Whoever Means You: Grace, Forgiveness, and the Heart of the Gospel - Jeff Ryan - 3TC Podcast - 5/11/2025

Jeff Ryan discusses the importance of confession and forgiveness in Christian life, emphasizing that everyone, regardless of their past, can be forgiven and considered great in God's eyes. It highlights the need to recognize one's spiritual depravity and the significance of obeying God's commands. Jesus came to fulfill the law, not abolish it, and to be obedient to God's word and to love others, stressing that true righteousness comes from a heart change and understanding that all scripture is useful for teaching and training in righteousness.

Welcome to Three Timbers Church! We are so glad you found us online and encourage you to explore all there is to learn about our church located in beautiful Bennington, Nebraska. When you come to Three Timbers, you can come as you are to experience the love of Jesus through the people of God. ​

Whether young or old, single or married, new to church, or a lifelong attendee, there's a place for you here. We invite you to join us toward a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ. Our goal is to share the passion, power, and presence of Jesus with others. We believe in supporting families through service, education, and loving one another as Jesus loves us, unconditionally.

Transcript

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Welcome to the three timbers podcast. We hope this will encourage and uplift you today. You know, as we continue to kind of get settled in our new place, you go through all of your possessions, all of your things, you come across old pictures, and you kind of say, Did I ever really look like that, and it also kind of reminded me of who I used to be. I don't know if you ever think about that when you look back at your life and you think about the way you used to think when maybe you were in high school or in college, or when you got out of college, I don't know about you, but I didn't think then, like I think now. I didn't think about things about grace and forgiveness and and God II. Kind of just thought about me and what would make me happy, what I wanted to do. And as we get a little older, and as we get to understand God's word a little bit more, we see how out of line our thinking is when it comes to this. And we can get stuck there. We can get stuck in thinking that we are who we were and that God will never forget what we've done. Because we can look back and go, gosh, I can't believe I thought that or did that. But as the people of God, we know that we are forgiven by God, but sometimes we don't slow down enough. We don't just kind of be still and know that he's God to say, Lord, I'm going to confes to you what you already know, whatever that struggle may be, whatever we're wrestling with, you know whether that's anger, you know whether that's fear, whether that's regret, whether that's whether that's lust, no matter what It may be we think, Well, God will never forgive, but he will, but we need to slow down enough and confess to him our sin. And if you say, Well, I don't think I really have sin in my life, that's a sin because we do. So let's take some time and let's go to God confess what he knows, and then rejoice in his promise to forgive us. Let's go to God in confession of prayer. Father, we could stay in this silence for days, Lord, when we really slow down and think about how we have not been faithful to you and to your word, and yet, Lord, You love us, You forgive us, you cleanse us. So, Father, I pray that we can leave our sin where you have called us to leave it, and that's at the cross, because if we continue to carry around our sin and let it weigh us down, then we have made our sin bigger than your salvation. We have made our grief bigger than your grace. So Father, I pray that we would leave it where it was called to be left, and Lord, we would celebrate your forgiveness. Amen. Let us now say together the words of joint hope from First John one nine, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. I hope that you feel a little bit of a burden lifted off of you as we take that time to confess our sin and we take that time to rejoice in God's word, it definitely feels like summer is here. I think summer has come in and it's going to be I think in the 90s today, it's going to be odd. But one of the things that comes with summer that I love are summer blockbuster movies. I love popcorn movies. I can't wait to see some of these movies, like I want to go see the new Michigan possible day one. There you go. Looks phenomenal. I love all of those movies. I'm looking forward to the Fantastic Four. I grew up reading those comics, and by far the one I'm looking forward to the most, of course, is Superman. Cannot wait to go see Superman when it opens up on july 11, today, after Christie and I's anniversary. So I know she's excited anniversary weekend coming up. But, you know, I love movies, and probably one of my favorite movie genres are sports movies. I love them. And I bet you, if we took a debate on what's the best sports movie, you know, we would hear so many things, Hoosiers, Bulldog, Field of Dreams, right? Trouble With the Curve. There are so many great sports movies out there. One of my favorite sports movies, and maybe it's one of