The Difference Between Sin and Struggle | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are going to have a conversation about the difference between sin and struggle.

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When a Christian finds themselves caught in sin versus a Christian who is simply struggling with despair, discouragement, or depression, how do we as the church respond to this type of person?

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How do we care for them? And if you're this person, how do you identify the difference between sin struggle and an actual struggle with humanity, with the broken world?

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And in the members' podcast, we have a lively conversation about identifying preaching that may be confusing the first use of the law, that leads people to despair, that actually doesn't help people come out of sin and a struggle, but actually maybe push them farther into it.

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. And I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

01:47

Justin, it is good to be with you again this morning. My friend, how are you? Good morning, brother.

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It is good to be with you too. It is beautiful here in Asheville, North Carolina. It's a great time of year.

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I mean, so it's like mid -October. This is a great time to live in the area where I do.

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And so I'm thankful for that. Thankful for the beauty that's all around me and all around us. And I don't know that I have a legitimate pro -con for today, but just as I'm processing the natural beauty of this area and what normally would be a very busy, bustling season here of tourism and all that kind of stuff with people coming in to look at the leaves and enjoy the good restaurants and the craft beer and stuff.

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I mean, obviously, it's been a minute since we've mentioned COVID -19, but boo, boo

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COVID -19. And everything that is related to that. I know here in North Carolina, we are now in phase three of a reopening plan, but there are still a lot of things that are not reopened.

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So there that is. I'm not really sure what all that means. When you're in phase three of a three -phase plan and there's still a lot of stuff that's not open.

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But anyway, don't want to get into that right now. I love the fall.

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I love that leaves are changing color. I love football. Football's on TV, though the schedule's a little crazy because games are having to be moved around and they're getting canceled.

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All that stuff. Anyway, there that is. I mean, those are just thoughts in my mind. We got a ton going on in the life of our local church.

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Really good providences from the Lord, and it's a really busy season. So I know I'm battling a little bit of just tiredness and weariness in some ways.

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And I have some things in my life that I'm encouraged by. So I feel like that's kind of the normal experience.

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Well, speaking of that, it's a good transition. I saw the set up there. I saw it. I saw it come in.

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I don't know. I don't know. I give it maybe a seven on a scale of 10.

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Maybe a seven. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. So today's subject is one of those that Justin and I, we become very passionate about.

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This is going to be kind of the pastor card that comes out in us. We're going to kind of put that hat on this morning.

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Instead of the punchy podcaster who's going to correct all the theology that's out there today. Oh my gosh.

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We try not to do that anyway. No, we don't. But we're going to put on the pastor's hat, and we're going to talk about something that I am very passionate about that I think that is a struggle within the broader evangelical world.

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It's something that my own congregants struggle with, and it's something that Justin and I were just admitting that we struggle with as we walk through the day -to -day life.

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The title of it is Sin vs. Struggle, and helping us identify the difference between what truly should be repented of and that which is the everyday struggle living in a

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Romans 8 world where we live in a world that is groaning, that is full of the curse, that there's complications where we're awaiting the restoration of all things.

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The subject kind of goes something like this. Most Christians, when they find themselves disappointed, discouraged, or even in the midst of depression, they see themselves and are disappointed with their response to a circumstance.

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COVID -19 has been one of these. A loss of a job, finding out you have cancer, the loss of a loved one.

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It leads you into a struggle where you don't see yourself getting better.

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You don't find yourself to have joy. You aren't succeeding at life in the ways that you were before.

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It could be at home, at your job, in your marriage, with your children. You feel like things are falling apart.

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You look at your life, and it's kind of one of those grab a tub of ice cream and watch a show moment, and then you find yourself feeling that that's the only thing that brings you solutions.

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Then you go to church and you pretend like nothing's wrong, and then that's a struggle because you realize now

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I feel like a hypocrite because I'm struggling. I'm not doing well.

