Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Hello and welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope with Rick Warren. We are so glad you're here with us today. We're going to continue our series called The Keys to a Blessed Life. Now in these messages, Rick walks through Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and shows us how to live a truly hopeful and purpose-filled life. And now Rick brings you the final part of why you need to stay hungry.

Rick Warren: The Bible says the wages of sin is death. That means somebody's got to pay for all the things I've done in life that hurt other people, hurt myself, hurt God, and all of the things that I've done wrong in life. Somebody's got to pay for them, either me or somebody else. And the judge says, "I'll be the savior, and I'm going to come to earth in human form and I'm going to die for your sins, Rick, so you don't have to go to hell. You don't have to pay for it. You can be with me forever."

Do you understand why the gospel's called good news? It means everything you've ever done wrong in life or ever will do wrong in life has already been paid for by Jesus Christ on the cross. He said, "It is finished," not "I'm finished." It's finished. What? Paying for all the sins of everybody. That's such good news. You see, this is the difference between Christianity and every other worldview, philosophy, or religion. Every other religion can be summed up in one word. It is the word "do." And everybody just has their own to-do list. In one religion, they say you got to do these things and God will think you're cool. In another religion, they say you got to do these things and God will think you're cool.

Christianity is not summed up in the word "do." It's summed up in the word "done." It was done for you 2,013 years ago on a cross by Jesus Christ. It is finished. It has all been done for you. There's a book in the Bible that explains this in quite detail. It's the book of Romans, and there are 10 chapters that deal with this issue. But Romans chapter three really gives a synopsis. Let me read you a little bit of it. For all have sinned and all fall short of God's glorious standard. In other words, we're none perfect. None of us measure up to God's standard. We don't even measure up to our own.

Now that's not good news. In fact, it's not even news because we all know that we're imperfect. Yet, it says, here's the good news, "Now God in his gracious kindness," that's his grace, "declares us not guilty." Unrighteous becomes righteous. I'm now declared not guilty. He has done this not because of what I've done. He has done this through Christ Jesus who has freed us by taking away our sins. For God sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sins and to satisfy God's anger against us. We are made right with God, that's righteous. We're made right with God when we believe that Jesus shed his blood, sacrificing his life for us. That is the good news.

Jesus gave us two symbols and he said, "I never want you to forget the sacrifice that I've done for you so you can go to heaven." And he gave us two symbols. One's called baptism and one's called the Lord's Supper or communion. Baptism is a symbol of Jesus dying, being buried in the ground, and raised again. That's why in the Bible every baptism in the Bible is you're buried underwater and raised again because it's the symbol of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus goes down to the Jordan River, is baptized by John, and comes back up.

The other symbol is communion, where Jesus takes bread and wine and says, "This is going to represent my body and my blood." And when he said it, he hadn't even gone to the cross yet. He said, "This is my body and this is my blood, which is given for you." Let me show you a couple of other verses. Second Corinthians chapter five says this: "God made Christ who never sinned to be the offering for our sin so that we could be made right with God through Christ." And in the Old Testament, there's an entire sacrificial system of the scapegoat and the sacrificial lamb who take the sins of the nation. It's a symbol of what Jesus would do for us one day.

Look at this verse on the screen: Titus chapter three, verse five. "God saves us not because of righteous things we've done." In other words, "Wow, I'm really impressed with that." God doesn't save us because of what we've done but because of his mercy. So this is the good news. First, I can't make myself righteous. There's not a snowball's chance in hell you're getting into heaven on your own effort because you're not good enough, and neither am I. But good news, God sent Jesus to pay for my sins. Now here's the third part of the gospel: I accept by faith what God did for me.

That's all you have to do. That's all I'm required to do. I simply, all I do is accept God's grace, his mercy. I accept God's forgiveness and I say, "I believe that what Jesus did on the cross paid for my sins so I can go and be a part of God's family. I can live the way he wants me to live now and I can go to heaven in eternity." That is righteousness. Let me show you a couple of verses. Romans chapter three: "We are made right in God's sight," that's righteousness, "when we trust in Jesus Christ to take away our sins."

And I love this part: "And we can all be saved," that's everybody, "in the same way, no matter who we are or what we've done." All right, I like that part. I want to say Hallelujah to that part. We can all be saved no matter who we are, what we've done, who we've done it with, or how long we've done it. All be saved. Now I don't care what religious background you are. Your background may be Catholic, your background may be Baptist or Buddhist, your background may be Muslim or Methodist or Mormon or Pentecostal or Presbyterian. Your background may be atheist or agnostic or secularist or no faith at all or a mix-up of everything.

