FREED | Past

We're gonna be in Philippians chapter three, verse 10 through 14. Paul writes this. I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on towards to take hold of that which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead. I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks, folks, good evening. Just a couple of things before we jump into God's word tonight. First one I wanna remind you of, our church is committed to being a church that prays, not just in a prayer room, not just in our own lives, but building altars for the presence of God here in New York. This Thursday night at 7.30 p.m., we are doing citywide prayer at Wellspring Church out in Queens.

And I wanna urge you to give your Thursday night to seeking God. It starts at 7.30. We only do this a couple times a year, four times a year, I believe, but it's where we gather with churches from all over New York to call upon the name of the Lord for a movement of the Holy Spirit here in the city. Something powerful happens when believers come together from different churches and traditions to seek God. So that's this Thursday night, 7.30 p.m. I'm asking you to come. As your pastor, I'm asking you, will you show up and in strength? Here's why this matters. Churches in Manhattan always expect people to come to them. And it creates a kind of arrogance with other churches in our other boroughs. And they never expect that people from Manhattan will make the commute out to pray in other churches in other contexts. And I just want an onslaught of people from our church to roll in so deep that they are like, who are these Manhattanites making this great pilgrimage out to Long Island City? So please, we'd love to see you there. I'm actually gonna be out of town and I'm flying back in for this prayer meeting. So getting up at 7 a.m., I'm preaching the night before in Dallas,

getting up at 7 a.m. and flying back for this prayer meeting. So please join me there. Number two, it's coming up on 21 years this summer since I moved to New York to start a church and to be a pastor. And I appreciate that, thank you. And I almost took a sabbatical. I've been a pastor for 30 years and I've never taken a sabbatical. And I almost took one last year on the 20 year anniversary, but it didn't quite work out. This year I'm turning 50 and I'm having my first grandkid in May. And I just do appreciate that. And I feel like the season is right to have a sabbatical. And so through mid June, back through the start of September, I'm gonna be off. If you've ever read John Steinbeck's book, Travels with Charlie, where in his late 50s, he gets in a car and drives around America. I am retracing Steinbeck's travel with Charlie route on an absolute pilgrimage of joy. And so I can't wait for that. So you're in great hands with our team, as you know. We've got nine more weeks in this free series and then we're gonna be doing a study through the gospel of Matthew on what it means to be a disciple according to Jesus.

So it's gonna be a great summer. I'll be back in the fall. And one last thing, I've got to have surgery on my jaw. And as a preacher, you're like of all the places, why not my elbow? You know how many people's knees go out in New York? Gotta get surgery on my jaw joint. And so just ask you to pray for that. If it goes well, it'll be a very minor surgery and I'll be eating yogurt for three days and then I'll be back. If it doesn't go well, I'm gonna have my jaw wired shut for six weeks. And I don't want that to happen. So if you could just be prayerful about that, I would greatly appreciate that, okay? Amen. When I got married, I was young. And we were so in love. Many of you know my story. Met my wife, was in a fever dream of Southern love at a small Bible college. And they tell us you need to do marriage counseling before you get married. So we go to the first session and this pastor, wonderful man. gives us an overview of a theology of marriage. And I'm like, got it, that's what we want. Good.

We do session two, and that's sort of like a family inventory, just tell us your family of origin. And he looks at our research that we give him, and he says, whoa, are you guys aware of how much dysfunction is in your families? We're like, yeah. But that doesn't matter, because we're in love. We're in love. And he's like, are you sure you're aware of the family dynamics you're bringing into this union? And we're like, yeah, we're in love. And then he got a phone call, and then he left, and that was the end of our marriage counseling. Well, we moved to Dallas, Texas, and the church that I was serving as a youth pastor in offered a class called Making Peace with Your Past. And my wife saw that class, and she said, I think I need to do that class. And so she goes into this class, and then every Sunday night, she would come out almost crimson red from how much she'd been weeping. And everybody who would come out of that class, was just so heavy, not a dry eye, just sobbing and weeping. And one of the things we studied was adverse childhood experiences. And there's a little sort of test you can take or an assessment you can take that talks about how these sort of abuse dynamics, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, mental health, incarceration,

poverty, verbal abuse, all of these childhood dynamics affect you in later life. And it's higher risk of depression and anxiety, but a lot of negative life outcomes. And if you've got three or four of these out of 10, it's like you had a rough childhood. We had nine out of 10. Almost every category of dysfunction and abuse that you could have, we had. And this started us on a great journey of trying to make peace with our past. Tonight, we're talking on freedom from your past. But I think it's important that we talk about the impact that the past has on us. Have you made peace with your past? As you sit here tonight, have you reconciled it all, resolved it all, and you're walking in freedom? There's that famous line, William Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it's not even past. James Baldwin said, people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. And Miroslav Volv, who's a theologian, talked about the role that harboring unforgiveness and issues from our past plays in sabotaging us. Look at what he says, as long as it is remembered, the past is not just the past, it remains an aspect of the present. The memory of the wrong suffered is also a source of one's own non-redemption. What he's saying is there's things that can prohibit

