Duane Calvin | More than Hearers

- Relationships, they can be beautiful and they can be messy. Confusing, complicated, sometimes even exhausting. Whether you're single, dating or married, you know it's not as simple as it looks. So why do we keep ending up here? Why doesn't love last? And why is it so hard to make it work? (upbeat music) With intentionality and the willingness to work at it, we can all have relationships that actually work. It's complicated, starting September 13th. - Hello, Willow Creek, how are we doing today? (audience applauding) Yeah, well, my name is Duane. I'm one of the pastors here. I'm excited to be with you today. I get the privilege of serving as the South Berington Campus pastor. And I've been doing that for about seven months now. Praise God, come on. (audience applauding) Yeah, I think they're gonna keep me. I think it's okay, a little over the child part, and praise God. We have been so thankful because God is clearly moving in our church. I mean, man, when you watch a video like that, you know that there's a series coming your way. And this series is coming next week,

is all about how we can do relationships God's way. And I don't know any person who wouldn't need just a little bit of help, or maybe a little bit of hope as a part of their relationship. And so this is gonna be a great series. In addition to our normal Sunday times together, there is also a cohort that will be assembling as a part of our journey over the next few weeks. And we would love for you to be a part of that relationship cohort. It's a 10 day thing that's gonna happen, and you can sign up by simply going to willowcreek.org/next steps. You're gonna wanna maximize the moment of the series that is to come. So don't miss any of the three weeks, but also make sure that you take the opportunity to jump into the cohort. It's gonna be a phenomenal time. And we're excited about the series ahead, but church, we are also thankful about the series we just came out of. How many of you were here for Willow? Welcome, let's come on. (audience applauding) Praise God. I mean, four weeks of voices from all around God's big sea church. Folks from as far as California, all the way to as close to home as Chicago land area.

And we have been so thankful through the series. If you missed any week of the last four weeks, I wanna invite you to go back and watch the messages. It was a powerful time of hearing from the word of the Lord. And let me give you a little bit of a recap. Now in week one, we had the privilege of hearing from Judd Wilhite from Las Vegas. Praise God, y'all give Judd some love. Now Judd shared with us that we can have God even in the midst of the wilderness seasons in our lives. Even in the most difficult places, God is still with us. And his word says that he'll be with us even to the end of the age. And it was a powerful reminder that no matter what you're going through, God is still with you. Praise God, powerful message, yeah. And then week two, we got to hear from Hosanna Wong Johnson. Anybody remember Hosanna? Yeah, praise God. And Hosanna shared with us that our names are found in the words of scripture. And the any identity that we assume needs to be rooted and grounded in the word of God. It was a powerful message. Hosanna came in here, she preached the word of God, and then she gave a spoken word, and it just rocked the room so much, so that I started to come in here this morning with a spoken word for y'all, and I said, no.

I'm gonna just go ahead and let Hosanna have that one. Praise God, you don't wanna hear that, listen. And then week three, we had a familiar friend return to Willow Creek. You all know Meghan Faith Erickson, yeah. (audience applauding) And she came back and brought a word here with us, and Meghan always dives deep into our souls. And she said that we need to be the kind of people who listen to the word of God, and who are filled by His Spirit, and who walk in the abundant life that God has for us, consistently being filled by the Lord, and that overflow being the way that we do life around others. And it was a powerful message that resonated in my soul, and I hope in yours. And then last week, we had the Reverend Dr. Charlie Dates come. Praise God. (audience applauding) Dr. Dates rolled up in here, looking cleaner than the Board of Health. I was scared to touch him. I might get cut, he was so sharp. Sharp! I started to wear a suit this morning. I said, I'm gonna go ahead and let Charlie have it. I'm not gonna do that. But he came in here and he preached the word, who walk in the joy of the Lord.