I really couldn't care less about that because religion, no religion can get you to heaven. Only God's grace can get you to heaven. No amount of works can make you righteous, whether it's this guy's list or this guy's list or that guy's list. None of those religious lists can get you to heaven because you can't be righteous enough. It's just simply a relationship to God through his son Jesus. And here's what the Bible says, Romans chapter 10: "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord," in other words, he is who he claimed to be, he's the Son of God, the Savior of the world, he came to die for you. If you confess with your mouth, "Yeah, I believe Jesus is Lord," and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, that's what Easter's all about, you will be saved. For you believe with your heart resulting in righteousness and you confess with your mouth resulting in salvation.

Now I want you to settle this issue this morning. As your friend, as somebody who cares about you, as your pastor, I don't want you to ever doubt, ever, ever, ever again that you're going to heaven when you die. I don't want you to worry about it. I don't want you to be concerned about it. I don't want you to have any doubts about it. So we're going to do what Romans 10 says to do: confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, you will be saved. Would God lie? No. Why? Because God cannot lie. People often ask me, "Is there anything God can't do?" There are a lot of things God can't do. One of them is he can't deny his character, so it means God cannot lie.

God can only tell the truth, and what's true is always true and what's false is always false. If truth wasn't always true, the universe wouldn't work. If the law of gravity was only true on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that would be a problem. The universe operates because some things are always true and some things are always untrue. The moon is not made of cheese. You might want to think that, but it's not true. And so the Bible says, "I am true." Jesus said, "I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life. No one comes to the Father but by me."

So I want you to settle this. I want you to have this assurance and never doubt again, "Am I going to heaven when I die?" What do you do? You accept the good news that we just talked about. So let's bow our heads right now. You may have been in church your entire life or this may be the very first time you've ever been in a service. I want you to pray this prayer in your heart. Just say something like this:

Dear God, I know I'm imperfect and I know I never can be perfect. I can't be righteous on my own. And yet I thank you for loving me in spite of myself. I thank you that you made me, that you created me. I thank you that you have a plan and purpose for my life and you made me to know you. Thank you for the choice that you've given me to accept or reject, to love or not love you. And today I humbly ask you, humbly ask you to save me because of what Jesus Christ did for me, not on the basis of what I have done or haven't done but because on the basis of what Jesus came to do.

Dear God, I don't understand it all, but as much as I know how, I want to put my trust in your son Jesus Christ. I want to get to know you. I want to learn to love you. I want to hunger and thirst for being right with you the rest of my life. And so I simply say that I put my trust not in my works, not in the good or the bad that I've done, but I put my trust in your grace and in your forgiveness. Jesus Christ, I want you to be the Lord of my life. Amen.

Doctors say that a loss of appetite is a symptom that you're sick. You know that. When you're sick, when you're ill, you don't feel good. The last thing you think about doing is eating. If you've got a fever, your stomach's upset, a loss of appetite indicates something's not right in your life. The same is true spiritually. If you don't have a hunger to know God, if you're not thirsty to know God, you're sick spiritually. You're not healthy spiritually. How do I maintain my spiritual hunger for God the rest of my life? I mean, for the rest of my life, so that tomorrow I want to know God better than today, and next week I want to be closer to him than I am now, and next year I want to be wiser and closer to God than I am today. How do I maintain a spiritual appetite? Five things.

Number one, remind myself how much God loves me. And you need to do this every day. You get up in the morning and say, "Lord, help me to remember how much you love me." Because the more you understand how much God loves you, the more you're going to love him. I was talking to a guy one time and he said, "I don't really feel close to God, but here's the problem, Pastor. I don't feel like I want to be close to God." And he said, "I guess my problem is I just don't love Jesus enough." And I told him, I said, "No, that's not your problem. Your problem is not that you don't love God enough. Your problem is you don't understand how much he loves you."

Because if you did, you couldn't help but love him. You want to hang out with somebody who's head over heels in love with you. The Bible says this, Ephesians three: "Pray that you have the power to understand how wide, how long, how high, and how deep God's love really is. May you experience this love of Christ, though it's so great you're never going to fully understand it." He says, "Then you're going to be filled with the fullness of life and the power that comes from God." Hunger and thirst for righteousness and you'll be filled. First, you got to know how much God loves you. Remind yourself, "God, help me to feel how much you love me."