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I don't feel like everything is improving. I don't think I'm overcoming this. Now I'm having to pretend like everything is fine, and it's not.

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What do we do with this? How do we handle this? What's wrong with us? Have we done something wrong?

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That's kind of the scenario we find ourselves in this morning. I might begin with a few high -level theological remarks just to chalk the field for us before we get into the pastoral application and the word to the struggler and the word to the church, essentially, that we're going to try to speak today.

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We're going to have this conversation with some pretty important theological understanding underdirting it and coming behind it.

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It's in the background of everything that we're going to say. We're operating from a place of a Reformed understanding of the fall and a

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Reformed understanding of sin and what that means for us as fallen human beings. We're operating from a place of understanding that we are, at the same time, saint and sinner.

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Without that in our theological backpack, so to speak, then a lot of what we would say – maybe let me rephrase that – if you don't have those things in your mind, some of the things that we're going to say may sound strange to you, but we trust that they're going to resonate with your experience.

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Consider these things that we're discussing. From a Reformed perspective, in terms of how we understand

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Scripture, when Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden and plunged all of us into a state of sin, corruption, and ruin, we were affected in every area of our person.

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There's not an area of our personhood that was not affected by sin, that has not been corrupted. That means that our minds, what we think, our hearts, what we feel, our emotions, what we desire, and then even our bodies physically, all of it has been corrupted by sin.

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That has a tremendous effect on us. In addition, the whole creation was subjected to futility.

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God cursed it, and so the whole creation is groaning now. That means that the world, in that sense, is fallen and broken and does not work as it should.

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We live within that world, and it has tons of effects on us. Then the last thing, theologically, is understanding that we are at the same time saint and sinner.

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We are saints in Jesus Christ. Our identity is in Him. Our status is one of being justified, declared righteous by God through faith in Christ and what

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Jesus has done, and we still have a fallen nature. We have not been completely delivered from that, and we now have on our hands what

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Paul describes most pointedly in Romans 7, it's a new internal war where our flesh and our spirit wage war against one another, and that has all kinds of fallout and implications for life as a

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Christian in this fallen world. We're coming to this conversation with all those things assumed and understood and in the background.

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Now, John, let's have a pastoral conversation about struggle and the difference between sin and struggle, and let's try to encourage some strugglers out there and hopefully encourage all of us to love the strugglers in our midst better and live with one another in charity and grace and compassion.

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Yeah, and I think we have to identify that there are times of discouragement, there are times of disappointment, and there are people who struggle with depression, depression meaning that it's not necessarily based upon a sin that they have committed, not always.

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And I think we have to be careful to, in the

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American culture, one of the things that we love to do is recognize the problem and then move on from it.

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We hear the media say things like, we're sending our thoughts and prayers for you, and then it's over.

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When someone dies, we've had a lot of famous people die this year in 2020, and you hear people say, we're sending our thoughts and prayers to you.

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Well, I mean, it's a kind of a way to tip the hat and not be a jerk, but it really, what does that do?

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It doesn't really offer anything. And we do this in the church as well. We hear about something that's really horrible and we're like, well, brother, we're really sorry,

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I'll pray for you. And that's all we offer. And then when it's a little bit closer to you, you start hearing advice about how you should be over this already.

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You shouldn't struggle with this. Why would this be a problem for you? Why would you be discouraged?

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And you hear things like, well, you know, at least you're not Job. At least you're not struggling on that.

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That's really helpful. Right. So I guess what I want to say is that when we think about these encouragements from Paul and the

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New Testament writers about love, patience, kindness, mercy, and grace, where we're bearing one another's burdens, that literally means to get up underneath and hold, to get up underneath and carry the weight is what that means.

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There's a difference between carrying the load of someone and saying, you shouldn't have that weight anymore.

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You should have gotten rid of that burden. It should not be a burden on you. Your discouragement, your disappointment should not be, you shouldn't have it.

