Living Hope

Pastor Philip Miller: Only a helpless heart can help other helpless hearts. This world that is full of bent and broken people that is chock-full of sin and twisted up in rebellion.

Pastor Philip Miller: All the self-righteous, pharisaical, condemning, blaming, shaming, ostracizing treatment of this broken world will never do an ounce of good. Self-righteousness can never offer good news to people.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and we're so glad you've joined us for this series through the Sermon on the Mount. Now Pastor Philip, we don't often think of helplessness as good news, but that's really the heart of the gospel, isn't it?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, well, that's where the gospel begins, right? It's when we collapse and realize we've got nothing and Jesus is everything. He's our only hope. We cling to him and that's what changes our lives. That's what brings us into the family of God.

Pastor Philip Miller: And what we're learning here from Jesus is that that fundamental change inside of us when grace falls down and changes our lives, that's what actually shifts us from being unhelpful to being helpful when it comes to engagement with other people.

Pastor Philip Miller: So the unhelpful thing he's been telling us, when you come at people with self-righteousness, superiority, trying to fix them, like they just shut down, it breaks the relationship, it never works. It's unhelpful treatment of others.

Pastor Philip Miller: But this change, this change that the gospel brings into our lives where the kingdom of God becomes at home in our lives when we learn to live by grace, that's the very thing that actually makes us helpful toward others.

Pastor Philip Miller: Because when we come in gentle and lowly and humbly, recognizing we have far more in common with the broken people around us than anything else, that we're two beggars and we've found some bread in Jesus Christ and we're offering that bread. We're saying, hey, look, look where I found help and hope. I found it in Jesus.

Pastor Philip Miller: That kind of humble approach to other human beings, that's the kind of thing that they open up to and that's what actually changes our relationships and can be helpful to others in pointing them to the Lord Jesus Christ. So that helplessness actually works for us when it comes to helping other people.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Now, beloved, you want to make sure you stay tuned because after the message, Pastor Philip is going to share a real-life story about how being completely helpless turned out to be exactly what was needed. But now, let's go to the pulpit of the Moody Church for part three of the sermon, A Heart for Others. Grab your Bibles, we're in Matthew, chapter 7, verses 1 through 12.

Pastor Philip Miller: When it comes to God, just simply, Jesus is saying to simply ask, seek, knock, just just what works in relationship with other people works with God too. Because God's a person too, you know.

Pastor Philip Miller: And if you come with all your demands and your manipulation and your coercion and your sales pressure to try to get what you want from God, look, just like you, he'll probably shut down. He's not interested in playing all those games. He loves you. He loves giving good gifts to his kids.

Pastor Philip Miller: So just ask him, just seek, just knock. He's predisposed to say yes.

Pastor Philip Miller: And maybe one of the good gifts that you need most is your father's help with the difficult relationships with people around you.

Pastor Philip Miller: Maybe you are asking and they're rejecting you. Maybe you're seeking and they're hiding. Maybe you're knocking and they're shutting you out.

Pastor Philip Miller: And maybe you're tempted to throw in the towel and say, forget them. They're beyond hope. I'm done with this. You're tempted to condemn and blame and shame and ostracize.

Pastor Philip Miller: And maybe you need just a little bit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Maybe you need the fruit of the spirit from your good Father who loves to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him, His greatest gift.

Pastor Philip Miller: Your Father's greatest gift, friends, is to make you like himself, to fill you with his spirit, to conform you to the image of his son so that you can begin to love other people with the same love with which you have been first loved.

Pastor Philip Miller: Do you notice how in this passage this sort of blends, it blurs from we're talking about other people and all of a sudden we're talking about God. We're talking about our relationship with other people, then we're all of a sudden we're talking about our relationship with God, and it's hard to know, when does it shift? When does it shift? It just blurs the lines, doesn't it? That's the point.

Pastor Philip Miller: As God has loved you, now you go love others, the way that God has treated you becomes the ethic of how you treat other people.