Even in the most difficult circumstances of our lives, we can still have joy because the world doesn't give joy and the world can't take joy away. Joy comes from the Lord, amen? (audience applauding) Powerful message. Clearly, God is at work. Clearly, God moved through the last four weeks of our series. And I got a couple of questions I wanna ask 'cause we start our time together. Let me just ask the first one. You ready? It's just between me and you and about 10,000 of our friends who are watching online. Listen, real quick, real quick, who is your favorite? (laughing) Let me use this as an opportunity to give a shout out to all of our other campuses watching. It's great to be with you and to our friends at Jefferson City Correctional Facility. It's good to be with you as well. Yeah. (audience applauding) I think I heard somebody from one of our other campuses say Hosanna in the highest. I was like, that's not exactly what I was asking. Not exactly the same thing. And I was just joking. You don't really have to tell me who your favorite was, but I do want a real answer to the second question.

And this dives a little bit deeper. Let me ask you it this way. What did you do with what you heard? Let me say it again. What did you do with what you heard? Thank you. Because each of us got the opportunity to be inspired by the Word of God. And for four weeks, we listened to voices from all around God's big sea church. And the question I might ask is because I'm guessing that some of us were inspired. We took copious notes, we sat down, we thought about what we heard in the message, and maybe just maybe it moved us to action, but maybe for quite a few of us, maybe we just kind of put the notes away and ever actually responded to what we heard. And I think there's a danger in that. I ask because we live in a world saturated by information. I mean, we can listen to sermons and podcasts and audiobooks and we can do Bible studies every single day. We can hear the Word of God preached and taught pretty regularly, almost constantly, but there's a danger with that kind of exposure that we might miss what we're supposed to gain from what the Word of God is saying to us. There's a danger. We can start to mistake information as transformation. That we can start to confuse learning about God

from actually following God. We can start to think that because we've heard the message that somehow it means that we've lived the message and the challenge is that we start to reduce what we've heard from the Lord into something that it was never meant to be. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Because we're so saturated with information, our natural inclination is to start to think that everything that we hear is just for informational purposes. So we start to classify as information or maybe because we live in a world where we're so inundated by social media that we start to think that the words that we hear from the Lord that they're content. And there's a real problem with that because every one of the speakers we talked about in the Willow Welcome series, they were anchored in the Word of God. And let me be clear, content is meant to entertain, information is meant to inform, but the Word of God is meant to transform. Amen? (congregation applauding) And that's a very different thing. And that transformation begins, it happens when you and I put God's Word into practice. When we do something with what we've heard. And for the past several weeks,

we've listened to powerful messages. We've taken notes that we've done all the things that we need to do. We've been challenged and we maybe even felt convicted. But again, what did we do with what we heard? Because feeling convicted isn't enough. Taking notes isn't enough. Being challenged isn't enough. We need to be transformed. And that kind of transformation begins at the moment that we put God's Word into practice, the moment we hear it and decide to do it. And here's what I've discovered over my lifetime of ministry. There are these two great distances in our faith journey. And the first one begins when we go from the place of unbelief to a place of belief. And many of us have walked down that journey. As a matter of fact, all of us have walked down that journey. And maybe you're here today, Can I just say that we're glad that you are here today with Oak Creek? Can you just let them know we're glad they're here? (congregation applauding) Because we're hoping today that something inspires you to step over the line of faith. Is you hear the word of God that you might respond in faith to Jesus Christ? That's what we've been praying for the whole time. And it's a great distance to go from unbelief to belief.

But let me tell you the second greatest distance. Once you cross over the line of faith, there is this distance that goes in our discipleship journey from being hearers of God's word to being doers. And I think that the greatest distance is salvation. It's from unbelief to belief. But the greatest distance in the discipleship is from hearing to doing. And make no mistake about it, God calls us to be both hearers and doers of his word. But how do you do it, right? How do you live that kind of existence? How do you respond when you hear the word of God? How do you take what you hear and put it in a practice? How do you read the word of God? See what it says, apply it to how you live and live it out every day. Well, I'm glad you asked 'cause that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today, amen? So if you have your Bibles, who's that I want you to do, go ahead and open up to the book of James. And that's where we're gonna anchor our time today. James chapter one, verses 22 through 25 is where we're gonna spend all of our time today and we're gonna jump right into the text. Now, while you're turning there, let me give you a few reasons why James is so important. One, James grew up with Jesus. They were brothers. Now, I have a brother who's a little bit older to me.