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And we go immediately into fixing a situation that maybe can't be fixed.

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And so this is where I think we need to, the danger of this constant upward movement where everything is always joy, everything is always happy, everything is always upbeat, and you can never have a down moment and struggle.

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It's just not the reality, one, of the Christian life, but two, it's not the reality of the Bible. Have you ever read the

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Psalms? David wrote Psalms of absolute despair, explaining his own disappointment, explaining his own discouragement.

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And often he says, I am in the pit of despair. Like, I don't feel as if there's anything lower

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I can get to where I'm at right now. And he's crying out in those moments. And yet you aren't allowed to have that in the church.

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You cannot say, I am in despair. I am disappointed. I am discouraged.

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It's just not allowed. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Because some of this is because many of us have not been taught very well as to what the scripture actually does say.

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And you've pointed out a number of passages already. I mean, maybe give a read to Psalm 77,

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Psalm 88, Psalm 73. I mean, there are just so many texts, Psalm 13, how long, oh

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Lord. I mean, the lament of God's people is just replete in scripture. And they're lamenting because we live in this fallen world and we ourselves are fallen.

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And the struggle is real for God's people. I'm like, think of second Corinthians one, where Paul says, we don't want you to be ignorant of the challenges and the struggles that we've faced brothers.

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For we despaired of life itself, you know, and we don't talk like that in the church.

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Like we tend to not talk the way that the writers of scripture wrote, because we think it impious to talk these ways.

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You know, we should be content in all circumstances. We should be joyful in the Lord. And like you said,

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John, I think people mean well. I don't ever want to impugn anybody's motivations, but you come meaning well equipped with bad theology.

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And then you tell people, you know, well, you should be better than you are because the assumption is you should always be improving like you alluded to.

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Or, you know, you shouldn't be struggling like you're struggling because we expect that we are just progressing onward and upward to glory, and we shouldn't look like we used to look, you know?

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And that means necessarily in our minds that the struggles that we had five years ago should just go away, you know, as we're being transformed and changed.

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And I think part of what we want to say here on this podcast today is you will be sanctified in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. God has you. He's doing His good work in you by the power of His Holy Spirit.

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And you being in Christ Jesus and being a new creation in Him and all those things does not necessarily mean that your particular struggles will just go away or that they will be easier in 10 years than they are now because,

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I mean, that is just patently and empirically just not true because many of us will fight the same battles that we're fighting today for the rest of our lives.

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And that actually is meant to give hope to a struggler, not to discourage us. It liberates us to realize, oh, okay, the point of the

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Christian life is not just that I get better. The point of the Christian life is that I trust

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Christ through the struggle in the community of the church, and I lock arms with my brothers and sisters, and we bear one another's struggles and burdens, and we look to the perfect one who has saved us as we are on this pilgrimage to the celestial city.

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And there will come a day when struggle will not be our reality anymore, but that day is not now.

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You know, this is a form of the prosperity gospel where if you do what's right, then

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God will prosper you in whatever area. You know, here's a scenario, and then I'll speak to it personally, but here's a scenario that just happened.

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The guy that I've been working with, Patrick Crandall, he's planning a church with us here in this next year. And Patrick had a friend of his who just passed away from cancer.

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And he was in his thirties. He left a wife and three kids. And often, you know, we're going to give her some grace period to kind of get through that.

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But then there needs to be like this miraculous story about how God is, you know, whatever God's doing in her life.

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And what we do is we want to eventually correct her and say, hey, listen, we know that this is a tough time for you, but aren't you excited that he's in heaven with God?

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And instead of carrying her through this death that she's experienced, we end up trying to correct her.

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We want her to kind of, because listen, it's a whole lot easier to see someone kind of get through it and just move on than it is to get up underneath there and carry them.

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And we don't understand that the responsibility of the believer is to see the discouragement, the despair, and the struggling, and to get up underneath there in that dirty, mucky, not fun, slimy, gooey yuck and say,

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I've got you, I'm going to carry you through this as long as it takes. And it may take until you die, but I'm going to be here with you.