Number two, second key to having a spiritual appetite: stop filling up on junk food. Stop filling up on spiritual junk food. You are a spiritual being with a God-shaped hole in you and only God can fill that hole in your heart. And when you try to fill it with salary or status or success or sex or passion, possession, position, power, prestige, or anything other than God, it's not going to be fulfilling. If you're not hungry for God, it's because you're full of yourself. It's the truth, or something else. And when you're full of yourself or full of something else, you're obviously not going to have a hunger for God.

Proverbs 15:14 says, "A wise person is hungry for truth while the fool feeds on trash." Maybe you need to take some trash out of your life. Now, if you're always thinking about something else instead of God, you're not going to have any time for God. If I'm always thinking about my sports or my favorite team, I don't have any hunger for God. If I'm always thinking about politics, I don't have any hunger for God. If I'm always thinking about work or making money or anything, I don't have any hunger for God because I'm feeding on other things. I'm filling my mind with other things.

Kaye and I have this old routine every Thanksgiving. She says, "Now honey, don't fill up on the appetizers before the big meal." You know what I'm talking about? You ever done that? You fill up on the appetizers and the big banquet, and you're not even hungry for the banquet because you filled up on the little sausages or something. And you go, "Really? I ate carrot sticks instead of this?" You've done this in a restaurant where you fill up on chips and salsa or bread and butter before the real meal gets there, and then you're not hungry. You've got to stop feeding yourself, filling yourself on junk food.

I love this, Isaiah 55. God says this: "All of you who are thirsty, come to me." Notice he didn't say come to religion, come to rules, regulations, rituals. He says, "Come to me. If you're thirsty, come to me and drink." God says, "Those of you who don't have any money to buy food, come and eat free. Why do you spend your money on something that isn't real food and doesn't really satisfy you? Why you wasting all your life on that? Come to me and eat what is good, and your soul will enjoy the stuff that really satisfies."

When I see that phrase, "most of the time we're not eating real food," I read an article recently about how people are starving to death eating worthless food. And it gave several illustrations. One of them was in China, in the great famine of China, there was no food and people were starving to death and so they actually used a kind of edible soil. It was actually dirt, an edible kind of soil that they began to make bread out of and they would bake it and they would eat it. And it filled them up and they felt temporarily satisfied, only it had no nutritional value to it. No vitamins, no minerals, no carbohydrates, no proteins, no fats. And so it had no value. It filled them up, but they were still starving to death.

Same thing happened in Australia when they had a great depression there and people had no food. And they went out to the, they started making porridge out of the spores of nardoo ferns. Now, nardoo ferns are very common, they're all over Australia. And they would take these pods or these spores from the nardoo plant. They would take it and make porridge out of it. The only problem was it had, again, no nutritional value. No fats, no carbohydrates, no proteins, no minerals, no vitamins. And so people were dying of starvation with full stomachs. Friends, that is a metaphor for America today. We are a nation of full stomachs and people are spiritually starving to death because they're eating junk food spiritually. And it has no nutritional value and their stomachs may be full and they may be temporarily satisfied, but they're starving to death and they're going to die.

Number three, and by the way, you know on this real food thing, Kaye and I have this ritual. Monday's my day off, so we like to go out to lunch or dinner on Monday. And we play this game every week. It's the ritual of "What are you hungry for?" You ever had this ritual? You go, "Let's go out to eat. Okay, what are you hungry for? Mexican food? Chinese food? Indian food? Thai? Mediterranean?" You know you're hungry but you don't know what you want. I want to ask you that question right now. What are you hungry for? Because whatever you're hungry for is determining the destiny of your life. If you're just hungry to go play golf, it's not a big enough hunger to satisfy you. If you're just hungry to go make another deal, that's not enough to satisfy you. Go ask Solomon. You need to hunger and thirst after God to be right with God and to live right with God.

Number three, make knowing God my number one goal. This is how you maintain a spiritual hunger. You make knowing God your number one goal in life. Not success, not happiness. You seek God, not those things. Those are the byproducts. Happiness is a byproduct of knowing God. And you go read the Psalms, how David said, "God, I really got to know you." And how passionate David is about knowing God. He says, "I long for you, God. I thirst for you, God. I hunger for you, God. I beg, I plead, I cry out. I must have you, God." Psalm 63: "O God, I earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My body longs for you as I travel through this parched and weary desert where there's no water." He wrote this in the desert of Judah.

