Daily Hope - Rick Warren

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, this is Rick Warren, Bible teacher for the Daily
Hope Broadcast. Did you know that because of Easter, your
past can be forgiven, you get a purpose for living,
and you can have a home in heaven. That's good news.
Where else can you get that kind of news? Nowhere else?
And did you know that at Easter, studies have shown
people are more open to an invitation to go to
church than at any other time of the year. Don't

(00:22):
go to church by yourself, but bring somebody who doesn't
know Jesus Christ, a family member, a friend, a coworker,
a neighbor, a relative. And if you bring them to
that church service and they come to know Christ, You're
going to be making a friend for eternity. It'll be
the most important investment you can ever make in their lives.
And by the way, if they come to Christ, would

(00:43):
you let me know about it. I'd love to hear
that story that you brought somebody to Easter and they
found Jesus. You can write to me Rick at Pastorrick
dot com. That's rickat Pastorrick dot com. I would love
to hear from you. God bless you and Happy Easter.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Hello and welcome to Pastor Rick Warren's Daily Hope. Well,
this weekend, across every continent and in thousands of languages,
millions of people will join together to celebrate the resurrection
of Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of our faith.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
But you know it doesn't stop there.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Not only was Jesus resurrected, he is still alive.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
So what do you say?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
We dive right in as Pastor Rick begins Part one
of a very special Easter message titled What it Means
to Believe in Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Easter is a celebration of what Jesus Christ came to do.
Jesus Christ split history into AD and BC because of
this event Easter. It is the most significant event in history.
In fact, every time you write your own birthday, your
birthday is in relationship to Jesus Christ. Because God invaded Earth.

(02:01):
He came to Earth in the form of a human being,
died on the cross for our sins so we could
go to heaven, rose again three days later to prove
that he was who he said he was. And today
billions of people around the world are celebrating Easter. Now,
the issue I want to talk about this morning is
why did he do it? They're on your outline, on

(02:23):
your message notes. The first verse is the most famous
verse in the Bible. It's called John three sixteen from
the chapter three of John, verse sixteen. In fact, let's
read it all aloud together, would you read it with me?
For God so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not

(02:46):
perish but have everlasting life. Now circle the phrase believes
in him. He says, whoever believes in him, that's Jesus Christ,
will not perish, but have everlasting life. That means go
to heaven. Now. The latest Gallup poll tells us that
I don't know eighty six eighty seven eighty eight percent

(03:06):
of Americans say I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe
he was who he said he was. But not everybody
who claims to be a believer in Jesus Christ is
a true believer. In fact, Jesus said this. Notice on
your outline. He said, not everybody who calls me their
lord will get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Only the

(03:29):
ones who obey my father in Heaven will get in.
Now what's he saying there? He's saying that you can't
tell a true believer by their words. Just because they
walk the walk talk the talk, doesn't mean they walk
the walk. He's saying, you know, you can meet people
who you know, talk like heaven and live like hell.
You've all met people like that. I was one of

(03:49):
those before I really committed my life to Christ. Maybe
you did so too. But he's saying, you got to
look not at what people say, not at what people think,
not at what people feel, but you got to look
at what they do to see what they really believe.
Behavior determines your beliefs. In fact, he says, if you're

(04:10):
really a true believer, it's going to change your life.
It's going to change the way you act. Look at
the next verse. If people say they have faith but
they do nothing, then their faith is worth nothing. Can
faith like that save them? And the answer is no,
it can't. Now, you know, I've got three kinds of
friends in my life, and I love them all, but

(04:32):
I categorize them in three different ways. Some are saints
and some are stumblers, and some are seekers. The saints
in my life are those people who believe in Jesus
and act like it. Now, they're not perfect when I
say saint, I don't mean perfect. None of us are perfect.
We're all far from perfect. But they're consistent, they believe
in Jesus and they're trying to live the way he said.
They're trying to be unselfish. They're loving, they're kind, they