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That's what love is. As Paul, when Jesus says, John 15, no greater love than this, than a man lay down his life for his friend.

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Love is the sacrifice of anything that is beneficial to you.

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To carry someone's burden is to set down anything that is beneficial to you.

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And there's a difference between someone who is in sin and someone who is in the midst of despair because of circumstance.

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That's just one example. I will tell you recently, I have been struggling with, you know, there

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I go through seasons, it was just my dad's birthday on October 11th and he's been gone now for almost 18, 19 years.

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And there are moments where I just, I actually fall into despair and discouragement because I would love to be able to communicate and have experiences with my father that I just haven't had.

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And, you know, I can get down and I can get disappointed and I can get discouraged and being able to share that even within my own men's

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Bible study and with some of the elders so that I can say, hey, look, I don't have to carry this and these guys aren't going to come over and try and give me a

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Bible verse to help me feel better. It literally, I get this theological spiritual where they just come sit next to me and you can hear them sigh.

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It's kind of like, man, that's really hard. It's what I call a theological hug at sometimes.

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You know, with COVID everything's kind of weird, but sometimes you just need a hug. Like you just need someone to say, man,

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I'm going to hold you for a moment. I'm just going to, I'm going to love on you for a second because what you're telling me, that is hard.

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That is complicated and that's it. You don't offer anything else. No, it's right. I think

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I've got a number of things written down right now that I want to riff on before we're done. Only one at a time,

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John, one at a time. Here we go. So like the first thought is, I know that we want to make a distinction.

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You said something that sparked this thought in my mind. We want to make an appropriate distinction between like ongoing unrepentant sin and struggle.

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Those are different things and we're not condoning just ongoing, unrepentant, high -handed sin, as though we just give it a pass and, oh, well, we're all strugglers, so we can't ever confront anything.

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That is not at all what John and I are advocating today. But we want to say and be very clear that the struggle as a

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Christian is our normal experience and we are battling against all kinds of things.

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Even when we find ourselves mired in sin and we are finding ourselves ensnared in sin or there are patterns of habitual sin in our lives, but internally we are grieved and we are fighting it and we don't want to be there.

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That kind of stuff is common for all of us and that is part of the struggle that we're articulating alongside things like disappointment and discouragement that, frankly, are reasonable sometimes in a fallen world.

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I mean, if we were not discouraged or disappointed by things that we see around us or things that we're experiencing, if we were not grieved, then something is wrong.

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If we look around in this world where horrible things happen and loved ones die and we bury our children and things like that, and we looked around and said, yeah, everything's pretty good, that would actually be insane.

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And so I think we need to understand that for people to experience disappointment, discouragement, despair, even despondency at points and depression at points, it's not unreasonable in this world.

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A lot of times I think in a kind of pietistic, hyper -pious environment, we tend to equate discouragement or despair with sin and that's not biblically true.

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You can be discouraged and not sin. You can be despairing of something and not sin.

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You could feel depression about something and not sin. There could be sinful responses to it, but that's another conversation.

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It's important that we have these categories in our minds, that the struggle that we're describing could be things that happen to us and they could just be the ongoing reality of battling against our own corruption and living in a fallen world.

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It wears us out and to not acknowledge those realities and act like that's not the case, it ends up producing tons of bad stuff in the church and it just breeds hypocrisy, like we don't talk honestly about what's going on.

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We don't confess our struggles and our sins to one another. We don't look at one another and say, yeah, I'm not doing well.

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I'm not okay. And we end up living this kind of double life that I think many of us have felt that experience.

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We see it happening in the church and we lament that it's the case, but we have to own the fact that our poor thinking has contributed to that reality at many points.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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And you can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

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And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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Yeah, well, I'll even say that it lingers. A lot of people end up going into deeper despair, into deeper depression because they don't have any relief at all.

