the heart. Our relationship with God is based off of the intimacy that we have with him. It happens every single day. It's grown every single day. So today I want to look at some of these decisions that we face every day. Some of these scenarios that come up. The first one being, do we want to be right or do we want to be righteous? Do we want to be right or do we want to be righteous? Now, when I say those things, they sound very similar. The words right and righteous, they sound very similar. But the two concepts of being right or being righteous are at constant war with one another inside of our hearts. Do you want to be right this day or do you want to be righteous? You see, being right is about being right in yourself. It's about being right in your own mind and in your own eyes. It's when we seek to justify ourselves saying, “No, you don't understand, it's really not my fault. What had happened was it was A, B, C, and D. This is why it doesn't apply to me.” If you start off the conversation with “what had happened was”, you know you're on the wrong foot already. The youth group kids try to pull that with me sometimes. They come up and say, “Well, Kris, no, what had happened was-” and I said, “No, you don't have to tell me anymore. I get it.” Right? It's when we try to do it on our own without ever seeking God, even to the point of leaving him behind. It's about being right on your own without God. But being righteous can never be found in the eyes of man. Being righteous is a totally different concept, and it completely surpasses yourself and your own flesh and your own mind, and it can only be found in the hands of God. Being right, it stops right there. You just go to yourself and that's it. Being righteous, you go to the arms of God. Being righteous can only be found in his courts. It's to say, “God, I want to seek you, Lord. Lord, seek my heart. I open it up before you, Lord Jesus. I open it up right now. Search my heart. Show me where I am. Even if I think I was right. I don't want to be right, God. I want to be righteous.”

"Righteousness is a gift from God paid for by his very blood."

This is what breeds intimacy with God. It's not about showing up on Sunday even, as great as that is. It's not about reading your Bible as great as that is. But it's about the pull of the heart when you follow God. When there's something that happens inside of the heart of man that they choose not to go with their flesh, but to go with the Spirit of God. Right, you see, is about being approved in your own eyes. It's walking, trying to maintain our self-image. What are some of the symptoms of this? Being argumentative. Excusing our behavior. Blaming on outside influences. All in an effort to be right without ever seeking God. We've got to understand today that righteousness is a gift from God. Righteousness is a gift from God paid for by his very blood. Paid for by his blood on the cross. For thousands of years, the Jews had been living separate from God. They had been following the regulations and doing every single thing they're supposed to do. But Jesus Christ died on the cross. He gave us the greatest gift that was ever given to man, and that was to live in intimacy with their God. But yet we have been given such a great gift. The gift of intimacy with God. The gift to live in God's courts. Righteousness is taking advantage of that intimacy. It's coming into that intimacy. It's saying, “God, I don't want to be right on my own, but I want to be righteous in your eyes, God.” Galatians 2:16, it says, “We know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Christ Jesus. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.”

In my job, I have to constantly keep up on new laws and certain case law and things happening in the courts. So I, you know, I'll go to trainings and I'll go to all this different stuff they send me to, all to keep up on the stuff that always changes. Why does it always change? Because lawyers, which are unbelievable, I never understood the depths that lawyers will go to, to argue every single little word and every single meaning of every single thing that is stated in a law. They'll twist it and change it. They'll even go to the history of the person who wrote the law to show that the spirit of the law, what he meant, wasn't exactly what was written down on the page. I mean, think to the extent that these guys go to, to go by the law, to change it, to try to fit what they're trying to say. But you see, this is what we do with God. We argue with God like lawyers, and we say, “God no, you don't understand God, like I you know this doesn't fit me because of exactly this, your law says this. And you know that verse really doesn't apply to me because I'm a good person, and you know because that's not really what I was thinking. That's not really what I was feeling, that wasn't what was inside of my heart!” And this is what we do with God. We argue with him like a lawyer and in doing so we separate ourselves from him. We become right in our own eyes but the righteousness of God is far from us. This verse says, right, that we put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith. This faith I'm talking about, it's not the type of faith that says God is real. It's the type of faith that makes a man go down to his knees before God, open up his arms and say, “God, here I am. God, here I am. Search the very depths of who I am, God. Show me my heart and open up yourself to me.” You see, this faith breeds intimacy. And our relationship with God is judged off of that intimacy.