yours, is, remember the titles, right? I anything that Denzel Washington is in I want to see. And when you put Denzel Washington in a football movie, I definitely need. See that, and that was a great movie coach Herman Boone, and there's a wonderful scene I want us to look at here, where Coach Boone has his team there, he's taken them to camp, and he lays out his expectations of what he wants from his players. Let's take a look. You. It, we will be perfect in every aspect of the game. You drop a pass, you want a mile, you miss a block and a sign, you run a mine, you form a football and I will break my foot off in your John Brown hind parts, and then we'll run a mile perfection. Let's go to work. I mean, come on, I love that, right? I mean, there he is, perfection. You will be perfect in every way. And that's not just something that Coach Boone says. That is something that Scripture says we are called to be perfect people. We are called to absolutely positively be perfect. But all of that went away when sin entered the world and the Garden of Eden. But Coach Boone has a standard that he expects his team to be and that's for them to be perfect. God has a standard for you and I to meet, and that is to be perfect. But here's the problem, we're not perfect. And some of us, hey, think we're perfect. Some of us are trying to be perfect, but we will never, ever, ever be perfect. So how do we meet a standard? Where do we find hope in knowing that we can never meet that standard? We find it in a word that may be peculiar for you to hear, but I hope over the next few weeks, you will come to appreciate this word, as I do, and that word is, whoever, whoever is a powerful, amazing word that Jesus used throughout the Gospels to describe how inviting, how free, how hopeful and how joyful The Gospel is because of the word whoever. And so we're going to begin a journey today of going through the Gospels and looking at many of the times where Jesus talks about whoever Let's pray. Father, we thank You for Your Word, which is a layup into our feet. Father, I pray that You would speak through me and definitely despite me. I pray Lord that this would be a time, Lord where our hearts as well as our ears are open. I pray Lord that our minds no longer to the To Do lists or what we're doing later. Lord, I pray that you would just speak today, Lord, in a way that is so powerful and profound that we walk out of here saying, I think I just wanted me to hear this. I pray, Lord, that that I would not even be a part of this, you know, the brokenness of who I am, and so Father, I pray that I could be an empty vessel and that your Holy Spirit would speak. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, amen. So we're going to be in the Gospel of Matthew and we're going to start at verse 17, Matthew 517, so if you've got your Bibles, open up. If you've got your phone, bring up your Bible app, and if you know it just by memorization. Man, I am really impressed. Let me just say that. So we're going to be here Matthew five, starting at verse 17. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of the pen will by any means disappear from the law, until everything is accomplished. Therefore, whoever sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices it teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I take you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. You years ago, during the summer, Christine and our my family and I, we went on vacation to North Carolina, and we went to this wonderful church. It was a very, very, very, very big, big church, and this young guy gets up and he's preaching. He's doing a wonderful job, but he stops in the middle of his sermon and he says, Man, I'm preaching good today. And he was so proud of the sermon that he was preaching, and that was fine. And every pastor thinks that the sermon they preach is so good, but let me tell you something, the Sermon on the Mount, where our text come from. Now. The greatest sermon there ever has been, and ever will be, and no pastor will ever, ever surpass. And Jesus has gathered his new disciples, his new followers, and he's saying, look, here's how I want you to live your life. I want to lay this out for you. I want you to be a witness to the kingdom of God. I want you to be a witness to the character of who I am so unbelieving people get a taste of who I am and who the kingdom of God is. Now this would have probably run a little familiar to most of the audience who grew up on the Mosaic law. And the Mosaic Law kind of taught that you can't earn God's favor. You cannot earn God's grace in any possible way, and you need to just accept that grace. This passage, and also in the Mosaic Law, talks about there is great blessing in obedience to God. When you know God's word, you study God's Word, you apply God's word, you will be blessed. But it also talks about the opposite of that, and if you don't know God's word, or you don't apply God's word, then there is going to be a painful road for you to walk. And so those two things are similar, and what we see between the Mosaic law and what we see here between the Beatitudes are two really important thing, number one, God reminds his people that he has rescued them. He rescued the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. He said, I brought