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There's no encouragement. There's no one speaking truth into their hearts, into their minds. There's no one there to kind of bring that relief valve.

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So they find themselves discouraged and despair, and then they hide it. They internalize it. And some people, this is part of their personality.

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Like if they have a struggle, they just internalize it and they just hold on to it themselves. But in the

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Christian community, this ought not to be. But we have created an atmosphere where it's not okay to struggle.

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It's not even okay to admit that you're struggling with sin. Let's even just go there. I hate my sin.

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I don't like it. I'm underneath its control right now, but I'm too afraid to admit it because if I did,

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I'm afraid of the consequences of how someone wouldn't be gracious towards me.

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And the reason that we wouldn't be gracious is because we have been so conditioned to think when somebody says to us, yeah,

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I'm struggling with this sin and it's habitual in my life and I hate it and I don't want to do it. We have been conditioned to respond, well, brother, well, sister, if you really hated it.

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You know, if you really hated it, you wouldn't still be doing it. Or if you loved God more than you loved your sin, you wouldn't still be doing it.

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And it's like, man, I could talk for hours about how unhelpful that posture is. And it's that saint -centered reality,

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John, where in my inner man, I delight in God's law and I want to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the reality is

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I still live in a sinful body and I have a sinful nature that is still a part of me and I have not done what

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I want to do completely for one second of my life. Anyway, go.

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I derailed your train. No, it's totally fine. So they're in a culture where you don't admit their struggle, in a culture where you can't fail, in a culture where there has to be constant progress, where everyone is superficial and everyone knows it, but what else do you do?

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But, and then I do think there's people who look at, you know, they go to church and like, well, John and his wife and Justin and his wife, their marriage is perfect, their families are perfect, they're perfect, and they, and they mean relatively, like how comical that is.

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Right. And they, I know they mean relatively like, well, compared to everyone else. And they're doing better than the rest of us.

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Right. And that's even a pressure that pastors feel. A lot of pastors are leaving the ministry right now because, look, the pressures are just too high.

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It's too much to deal with amidst the COVID -19.

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And I mentioned all of this. And the reason I'm saying all of this is that when you think about what's coming to you from the pulpit, what's coming to you from broader

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Christianity, you aren't being trained and taught how to deal with the struggle of life.

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You are being taught how to become a better you. It's always the improvement of self.

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You're taught self -improvement. That's exactly right. Right. You're taught self -improvement in Jesus' name.

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That's right. Basically, which we would contend is not the emphasis of scripture.

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It's not the emphasis of the New Testament. No, as a matter of fact, I agree that we should be improving.

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But the thing is, what we're improving in is completely, so technically, so I just did a new members class and in this class, we had several families and the families were saying, man, this form of Christianity is just so foreign to us, we see it,

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I can't unsee it. It seems like Ephesians has completely transformed my understanding and perspective of Christianity.

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But the comment was this, I have always been trained to be focused in on me and my individual growth and pursuit in Christ.

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I think, no, I know that the Bible tells us that we are to be pursuing holiness and that we should be growing in godliness.

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But how that happens is not you individually working on you.

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As a matter of fact, part of godliness, I mean, what does Paul say, or it's

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Christ, man, my brain's leaving me, but the love of neighbor basically fulfills the whole law, when you understand that life happens together and it's about bearing each other's burdens, it's about Ephesians 4, when the body functions properly, builds itself up in love, consider how to build one another up in love and good works, all of these coming together, you cannot accomplish that, you cannot accomplish love if you aren't willing to get down and dirty, to accept failure, to accept discouragement, to accept people to abuse you, hurt you, misrepresent you, all of that is there if you're going to carry each other's burdens.

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I'm going to tell you right now, if you've ever been around someone who's in despair, they will say mean things and they will say hurtful things to you, to you.