I think I can speak for every single husband in here. That when a guy gets home and he walks into the house, if something's wrong, it's almost like you can like taste it in the air, right? You know as soon as you walk in the house, something's not right. You can walk inside and just know subconsciously, even if it wasn't spoken about, wait a second, something's not right in my house. I think my wife might be upset about something. I think something might be going on. You can feel the intimacy had been broken. You can feel that there's something standing in between you and your spouse. I'm sure wives are the same way. How is it, people of God, that we know in an instant when the intimacy with our wives had been broken? How is it that when we go to work, we know something's up with our bosses? How is it that when something's up with our friends, we know in an instant? But when it comes to the Spirit of God, we can go days and weeks and months never recognizing that the spirit, that the intimacy has been broken. How is it that we can go weeks and stand in church and read his word yet never say, “God, the intimacy has been broken. Something's wrong, God. Something happened and I got to find out what it is.” That's what God meant for us. He meant our relationship to be like that marriage. Where all of a sudden, as soon as something comes in between us and God, we're like, “Whoa, whoa, something's going on. Something's happening, and I got to find out what it is.”

You know, I think about Adam and Eve. When Adam, when he took that fruit and sinned before God, what did he do? And God comes to question him about it. He says, “Adam, what's going on? What did you do?” What is his immediate reaction? He says, “No, God, it was the serpent's fault. No, God, it was the woman's fault. No, God, it was your fault.” You see, when that sin comes on upon a man, and he is striving to be right, the finger always points outward. But the righteous of God, the finger always points inward. We need to live exposed to God, in intimacy with God. The Bible says examine your heart, right? Examine your heart. Look at it closely. Last week, Prim was telling me about what he does for a living. He said he stares in a microscope all day long looking at cells and just sits there and looks at it, right? And he just looks at it and he's told me his project's going to take years to complete. And I thought, “Wow, I don't know if I could sit there and look that closely at cells all day long, right?” He's a smart guy, though. Good for him. I don't think I could do it. But do you think he's just glancing at the cells? No. He's looking intently. He's studying that cell. As soon as something happens inside of that cell, he says, whoa, we got to find out why that just happened. We have to look. It didn't just happen on its own. We got to look and figure out what just caused that. That's the way that God has called us to examine our hearts. Examine. Look at it closely. Why did that just happen? Why did that just go to the left? God, why am I arguing? Why am I justifying? Why am I excusing? God, why is my heart jumping to defend instead of jumping to the righteousness of God, instead of jumping into more intimacy with you. That has to be our heart's desire. Our relationship with God, it's based off of those quick, minuscule decisions that come up. They don't go make it to the brain too often. They start in the heart, and the heart jumps, and the heart jumps. Maybe there's some type of conviction. Maybe something happens inside of the heart. Maybe you're sitting there on a Sunday, and Pastor Janeth's preaching, and she gives a word, and all of a sudden there's a tug inside of the heart. What do we do? Do we seek God and say, “God, what was that? I want to be in righteousness. I want to be in communion with you.” Or do you stop and just say, “No, that really didn't apply to me, so I don't really have to think about it.” You see, being right stops you right there. It takes away your need for God, so you never have to go to him. But the righteousness of God can only be found in his presence. Being right or being righteous. That's one of the decisions that we may have to make all the time.