and block you from living in the fullness of the life of God that flows through you. So I wanna ask and answer a very simple question tonight, but the implications for it are profound. Can we be free from our past? And if so, how? Now, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, I'm not a therapist, I'm a pastor. I'm not a counselor, I've read a few counseling books and quite a few therapy books. And that's like that person who watches a few clips on YouTube and thinks they're a theologian. I have a dangerously unhelpful amount of knowledge. So I wanna acknowledge that in a 40 minute sermon, I'm not going to be able to get to the deep kind of care that some of you may need. And I'm assuming that you are on a holistic journey. And if you're not, our church would love to help you with that. But what I can do tonight is frame up the big picture of how theologically it is possible, in fact, you are destined by God to be set free from your past. I made the claim last week in my sermon opening this series on freedom that the central narrative, not an incidental sub narrative, but the central narrative of the Bible is about freedom. And I wanna take that one step further. The central narrative of the Bible is about freedom from your past.

Look at the characters in the Bible. And part of the authenticating factor of the truth of the Bible, there's many, but this is one, you don't write and include the details of the failures and struggles of the characters in the Bible who are godly heroes if you want to establish a hero myth kind of narrative. Think about Jacob, okay? Jacob is gonna become Israel and is gonna be the father of the faith in many ways, and yet he rips his brother off in a scam and spends the rest of his life trying to unwind the consequences of his past. And it's not until he has a radical encounter with God, it's not until he has a new name and a new sense of calling, he's actually able to shake it off, but much of his narrative is him trying to flee from the decisions he made in his past. What about David? We think of David and we think, yeah, just a man after God's own heart who lusted after a woman, got her pregnant, killed her husband, and tried to hide it all. He wrote Psalm 51, which is an account of a man reckoning and trying to reconcile his past. Moses, we think of him as the great deliverer. We forget that Moses murdered someone in an attempt to deliver them himself and spent 40 years in the wilderness

as a shepherd, forgetting about his call, pretending that none of his past had happened until the burning bush. Josiah, my favorite king in the Old Testament, we read about a young man who sought the Lord, but what did Josiah do? He had to deal with generational sin and generational curses. His grandfather Manasseh was one of the most wicked kings in the Bible. His father was so wicked, he was assassinated shortly after he took power, and then you've got a young man who has to deal with his family past, not just his personal past. All through the pages of the Bible, you've got people trying to get free from their past. I wonder if you were really honest, if you've reconciled and come to terms with the things you need to be free from. Sometimes there is generational sin and curses. Epigenetics can play a role in how you view life and experience life. Maybe you've got guilt from what you've done. Maybe you've still got, what's rattling around the loudest in your mind is some mistakes and sins you committed in college, and you're still feeling the effects of those. Maybe traumatic effects, the events that you've been through. Maybe it's abuse you've suffered. Maybe it's wounds.

Maybe it's rejection. It could be anything, but so many of us have things in our past we need to be free from. Now, the challenge about talking about our past is that the past is a concept that exists in time. Time is such a head trip. It's such a memory, such a complexity. I started reading, just sort of refreshing Stephen Hawking's on time this week, and then just dipped into a little Einstein, and I immediately just dipped straight back out and said, let me just use something else here. Because time is such a mystery. It's such a mystery, but it is the reality that we live in. And so I came across an understanding of time that over the years I have found incredibly helpful. And it's from Philip Zambardo. He was the president of the American Psychological Association at one point. He's most famous for conducting the Sanford Prison experiments. And in all of his research and studying of psychology, he began to notice that there was an underlying factor influencing how people experience life that nobody was talking about, and it was called their orientation towards time. So he called this the dimensions of time perspective. Ooh, how exciting. Now, I wanna illustrate this. I wanna show you how this shows up in a relationship, okay?

Now, my wife grew up in poverty. It was many nights as a kid that she grew up sleeping by the fire because the electricity was cut off. Genuinely poor. But every year, her family did a blowout trip to Disney on credit card. So they would, at the start of the year, here we go, just load this puppy up on credit card. And then they would spend the rest of the year hating their lives, slaving away to pay off the credit card. Now, I, by instinct, am a future-oriented person. So when our kids were at the age that Christie started going to Disney, Christie said, we need to take our kids to Disney World. And I was like, I'm not sure we need to because we're broke. I was 18. I was a church planter when I moved here. How about this, when I moved here, I lived with two roommates, two kids and two dogs in a 580 square foot apartment and my salary when I moved here was $60,000 a year because I was trying to live as a missionary. And I did live as a missionary, that was forced on me by that salary, but I set myself. All that to say, I wasn't flushed up with cash for a Disney trip. My wife would say, you're robbing our children of a lifetime of memories. And I was like, you're robbing our children who won't have these memories because they're kids