you out. You were enslaved, but I came in and I brought you out from bondage. How many times and in how many ways has God brought you and I out of slavery and bondage to something in our life. The second thing that both of these remind us of is that it is a privilege, not a right, to be a vessel for God's love, to be someone that is an example to other people, that lets other people see God. There's an old pastor's saying that says you are the only Bible people will read as your great turn of Freddy. But it's true, isn't it? People who don't know the Bible but know you, they will read your life, and that's how they will say that's the Bible. And so what we see here, from the Beatitudes to Mosaic law is that that both of them end with this, this idea that we are blessed, but we are also called to be examples for other people to see. Now in our text here, Jesus says, I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. And what the the law, and what the prophets talked about all of that pointed to the coming of Jesus. When we read the Old Testament, we don't always read it through that lens, but the Old Testament is setting up the New Testament. All the things that we read in the Old Testament, all the things that the prophets talked about, were pointing to Jesus. So if you are reading the Old Testament, read it through the lens of, how is this pointing to Jesus? Because that's what Jesus is saying here. Now, one thing we need to understand about the Mosaic law in Old Testament is that it was written for a nation state, that the people of God were people and a nation. And so it was laying out what God's expectations of them were and how they were to live as a group. When we moved to here to the Beatitudes, it's about the individual, how we are called to live our everyday life, how we are called to interact with the people in our home, in our neighborhood, in our jobs, people that we randomly come across so people say, Well, I don't know how I'm supposed to live. Scripture lays out what God's people are supposed to live. Now, if you've got your Bibles open, or you've got your your Bible app open, I want you to look at verse 20. Okay, verse 20 says this For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. We will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, when we see those words, Pharisees, teachers of the law, we think, Oh, well, those were the really the religious leaders of the day. They had it all together. They didn't. Their hearts weren't right. They weren't. They were kind of masking who they really were. And so often people can do that today, right? We can look one way on the outside, but our hearts are very different on the inside. But as the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. And so there were a few things that, despite what the Pharisees said, they didn't care about, they didn't do. For example, they weren't concerned about justice. We should be concerned about justice or injustice that happens to people in our community, whether they are a part of our church or not, if not that we are acting like Pharisees, if we don't care about justice for people in our world today, if we aren't the people of mercy. Me, then we are the people of God, the Pharisees. They didn't care about other people's problems. They just cared about their own and how others viewed them. And then we need to make sure that we're not focusing like the Pharisees. They focused on their own piety, that they wanted people to look at them and say, Oh, they're so holy, oh, they're so spiritual, they're just amazing. We need to focus on our faithfulness to God and not to other people. And so what Jesus is saying, and Jesus was all over the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees, the religious leaders of the day, because they didn't do their job. He said, If you want to beat their fake righteousness, then you need to be obedient to what I am teaching. You need to be obedient to God's word. And the only way that you and I can be obedient, there are two ways. The first is this, and this is not an easy one to hear. We have to recognize our own spiritual depravity. Nobody ever wants to think about that. But we are spiritually depraved. You know, we're not as bad as we think we are. We're worse. Right? When they coach Herman Boone say, you will be perfect in every aspect of the game, God said, I demand you to be perfect, and we're not. So we have to come to a place where we recognize I'm not perfect, I'm spiritually depraved in God's eyes. Maybe not the world. You can be loved and admired by the world, but wrong in the eyes of God. So first, we need to understand our own spiritual depravity. And secondly, we gotta have a change to work. We gotta have a change to work. You know, when I was going through these pictures and I was looking back at all these, these things, I think my heart is different than my heart wasn't what it is now back then, my heart was wrong, my heart was hard, my heart was selfish, my heart was all about me. So I had to have a heart change. See, we need to make sure that our hearts are changed by the gospel. Now we need to also understand when Jesus says, I didn't come to abolish the law. Well, what is the law? Is the first five books of the Bible, right? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, that was considered the law. Now one of the prophets, all of the rest of the Old Testament, teaching, and that's what God was trying to put on the people's heart. Now, there are people will say, well, we don't have to listen to the Old Testament now, in any way, because we're a New Testament. We are a New Testament, people. But the law doesn't go away. In fact, we read this year in Second Timothy, listen to this from infancy, you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ, Jesus. All Scripture is God breathing and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. All, all, not just the verses we like. We can't disregard the verses we don't like. Well, that one makes me uncomfortable, or that one, that one I don't agree with, All scripture is from God, therefore all scripture is to be adhered to. But what we do is what the Pharisees and the scribes and those before us Do we love to rank sin? Everyone of us likes to say, well, that that is a really, really bad sin. This one isn't so bad. You know, we have big sins and we have small sins. I remember many, many years ago, there was a college football player who got arrested for shoplifting, got caught on camera, got arrested, and when they asked him, like, why did you do that? He goes, What's the big deal? It's not like I killed somebody. So what he did was he ranked crime on big crime versus little crime. We do the same thing. We try to say, well, as long as I don't have the big sins violated, I'm fine, and the little ones are okay too. So here's what the Pharisees did. The little sins, right? Were if you didn't tie out of the produce of your garden, right? Because people were called to tie, you know, some people could eat if you didn't do that. Oh, okay, that's a little one. You're fine. Not a big deal. The big ones were murder and adultery. Hey, I may not tithe, though. It wasn't like I killed somebody or committed adultery. We love to do the same thing. And there are so many people today that are living, and people within the church who think, as long as I'm not committing the big sins, I'm fine. And you can go through life I did. I did for a lot of years. I believe, as long as I wasn't committing big sins, little ones with that big a deal. But then we come across something. In the book of James. And if all scripture is God breathed, then we need to hear these words in James, 210, for whoever keeps the whole and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking it all. So even if, and this would be impossible, let's just say you went 25 years of your life that you never, ever broke the law, you never, ever did anything that is contradictory to the Word of God. First of all, please come up and take the microphone if you've ever done that. But if we break one part, we break them all. We commit one sin one time in our life, we break all of them. So again, that goes back to understanding that that spiritual depravity, that goes back to understanding there are no big sins and little sins. And this is an odd way to equate this, but there is no difference in God's economy to whether you rob a bank versus you stealing office supplies. Now, in our world, there would be a big difference in what would happen to you, but in God's economy, Stealing is stealing and sin is sin, and it's hard to walk around knowing that if you break one, you break them all, because like Coach boom, we are called to be perfect in every way. But we are perfect. We can't be perfect, and we'll never be perfect. So where, where is the hope in that? It's in that word, whoever, which we're going to read about here, Kingdom righteousness is not outside in you can't make yourself righteous by doing nice things, Kingdom righteous means you have a heart change because you've understood your spiritual depravity, and out of understanding that, out of a heart change, you are able to do things for the glory of God. So it's about motivation. Our motivation in life shouldn't be how other people view us. Our motivation speak. How does God view me? How does God view what I'm doing? And so what what Jesus was being accused of is setting the law apart. He came to fulfill the law perfectly. Jesus never committed a sin. Obeyed God perfectly in every way his entire life. What the Pharisees and the religious people were doing was they were putting all these man made laws on top of God's law. Say, if you want to be saved, you gotta do what we say, too, and if you don't do what we say, well then you're not really saved. And so we can come up with all of these man made things that we think that we will do, because the rabbis love to define big sin versus little city. Now, do you know who gets to rank what commandments are the most important God? So I want to read you a passage from Mark 12. And we know this passage says one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debated. This is Jesus and the religious people. Nothing that Jesus had given them a good answer. He asked them, of all the commandments, which is the most important? The most important one answer Jesus is this. Hear O Israel, the LORD our God. The Lord is One Love. The Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than this. So we have to ask ourselves, are we loving God and loving others? Are we loving God with all that we've got, or just what we've got left