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I mean, I think something that is important for us in this conversation, as we've acknowledged,

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I mean, we are to be improving, but we need to properly define what improvement is and we need to better understand what sanctification even looks like.

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God is the one who does the work of sanctification and he often does it through suffering and trial that we would never sign up for and he does that work supernaturally in us.

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But then even just the marks of godliness, I think sometimes we get this all kind of confused. I mean, if you were going to ask biblically, what's the number one mark of a godly

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Christian? Well, I mean, it's love for one another. That is just like overwhelmingly the answer of the

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New Testament. A lot of times our sanctification is going to manifest itself in ways that we have not been conditioned to look for it.

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We tend to think about our own personal thought life or our own personal experience of life or whatever it may be, our affections and things, and it's not that those things are irrelevant, but it matters a ton with respect.

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If we're going to talk about sanctification, you cannot talk about it apart from loving the brothers, bearing one another's burdens and sorrows, rejoicing with those who rejoice, being patient with one another, bearing with one another in love, pursuing unity of the spirit and the bond of peace,

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I could go on, but it has everything to do with how we live together in the church. That's how we see that, man, that guy, that gal is different than he or she used to be because look at how he lives in the church.

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Look at how she lives with her brothers and sisters. Praise God for his work in that individual's life, but we have not been conditioned to think that way, sadly.

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So let me make another comment. I do have a thought on that real quick, Justin, if you don't mind before you move on.

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No, you're good, brother. I just want to reword something you said. I think this might be a moment of clarity here.

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Sanctification in the New Testament, if I were to give you examples, is you learning how to love with patience, grace, mercy, and long -suffering.

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I mean, think about the fruits of the spirit. The fruits of the spirit are what it requires of you to actually show love.

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It requires patience and mercy and long -suffering. I mean, this is Ephesians 4, walk in a manner worthy of the calling of which you have been called.

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Then what is he named? Patience, mercy, long -suffering. You go to 2 Peter 1, verses 3 and following, and he says, add to your faith, what, mercy, grace, patience, long -suffering, so sanctification is you learning how to love other people.

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We look at sanctification as, I pray more, I struggle less with sin, and I read my

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Bible more, and I'm a missionary. It's like, no, that is not what sanctification looks like according to the

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New Testament. If you think of the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self -control, even that last one, self -control, a lot of times people think about self -control.

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It's like, well, I'm battling my lusts better, or I'm battling this better than I once did, as though self -control only exists for you.

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Self -control is for the benefit of your neighbor, like you're not acting upon, whether it's your lusts and cravings of your flesh that are sexual in nature, or whether it's just like, no, you tend to be explosively angry, and as God has worked self -control in you, you don't blow up as often, and just like bludgeon other people to death.

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So even things like that, that we tend to think self -control exists for me in my thought life.

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It's like, self -control is about you loving your neighbor, your brother and sister well, and you're going to wound other people far less if you are a self -controlled person.

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So a couple of thoughts, John, that I'd want to maybe touch on these two things before we move into the members area.

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One is kind of autobiographical, and one is a little more punchy. So you tell me which one you want me to go with first.

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Oh, well, go with the auto because we may do the full punchy. Yeah, the punchy might lead us into the members area.

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We'll see. All right, so autobiographically, like things that I've experienced in my own life even recently, and this is not about my own struggle so much, but about how other people around me in the church have struggled with me, and I've struggled with them, and it's been edifying.

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So I'm going to just one example. I could give many. We have recently put forward three men who will be confirmed to serve our church as pastors moving forward.

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The eldership is growing at CBC, and we're really encouraged by that. But part of what we've been doing in elder development with these guys and onboarding them is to have them come recently to begin sitting in on elders meetings just so that they can get a feel for what elders meetings are like and all that.

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Well, at the beginning of every elders meeting that we do, we begin, we sing, and we open in prayer, and we look at the upcoming

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Sunday sermon texts, and we read that and pray together. But then we pastor each other.