and all they'll do is complain about how hot it is. You're robbing them of a college education. Can you see that tension? She had an orientation of make the memory now, I had a so and invest for the future. There was a massive tension in our marriage because we had different time orientation. I just want you to know that that Disney trip was the best trip of my life. So, here is the framework he puts out for an approach to time. Okay, the first one's what he calls a past negative approach to time. This is a view of time where people are trapped in the past. Next slide, they have a pessimistic averse or traumatic. Next, there it is. A pessimistic averse or traumatic view of the past. They dwell on mistakes, rumination, on trauma, regret, and correlates with high anxiety, depression, aggression, and low self-esteem. These are people who are trapped in the past. Then he talks about a past positive orientation towards time. This is a warm, nostalgic, and sentimental construction of the past, valuing family traditions, keeping souvenirs, enjoying reunions. Results in a high self-esteem, happiness, and overall life satisfaction. Then you've got a present hedonistic view. It's a focus on immediate pleasure,

novelty seeking, and gratification. It sort of correlates with the behavior that is described by risk-taking, impulsive decision-making, social sensation seeking. And then it's a high energy and creativity, but risk of substance use and poor health habits. Then you get the present fatalistic view. This is a hopeless, hopeless belief. Life is controlled by fate. Lack of planning, apathy, resignation regarding outcomes, strong link to depression, external locus of control, and low well-being. And you have a future orientation, a goal-oriented focus on planning, delayed gratification, rewards, punctuality, finishing tasks on time, concern for health. And the result of this is high academic and career success, but potential for stress and workaholism. Christie had a present hedonistic view of time, and I had a future orientation, and they were in major conflict. Now, you read this little paradigm, and you go, oh, this is interesting. But here's what he says. The least healthy relationship to time is having a past negative view of time. Like people who are trapped in their past are the ones that will not move forward into the life that they are called for.

And here's the truth that our world does not say. Sin traps you in its past. It exerts power over you. And so, so many people are hung up on things that they've either done or things that have been done to them by the sinful behavior of others that holds them in the past. And we've gotta go on a journey to have God's vision of time that pulls us out of a negative past and the future that he wants for us. Now, we're gonna use Paul as our mentor tonight on how this happened, and I think that Paul is very instructive. Here's why. Because Paul had to make peace with his past. You look at Paul, and you're like, well, he was an apostle. He wrote the New Testament. He had it all figured out. Paul had a nasty history. Paul hated Jesus. He persecuted the church. When he was a young man, he was complicit in the murder of Stephen, holding the clothes of the older guys so that they could stone him. And then when he becomes a Christian, he experiences massive amounts of abuse

from the people who used to love him, and then horrific rejection from the churches that he started. The Galatians, as we talked about last week, sort of turn their back on Paul and go back into legalism. The Corinthians say, hey, you're not a good enough speaker. We want someone who can preach better than you, and they reject his leadership over them. So he's got wounding. He's got trauma. He got stoned. They thought he was dead. They drag him outside the city to leave him. You wanna talk about internalized self-hatred because he hated Jesus? Everything you can think of, Paul's dealt with this. And that's why Paul says this. When I think about my history, this is from the teaching text, I have to forget what is behind. That's a part of his understanding. He's like, I gotta reconcile this past. I've gotta make sense of this past. I've gotta move on. So just a couple of things that we see from Paul tonight. The first one is this. You've gotta learn to forget what is behind.

Now, immediately, this makes some of you nervous. because you think this is just Christians saying, don't worry about it and everything's easily fixed. I'm not saying that at all. There's an unbiblical forgetting and I'm not advocating for this. And here's a couple of ways I think the church gets this wrong. The first one is this term called spiritual bypassing. And spiritual bypassing just simply says, because I've had either a euphoric experience with Jesus or I've been saved or I've encountered spiritual enlightenment, all the other stuff is just gone, it's just washed away. Not true. It's there and it will come out at some point in time. You cannot bypass your brokenness and the gospel is not a magic wand that undoes everything that you've been through. As you know, I'm from a Pentecostal background, okay? Assemblies of God, speaking in tongues, fire tongues glory, fire tunnels, like all the things, okay? Pentecostals are the worst spiritual bypasses of any group. They're just like, I got touched with the Holy Ghost, I'm fixed. Remember I said last week, Peter touched with the Holy Ghost, not fixed. Still shrinks back because the Judaizers come at him. Peter had prejudice in his heart and the fear of man and a filling with the Holy Spirit