Pastor Philip Miller: So, verse 12, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets. The law and the prophets, all of the scriptures are teaching you fundamentally this basic truth to do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Pastor Philip Miller: Instead of condemning and blaming and shaming and ostracizing others, you don't want that. You don't want that.

Pastor Philip Miller: What would you like to be treated? Jesus is treating us, teaching us, to put ourselves in other people's shoes, to act in empathy and love. If I were them, how would I want to be treated? How would I want to be approached?

Pastor Philip Miller: I bet I bet they're scared. I bet they're afraid. I bet they're embarrassed and ashamed. I bet underneath they're actually hurting.

Pastor Philip Miller: And if I were in their shoes, how would I want someone to interact with me?

Pastor Philip Miller: Jesus says, look, all the law and the prophets, the whole of scripture is about living well in relationships with others from a heart that's right before God.

Pastor Philip Miller: And if you treat others the way you'd want to be treated, if you were them, that's what God was after all along.

Pastor Philip Miller: Now the only way you could ever do that is if you have the new heart of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus is offering us in himself, right? We can't divorce these words of Jesus from the works of Jesus, that Jesus came, that he lived a perfect life, that he died in our place and for our sake, that he rose again to make us right with God so that we could be children of God, filled with the spirit, clothed in his righteousness, by grace, through faith.

Pastor Philip Miller: And a righteous righteousness, grace heart is helpful with others. A righteousness grace heart is helpful with others.

Pastor Philip Miller: Friends, if you know your righteousness is not your own, that it's a gift from Jesus, you can't look down on anybody. There is no room for pride or boasting or self-righteousness or condemnation. All of our righteousness is like filthy rags. There's no one righteous, no, not one.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so there's no basis in a heart made right by grace for condemnation, and blaming, and shaming, and ostracizing other people because we're the chief of sinners. Amen. And in the end, we are one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread. That's all we are.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so we humbly ask, seek and knock because that's what we wish other people would do to us. And that's exactly what Jesus has done for us.

Pastor Philip Miller: When we were worthy of being condemned and ostracized and put away forever, in love our Jesus came and pursued us in love.

Pastor Philip Miller: Don't you see, a heart that has received the grace of God is equipped to extend the grace of God.

Pastor Philip Miller: This is why a righteousness grace heart is so helpful with others. Think think about the people in your life who have been most helpful to you spiritually. Were they stringently rigid and hard and tough and perfect in every way, or were they gentle and humble and lowly of heart?

Pastor Philip Miller: They were like Jesus, weren't they? Gentle, lowly, humble of heart. Here's the irony, here's the irony, friends, the most helpful heart is the one that realizes it's helpless. The most helpful heart is the one that realizes it is helpless.

Pastor Philip Miller: The people who think they've got it all together can't really help others. But the people who realize they've got nothing are best positioned to actually speak into other people's lives.

Pastor Philip Miller: Because it's the heart of helplessness. It's the heart of helplessness. The reality is, only a helpless heart can help other helpless hearts. Only a helpless heart can help other helpless hearts.

Pastor Philip Miller: This world that is full of bent and broken people that is chock-full of sin and twisted up in rebellion.

Pastor Philip Miller: All the self-righteous, pharisaical, condemning, blaming, shaming, ostracizing treatment of this broken world will never do an ounce of good. Self-righteousness can never offer good news to people.

Pastor Philip Miller: But if we are sinners saved by grace through faith, and this not of ourselves, it is a gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast. If we are helpless to save ourselves and we and yet have been given such mercy, such grace, such forgiveness and and such love. If we, the poor in spirit, are actually welcome in the kingdom of heaven by grace, then maybe, just maybe, we are the ones, the best ones, to help point the way.

Pastor Philip Miller: I see you got a little sawdust in your eye right there. Does it hurt? Mine did a lot. Have I ever told you? No. For years I had sawdust in my eyes. It hurt like crazy. I was crying myself to sleep and I couldn't do a thing about it.

Pastor Philip Miller: Was helpless and hopeless. That was my story.