Some of you are going through a desert right now. You're in a desert in your marriage; it's all dried up. You're in a desert in your career; it's all dried up. You're in a desert in a relationship. You're in a desert financially; it's all dried up. What do you do when you're in the desert? You hunger and thirst for God because he can fill you. Matthew 6:33, Jesus said, "The thing that you should want most is God's kingdom and doing what God wants. Then all these other things you need will be given to you as well." Make knowing God my number one goal.

Number four, get into God's word every day. Get into God's word every day. This book, the Bible, is your soul food. It's food for your soul. The Bible calls itself bread, the Word of God is milk, the Word of God is meat, the Word of God is food, the Word of God is honey. The Bible uses metaphors saying, "You can't live without. Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God," Jesus said. First Peter two: "You must crave the pure spiritual milk of the word so you can grow into the fullness of your salvation. Cry out for this nourishment like a baby cries for milk."

When we did the series on 40 Days in the Word, I showed you this verse. Second Timothy says this: "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and notice, training in righteousness." Hunger and thirst for righteousness. How do you learn righteousness? By getting into this book. Now notice I said get into the Bible every day. I didn't say read it every day. Some of you don't like to read. Fine, listen to it. You can listen to it every day. You can get it on CD or MP3, or you can get Daily Hope that I'm teaching the Word of God every day. You can hear it on the radio, you can listen on the web every day, you can download a podcast on iTunes or for Android, or you subscribe to the daily devotional. So you're getting into the word every day. Eating a meal once a week won't keep you healthy. You need to feed on the truth every day.

Now here's the last thing I want to say and we'll close with this. Appetite is influenced by association. For instance, you get a bunch of kids together and one kid says, "I'm hungry." What do all the kids say? "I'm hungry." If I say to you, "Man, I'm really hungry for," and I say a Cinnabon. Some of you get hungry for a Cinnabon. Appetite is influenced by association. So if you want to keep a spiritual appetite for God the rest of your life, here's the last thing: join a small group for support. Join a small group for support because whoever you get around with is what you're going to be hungry for.

Proverbs 2:20: "Join the company of good men and women who will keep you on the path of the righteous." Now, if you hang out with people who all they care about is politics, that's all you're going to care about. If you hang out with people who all they care about is sports, that's what you're going to care about. If you hang out with people who all they care about is the stock market, that's what you're going to care about. But if you hang out with people who are hungry to know God, that's what you're going to care about. You need to get in a small group. Let's bow our heads.

And let's close with a simple prayer. It simply says this: God, I want you, I need you, and I must have you in my life. Would you say that? God, I want you, I need you, and I must have you in my life. Father, this week I pray a blessing on everyone here that we would sense your closeness, that we would realize how much you love us, that we would make knowing you the number one goal of our lives, that we would stop feeding on junk food. Help us to get into God's word every day. Help us to get around people who put us on the path of righteousness rather than distracting and detouring us. And I pray this blessing in Jesus' name. Amen.

You know, if you just prayed that prayer for the very first time or you just recommitted your life to Jesus again today, would you let me know about it? There's something real about sharing your commitment. So write me at rick@pastorrick.com and say, "Rick, I prayed that prayer of commitment. I gave my life to Christ." And I'll send you some material that'll help you on your journey with Jesus, and I'll also pray for you. God bless you.

Guest (Male): Hey, thanks so much for being with us today and listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. I hope that you were just as blessed as I was from today's broadcast. Right now, here's Pastor Rick with a special message.

Rick Warren: You know, when I started Saddleback Church over 40 years ago with just a handful of people in our living room, I also began writing a simple devotional, just for the people in our church, to help them start each day with hope and with truth and with peace that comes through Jesus Christ. Well, you know, that little devotional grew and grew, and today Daily Hope is one of the largest email devotions in the whole world. And each day people all around the globe are reconnecting with God's promises and finding fresh strength in his word to face whatever comes their way.

Now here's the best part: it's absolutely free. We don't have any charge for this. Every day you'll get a quick devotional read and a podcast that you can listen to on the go. Now you know, in a world that's more distracted and uncertain than ever, I want to help you start your day centered on what never changes. And what never changes is God's love, his unconditional love for you, and his promises to you. You know, if you'll just spend just a few minutes a day in the morning with the Lord, it can bring so much more clarity, more purpose, more peace to everything that happens in your day. Particularly, psychologists have said that what you do with the first five minutes of your day pretty much sets the tone. So friend, you were never meant to go through life alone. I want to personally invite you to just sign up for the Daily Hope devotional. Do it today. I think it's going to bring fresh encouragement to your walk with God.

Guest (Male): If you'd like to sign up for the daily devotional, it's easy. Just go to pastorrick.com. That's pastorrick.com. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.