didn't undo the work of formation that had to happen in that area. I'm not talking about bypassing. I'm not talking about numbing. Some people are so overwhelmed, the thought of dealing with the stuff that's overwhelming them is overwhelming them and they just numb it out. A lot of times, people just do numbing behaviors. It could be anything. I'm not talking about that. I grew up in a repressed Australian culture where our solution as men was stuff it down. It's like something's wrong, it's like stuff it in there. Just stuffing it all the way down. And so I grew up in a culture, if you cried, you were weak. I grew up in a culture where if you went to a counselor, they were like, what is wrong with you? And so much of the work of my life has been like trying to, in a healthy manner, not vomit it out, but strategically process it out in a healthy manner. And then you get other people who just, they're living in total denial, like everything's fine, but everybody around them can see them, you're not fine. They're like, I'm fine. You're like, not fine. If you bury radioactive material in the ground and then build a house on top of it, at some point, it will leak out

and poison everybody in the house. And the same way, if you do not acknowledge what has happened to you, it will poison the life you build. I'm not talking about unbiblical forgetting. I'm talking about biblical forgetting. The word that Paul uses here, Philippians 3.13, he says, forgetting what's behind. It's a fascinating word. It has the idea of making a conscious choice. It has the idea of neglecting something you used to attend to, or no longer caring about something that you cared for a lot. Now, this to me is very, very interesting because it's possible in our world today to build a trauma-based identity. And what that means is you make your diagnosis about what you've been through the most important part about you, and you don't want healing, or you don't wanna move on from it because you don't know who you are if you're healthy. And so there's been a lot of research on Gen Z about how Gen Z have woven in, because trauma has a social value in our world today, that this is a part of not just what has happened to me or what I'm wrestling with, but this is who I am. It actually makes me me. And Paul's wanting to say, if you consciously care for and tend to the wound like it is a part of you, you're not gonna get the freedom from it that you need to.

And so it's to neglect or no longer care for the thing that is seeking to control you. This is why biblical forgetting is so potent, because if we're not careful, our guilt will become a form of rumination. Now, a typical person has 6,200 thought bubbles, they're called thought worms, but it doesn't sound good, thought fragments, thought fragments, 6,200 thought fragments a day that go through a person's head. And researchers tell us that almost 80% of those or more are just thoughts from our past that just play on loop. So again and again and again, our minds are switching back to these preset scripts about how we view life and how we view reality. And in essence, what rumination is, which is sort of being trapped in your past, is letting those preloaded scripts be perpetually about the wrong things, about the hard things. A biblical forgetting says, you think about like say, I'll just use college as an example. A lot of people get into trouble in college. morally, okay? And so a lot of times you can, and you know this as well as anybody, time does not erase guilt. Again, if you get a parking, I was in an Uber with Max, we'll go to the airport and the Uber gets pulled over and the Uber driver gets arrested. I was like, what the heck? I was like, dude, if you ever been in, what what do we do now? And the cop's like, call another Uber. Say, oh, I hope they refund us from that one. Anyway, you know why the guy got arrested? Unpaid parking

tickets. He's driving along thinking, hey, I haven't committed a major crime. Time had made him forget, but the consequences were still present. My simple point is we can have things that are hovering around in our life and what the gospel does, and this is what Paul experienced, he says those things are covered and washed by the blood of Jesus, so you do not have to think about them again and again. There is a divine amnesia the Bible teaches about how God views our sins. It says he does not remember our sins. It says as far as the East is from the West, thus far as he's removed our transgressions from us, and it says, this is the promise of the new covenant, he will remember our sins no more. You're thinking about things that God does not think about anymore, and to take on the mind of Christ is not just having a kingdom view in general, it is having a redeemed view in particular of your own story, and so biblical forgetting says that we take out of our mind and out of our hearts the guilt for the things that we have done. Now, I think another thing that's also interesting here, in New York, okay, we always talk about family of origin stuff and trauma and wounds and all that sort of stuff, but sometimes what's holding you back from your past that you have to forget is how successful you are. Pride can rob you of your life in God as much as brokenness can. Here's what Paul had to say, this passage, Philippians 3, it's a remarkable passage. Paul says, because the Judaizers are coming at him saying you're not holy enough, and he's like, yo, hang on for a second, you want to do a little resume flex here? He's like, I'm from the perfect tribe, I was circumcised on the eighth day, I had the perfect mentors, I was a part of the right community here regarding the law, I was blameless, and then he says this, all of that stuff that I used to value, scoobalong, this is rubbish, it's dung. He's like, it's just my value system's being completely reoriented. I put all my hope in my accomplishments, but now that I've met Jesus, I realize there's just, there's no spiritual value to these things. In fact, they may rob me and keep me in pride in my past rather than entering into the kingdom. So biblical forgetting is giving up our guilt, it's giving up our shame, it's telling our story the way that God tells our story, and it's forgetting the good