I'm one of five children. My brother's a rock star. He's a superintendent of schools. He's got a PhD. He's a sharp dude, but he ain't Jesus. I mean, could you imagine like living with Jesus? I like your brother's perfect, all right? Now, my brother thinks he's perfect, but he's not, but Jesus actually was. And at first, James didn't believe Jesus was the Messiah, but everything changed at the resurrection. When James saw the power of the resurrection, it transformed his whole life. And James writes all through his book, he becomes one of the most important leaders in all of the church history. He led the church in Jerusalem and he wrote letters encouraging the church who were believers, who were scattered and who were suffering. And throughout his letter, James keeps coming back to this one principle. It's that real faith is not just something we believe. It's something we have to live. When you get to verse 22, James starts us off by saying these words. Do not merely listen to the word of God. And so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. I mean, that's a one minute sermon. Amen.

Am I still doing what amen training around here? I need to come on somebody, come on church. So one minute sermon right there. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says in one short sentence, James tells us to guard against something that we all have a tendency to drift into self-deception. He lays out the reality. But if we're not careful, we can be the kind of people when it comes to hearing and responding to the word of God that simply hear, but don't actually do it. And in doing so, we can deceive ourselves. And notice he says, do not merely listen to the word of God and deceive yourselves. Do what it says. He doesn't say that somebody else is going to deceive us. He says that we, you and I, we do this to ourselves. It's the kind of self-deception that happens when we convince ourselves that hearing the word of God is the same as obeying the word of God. How many of you know that you could hear the word of God every single day and choose to be unchanged? It's when we convince ourselves that hearing God's word is the same as obeying God's word because you can hear God's word and choose not to obey. Hearing is important, learning is valuable, studying scripture is necessary, but none of those things are the final destination

because you can know more about God without actually becoming more godly. See, the way that we become more godly is by doing the things. And so as you move through the rest of the text, he starts to give us an illustration of what it looks like in practice, and he uses a very familiar tool that all of us have used at some point in another. Here's what James says as he continues to detect. He says, "Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in the mirror and after looking at himself, he goes away and he immediately forgets what he looks like. He uses the mirror to remind us about what scripture's power and purpose is. As I was preparing for this message, I was getting excited because I remember as a kid some very familiar times with the mirror. Now my mom is with us today, praise God, and man, y'all give us a round of applause, my mom. Thankful. She's not normally with me, so I'm very thankful. My mom is the hardest working woman I've ever met in my life, by far. She raised five children as a single parent, praise God, five of us. We are some biggons, I'm the run of the litter. My household was like 12 gallons of milk, 22 boxes of cereal, one week. My parent and my mother had the awesome responsibility of feeding us, but also she was kind of like the gatekeeper in the morning. She would stand at the bottom of the stairwell and we would all get dressed, all various ages. We would come downstairs, we would go into the living room, she would see us and she would say, "I don't think so." Now I tell my kids all the time that my mom is not the person that they see today, this is the person who's trying to get into heaven clearly.

So she wasn't as nice as, "Hey, go on back up the stairs and change clothes." That was not what she did. She would say, "Your hair is all over your head." Y'all must have been in my house, all right. She would say, "Hey, I don't know what it is in your eyes." She would reference this substance called sleep. I don't know what sleep is even to this day, but apparently it was in my eyes. And I needed to go upstairs and wash my face. Or she would tell us that we had the outfit on that looks the most ridiculous of the day. So she would say, "I don't know why you chose to wear that, but you ain't going nowhere out of this house looking like that." She would send us back upstairs to change. Now every now and again, a child would come downstairs and be so disheveled, such a mess that my mom would say, "Turn around. Go back upstairs and just look at yourself in the mirror." So we would go back up the stairs and we would look in the mirror. And we would, for the first time, see what my mom was seeing. We would see the messy hair, we would see the clothes that didn't match or that were a mess or that needed an iron. We would see the stuff in our eyes. We would see that there was something that needed immediate attention. We might have buttoned the shirt wrong or done something crazy, but we would see what my mom was seeing. And when we saw it, it would make us want to change it. It would make us want to do something different. And when James is talking in this passage about Scripture being a mirror, what James is saying is that when we look at the words of Scripture, Scripture has the power to show us ourselves. It cuts to the core of who we are. We see who we really are. I mean, we try to hold back the person that we actually are when nobody's looking.