(04:56):
help others, they're not living for themselves. I call them saints.
Then I've got people in my life, friends in my life,
and I love them just as much, and I call
them stumblers. And they're people who think they think they
know Jesus, believe in Jesus, but they don't really act
like him, and they don't act like it at all.
In fact, they're really living a self centered life. They're
living for themselves and doing a lot of things that

(05:17):
are different than what Jesus would tell us to do.
Then I got a third group of friends in my
life that I love, and I call them seekers. And
they're the people who just haven't made a decision. They're
intellectually honest and they're going, Okay, I'm checking it out.
I'm interested. Tell me more about what it means to
be a believer. My guess is that every one of
us today are in one of those three categories. We

(05:39):
either know Christ and act like it, or we think
we know Christ and don't act like it, or we're
just checking it out. As your friend this Easter, I
want to help you settle this issue because it has
some profound implications. Whoever believes in Him shall not perish
but have ever lasting life. I want you in heaven.

(06:00):
I want you to have it. So I want to
settle this issue of what it means to really believe
in Jesus. Faith is kind of like a diamond. It's multifaceted,
has a lot of different angles to it. And today
we're going to look at five different angles of what
it means to really believe, what it means to have faith.
Now these aren't in any particular order. I just put

(06:21):
them in a little acrostic faih to spell faith as
kind of a memory device. And if you're taking notes
on your outline, the f stands for follow his example.
That's the first thing that it means to believe in Jesus.
I follow his example. Everybody has an example that they follow.

(06:41):
You say, well, I don't know who my example is.
Then you've got a problem because I've noticed this. If
you don't decide what's your model in life? Other people
will decide it for you. The media, culture peers pressure,
you know, parents, other people will try to tell you
how you should live your life. And God says, wait

(07:02):
a minute, I don't want anybody else telling you how
to live your life. I'm God. I'm the one who
should be telling you how to live your life. Don't
be pressured into some mold of what other people think
you ought to be. God says, I made you to
be you. And he says, the only perfect example, by
the way, anyway, is Jesus Christ. You know, I had
a number of friends who, once they hit forty, went

(07:25):
through a real period of shock because they discovered around
that age that the model that they had chosen for
their life was an inconsistent and ineffective model. And at
forty years of age, they were ending up divorced, discouraged, depressed, friendless,
lonely and not and out of whack with life. Why

(07:46):
because they were looking for the wrong model following the
wrong model. I actually had a friend I mentioned his name,
you'd know who he was, who said, you know, Rick,
I was climbing the ladder of success, and when I
got to the top, and he did. He said, I'd
discovered it was the latter was hanging against the wrong wall.
Leaning against the wrong wall, he said, I was heading

(08:08):
And I invested all that time in the wrong thing.
Now I have to admit to you that when I
was a young man, I really wasn't interested in following
Jesus Christ. And the reason why is I bought into
the stereotype of what Jesus is. You know, if you've
looked at any pictures of Jesus, they always look so wimpy,
you know what I mean. I mean, it's like this

(08:28):
guy's looks like this pale, weak, wimpy guy with little
rouge on his cheeks, and you know, and little his
hair and curls, and he walks around, you know, with
a robe on, skipping the hills of Jerusalem, talking about
peace and love. And I'm going boring. And as a
young man, the last thing I wanted to do was
follow Jesus Christ because I thought he was some kind

(08:50):
of whimp. Well, listen, if that's really the way Jesus was,
how in the world did he get burly fishermen to
drop their nets and follow him? How did he bring
a revolution against the Roman Empire? If he was some
wimpy guy. He wasn't. He was the most countercultural, radical
revolutionariy you've ever imagined. And it takes courage to follow him. Now,

(09:11):
Jesus says this, they're on your outline. He says, you
will be blessed. Whenever you what follow my example, you
will be blessed. You know, everywhere Jesus Christ went he
told people to follow fact twenty one times in the Bible.
He says, follow me, you follow me, you follow me,
you follow me, you follow me twenty one times. He