things that we have tried to accomplish on our own. And I want to note this is a holistic healing, it contains a narrative reframing. You process your past events not as shame-based mistakes and failure, but as opportunities for the grace of God to show you mercy. It's a redemptive process that ultimately leads to healing. That's what I think is so hopeful about what Jesus does. Jesus is a healer. A third of Jesus' ministry was healing people. We talk about Jesus the Messiah, we talk about Jesus in politics, we talk about Jesus in teaching, we talk about Jesus in discipleship. We forget Jesus spent so much of his time healing broken people. And Jesus wants to come into those painful parts of our part and heal us. Much, much of my marriage, 28 years now, much of my marriage has been re-narrating, shutting off the brokenness, forgetting where we come from and what we've been through from a biblical perspective, and then building a healthy culture of love. And a lot of times people can look at Christie and Mai's marriage and listen, I am so idiosyncratic. It's not lost on me. I'm not weird. Did you say it's true? I'm not weird. Sam says it's true. Sam spent a lot of time there. I'm not weird per se. Like I think when most people meet me they're not like, Tyson's weird, okay? But they definitely say Tyson's idiosyncratic. It's true. You meet my wife, my wife's in a category of one. But if you knew what Jesus had done for us, and if you knew how far we'd been brought, and if you knew the journey to healing that we have been through, you would honestly probably, you'd clap. It's an act of mercy. It's an act of God's grace. And so You gotta learn to forget the way the Bible calls us to forget and let the story of the gospel reframe those things and heal those things so that you do not drag them into the future. Next, Paul says you gotta learn to press into what's ahead. So part of it is forgetting about your past, but the way that you're pulled into the future is forgetting and by pressing into what's ahead.

I wanna read this again, but I think this is a beautiful passage. Imagine we could get Paul here tonight, like, ladies and gentlemen, by way of kingdom magic, Paul, and he's like, thank you guys, comes out, like, thank you guys, good. And if we could interview Paul and say, hey, Paul, listen, man, you went through some, you did some nasty stuff and you went through some heavy stuff. Just talk us through your mindset. How did you process that? Like, what was the internal journey? What was your understanding and your framing? Here it is. Look at what he says. I wanna know Christ. Yeah, I wanna know the power of his resurrection, participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Now, I wanna note, Paul's transformation was based on the encounter with a person. It's the person of Jesus that disrupted the life script that Paul had for himself. Wasn't an ideology, it wasn't even just a theological vision. Paul met a person that pulled him into a different future. Meeting Jesus was a disruptive event for Paul. But then I want you to note the pattern Paul talks about. He's gone from a life of self-righteousness,

suffering, and abuse, but then he realizes, actually, there is a way to live, that there's a different script, there's a different thing that needs to run through my head. And look what he calls it, it's the way of the cross. I wanna know the power of his resurrection. I wanna know the fellowship of his sufferings. I wanna become like him. He realizes that the culture has all of these scripts that it gives us that tell us how to get to the good life, and they do not work. But as you know, the good life is the life of the gospel. It is the way of the cross. So Paul internalizes the path of Jesus as the pathway forward into life. And he never would have come up with this on his own. And then he says this, not that I've already obtained all this, or I've already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Now, note, you, with your New York ambition, that energy's going somewhere. Your life energy is going somewhere. I want you to note this, okay? I want you to note this. Paul uses the same word for pursuing Jesus, the same Greek word he used to describe how he used to persecute Christians. Paul's energy used to go to destroying the church,

now his same energy's going to building the church. Complete and utter redirection of his life energy into a redemptive purpose. And then he says this, brothers and sisters, I don't consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what's behind and straining towards what's ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize of which God has called me, heavenward in Christ Jesus. Now, Paul is saying that Jesus has disrupted his life pattern and something new, a glorious future has appeared on the horizon of his life that is now pulling him out of his past into something that is better than he could have hoped or imagined. The Bible talks about this. 2 Corinthians 5.17 says this, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old's gone, the new is here. Now, that's a verse we always talk about for people when they become a Christian. People are walking around like, I'm a new creation, I'm a new creation. Love that, hallelujah. But I think the NIV gets this right. It doesn't say, the emphasis is not on the new creation you've become as much as it is the idea that the new creation,

which is God's plan for redeeming the whole cosmos has now arrived in the middle of human history and it's hit your life. This is extraordinary. The Jewish community believed that there would be a resurrection at the end of time where the Messiah would come and repair the world and heal all things. But now, Paul is saying, that vision has happened in the middle of human history through the resurrection of Jesus. And when you meet Jesus, the presence of the future becomes real in your own heart. The kingdom of heaven is alive in you. Now, why is this important? Listen, it's hard to explain but it's revolutionary, ready? Here's how most people do life. They look back at their past, they drag all of their past history with them and they try and get a little bit better. So, you know, New Year's resolution. like a little bit better, a little bit better. But the number one thing defining their future is their past. It's 80% past, 20% future. But what Paul is saying, no, you live from the glory of the future back into the moment. It's 80% future with 20% redemption from your past carrying you along.