The mirror of Scripture shows us our reflection and it tells us how we can be better in Christ. Our fears, things that we hide, our sin, the mirror of Scripture reveals all of that to us. I want to be clear here that Scripture is not doing that so that we walk in shame. Church, I need you to hear me on this, that there is no need that you or I have to ever walk in shame. Jesus rose from the grave and to power over sin and death. And it is as far as the east is to the west. God's blood has covered shame. We have no need of it. We have no need of shame. So when the Bible exposes something about us, the Bible is not trying to shame us. It's trying to shape us. It's trying to shape us into the very best version of ourselves. The person that God truly wants us to be. He's trying to shape you and I. He's trying to shape our character. He's trying to shape our hearts. He's trying to get rid of the pride and the selfishness and the fear and the unbelief and the hidden motives and the broken relationships and all of the things that have caused the separation between us and him. He's trying to show us so that he can shape us into who he would have us to be. And God doesn't show us our sin because he wants us to feel terrible about ourselves.

He shows us our sin because he knows who we can truly be in him. It requires a response of obedience. The mirror shows you, but it will not do it for you. Doing something about it is what actually transforms us. And this is the place where self-deception starts to creep in because we look in the mirror and we see what needs to change and then we walk away and do nothing. We forget what we look like. And it's subtle. I guess it's slow creep the way we get to this place. And it takes on a couple of different forms. Let me show you what I mean. One of the forms that we see when this happens is that we start to actually look in the mirror, we see the reflection. We don't like the reflection, so we begin to reject the mirror. Self-deception. What do I mean by reject the mirror? If you ever see your Bible sitting on a table, you know that it's gonna tell you real truth as you open it up and read what it says. You know that there's a response required from what you've read before, but instead of actually reading the word and allowing it to transform you,

you just walk right around it. You start pushing scripture away because you know what it's gonna tell you about what needs to be transformed in your life. Anybody ever been there? Amen, I have. You know the reality is, is that the word of God is there to shape us. And we don't have to push scripture away. What God is telling us is meant for our good, but it's easy to practice that kind of self-deception if we're honest. Let me give you a couple of other ways that this starts to show up. Rather than looking the mirror for ourselves, see what it says, make the changes that are necessary. Sometimes if we're honest, what we do is we look in the mirror and then we take the mirror and we turn it on everybody else but us. Apparently y'all know some people who do that. Maybe not you, but people you know. You ever get like a sermon video sent to you and it's like you really needed to see this. And I'm like, maybe you needed to see it first. This is where we take the mirror and we turn it on other people because when the mirror is on them, it's not on us. And we think that means that we don't have to actually respond to self-deception. And let me tell you where I see this most at

is in like marriage counseling. Like I'll spend time sometimes counseling with a couple and talking through their marriage and out here the husband begin to share all the verses that he thinks specifically apply to his wife and out here the wife share all the verses that he thinks, or she thinks specifically apply to her husband. And I'm like, why don't everybody just do their own verses? Get your hands off her verses. Get your hands off his verses. We've got enough verses to do of our own. Turn the mirror on yourself. I think sometimes this is where we get stuck in self-deception. Let me give you the last one. I think that we get stuck in self-deception because we don't recognize that obedience actually has a cost to. Obedience costs us something. It will always cost us something. When Jesus died on the cross, when he rose again, he now offers us the free gift of salvation to reconcile a relationship with him. And that is free. That's a free gift of salvation. There is nothing that you and I could do to earn it. allow God to transform our lives, that's free, but this discipleship journey on the other side, this obedience to following Christ,

that will always cost us something. It'll cost us our pride, our time. It'll cost us to lay our very lives down at the feet of Jesus and allow him to transform us and change us because he has something better on the other side, but it will cost us something to be obedient to Christ. It'll cost us something. (congregation applauding) Salvation is free. It cost you me nothing but discipleship. Discipleship will always cost us something. As followers of Christ, we lay down our lives and we pick up that cost. It might mean that some things need to die. It might mean that some changes need to be made, but it's so worth it, Church. It's so worth it. It's so worth it. You know, on the other side, Jesus has something better for us. And James doesn't just leave us here at the cost of discipleship or at the cost of obedience. He takes us on this journey and telling us what the other side of life actually looks like because as you continue in the text, here's what James says. He says, but whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues in it, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it, they will be blessed in what they do.