(09:34):
was always saying follow me. Now I like that because
he's not saying follow a principle. He's not saying follow
a program. He's saying follow a person me. He's not
saying follow a religion. He doesn't say follow a code
of ethics. He says, follow me. If you don't get
anything else I say to you this morning, I want

(09:55):
you to get this. God wants a relationship with you,
and following me implies a relationship. It says you're gonna
know me personally. God isn't interested in religion. He's interested
in their relationship, and that's what he sent Jesus to
establish between you and him. Now, when you begin a

(10:16):
relationship with Jesus, what happens, Well, you get all kinds
of benefits in your life. I don't have time to
go into all of them, but let me just mention
two very good benefits that happen if you start following Jesus.
One of them is stability, and the other one is clarity.
Clarity and stability. You might write those down clarity and stability.

(10:36):
There are two benefits of following Christ. First, I get clarity.
What that means is things get clearer in my life.
I see things a whole lot better. I see my
relationships better, my problems better, my future better. Everything gets clearer.
All of a sudden, I'm not so confused anymore. I'm
not so distracted anymore. I've gotten more direction in my life.

(10:57):
I've got more focus in my life. And the first
benefit is when I start following Jesus, I'm not confused anymore.
All of a sudden, I've got direction and focus and clarity.
Jesus said this, I am the light of the world,
and if you follow me, you won't be stumbling through
the darkness because you'll have the light that leads to life.

(11:21):
Do you ever feel like you're just stumbling around in life.
You ever feel like you're going nowhere, you feel like
you're lacking direction. Have you ever said to yourself, I
have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing with
my life. That's in a symptom of one thing. You're
not following Jesus. Because when you follow God's plan and
God's purpose for your life, he makes it very clear.

(11:44):
The confusion goes away, and you get direction and focus
in your life. You get clarity, things seem clearer. The
second thing that happens when I follow Jesus Christ is
I get stability. In other words, I get a solid
foundation on which to build my life. Now Here in California,
we know the value of a solid foundation because we

(12:05):
have a thing called earthquakes, and we know you got
to have a solid foundation or you're gonna crack up
when the earthquakes come. Jesus told a story about this once.
He said, two guys went out and build their houses.
And one built his house on a foundation of sand,
and one built this house on a foundation of a
solid rock. And when the winds came and the floods came,

(12:26):
and the rains and the storms and the Katrinas of
life came through the guy who built this house on
the sand. It collapsed, it fell apart, it crumbled, he said.
But the guy who built his house on the solid rock,
it stood stable. And the storm came against it, but
it held strong. It had a center. You got to

(12:48):
have a center for your life, because, friend, you're gonna
have storms in your life. You've already had some. You're
gonna have financial storms in your life. You're gonna have
some relational storms in your life. If you get married,
you're gonna have some marriage storms. You're gonna have some
health storms. You're gonna get sick, people who you love

(13:09):
are gonna die. You're gonna have some emotional storms in
your life that just throw you up in the air.
And what's gonna be your stability when that happens. If
you don't have a solid foundation, when the rogue winds
that come the Katrinas of life come, you're gonna crack up.
You're gonna crash, you're gonna crumble, You're gonna fall apart.

(13:30):
And I see people like it all the time, who
just fall apart when the stress is on and they
worry and they fret, and they get anxious because they
don't have a solid foundation. Jesus said this, All who
listen to my instruction and follow them are wise like
a man who builds his house on solid rock. Now

(13:53):
the a in faith stands for except his grace. That's
the second thing of what it means to be a
real believer, not a phony believer, but a real believer
in Jesus. I follow his example. I accept his grace.
Now what does that mean? Well, the Bible says this,
there on your outline, Romans chapter five. Those who accept

(14:14):
God's full grace and the great gift of being made
right with him. In other words, God wipes away all
the things you've ever done wrong. He forgives you will
surely have true life and rule through Jesus Christ. Now
what is grace, Well, Grace means when God does something
for you, or anybody does something for you that you