It is a completely different life to live backwards from new creation in the middle of a broken world than trying to drag a broken world with a little bit of hope in the middle of it. He's letting them know that new creation power is in you. That's why Paul's like, I wanna know the resurrection because if God can do that in the person of Jesus, he can do that in me. Second, he gives us a new identity. I touched on this last week, but I'll touch on it every week in this series. Look at 1 Corinthians 6, 9. Look at what he says. Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Okay, so if there's theology in the world today that says God doesn't mean it and he doesn't care. Look what this verse says, don't be deceived. Do not let people who live in the modern world re-describe theology the church has taught for 2,000 years because they do not like it, okay? Don't be deceived. But he says this, wrongdoers won't inherit the kingdom of God. And then he puts out what in Greco-Roman culture was called a vice list. And a vice list basically says, here's a bunch of people doing bad stuff. Now I've got bad news for you tonight.

Every single one of you is on this vice list somewhere. So look at what he says. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Now some of you right then were like, oh, I think I've made it. And then slanders were there. And then you remember what you did on social media in the comment section this week and you're like, dang, got me, okay. Look at what he says. And that's what some of you were. Now I wanna note this. Sometimes people will come to our church and they will say, I'm a little disappointed by your church. And I'm like, why? And they're like, I met some people and they was like, people were a little jacked up. Some of the people had issues. And I was in a small group and it wasn't an emotionally whole small group with successful people dominating life and optimizing and getting better. And we have a subconscious, we get to the church and sometimes we're like, why are these people jacked up? And it's like, because the church is not a place

where emotionally whole people come to do life a little bit better. The church is a place where broken people are freed from their past and are on a journey of healing. And sometimes that's messy. And so he says, imagine going to church at Corinth. What a disaster. They're coming from visiting the sleeping with temple prostitutes. One bloke's having sex with his step-mom. Other people are divided into political factions and hating one another. And imagine that in your small group. How's your small group this week? You're like, dang, wild. Bro, Corinthian small groups are wild. And Paul wants them to know your past. Look at what he says here. Such were some of you. That's who you were, but it's not who you are. Look at what he says. This is such a beautiful verse. First of all, he says, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Justification is the doctrine that says because of Christ's death on the cross, he took away our sin. All of our guilt was put on Christ. Christ was punished in our place.

Therefore, we receive the righteousness of Jesus as a gift. And so what means that in the eyes of God, we're declared not guilty. It's as though we've never sinned. This is the most amazing thing. So we go from those with deeply broken past, things we've been through, choices we've made, things we've done, but in the sight of God, because of the work of Jesus, we are justified by the blood of Jesus on the cross as though we've never sinned. And then he says this, you were washed. What a beautiful image. It's been covered in dirt and then coming in and that existential experience. If you ever needed to take a shower, it's like 104 degrees, it's August, you wore flip-flops around the city, you've been on the subway, you're like this, what am I doing with my life? You have a shower and you come out, you're like sitting in front of the air conditioner, you're like, feels so good. That's the experience of being clean, but there's an experience of being cleaned by Jesus, of the washing of your sins, the guilt taken away, knowing existentially that God's removed that from you. And then it says that you are sanctified, which means you're set apart for a holy purpose by God. You're not destined to live out of your past

and repeat those mistakes and deal with that same stuff forever. God sets you apart for a holy purpose because he's got something for you. And this happens by the Spirit of God. It's amazing. This ultimately gives us. a new calling. Look what Paul says, not that I've already obtained all this, or have already arrived at this, but I press on to take hold of that for which Jesus Christ has taken hold of me. Next slide, new future. One thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining towards what's ahead. Next one. I press on towards the goal to win. It's under the slide new future. I press on towards the goal to win the prize of which God has called me heavenward. That word heavenward is amazing. Human culture, your life for the most part, comes down to that little dash that exists from the day you were born to the day that you die. All of your love, all your hope, all your fear, all your glory, all the sorrow, sadness. You're going to be a tombstone one day and that little dash, that's your whole thing. And our culture says that's all there is. But that is a horizontal call. But Paul says there's a vertical call. There's a heavenly call, which means you're called out of a restrictive cultural narrative and a repressive cultural timeline into this glorious future. And therefore the power of where you're headed and who you're going to be gives you grace to break the gravity of your past and what you've done. I want to try and illustrate this. Many of you know I became a Christian the weekend I turned 17 in Australia. This is a Paradise Assemblies of God youth cab. And before I was a Christian, I did not live like a Christian. And I started working in a meat factory when I was 14 around men that I would not describe as emotionally healthy men, okay. And it was, I've described before, it was like almost like a prison environment. It was like super violent and there's people literally doing Rocky, like punching the meat. It was a total head trip. I just took Sam back there and he was like, gosh this is worse than you described it. And so that's encouraging. And so that's where I was. And so before I was a Christian, I wanted the approval of the older guys I worked with. And at the end of the day, after a long day's work, everyone would just sit around, drink beer, and just like do dumb stuff,