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I mean, that's what's in our agenda. So we go around the table, and we share about our lives, and guys ask questions, and then we pray for each other, and it has been remarkable to see some of these newer guys who have not experienced this before in this setting come to the table, and they're starting to share about their lives, and we ask very pointed questions, or we're sharing about our lives and say very pointed things that almost it's like, can we even talk like this in the church?

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We're sharing this stuff, and we're crying together. We're praying for one another.

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One of the guys recently said to the rest of the group, that thing that we did in the last elders meeting where we all just shared what's going on in our lives, and we prayed for each other, is probably the single most edifying thing that I've ever experienced in my whole life, and the reason

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I even bring it up, and I feel this too, it's because it is actually safe and okay to say,

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I'm not okay, and this has been really hard, and this is not going well in my marriage or in my family, or I am really struggling in this way, and brothers,

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I just want you to know, and can you pray for me? It's a very liberating thing, and that's just a microcosm of what we pray is happening in the church broadly.

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I've been mega encouraged to walk alongside my brothers and my sisters and be able to struggle openly, even as the lead pastor of the congregation.

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Exercise discernment, certainly, but share what's going on, and nobody looks at you like, are you even saved, bro?

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Because in some contexts, you fear that. Like you said, if I really say what's going on, people are going to question whether or not

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I'm even in Christ, and I don't think that what you're confessing is unusual. I think it's the struggle of most people.

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Go ahead, John. I don't think that this can really happen on a Sunday morning, so I believe

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Sunday mornings are designed for the family dinner.

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It's to be fed and equipped. Right, fed, equipped, and served, where you're going to serve one another in these ways.

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I think the church needs to be creative in ways to find those avenues where you can break down the walls and be allowed to admit those struggles.

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For instance, my greatest desire is that when people show up on Sunday morning and they see each other, they have this look where they look at each other and they know what the other one is dealing with, and there's a look of, brother,

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I love you, sister, I love you, and I'm glad you're here. They don't have to pretend to be fake.

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I trust that's happening in your congregation, and it's happening in ours here, imperfectly, but really, where people do show up and they're asked, how are you doing, and they say, not well, and the look is not one of condemnation, the look is one of,

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I get it, I'm with you, I love you, talk to me. Or they'll say,

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I'm here, or they'll say, I'm doing great, but I know what they mean. They mean, look, I'm here, and part of me carrying that burden with them is to love on them and to care for them and to say, hey, look, it's okay if you're discouraged this morning.

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It's okay if you're disappointed in your circumstances. It's okay if you're battling depression because you are going to receive from Christ mercy and grace, and you're going to receive that which is spiritual and you cannot find anywhere else.

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We're going to carry you through this moment of discouragement. We're going to carry you and hold on to you as long as it takes because that is what the purpose of the gospel and the church is for.

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The gospel is the good news for the weary believer who just can't seem to figure it out, and the gospel message is, guess who did?

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Christ figured it out. He completely brought you everything you could not bring yourself.

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There is nothing that's left. The discouragement you are facing is the reality of the current circumstances you still find yourself in.

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You're still living in a world that has not been redeemed, even though you yourself have been redeemed. You live in a world that has not.

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Your body has not. You need to hear someone speak to you the message of the gospel.

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This is why I've said this in the past and I've gotten myself in trouble, but I stand by it. The primary means of the gospel should not be coming from you.

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It should be coming from someone else because we're not really good at telling ourselves what's wrong with us, and we're really not good at telling ourselves good news.

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This is why the design of the church is to gather and receive the good news, because we're not good at pulling ourselves out of pits.

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Justin Perdue Well, yeah, and like you're saying, we're not the best at preaching the gospel to ourselves. We need other people to herald the gospel to us and for us and over us.

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Agree completely, and it only squares with things that we say all the time, that the gospel is objective.

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It's outside of us. Well, why would we assume that if we're always looking outside of ourselves to say what's wrong in us, why do we assume that strength and all these kinds of things will always just come from within, or that from within, we would be able to preach to ourselves?