(congregation applauding) He's talking about two things here. And the first one is freedom and the second one is blessing. Church, that's what's on the other side of obedience. Freedom and blessing. Now let me just break these down a little bit because I think we have a misnomer about what freedom is really all about. In our current culture, when we talk about freedom, most of the time it's in the lane of, "You get to do whatever we want." And that's not the freedom that James is talking about here. I want to be clear. The kind of freedom that James is sharing with us is a freedom that is anchored in Christ. It's a freedom that is connected to Christ. And so we're able to fly further and do more because we're connected to Jesus. And he shows us our left and right limits and walks us in freedom by his design and for his purpose. Let me show you what I mean. When I was younger, I had kids that were growing up and I was kind of like a fun dad. My wife and I would spend a lot of time with our children but there were ways that we just thought would be fun for our kids. Now I was responsible a lot of times for like trying to creating that fun 'cause I just like to have a good time. My kids are growing up now.

They are off the payroll, praise God. Father, thank you. Thank you. But at the time, we didn't have a lot of money. And so we would go to the dollar store and one of the best ways I could have fun with my kids was buying a kite. Anybody ever do this, dad? You ever do this? You go outside, you run the kite up in the air. It's attached to the string. The kite is flying and your kids are over the cheering you on. Go dad, go! Fly that kite, dad. And this thing is soaring through the air. And I would be so like happy to watch it and to watch them watching it because the kite had this freedom. Now what you might not know is that if you cut the string of that kite, it would crash to the earth. It would lose every bit of freedom that it has and it would turn into chaos. You see the freedom that James is talking about here is freedom that is anchored to Christ. And while we wanna fly high, we gotta be careful about flying alone because that's the kind of freedom that always ends up in our crash. The kind of freedom that we need to walk in

is the freedom of God's word, the freedom where we are attached and connected to Christ. And somebody needs to hear this in here today. That God's word isn't a chain holding you down. It's an anchor that sets you free to soar. And the way that you are always meant to fly. And the way you were always meant to experience freedom. Freedom in Christ. Not freedom to do whatever you want. Freedom from sin. That's what's on the other side of obedience. You know, when we talk about blessing, oftentimes we talk about health, wealth, and wellbeing. The blessing that James is talking about here is the idea that if we would be the kind of people who do things the way that God has called us to do them, and we would experience God's blessing in our daily lives. Because God's people, doing things God's way, will always receive God's blessing. We don't live blessed lives apart from responding to the word of God. It is in our obedience that we experience freedom and blessing. And I know what you're thinking. When all of this sounds great, how do I do it, right? Like how I practically step forward by faith and do this each day of my life? Because I did sit through those four weeks, and I heard some things that I wanted to respond to, but how do I actually live this out in my day-to-day?

And I wanna give you a little bit of a framework that you can approach a sermon with. Every time you hear the word of God preached, every time you read it for yourself, this is a framework that will ensure that we move from being just hearers, to being hearers and doers. And it starts with us asking the right question. And the right question is what is God telling me to do with what I've heard? What is he already told me to do with what I heard? And that could have been three weeks ago. That could have been 30 years ago. But what is God already telling from his word that you need to do? We start with that question, right? And so we start by simply seeing what God is telling us to do. We see it, we see it, and then we should want to respond to it. And then right behind that, we see it, and we have to plan for it. We have to prepare for it. We have to maybe move some things around in our lives to make sure that we can accomplish it. So we begin to plan. And here's what I know. Nothing happens without intentionality. So we need to be the kind of people who are intentional about responding to God's word. So we see it, and then we plan it.