tell dumb stories, dare one another to do stupid things. And so I had like a whole history of the joyful participation in the brokenness of the meat culture in which I lived. And then when I become a Christian, all of a sudden they're like, I've told you this before, this could be Johnny Swank. Johnny Swank is my nickname. Johnny Swank, do this. And I was like, I'm not doing that anymore, man. Oh, Mr. Holy Man, we've got a monk among us. Like just that they would just harass me because all of a sudden I would no longer participate in all the things I used to do. And it would beat me down. Like I was like, oh gosh. And they would just go at me and they'd try and tempt me. Like I haven't, I've never even shared some of the crazy stuff they did to try and get me to sin again. And then God did something amazing. And I'm just sitting there thinking, is this my destiny? Like fighting the butchers for holiness. God, come on, you gotta have more. And then I got that phone call from my dad. Hey, John, you want to go to Bible college? Yeah. In America? Oh heck yeah. Dad, is that the land of the free and the home of the brave? I do believe so. And I thought, genuinely I thought to myself again, like I'm 20 years old. The chance of me meeting an American hottie is high. It's high. I'm going to Bible college, which they call bridal college. And I was like, this ain't target rich environment right here for a young Australian preacher, ex butcher, current preacher. So I go there. But now I'm in the butcher shop and nothing they say phases me. Because I know my destiny is not doing this for another 20 years. There's another place. There's a different people. There's a different call. There's a whole nother life. And all of the sin you're trying to throw at me does not move me a bit because some beautiful futures open up in the things of God. You get the illustration, the what Paul is pulled. And some of you are like, John, every time you preach on this, you bring up the phrase eschatological realism. Are you going to bring that up again? Yes, I am right now. Eschatological realism. This is the idea that God's beautiful future is so real in the heart. We're pulled into it and it breaks the gravity of our past and it pulls us into the future that God has for us. If you do not have a clear future of what God has for you, you will not. to be able to break free from your past because it's all you know. Listen, Satan loves to deal with your past because he knows he cannot control your future. And if he can keep your eyes in your sin,

your shame, your brokenness, and your trauma, he thinks he can sabotage you from what God has ahead. But in the same way, when you get a realization of who you are in God, what you're destined to do, the glorious future God has for me, those voices lose their power. You stop looking backwards and trying to drag your past into your future, and you live from your future, and it breaks you free from your past. It is so good. But you know, God's so merciful because he will not only set us free from our past, he will use the very things we've been through to heal other people. Here's the truth. I think sometimes, I think maybe sometimes people listen to me because they think, I think Tyson's been through some stuff. He's not just like reading a book and then regurgitating the content he's been through. I think he's been through some stuff. And if you ever sit with my wife, now my wife is not, she's not a preacher. Her gifting is not like public teaching. But if you ever sit with my wife, who has overcome so much, it is like sitting with a, it's like a Venn diagram of like the mother you always wanted plus the person of Jesus plus Yoda. I mean, it's like a very interesting dynamic.

But she has a zone. She has a zone of listening and healing where you fall into it. And then three hours later, you're like, I'm not done, I'm still talking, I'm still talking. Because she's a wounded healer. Because of a level of empathy and understanding of what she's overcome. And she has authority to call you out because she knows what it takes to be free. God is so kind. Philip Zimbardo says that the worst kind of orientation of time is to our past. Satan is obsessed with the past. And God is open to a glorious future. So here's what I think the gospel gives us, ready? A redemptive time orientation. And I wish I could just submit that to Philip, add that as a sub note to Philip Zimbardo's work, okay? Here's what the gospel does. It helps us redeem our past. And then it gives us a time where we look back on it as a source of God's mercy and grace. And instead of producing shame, it gives us gratitude for how he saved us. And then it gives us a present sense of joy now where we're open to the wonder of life. We open our hearts again. The word wonder, as you know, comes from the German word wund,

which means to wound. And what wonder does is it gets through your armor and pierces you with goodness from outside and so all of a sudden, instead of being closed off and obsessed with the past, we have these in-breakings of the kingdom of heaven that open us up. They almost wound us with glory about what is possible. And then it gives us a future hope. We move from rumination from the past to an imagination about what God can do in the future. Folks, I wanna just remind you again that Jesus specializes in setting people free from their past. This is not a side thing from the gospels of Jesus. This is at the heart of the gospel. How much of the gospel is just Jesus meeting people and giving him a new future? Jesus bumps into Matthew, the tax collector, and he's like, you wanna do taxes, mate? Or do you wanna be a part of a kingdom revolution? And Matt's like, I'm with you. Great, he gets a totally different future. He could have died at the booth, but he got up from the booth and became an apostle that touched the nations because he said yes to Jesus' future. The woman at the well, radical relational brokenness. And she's just thinking, tried one husband, didn't work, got another husband, didn't work.