The second one is, are we being called innocent or are we being called guilty? Innocent or guilty. Now I know for the Christians that have been here for a while, when I say are you innocent, people jump to it automatically, right? Yeah, I'm innocent in the Lord Jesus Christ by the blood paid on the cross. He paid for my sins, right? It's quick. Like we have it memorized in our heads. We can say it like that. But when I say innocent or guilty, I'm more talking about who is calling you innocent and who is calling you guilty. The other day I was listening to this guy and he was talking about the crucifixion of Jesus. And I turned off the radio and I stopped for a second and I was like, God, why crucifixion? Why was your son crucified? I know, all the Christians, right? He took the penalty for my sins. I get that, right? But why crucifixion? When you read the Old Testament and go throughout the Bible, you'll find that God didn't concern himself with how other people did things. You see, crucifixion, It's not a Jewish custom. It's a Roman custom. So why, after so long, God was going through and wrote the Bible and only really cared about how his people did things. He didn't talk about other civilizations. He didn't talk about how other people did things. He talked about how his people did things, how his people went about things. In fact, he left them a list of exactly how to go about their daily lives. So God, why all of a sudden do you bring in this crucifixion? Not even just to your people, but to your very son. You bring in this outside influence, this outside custom. God, why would you do that? Why crucifixion? God began to speak to me and started to saying, “Kris, you don't understand. You see, the Jewish leaders then, they had to go to an outside law. They couldn't take my law. Because God, my son, the Lord Jesus Christ was innocent in my law. He was completely innocent. He had no sin. In fact, he was the very fulfillment of the law. So they had to go and they had to bring the world's law. They had to bring another law in to judge my son.” What is the world's law? It's a flawed way of thinking made by flawed men. I'm not necessarily talking about even like feeding being a law. Or if you open up a law book, you can read about all the different laws. That's not so much what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the laws and the social norms that govern our way of thinking, the world's way of thinking every single day. Right? There's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things. And everybody in the world has this inside of their hearts of which way to do what's right and what's wrong, what I can get away with and what I can't.

We need to understand today that the laws of God are in direct contrast in so many instances from the ways that the world runs. And we try to walk this fence all the time of not trying to offend God, yet not trying to offend the world. And we walk it, you know, very slowly, like we're walking on eggshells. “I don't want to offend the world, but I don't want to offend God.” And we walk this. But the truth is, so often we find you can't have both. You can't have both. Think about Jesus Christ going innocent in God's eyes, the perfect Son of God. And what do they do? They release a murderer to make room for him on the cross. And he goes up on the cross. And who is he between? Two convicted criminals. The perfect Lamb of God. Treated like this criminal who was innocent. Who was innocent. He didn't break any Roman laws. But yet he was found guilty in the eyes of man. You guys ever heard the phrase guilty in the court of public opinion, right? That's the same thing. And people fear that almost as much as they fear getting found guilty in the court of law. Because they know what the consequences are. Jesus Christ, he was found innocent in God's eyes and guilty in the world's. Let's look at 1 Peter 2. “‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ They hurled insults at him, yet he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.” So often, people of God, we find that we can either be innocent in the world's eyes and guilty in God's or innocent in God's eyes and guilty in the world. It's one or the other.

"It's a heart that wants to be intimate with God that seeks the innocence of God. It's a heart that wants to be intimate with God that goes to the cross every single day."

Remember I talked about those scenarios, those decisions we have to make every single day. Right, you get up and you go to work, you go to school, you're with your families, something happens, there's a tug inside of the heart that says, “Oh, I know this situation is wrong.” And there's a tug that says, “Oh, I know I should go this way, but I want to be innocent in the world's eyes too.” Where does our heart jump to? Does it go to the left that leads to intimacy with God? Or does it go to the right that leads to us being separate from God, but feeling right on our own? Jesus Christ, he knew what God intended. He knew he was innocent in God's eyes, and he did not retaliate. He did not reason. He did not defend. But he trusted himself to him who judges justly. We have to look and say, “Where does our heart lie,” this day. There's this unspoken fear that the world tries to pressure us with. Don't step out of line. Don't be guilty in the eyes of the world or else you'll be isolated. People will have a negative opinion of you. You'll be pushed aside and not included. Whether it be our bosses or our friends or our family or our neighbors, we don't want to step into that line of being guilty in their eyes. We want to be included and not separated from the majority. We want eyes that look at us as friends and not foes. But let me explain something to you. You see, everything in this world is a cheap imitation of what God intended. We say to be innocent in the world's eyes, but the truth is there is no innocence outside of the cross of God. And Satan likes to lie to us and talk to us about how there can be innocence in the world, but the truth is there is no innocence. It's only by the cross of God. Innocence can only be found in the cross of God and by his blood. Let me explain to you what it means to be innocent in the eyes of God. It's when God up in heaven turns his eyes to you and he looks at you intently. He does not see a man who never sinned. He sees a man covered by the blood of his son. And that is the person he calls innocent. And that is the person he calls righteous. Those are the ones that God looks at. It's a heart that wants to be intimate with God that seeks the innocence of God. It's a heart that wants to be intimate with God that goes to the cross every single day. To seek more of that blood. And what good thing would God withhold from his bride? What joy, what peace, what love, what thing will he withhold from the one who loves him and wants to be intimate with him, who wants to come into his courts and find innocence at the cross? We have to look and say, where does our innocence come from?