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, what what happened? You don't want to know. No, I no, I really do. No, seriously, you don't want to know. It'll wreck you. No, I want to know.

Pastor Philip Miller: This man named Jesus turned my life upside down. He cleaned me out. He changed me forever.

Pastor Philip Miller: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. I was blind, but now I see.

Pastor Philip Miller: Friends, here's your takeaway: Grace floods out of a heart that is flooded by grace. Grace floods out of a heart that is flooded by grace.

Pastor Philip Miller: I sometimes think of my soul as like a a pipe. This is weird, stay with me. As like a pipe with an opening up top and an opening down below. Down below is everything that flows out of my life, the way I interact with and treat other people.

Pastor Philip Miller: And at the top, the input of the pipe of my soul is a is another valve. There's a valve on both ends. The valve up top is what's coming into my soul. I cannot dispense what I am not receiving. I cannot extend what I have not welcomed in. I cannot give what I'm not getting.

Pastor Philip Miller: The valves of your life are meant to be opened on both ends, to freely receive the grace from God, lavishly pouring in, saturating all of who you are to the depths of your being, so that it lavishes out. You are a conduit of grace.

Pastor Philip Miller: You want to have a heart for others that's helpful? Let the grace of God flood into your life and wash out all the self-righteousness, the entitlement, all the ego that's gunking up the pipe of your life. Until there's nothing left but a poor, abject sinner, saved by grace, beating his breast. Crying out, have mercy on me a sinner. And I am surprisingly loved more than I know.

Pastor Philip Miller: And in that helplessness, you will discover to your great surprise how supremely helpful you are to the helpless hearts all around you. Because when you are gentle and lowly and humble of heart, they will sense in you the presence of the living Christ. As your life is a conduit of the amazing grace of our God. Amen. Amen.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy. And now, before we begin today's discussion, I wanted to let you know that it's faithful partners like you that make this program possible each day. As our way of saying thanks for your gift today, we have a resource we'd be thrilled to send to you. Simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us, 1-800-215-5001.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: We're so glad you joined us today as we explore the helpless heart. Now, I don't know, Pastor Philip, if our listeners are saying, if my interactions with other people are feeling all clogged up, all gunked up, is that bitterness? Is it a lack of grace? I'm not sure I can make the distinction. Let's help them.

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, so you know, we ended that sermon clip with this analogy of the the pipe, you know, my life like a pipe with a valve at the top and a valve at the bottom. The valve at the top is what I'm receiving from God and receiving from him in terms of grace flowing into my life, and that valve is meant to be wide open in our lives so that his grace comes pouring in, and then we're meant to open up the bottom part of the valve, which is how we love and extend grace to other people.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so when both valves are wide open, you've got a high flow rate and all the gunk gets cleaned out, you know, it just kind of flows through, and that's how it's meant to to work. But for a lot of us, we're restricting it in different ways, right? Some of us, we have our the the bottom valve wide open, but the top is is restricted because what we're trying to do is love on all the people around us, pour ourselves out in the world, but we're not bringing in enough grace from the Lord to fill us up.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so we end up feeling burnt out and empty and drained constantly because we're giving, giving, giving ourselves away, but we're not drinking in all the resources of grace that God has for us. Or others of us, maybe have, you know, the bottom valve closed off. We're not doing a lot of loving of other people, but we've got the top valve wide open, but we're kind of, it's like stopping the flow because once it fills up, it just has nowhere to go, right? And if we need more grace and more of God, we've got to open that that bottom valve up as well.

Pastor Philip Miller: So I I think that the key here that Jesus is really pushing us toward is this fundamental shift from a self-righteous heart to to one of grace. When I'm self-righteous, what I'm doing is I'm not actually metabolizing grace. Self-righteous people don't go for grace because they think they're fine. But the gospel is teaching us, we're not righteous. Even on our best days, even the good things we do are tainted.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so it's making us, it's humbling us down to the point where we run to God constantly. We need his grace all the time. We need it constantly. And so self-righteousness actually makes me not want to go to God for grace, which is the very thing I need. And then self-righteousness makes me really bad toward other people because then I come in with superiority and condemnation.