Just relational brokenness. She says like, stuff it, I'm not even gonna get married. I'm just gonna live with a bloke. And then Jesus meets her and says, I wanna heal your relational needs with living water. And as a result, she goes back to her village and she leads a revival. She's left her cycle of shame where she's outside of the normal confines of society and she's welcomed back as a heroine of grace. The demoniac, completely overwhelmed with outside powers. Nobody could touch him or help him. Their best job was to try and chain him up and leave him alone. But when Jesus meets him, he says he sat at Jesus' feet, clothed and in his right mind and he ends up going back to the Gerasenes, a 10 city part that used to represent Canaan. And he goes back and he prepares the way so that when Jesus comes back, a revival breaks out. Zacchaeus is a man who was compromised. He's living in the richest area of the city of Jericho. This is where all the cultural elites have their summer homes. He's a chief tax collector. Jesus meets him, boom, his future is not tax collecting. His future is bearing witness to the goodness of Jesus. Jesus says to him, this man too is also a son of Abraham. He rewrites him into a story of redemption and heals him socially. Mary Magdalene, seven demons.

And Jesus meets her and says, your future is not the demon possessed girl. You're gonna be the first witness to the resurrection from the dead and for all of history, you're gonna be remembered as the woman that saw Jesus first. Peter denies Jesus after everything Jesus did for him. And then Jesus comes and restores him to his calling. Paul, who hated the gospel, gets a new future and ends up building the church. Folks, here's what I'm here to tell you tonight. Jesus can free you and forgive you. It does not matter what you have done. If you've lied, committed sexual sin, if you've been a thief, if you've got hatred in your heart, if you've abused other people or you've been through abuse, if you've had an abortion, envied other people, had an issue with drugs and alcohol, if you're a people pleaser, you're full of pride, you've got shame, you've dabbled in the occult, you've got fear, or you've got prejudice in your heart, Jesus loves to set people free and he will set you free tonight. Do you want this? It can be yours. Here's how this happens. Gotta bring it to Jesus. Gotta bring it to him. Gotta bring it to him. This is what Brennan Manning says.

If we can seal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others. You gotta bring it to Jesus. Jesus is so kind and because he is Lord of history and because he is outside the bounds of time, you know what he has the ability to do? To take your worst thing and make it the very thing that gives hope to others. And it says that he can restore the years that the locusts have eaten. You know what, locusts just come in, man, they just chomp down and they devour. And there can be years of your life where you've been controlled by guilt or shame or condemnation or fear or regret and this is, it's taken over your life. And then Jesus can come along and all the things you've lost, he can give back to you and restore you. I have seen this happen in New York hundreds of times. You wanna be free from your past? You can. You are not destined to repeat your family cycles. You're not, your trauma is not your destiny. Your sin is not the final word about who you are or the value you have before God. The good news from the cross is it is finished, you are free, a door is open. Come and live if you want it.

So I want us to just bow tonight in response to the Lord. I'm not gonna ask you to do anything right now other than maybe open your heart up to God. As I've been speaking tonight, is there anything in your heart where the Lord's just put his finger on it and you just know that you are trapped in your past? You have a past-time orientation and the enemy has used this to hold you back. He's used this as a place of shame. He's used this to control you. He's made you think, oh, if people knew what's been done to you or what you've done, no one would accept you. And so you're living from half your heart. You're just, you're in a shame-packed place. Past-sin-management situation. Jesus specializes in meeting people and setting them free. So I wanna invite you now, just if there's anything that God's bringing up in your heart, I want you to just see, by faith, Christ standing before you in love. The man of mercy, the friend of sinners. The healer. And I want you to take that thing and just hand it to him. Just say, Jesus, I surrender this to you. Hand it over to Jesus. Say, Jesus, I wanna give you my past. Here's my sin, here's my guilt, here's my shame, here's my pride, here's my abuse, here's my trust,

here's all the stuff I've been through and I don't wanna carry this on my own anymore. I'm giving this to you. And just by faith, see Jesus taking that and giving you joy in its place. Remember Jesus would come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, I'll give you rest. If you've got a tired soul from carrying your past, you can lay it down at the foot of the cross tonight. You can be free. And then just receive His mercy and His love. Jesus, I receive your forgiveness. I receive your mercy. I receive your power. Many people sitting in the very pews that you're sitting in have had a new future open up in front of them because of the power of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit and the inbreaking of the age to come. And so I just want you to say just in your heart tonight, Jesus, I want everything you've got for me. I turn my back on the world. I turn my back in an unhealthy obsession with the past and I just, I want to run into the future you've got for me. Everything that is on offer, I want it Lord. Jesus, we thank you that you are the one who sets us free. Jesus, we thank you that your kingdom has come and you've broken into human history to give us hope, to give us peace, to give us power and to give us life. And Jesus, I just pray tonight for a movement of freedom to happen in the hearts of the people here tonight. Lord, I pray that people would lay down burdens they've carried their whole life and they would run free into the heart of God tonight by the power of the gospel. Thank you for your love.

We receive this in Jesus' name, amen.