over? Are we loving other people, even people that are very different than us, even people that don't believe what we believe or live like we live. Because if we're going to be the people of God, then we've got to understand how God says this is number one. Love God, and you can't love somebody you don't spend time with, you can't love somebody you don't talk to, you can't love somebody you don't listen to. So we gotta love God, then we gotta love other people, which means looking at all people and say they have value, they have worth. They are created in the image of God, even if I don't agree with everything they stand for. We are called to be different in that way, because we remember our own spiritual development. And if you break one part of the law, you break Every part of the law. In fact, Jesus says in here that if you break one part of the law, you are considered the least, the least. Nobody wants to be considered the least. We all want to be considered the greatest. So how do we go from feeling like the least? How do we go from being the least to being the greatest? Jesus says it here and he says that word. He says, Whoever he says, Whoever obeys and practices these commands will be great. Whoever that's a powerful word, whoever obeys God's word and practice it, who. It a glorious word that Jesus said. Whoever say that word with me? Whoever? Let's try that again. Whoever. That's a powerful word, because whoever means it, it's anybody, see, whoever doesn't care about your level of education, if you are a whoever. It's not about where you graduated, or if you graduated, because it's whoever, whoever believes and puts these things into practice will be great. If you want to be great before God, you gotta be a whoever, whoever means it's not about your education. Whoever means it doesn't care about your financial status, whether you have a lot of money, whether you have no money, whether you're in debt, whether you're struggling. Whoever you don't have to have a certain financial position to follow God. Whoever doesn't care about whether you have a job or you don't, whoever is out impressed with our title, whoever doesn't care you've been promoted or demoted. Whoever applies God's word to their life will be considered great. Whoever doesn't care whether you're married, divorced, single, widowed, dating whoever doesn't matter, anybody Whoever accepts, believes and applies the Word of God will be great. Whoever doesn't care whether you're a man or a woman, whoever does not care about your race or authenticity, whoever, whoever. How amazing is it that the gospel is so inviting, that salvation is so inviting, that whoever says, I believe in the word of God, and I apply the Word of God, I will be considered great before God if you and I want to be righteous before God, and who doesn't. Because one day, everybody stands before God. The Bible tells us, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, every one of us will stand before God one day now. We can stand there with our own resume of life, all our failings, all the times that we broke the law, all the times that we have sinned. We can stand there and be judged like that, or or whoever. Whoever believes and applies and teaches God's word, they don't get judged on us. We stand there, and Jesus is our representative. He's perfect. He's perfect, and it will be his righteousness that is judged, and not ours, because he's perfect. See, God knows our hearts, and that's that's a tough thing, because other people don't know our hearts, right. Like we can fool people a lot. We can show them the outside and make them think Man, we are holy, we are spiritual, we are pious. That's what the Pharisees did. But God knows each of our hearts listen to what Scripture teaches us. In Matthew 23 he says, Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees and hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they're full of greed and self indulgence. Luke 1615 he said to them, You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God's sight. See, God knows our hearts. He knows how we try to justify the things that we do and don't do. God knows our hearts when we try to impress people. See, whoever means you have a changed heart, whoever means you know your spiritual depravity, whoever means that you know how much you desperately need Jesus. See, the Jews of the day believe that when the Messiah came, he would lower the standard of what it took to be a part of the Kingdom of God. Jesus didn't come to lower the standard. He is the standard, and he fulfilled the law perfectly. Right? We literally hear Jesus say this, for whoever believes in Jesus Christ shall not perish, but have eternal life. Who ever that's a powerful word that we need to understand, that we are a part of the whoevers. And there are many people out there who don't believe that they are a part of the whoevers. But see, we have adopted something imma throw a big word here at you, but it won't be a big definition, anti nomianism. Now that's a big word. What the world does that mean? It means it's all about us. It means everything is about us. The word anti means against and no mechanism means law. It means that we are against the law. It's all about making ourselves happy in the moment. Do we not live in a world of instant gratification? It says, I want to be happy. I want to. Happy right now, and noone can tell me I can and I can do whatever I want. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks or if I hurt anybody. Antinomian doesn't mean that you reject any kind of authority that will hold you accountable, particularly scripture. That's our world, friends, that's our hope. We've adopted that mentality, but even those who have adopted that mentality, even if that can be us at times, we are still part of the whoever's whoever, whoever puts their faith. Do you know what makes us great in the world today? It's not it's not your bank account, it's not your job title, it's not how many likes or how many followers that you have. What makes us great is that we are one of the whoevers that when we believe, when we accept, when we apply, when we share the Word of God, we are great in the eyes of God. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be great in anybody's eyes except God. But don't we live as if we want to be great in the eyes of everybody but God? It's all about who we're trying to impress. We need to understand that obedience proceeds actions when we are obedient to God's word, out of that will grow our actions. But just because we're doing things doesn't mean we're being obedient. There is a huge difference in that. So many think that, like the Pharisees, that righteousness is about rules, righteousness is about relationship. We can try to be righteous by following rules, or we can be righteous by saying, I'm in relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and that's what makes me great. Coach boud was very clear, you drop a ball, you run him up. You do this, you run them up, we're going to drop the ball. I don't know about you, but I have dropped the ball constantly and consistently in my life. But Jesus is the bridge. He's the bridge between our imperfection and his perfection. He's the bridge between the law and grace. He is the bridge which when we accept and believe and apply and share that we get to walk across from imperfection to perfection. We've got so many people standing on one side of the bridge who don't want to walk to the other side of the bridge. It's time to cross the bridge. The other thing I would tell you about whoever is, it also means whatever, whatever you're struggling with, whatever your past has been, whatever your failures have been, it doesn't matter, because when you are a whoever, the whatever doesn't matter anymore. To God, it doesn't matter the road that you took, no matter how twisted, long, deep or dark it may have been, that when you surrender and say Jesus is Lord, all of that goes away, whoever means there are no pre qualifications. Have you ever gotten those things in the mail say you are pre qualified. And, hey, alright, I'm having a good day. I'm pre qualified. I didn't even know you are pre qualified to be a whoever. Because of Jesus, there's no tax bracket or level of education. You have to have to be pre qualified to be a whoever. There is no specific zip code that you need to live in to be a whoever, and there's no age restriction for you to be a whoever, whoever accepts, believes and puts into practice the Word of God. They will be great in the eyes of God. They will be righteous in the eyes of God. I don't know about you. Maybe you are a whoever. Maybe you don't think that you're qualified to truly be saved or truly to be forgiven or truly, to allow God to love you, but you are, and if you are somebody that's accepted the love of Jesus, praise God. I love that. But I bet you, everybody in here knows somebody who's a whoever that they don't know, that they can still be great in the eyes of God, that their past doesn't matter, that their struggles don't matter. What if everybody in here today and watching online said, I'm going to start praying for one of my whoever people that I want them to know that they are one of the whoevers that they can be great in the eyes of God. How freeing is that you. There is a standard that Coach Boone said, there is a standard that God sets. We need to understand. The only way to meet that standard that God has set is through Jesus, is to believe the Scripture. So I think we should, we should be excited that we have gotten to to be a whoever. And I think we need to be motivated to go out and let other people know that they are a whoever too, and they can become great in the kingdom of God. Amen. Let me pray for us, father. I pray that everyone of us, we really think about who are the whoevers. Is there a whoever Lord in our life, someone that that Lord doesn't believe they're good enough or worthy enough, or doesn't even know that they need you, I pray Lord that they would see in us, Lord that we believe, that we trust and that's what makes us great. You make us great. We don't make us great. You make us great. So Father, I pray that we would just hear this message and then go about our day. I pray, Lord, that we would really listen to the message and the Lord, we would say, Thank You, Lord for letting me be a whoever. How can I help those who are whoever's We ask this in the name of Jesus. Name. Thank you for joining us. For more information about three timbers, church ministries and services. Visit three timbers.org. We would love for you to join us in person. You.