Pastor Philip Miller: But when but when grace does its work in my life, it sweeps in, it starts to clean me out and and then it allows me to actually extend grace to other people. So if I've got condemnation and superiority and I'm kind of cranky toward other people, it's probable that I'm not receiving the grace of God for myself and that's why I'm having trouble extending it toward other people.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: I really like the illustration of the pipe, but perhaps you could help us a little bit. I want to stay on that for a minute if we can. So what's it look like when it's flowing well?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, so if if we go to, if we realize that we have nothing, that we we are people who who constantly need the grace of God. All of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Then what that means is I need grace every day. I need it every morning. I need it all day long. I need it every night because there's so much in my life that's not glorifying God, right? Every breath is meant to glorify God. And and I and I'm not and I'm not doing that if I'm not living in grace. I need Jesus to help me every moment of every day.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so I've got to have the the the my soul needs to be wide open, drinking deeply from the grace of God. And because I know I need that so much, when I then encounter people who need grace because they're broken messed up sinners too. I I actually see them as somebody who's a lot like me because I'm just I'm just as messed up. We're all in the same boat. We all need immense amounts of grace.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so I don't come in as like the rescuer trying to fix them and make sure they get right. I come in as a fellow person underneath who's who's in need of mass massive amounts of grace and I'm saying, hey, let's go to the Jesus who can save us both. And that kind of humility is what ultimately changes us. It's what can really reorient the way we interact with other people. So that's what help looks like.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Can you can you share with us a time when someone's admission of their own mess was or struggle actually made them more helpful?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, so let me just give an illustration from my own life. So there was there was a staff member many years ago at a different church where I was working and and this staff member was was very stressed out, panicky about something that was happening. It doesn't matter the details, but they were they were really scared. And they were they were freaking out about this scenario, or whatever.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so I'm trying to trying to help, right? And so what I what I did with this with this staff member is I I just said, I said, listen, I'm scared too. And this feels really out of control, and I wish we didn't have to deal with it. But the question is, what are we going to do now? And so can I ask you, can we do this scared together? Can we just do this scared together?

Pastor Philip Miller: We're not going to quit. We're not going to run away. It's awkward, it's hard. I wish we didn't have to deal with this. But can we do it together? Will you do it with me? We're going to pray. We're going to ask the Lord to be with us, to be our strength, our comfort, our portion, our everything. And because he's with us, we we're going to we'll do this. And I'll be with you too, and we'll go together, you know?

Pastor Philip Miller: And and and it it's just, I mean, I could have stood above the situation. I said, why are you so scared? Like you shouldn't be scared, you know, God hasn't given us a spirit of fear. He's given us power and love and a sound mind and like I could have just like, you know? But to but to climb underneath it with this person and just say, hey, I'm with you in it. Let's go together. Like all of a sudden it's helpful, right? It's empowering to to do that.

Pastor Philip Miller: And so I I think it's like when we lead out of weakness, when we're willing to humble ourselves, to to to embrace weakness and and our deep need for grace and God's power. We don't have it all together. We're sinners. We're messed up. We're working this out. When we come down from that posture, we're actually most helpful toward the souls around us because we're all in the same boat, aren't we? We all need grace.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: And amen. You know, when we're at the end of our resources, that's when God's attributes become personal. They become real for us. Now, beloved, we have a resource we'd like to share with you as a thank you for your support today. It's Pastor Erwin Lutzer's book, Christ Among Other Gods. It's available right now for a donation of any amount. This book helps you understand the uniqueness of Christ and gives you the facts to confidently defend his claims and deepen your daily trust in him.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: And there's more. Through our active $90,000 matching challenge, your gift goes twice as far. When you give today, you're helping bring gospel truth to searching souls. To request your copy of Christ Among Other Gods and to have your gift doubled, simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us. 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: You can also write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Embracing our helplessness before the cross prepares us to share God's love with a hurting world. And so next time, we'll talk about the virtue of love. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by The Moody Church.