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I understand that we have the Holy Spirit living in us and he does his work in us, and praise be to his name that he does, and at the same time,

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I am going to need other people to walk with me and point me to Jesus, and that is

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God's design, that's his plan, that's what he has set up for us in the community of the church, and so I think a parting shot for me, and some of this may sound a little punchy, but I hope to kind of land it with something that's more compassionate.

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We have had experiences in our church where we have had members who mean well, who have very high expectations of other people's conduct and of other people's godliness and of other people's joy in the

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Lord or whatever it may be, and they say things about their brothers and sisters that are less than charitable at points, and they will say,

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I've had people in the past, like guys that I've known in the church that are trying to spend time with other people, come to me and say, the people of this church just wear me out.

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They wear me out, spending time with people exhausts me. Implication, all these people are just struggling far too much.

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They're not godly enough. They should be more joyful. They should have it more together, and I just don't know that I can keep doing this, spending time with people that are like this, and my reaction is, brother, my reactions to that in the moment,

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I aim to be kind and under control. First of all, I'm thinking like, bro, you might want to look in the mirror and assess yourself honestly for a moment in terms of your own struggles and the bends in your frame and how you are probably not as godly or obedient as you think you are, and maybe you would be more humble and charitable, but my goodness, do you hear yourself talk, like where you're saying that spending time with struggling saints who are trusting

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Christ and whose lives are hard and who find themselves fighting a battle that they feel like they're losing a lot of days, that spending time with those dear people is exhausting to you and you just don't know that you can keep doing it anymore.

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My thoughts are, bro, I mean, in addition to look at yourself, consider the calling of even being one of Christ's people, because as I read scripture, we are called to do that very thing.

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Spend time, bear with one another, bear one another's burdens, weep with people.

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Don't just fix them because it's not possible, but point them to Jesus and love them, and so if we find ourselves with that kind of thought that I just can't keep loving people like this,

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I think that's a serious problem. If our theology ever leads us to a place where we have that posture, it is an indication of seriously skewed thinking, and so I think what we are encouraging today is a

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New Testament pattern and a gospel grace -driven pattern of love for one another and acknowledging that the struggle is normal and the struggle is real, sin is not okay, and we are called to bear with one another and point one another to Jesus as we limp along as pilgrims and sojourners in this life.

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Was that your punchy? It was. I tried to dial it down to not be super punchy.

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It really irks me as a pastor when people look at me and say, man, the people of this church are just not godly enough.

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They need to get their act together, and they're absolutely exhausting me. I want to be like, well, you are actually probably the most exhausting person that I ever spend time with, and I don't know if you've ever reflected on that.

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Here's what I want to talk about in the members' podcast, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of other things, but I think that when you listen to the tone of the

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New Testament and Paul, Paul is pushing the believer towards love and unity in Christ to deal patiently with those who struggle.

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I think modern -day preaching, especially in the evangelical world, is based on fear tactics to get people to start acting more holy, and they are setting the standard of holiness that may not even be the true standard of what holiness is.

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Preaching that actually creates despair instead of encouragement. It creates despair and breeds condescension and hardness toward one another.

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What does that look like? I think it's sadly prevalent. What does that sound like? Yeah, we're going to do that. For those of you that don't know,

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Theocast is a way that we support our ministry and continue to write more books and provide more classes and provide more resources for pastors around the world.

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For those of you that don't know, Justin and I have been doing a book study on covenant theology for pastors, and we have had several pastors from Australia, India, Canada, I can't even think of all the places where, but all of that is funded through our membership.

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Our membership is a way for people to come alongside and partner with us. We consider you our partners in ministry.

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You can go to theocast .org to learn more about that, and there's a free trial there.

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We're going to jump over to the members podcast for those of you who want to join us over there, thanks, and if not, we'll see you next week.