In this insightful episode of Daily Hope, Pastor Rick distinguishes between religion and a personal relationship with Jesus. Explore the concept of grace and learn how accepting Jesus’ grace changes lives. Whether you’re a saint, a stumbler, or a seeker, this Easter message encourages reflection on faith and the abundant benefits of a relationship with Christ, including clarity, stability, and a clean slate through divine forgiveness.
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 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 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.com. That’s rick at pastorrick.com. I would love to hear from you. God bless you and happy Easter.
SPEAKER 01 :
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. But you know, it doesn’t stop there. Not only was Jesus resurrected… He is still alive. So what do you say 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 02 :
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 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 wanna talk about this morning is why did he do it? There on your outline, on your message notes, the first verse is the most famous verse in the Bible. It’s called John 3, 16, from chapter three of John, verse 16. 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 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, 86, 87, 88% 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 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 talk the talk doesn’t mean they walk the walk. He’s saying, you know, you can meet people who talk like heaven and live like hell. You’ve all met people like that. I was one of those before I really committed my life to Christ. Maybe you did so too. But he’s saying, you gotta look not at what people say, not at what people think, not at what people feel, but you gotta look at what they do to see what they really believe. Your behavior determines your beliefs. In fact, he says, if you’re really a true believer, it’s gonna change your life. It’s gonna 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 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 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 there are people who 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 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. 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 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 everlasting life. I want you in heaven. I want you to have, so I wanna settle this issue of what it means to really believe in Jesus. Faith is kinda like a diamond, it’s multifaceted, it has a lot of different angles to it. And today we’re gonna 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 them in a little acrostic, F-A-I-T-H, 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. 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, parents, other people will try to tell you how you should live your life. And God says, wait 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 40, went through a real period of shock because they discovered around that age that the model they’d chosen for their life was an inconsistent and ineffective model. And at 40 years of age, they were ending up divorced, discouraged, depressed, Friendless, lonely, and out of whack with life. Why? 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 discovered it was, the ladder was hanging against the wrong wall, leaning against the wrong wall. He said, I was heading 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 guy’s just like this pale, weak, wimpy guy with little rouge on his cheeks and, you know, 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 of wimp. 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 counter-cultural, radical revolutionary you’ve ever imagined, and it takes courage to follow him. Now, Jesus says this, there 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 him. In fact, 21 times in the Bible, he says, follow me. He says, you, follow me, you, follow me, you, follow me, you, follow me. 21 times, he 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 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 a relationship. And that’s what he sent Jesus to establish between you and him. Now, when you begin a 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. They’re 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 got more direction in my life. 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. 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 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, 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 have a thing called earthquakes. And we know you gotta 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 built their houses. And one built this 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 and the rains and the storms and the Katrinas of life came through, the guy who built this house on 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 have a center for your life because friend, you’re going to have storms in your life. You’ve already had some. You’re going to 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 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 have come, the Katrinas of life come, you’re gonna crack up. You’re gonna crash, you’re gonna crumble, you’re gonna fall apart. 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 the A in faith stands for accept 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 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 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 deserved, 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 need, even before you know you need it. Now, one of 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. 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 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 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. 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. No, no, 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 body, the air you breathe, everything you’ve got is a flat out gift from God. If God hadn’t wanted to create you, you wouldn’t even be alive. The only reason you’re alive 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. You say, well, what about the money that I earn? 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. When it comes to blowing it, making mistakes, God says, I will forgive you of everything you’ve ever done wrong, even though you don’t deserve it, if you just trust in Christ. Look at the next verse. Now God says he will accept and acquit us, in other words, declare us not guilty for all the things we’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 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 Protestant or Buddhist or Baptist or Mormon or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or no religion at all. This isn’t about religion. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’ve come from. He says, I want to help you out. I want to forgive you. I’m going to show you my grace. That’s what God sent Jesus to do. He wants that relationship. And he said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Well, that’s good news because none of us are perfect. We’ve all blown it. We’ve all made mistakes. God says, we’re just going to wipe that out. We’re going to erase the guilt. We’re going to wipe the slate clean. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to give you a second chance. I am so glad that God gives us a second chance. He’s not a three strikes you’re out kind of guy. He gives us a second chance, that’s grace. You know, when I was in junior high, I took a shop class in woodworking. And one of the assignments is 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 all wrong, and it was uneven. I varnished and stained it, and it did look terrible, and it was uneven, and 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 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! No, he didn’t say that. He didn’t. What he said was, 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. You’ve made some really poor decisions. You’ve really messed up some choices in life. You didn’t do it all right. But you know what? He doesn’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. 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. I’m not. There’s no chance I’m going to 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. They just 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 grace of God.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 02 :
Your generous prayers and support help us teach God’s Word to people all around the world who’ve never heard about the hope in 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 my life every day through your daily email devotional. Through your teaching, God is continually changing my thinking and aligning my heart with his word, which brings hope and happiness to my life and positive thoughts for a great future. Please pray that I’ll keep the fight to keep the enemy from stealing the truth from me. I can now 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 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 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 this prayer and I pray this blessing in the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER 01 :
Amen. 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 PastorRick.com and sign up today. 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.