You know, we have a tendency to plead our innocence to defend the image that we have of ourselves. We come before God and we have this image inside of our minds. And I've lived it. I've seen it, right? I had this nice, beautiful image of who I was in my mind's eye. I would look and say, you know, like, “Whoa, I wonder what I look like. I wonder what I'm like inside.” And it was this guy with his hands on the hip like a superhero, right? Strong, you know, beautiful and sparkling! Like you would see in a comic book, right? That was the image I had in my mind of who Kris was. And then something would come up. My heart would move. Pastor Janeth would come to me and say, “Kris, you know, something's going on in your life.” And she would say, “You know, God told me this and, you know, he showed me this about you.” And I would look in her hands and I would say, “Oh, that's not nice. That's gross. That's dirty. How? No, look at me. Hands on hips. Beautiful. Sparkling. This guy and this guy. They can't be from the same thing.” Right? And that's what we do. We say, these things can't be related. Up here, so beautiful. Down here, so dirty. “No, Pastor Janeth. No. Sorry. You missed it on this one. You missed it on this one. These two things, they can't be related.” And then what we have to do. We have to start going down the trail, right? We have to take a step back. Start looking at us subjectively. We have to pick up the Word of God and start looking at the Word of God and comparing ourselves to the Word of God. And every time, you know what I found? I wasn't so innocent. Every time I found I could not stand on my own two feet. And every time I ran to the cross of God saying, “God, my innocence can only be found by you.”

Why did Jesus Christ die on the cross? It wasn't for your innocence. It was for your sins. Why did he go and pay the price? It wasn't so we can say we never sinned. It was so we can say, “God, I am the worst sinner of them all. Yet you forgave me on the cross.” That's what God is meant to do. I was talking to a few people the other day. And after I got done talking to them, one of them stopped me and they said, “Kris, let me explain to you exactly how I'm innocent and everyone else is guilty.” So they started to break it down a point by point with me saying like, you know, ABCD and bullet points and going through the whole thing. And at the end of it, I was like, wait, wait, wait. Let's stop for a second. Let's stop. And I'm like, let's take a step back and let's ask God how he sees this scenario, right? Let's say, let's just not deal with the bullet points and every single exact little thing like a lawyer. Let's step back and say, “God, how do you see this? I want to see it through your eyes.” And you know, it was almost instantaneous where it was to turn and say, “I'm guilty.” You know, it was almost instantaneous when you took a step back to look at it throughout God's eyes, for that person to say, no, I see it now. I see exactly what you're saying. You see, we like to focus. We like to argue like a lawyer, but God is calling us not to be innocent in our own eyes, not to be innocent in the world's eyes, but to be innocent in God's eyes.