(14:35):
don't deserve. When they do it simply out of their love,
not out of your deserving it, that's called grace. Grace
is when God gives you what you need, not what
you deserve. God doesn't give us what we deserve. If
I got what I deserve, I wouldn't be standing here
I'd be dead right now, so would you. God doesn't
give you what you deserve. He gives you what you

(14:56):
need even before you know you need it. The things
that I need most is I need forgiveness because I
blow it all the time, so do you. And God
says I will forgive you before you even know you
need it. I will forgive you before you even ask,
before you even know what you've done wrong. You might
write the word forgiveness down because that's a synonym for grace.

(15:16):
It means God says, I give you forgiveness for what
you've done. Now, we don't understand this because we don't
do this very often with each other. We don't show
each other grace. Here's something I read in the La Times.
David Hagler is an umpire for a men's baseball team,
a community men's baseball league, and he said, I was

(15:38):
driving too fast one day when a policeman pulled me
over and gave me a speeding ticket. I tried hard
to talk him out of it by telling him how
worried I was about my insurance and what a careful
driver I normally was. He said, I begged him for
some grace, but it was no deal, and the officer

(15:59):
said if I didn't like the ticket, I could go
to court. Well, the very first game of the next
Community Men's League baseball season, I'm umpiring behind home plate,
and coincidentally, the first batter up was that same policeman.

(16:20):
Now I immediately recognized him, but more important, he recognized me,
and he nervously asked, how did that thing with your
ticket go? I told him you better swing at everything. See,
we don't show each other grace. Now now we're not.

(16:42):
You know you didn't let me off the hook. I'm
not letting you off the hook. The fact is God
shows you grace every single second of your life, because
everything you have from God is a flat out gift.
Everything you have, your freedom, your life, your mind, your friends,
your health, your the air you breathe, everything you've got

(17:03):
is a flat out gift from God. If God hadn't
wanted to create you, you wouldn't even be alive. The
only reason in your life is God made you to
love you. And if God didn't want you to be alive,
you wouldn't be taking your next breath. The air you
breathe is a gift from God. Everything you have you
didn't earn a single bit of it. It's all by grace,

(17:24):
He said, what about the money that I earned? Where
do you think you got the ability to earn it?
Everything you have is a flat out gift from God.
You can't It wasn't from yourself. God gave you those abilities.
God shows us grace all the time, and when it
comes to blowing it making mistakes, God says, I will

(17:45):
forgive you of everything you've ever done wrong, even though
you don't deserve it, if you just trust in Christ.
Look of the next verse. Now, God says he will
accept and acquit us. In other words, declare us not
guilty for all the things you've done wrong if we
trust Jesus Christ to take away our sins, and we
can all be saved in the same way, all of

(18:06):
us by coming to Christ, no matter who we are
or what we have been. Like Now, I like that
last part. First, It says, no matter who we are,
regardless of your ethnic background, regardless of your economic background,
regardless of your religious background, it doesn't matter. You can
still come to Christ. Shoot, it doesn't matter if you're
Catholic or Methodist or Presbyterian, or a Protestant or Buddhist.

(18:30):
Or Baptist, or Mormon or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu,
or no religion at all. This isn't about religion, so
it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from.
He says, I want to help you out. I want
to forgive you. I'm gonna show you my grace. That's
what God sent Jesus to do. He wants that relationship.
And he said, no matter what you've done, well, that's

(18:52):
good news because none of us are perfect. We've all
blown it, we've all made mistakes. God says, we're just
gonna wipe that out. We're gonna this raise the guilt.
We're gonna wipe the slate clean. And what we're gonna
do is we're gonna give you a second chance. I
am so glad that God gives us a second chance.
He's not a three striketure out kind of guy. He
gives us a second chance. That's great. You know, when

