So I have to take at least one of these blogs to brag on my boy Matt Chandler. He is a pastor from The Village church in Texas. You most definitely need to check out his podcast. I listen to him faithfully and never get enough. He truly has changed areas of my life. I have grown so much in the past couple of years from listening to him speak. I can go on and on about how great of a speaker and pastor I think he is, but is a small piece of one of his sermons that struck me the other day. The Lord's favor is a peculiar thing, is it not? Like, if we talked honestly and openly, most of us would have a very difficult time with the reality that there's this real deep pleasure in the heart of God for us right now. It's not a stretch for us to believe that God loves us in the future, because we're going to do better, aren't we? I heard this illustration, and I loved it. What if you knew that in order for your kid to not fall over anymore but be able to run free and strong, he was going to have to fall down fifteen times—I mean horrific, fifteen—I mean—bam—like blood, teeth, ear fell off—I mean, bad. Fifteen times he was going to fall and bust, but then after that fifteenth time, he'd never fall again. I think two things would occur every time he fell. One would be the hurt of the fall, but the second thing would be a joy in knowing, “Only fourteen more. Only thirteen more. Only twelve more. Only one more year. Only three more years. Only one more fall.” The favor of the Lord. You see, the thing that's driving all of our doing instead of being is when you strip away all of our correct language, we still don't believe that God loves us because of the cross of Jesus Christ and the shed blood. We haven't by faith embraced that. We can embrace that God loves, but God loves those who do well. Isn't that what we really believe? Not that God loves us right now. But most of us don't buy that. Honestly, most of us believe that we've got to do these things in order for there to be any real pleasure of God in us. We've got to read our Bible daily. And we've got to pray every day, and we've got to do that and do this and we’ve got to do these things and that's how we get the Lord's favor, by being a good Christian, which biblically there's no definition of. There can't be a definition of that, because either by faith you've embraced the righteousness of Christ, or you haven't. And that's why you're seeing so many men and women here in Dallas who we're baptizing who get in the water with this testimony: “I grew up in church, and then I walked away. I didn't know the gospel. I’m back.” I mean, probably 80% of the people that we've baptized over the last five years have got in the water with that testimony. “I grew up in church. I never knew the gospel. I knew quiet time. I knew, 'Don't cuss.' I knew, 'Don't go see Terminator 2. It will mess up your mind. Garbage in, garbage out.' I knew, 'Don't listen to secular music.' That's what I knew. Nobody told me about imparted righteousness.” Easy to press in and love a God who you believe has an infinite amount of pleasure in you. If my daughter thinks I'm angry at her, do you know what she does? She hides. But if she knows she going to walk in the room and I'm going to be like, “Look at that! Get a camera!” If she knows that there's going to be this implicit joy in me when I see her, then she wants to sit by me. She wants to sit on my lap. She wants to tell me about her day. She wants to walk with me. Do you think that's some kind of a coincidence, or do you think maybe God's trying to communicate something? I know—narrow is the path, and few get it. It's frustrating.