Galatians 2:21 says, “for if righteousness can be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” He died for our sins. He died to cover our inequity. Jesus Christ, it says in the Bible that he did not come for the healthy, but for the sick. And by our perseverance in claiming our innocence, we disqualify ourselves from the power of the cross in our lives. All that arguing, all that justifying, all it does is separate us from God, put a nice little bubble around our sin, and allow it to grow up to be big and strong. And we take away the blood on the cross that Jesus Christ died for, so that we could be forgiven for our sins. We should be continually searching, continually searching and examining our hearts. “Lord, I have this area in my life, I need your blood! Lord, I discovered this sin today. I need your blood! Lord, I screwed up today. I need your blood!” That's what we say. We go to him every day and say “God, I need your blood, I see this sin moving in my life. I need your blood!” And God covers that sin and he takes away that sin. And then, we grow up we get up and say “I was once a sinner but now I'm a saint. I was once bogged down by sin, but now I can live as a free man.” Do we lead it to innocence in the world to be separate from God? Or do we lead it to innocence from God that leads to, again, to more that close relationship, that intimacy?

"But God in his grace looks down upon us and instead of giving us the wrath that we deserve, he gives us grace, he gives us mercy, and he gives us forgiveness."

So the final thing we see, we can be right or righteous, we can be guilty or innocent, and finally, we can live saving face or we can live in saving grace. You know, we can all laugh about, you know, those situations, those embarrassing situations. I know I do, right? We all laugh about those embarrassing things. We understand saving face, but I don't think we understand saving grace. If I ask anybody in RLTI here, what's saving grace, right? My Thursday night, what are you going to say? It's the undeserved favor of God, right? Like that, undeserved favor of God. But it's so much more than that. It is the undeserved favor of God, but it's the undeserved love of God. It's the undeserved peace of God. It's the undeserved forgiveness of God. God is all of those things, right? Amen. I explain grace to my Thursday night as it's like that weight that's upon your shoulders, right? There comes a time where a man comes to terms with his sin, and it's that heavy weight upon that shoulders that bears you down to the ground. You feel like you can't get up. You feel like you can't move, and it's so heavy upon your shoulders. And we all know the punishment for sin. We know it. God knows it. And we're looking up, and we feel that upon ourselves. But God in his grace looks down upon us and instead of giving us the wrath that we deserve, he gives us grace, he gives us mercy, and he gives us forgiveness. You see, people can't live with that weight upon their shoulders every day. They either have to go to the cross of God, they either have to go to saving grace, or they have to go on their own and try to act like it didn't happen. Try to save face before God and say,“No God, that never really happened. If I don't think about it again, it doesn't matter.” Right?

And that's what we try to do with God. But what begins to happen with somebody who tries to save face? They live their life with that weight upon their shoulders, and then drugs, and then alcohol, then addictions, then busyness, then girlfriends, and boyfriends, and all of these things that we fill our time with. Why? To take off our minds, off of the weight upon our shoulders, and the eyes of the living God. We act like those embarrassing situations. Walk it off, act like it didn't happen and God will never see it. Just keep going and just play it off, save face, and we'll never have to address it again. But that's not how it works. The weight adds, and it adds, and it adds. And we're further down and further down. And there comes a point in every man's life where they either have to go their own way completely or say, “God, I need your saving grace. Lord, I need your sacrifice on the cross. Lord, I need what you did on the cross. Lord, you died for me, God. You died so I would not have to live like this.” You see, those who live saving face, they will argue, justify, calculate, and confuse their way out of responsibility. But those who live in saving grace say, “No, that's me. That was me. That is me. But God has forgiven me.”

2 Corinthians 12. “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, and my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest upon me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Power may rest on me, right? What power? It's the power of redemption. It's the power of forgiveness. It's the power of grace. And it all comes from the cross of God. It all points to the cross that Jesus Christ gave up his life for us. It's the symbol of victory over flesh and what does it say - it says he delights in hardships, in insults, in persecutions. Why? Because the fleshy man has fallen. Because he has been found innocent in the eyes of God, and like Jesus Christ who was only concerned about the innocence of God, he entrusts himself to him who judges justly. We have a choice to make every day flesh or spirit. Right or left. One must rise so the other may fall. One must die so the other might live. We try to save face so often, but in doing so, we separate ourselves from God. But living exposed to God, living in intimacy with God, means that you're opening yourself up. You see, there's nothing like it in this world but to live in an intimate relationship with the creator of all heaven and all of earth, that you can open up your arms and open up your heart and say, “God, here I am. God, take a look inside. It might not be good. It might be dirty, but God, I open myself up to you, Jesus, this day.” That is true intimacy. That's what it means to have an intimate relationship with God. Saving face focuses on how they are strictly right or strictly wrong. They're innocent until proven guilty beyond the reasonable doubt. But living and saving grace, it always focuses on the cross, on the sacrifice that was paid for our sins.

We do not disqualify ourselves by acting like it never happened or refusing to present it before God or separating ourselves and hiding what is really there. But we say “God, your cross was for me, Jesus. Here it is, God, I lay it down at your feet.” The gospel was once called “good news” for a reason. It's been watered down so often over so many years. It's been watered down to a point where it just means a nice story that you guys should like live up to, that you should really think about a lot. But the Bible is good news. It is good news. The gospel is good news for the heavy laden. The gospel is good news for the broken. The gospel is good news for the ones who have weight upon their shoulders. It's good news for those who live every single day with that weight upon them and they feel like they can't go anymore. It's good news for the ones who have been broken down and beat down and can't do it another day. It's good news for the ones who say, “I can't do it anymore, God. There has to be a better way.” The more guilt you have, the more Jesus can forgive you for, and the more power God can move in your life with. By that measure, you guys, the kids especially, should be taking any guilt they can, right? Their friends do something wrong. No, I'm guilty, right? And they take it. Why? Because there's more guilt is the more power God can work in our lives. We should be laying it down, saying, “God, here I am. God, here I am at your throne, Lord.”

I started this off with saying that your relationship with God is not based off of whether you're in church or whether, you know, you had an experience with God. It's based off of the intimacy that you have with him, the deep intimacy, the things of the heart. You see, these decisions that we face every day, they happen so quickly you have one second to respond to that thing and that tug at the heart that one, that conviction you open up your Bible and you read it and you say “Oh, this sounds familiar.” There's a tug on the heart and you have that instant to say, “God, I want to follow you. I want to go deeper with you. I want to be righteous, I want to be innocent in your eyes, and I want to live in that saving grace.” Or to go on our own. God died on the cross to give us this gift of intimacy. He shed his very blood so that we could come in this day. I pray that we would examine our hearts and say, “God, how am I living differently?” For thousands of years, people lived following the rules and going about how they were supposed to. But Lord, “How has your cross changed me? How has it developed more intimacy in my heart? How has it caused me to open myself up to you? How has it caused me to fall to my knees and say, you are the God of heaven and of earth, and Lord, I don't want to do it my own way anymore?” God died and shed his blood so that we could be exposed to him, so that we could live in him, so that we would not die in his presence, but we would come in and be intimate with him.

So Lord, Lord, I pray that you would speak to the hearts, Jesus. Speak to the hearts, God. Go deep, Lord Jesus. I pray that every man and woman in here would open up their heart to you, Jesus. They would open up their heart and say, “God, here I am. I'm not trying to save face. I'm not trying to do it on my own. I'm not trying to act like it never happened.” For God, innocence can only come from you. Innocence can only be found on the cross. Your son paid the price for my sins, God. So that I would not have to live heavy laden. So that I would not have to live with this burden upon my shoulders. Lord, I want to come into that marriage with you. That intimate place with you, God. That intimate place, Jesus, where you are found, God. I don't want to live the same. I've spent so long going my own way and doing my own thing. So long that I don't even recognize sometimes when the intimacy has been broken. Lord, I know it with my husband. I know it with my wife. Why don't I know it with you, Jesus? Bring me into your courts, God. Bring me into where your spirit is, God. For there I will find rest. For there I will find comfort. For there I will find forgiveness. I want to be right in your eyes, God. I want to be innocent in your eyes, God. I want to be righteous. I want to know your grace, God.