(19:14):
I was I was in junior high I took a
shop class in woodworking and one of the assignments says,
we were supposed to make a table. And actually, at
this time we were living my family was living out
in the country, and I was actually building this table
in a barn, and I just screwed it up royally.
I mean I messed it up. I was planing it

(19:35):
all wrong, and it was uneven. I varnished and stained it,
and it did look terrible, and it was uneven and this,
you know, it wouldn't even it was wobbly. It was
just a total disaster as a table and as a
junior high boy. I got so discouraged. I just kind
of crumpled into a pile there on the ground and
just started crying. I was so disappointed in what a

(19:57):
mess I had made of things. About five minutes later,
my dad came into the barn and he looked at
the table, and he said, is that the best you
can do? Loser? No, he didn't say that, gotcha. Now,
he didn't say that. He didn't. What he said was

(20:21):
I got What he said was, is it's okay, Ricky.
He said, we'll do it over. You can start over,
and this time I'll help you. Friends. That's grace. Grace
is when God says to you, Hey, you know what,
You've messed up a few things. You blew a few relationships,

(20:44):
You've made some really poor decisions. You've really messed up
some choices in life. He didn't do it all right,
But you know what, he didn't say okay, loser. No,
he comes and says, it's okay, we'll start over, and
this time I'll help you. That's grace. Now, how do
you get grace for your life? You can't earn it,

(21:04):
you can't work for it, you can't deserve it, you
can't buy it, you can't get credit for it. There's
only one way you can accept God's grace. Admit you
need it. You swallow your pride, your ego, and you
realize I need God, and you say, God, I need
your grace. I'm not perfect. Heaven's perfect. There's no chance

(21:25):
I'm gonna make it into heaven because I'm not perfect
and I need your grace. God. I need your forgiveness
and I need you in my life. That's called humility.
The Bible says this, unless you accept God's kingdom in
the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in what
does a child do? Child doesn't come in boisterously prideful.

(21:47):
They you say help, Daddy, I need help, and you
just come and say God, I need your help. Now.
This is why we celebrate Easter It's why Easter is
a party. Easter is about the God.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Hey, thanks so much for being with us today and
listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. You know your prayers
and financial support are having a huge impact on millions
of people here and around the world. So thank you,
Thank you so much. And now Rick's going to share
a letter from one of our listeners who says Daily
Hope is making a real difference in their life.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
Your generous prayers and support help us teach God's word
to people all around the world who've never heard about
the hope of Jesus Christ. And God is using your
prayers and your gifts to help us reach people who
would never set foot inside the door of a church.
Here's a letter from Cheryl, who said, Pastor Rick, your
obedience in teaching God's Word brings blessings of hope in

(22:51):
my life every day through your daily email devotional. Through
your teaching, God is continually changing my thinking and aligning
my heart with the Word, which brings hope and happiness
to my life and positive thoughts for a great future.
Please pray that all keep the fight to keep the
enemy from stealing the truth from me. I can now

(23:13):
see why staying in God's Word every day is so important.
I want to pray for Cheryl right now. Cheryl, let
me pray for you. Father. Together we join in praying
for Cheryl right now, and I ask that your word
will grow deep in her heart and in the hearts
of everyone else who's listening right now. Plant it like

(23:34):
a seed in fertile soil, and then make it grow,
and let the weeds of temptation not choke it out.
Help her, and help all of us to stand firm
in your truth. And Father, I pray for everyone who
hears this message today. I pray for every listener of
Daily Hope, and I ask that you strengthen them to

(23:56):
be obedient to your word, to see your purpose, and
to depend on your power, trusting Jesus that you'll help
them through no matter what they face. And I ask
his prayer, and I pray this blessing in the name
of Jesus. Amen.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
Hey, you know a great way to stay in God's
Word every day is to sign up for the free
Daily Hope devotional And it's so easy. Just go to
Pastorick dot com and sign up today. Be sure to
join us next time as we look into God's.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Word for our daily hope.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and
your generous financial support.