And then we do it. We actually do what God is asking us to do. One of the ways that we know that we will respond by being doers is that we create accountability in our lives. And so lastly, we check it. We invite people into the journey who could hold us accountable. Hearers and doers. And this is a framework, it's not the framework, but I'm hoping it helps us to respond as hearers and doers of God's word. I mean, Willow Creek, could you imagine a day where our church, where every person was committed to hearing God's word, and doing what it says? So I want to get you excited about it. I want to get you riled up about it. Like I want us to be hearers and doers of God's word. Let me say it again. I want us to be hearers and doers of God's word. The third time somebody's gonna catch it and say it with me. I want us to be hearers and doers of God's word. And the fourth time's gonna be even better because I want us to be hearers and doers of God's word. Come on, give God some praise, church. (congregation clapping) Let me give you two quick warnings before we close out our time. No, you hear a message like this

and sometimes you want to get inspired and you start doing, but I want to caution two things. The first one is I want to caution us from doing for the wrong reasons. If at any point you get in the journey of doing and you start thinking about you more than you think about Christ, wrong reason. This is about God and his kingdom. This is about following Jesus. It's never about us, it's always about him. And there's a caution there, right? And then let me give you the second caution. Is that we might think that we can do this in our own power or in our own strength. And let me just be clear here. Doing God's word doesn't work without God's spirit being a part of our lives. So you could be doing a whole bunch of stuff and never actually connect to the one who has told us to do it. if you have not put your trust in Jesus, I want to invite you to do that today. You can respond today with faith in Jesus Christ. You can allow him to fill you with his spirit. And you begin to read his word and respond because on the other side of your obedience, you know there is freedom in Christ and blessing that will follow you all the days of your life. You know, I made that decision a long time ago, church, and he has transformed me by his word. And that's what we want for you.

So I would ask you to join me in a word of prayer as we close out our time. Father, we thank you for the day. We thank you for your grace and mercy. Father, as we close this time, we know that there may be some here today who do not know you. I pray that they would step over the line of faith today. I pray that we would be the kind of church that are both hearers and doers of your word and that you might be glorified in that. May the name of Jesus be lifted high in all of our doing. Father, we thank you in advance for lives that are changed and transformed in Jesus' name. Now listen, as you're here with every head bowed and every eyes closed, if you would like to accept Christ as your Lord and Savior today, I'm going to pray a prayer that you can echo with me. And you can simply say these words wherever you are. And this is a moment where you declare to the Lord that you want him to be your Lord and Savior, that you want to follow him with your life, that you put your faith and trust in him. Let me give you some words. God, I know I'm a sinner. I know I have chosen to live my own way instead of living for you. Today, I want you to be my Lord and Savior. I want to follow you. So I turn away from my sins and I turn towards you. I put my faith in you.

I put my trust in you. Help me to read your word and respond with my life. I trust you in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Come on, let's give God some praise. All of our campuses, all around, let's give God some praise. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and stand to your feet. Come on, church, stand up as we're closing out our time today. We're going to pray one last prayer before we go. I'm going to ask that our prayer team goes ahead and moves into place. If you need individual prayer, they will be here for you. They'll be standing by ready to pray with you. I want you to walk out changed today. And if you need prayer, you need to offer something up for the Lord, this team is here to help. If you made the decision to follow Jesus today, I want you to know it's the best decision you ever made in your life. Praise God, ever, ever. It means that your security is secure with trial. Your attorney is a secure Christ. And we would love if you let somebody know that. You made that decision today. There's an area called the Next Steps area. We would love if you stopped there on the way out. You'll see it just out in our lobby. If you're new to Willow, make sure you stop there as well. If you have any questions, make sure you stop there as well.

We are here to serve you, to help you walk alongside you and to point you towards Jesus Christ. So let's pray and we will close out our time together. Father God, we thank you for the day. We pray that you have been glorified by our worship today. As we leave this space, we pray that we would be the kind of people who are heroes and doers of your world. In Jesus' name, amen. Willow, God bless you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC]