Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve been able to see some pretty incredible things. The Go Tell evangelistic event was incredible. While thousands attended, we saw 719 decisions for Jesus. That is simply incredible. Last week alone we almost had 600 people here for Easter. 63 people made some decision for Jesus.

Even out there in the world, in the culture, we are seeing a resurgence of faith in Christ. There are so many athletes and other stars who have been very vocal about their faith in Jesus.

People are starving for the truth. We've gotten to a place where we don't want ineffective, preaching, but people are craving the truth of the word of God that actually makes a difference in their lives. I've said it before that when you are weak in the pulpit, people are wrong in the pew. What we're finding is that when we are weak in the pulpit, we are wrong in the pulpit as well.

2 Timothy 4:1-5
1 I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: 2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. 3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. 5 As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

We do our best here to preach the truth of the word of God unfiltered. We might use stories and anecdotes and various literary tools help you understand or to make the truth easier to take, but you're still getting the truth. I'm convinced that people need the truth, but we also need grace. When you just preach truth, it can break relationship. When you just preach grace, compromise is the result. But when truth and grace are being used hand in hand, restoration is the result.

When it comes to the truth of the word of God, we are not going to compromise. We are not going to allow culture to dictate whether or not we follow through with something the Bible teaches. We’re not going to let our flesh do that either. We are going to hold fast to the written word of God. That doesn't mean we turn a deaf ear to what the Spirit is saying, That doesn't mean we blindly ignore anything that's going on in the culture, but it does mean our actions are going to be dictated by the word.

Some people might look at this and say that we are being too harsh. Some might look at us and say that we are being the exception. I want you to know, however, that this stance, it's called Christianity.

The moment I said yes to Jesus, I surrendered my will to his. I agreed to allow his desires to eclipse mine. I agreed to allow his truth to trump my own. I willingly chose this.

I do realize that there may be somebody in here that the reason you got saved is because you were scared to go to hell. I understand that completely. I don't want to go to hell either. But Christianity is more than fire insurance. It is more than a ticket to heaven. It is an invitation to a relationship with Jesus. It is an invitation to his family. It is an invitation to live a life that you never even dreamed was possible.

But biblical Christianity is going to require that you understand that the moment you say yes to Jesus, you went under new management.

Have any of you ever worked at a job and another company bought your company and they brought in an entire new team of management? They always say this phrase, "Listen, nothing's gonna change. We're just gonna tweak a few things here and there.” Next thing you know, the only thing that didn't change was the stapler you use.

I am willing to bet that at the moment you chose to say yes to Jesus, you went down this path where you:
Evaluated your life, including your choices. You realized that you are a sinner in need of salvation. You realized that Jesus was offering you that salvation. You embraced the truth that Jesus died on the cross and rose again. You made the choice to willingly give him everything you are in exchange for everything he is.

Whether this happened in the last 14 days, or whether it happened in the last 40 years, you willingly chose to embrace the new management of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It meant that you looked at your life leading up to the moment you said yes, and you realized that you desperately needed change. You realized that you needed new management.

And now that you are under that new management, I want to know if you're cool with the new manager.

You see, the world offers a completely different management style.
1 John 2:15-17
15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Let me give you a caveat right now and say when the Bible says love here, it means unconditional, selfless, sacrificial love. The word in Greek is agape. This is love that is reserved for God. It means don't make it a God. Look I love baseball, it's awesome! But I don't make it an idol.

The world wants you to do you, to go your own way, to be your own person, to live your own truth. What's crazy is that this has been sold to us for so long, that there's a slight displeasure in hearing this. The enemy likes to say, "That means you've never get to do anything you want to do.”

But let me remind you:
When you were evaluating your life and your choices leading up to the moment you said yes to Jesus, you made a decision that whatever you were doing wasn't working out, and that you needed rescuing.

It turns out that Jesus is right:
Chasing your own passions, lust, and desires is bad for you.

If you go back and look at that passage in 1 John 2, while the world gives its management style, God gives his: “Whoever does the will of the father.”

Doing God's will is doing what God wants, not what you want.

Question:
Are you OK doing what God wants you to do especially when he wants you to do it in a way that you don’t? You see, now we're getting into the actual Lordship of Jesus.

Remember last week I told you that Lordship is your complete and total surrender to God. Lordship isn't Lordship if you ignore his commands. So just for fun let's do a quick quiz of things the Bible explicitly tells us to do:
- I have forgiven the person that hurt me the most.
- I tithe and manage my finances according to God’s word.
- I regularly attend and engage with a local church.
- I avoid actions or people who lead me to sin.
- I regularly tell others about Jesus.

How’d you do? Each question is 20 points. “Well, preacher, I feel a lot of judgment right now lol” What are you being judged by?

Are you truly surrendered to God?

Now, before this spirals into some notion that you just do what you're told with no questions, let me just stop you right there.

The obedience to God's will is not about him controlling you. That is precisely what Satan wants you to think. "Don't you dare question me. Just do what I say." Some here have grown up in that kind of household. These these are the kind of mindset that keep you from fully surrendering to God.

So then, what is God after? You and your best, that’s what. He wants us to surrender to his Lordship. He wants us to obey. He wants us to embrace his will and his plan for our lives. And he knows best. We know that, but we don’t act like it. He wants all of us. But there are things that are gonna keep you from doing that.

We could spend the rest of our time today, talking about all those negative things that Satan is trying to do to keep you from fully surrendering to God, from fully embracing his plan for your life, but I want you to leave today encouraged.

So rather than focusing our attention on the destructive work of Satan,
I'm going to focus your attention today on what God is really trying to do
to fulfill the plan he has for you in your life.

So many of you here have gotten to the place where you know you need Jesus to save you, and you have embraced Jesus and his salvation. But I'm wanting you today to taste and see how good God is, and how much better your life will be if you embrace his leadership, his will, his management.

Three things we need to understand to help us embrace his management in our lives:

1. He loves you
Jesus loves me, this I know. Awesome. Then why does he let bad things happen in my life? I mean, if we're gonna talk about it, we need to talk about all of it. How many of you had this question raised in your own heart?

If Jesus loved me, that person would not have died. If Jesus loved me, he would've protected me from that parent. If Jesus loved me, would not have had to walk the road I had to walk.

I don’t know why you had to walk that road, but there are reason for suffering.
Fallen world. One is that we simply live in a fallen world because humanity chose sin and separation over perfection and relationship. We did that, not God.

Free will. God gives us free will, and that means he gives free will to people that I've hurt us, too. Some of our broken road comes from people sinning against us. Some of our broken road comes from us sinning.

So where does the love of God show up in these two things? These two are not proofs that God doesn't love us. They are actually proof that he does. How? Fallen world: If he didn't love us, he would've already left us, but instead, Jesus came to earth to fix what we broke in the garden. He loves us so much that he died for us just so we could have his life.

Free will: If he didn't love us, not only wouldn't he not have died to set us free from our sins, but he wouldn't pour grace and mercy on us when we do sin. That forgiveness is available to people who have sinned against us,
and for us as well as we sin.

And just a side note here: You have to be super careful that you are not blaming everybody else around you for the brokenness in your life. I know this is gonna come across as a little harsh, but just hear me out for a second.

For those who have had sins committed against them, I'm not being uncompassionate about the hurt, I'm not ignoring the pain, I'm for sure not saying what they did was OK, but be careful how much lordship you give what was done to you.

If what happened is defining you, then it's also controlling you. And by the way, that is sin that has happened to you and sin that has happened through you.

Please hear the love for you and the compassion in my heart when I say this: At some point you are going to have to surrender all of that to Jesus and let him be Lord of even the brokenness that has defined you.

And I can hear you now screaming how? How? How?
You have to choose to give it to God.
You have to choose to no longer try to control the outcomes.
You have to choose to forgive that person that hurt you.
You have to choose to forgive yourself if you were the one that committed the sin.
You have to choose to not repeat in others what was done to or through you.
You might need a once a week prayer meeting with some godly people.
You might need somebody in your life to hold you accountable.
You might need to meet with a pastor here once a week.
You might need a therapist.
But you are going to have to do what 1 Peter 5:7 tells us:
Cast our cares upon him because he cares for us.

We are gonna have to choose to take responsibility for our actions. We have to choose to take responsibility on how we respond to things. We have to choose to forgive, and the love, and care, and believe, and have faith. And you're gonna have to choose to believe the truth that Jesus loves you.

The pain in your past is not proof that Jesus doesn't love you. The fact that he's here right now offering restoration is proof he does.

Do you believe Jesus loves you? Do you love him enough to surrender everything to him?

2. He wants you to trust him.
So you know, he loves you, you just don't know if you can trust him. “I’ve loved and trusted others only to be hurt. Those people that hurt me were people that said they loved me.” Maybe that is what has kept you from full surrender. Can I trust him?

Delighting in the Trinity
“Not everyone instinctively warms to the idea that God is a Father. There are many for whom their own experiences of overbearing, indifferent or abusive fathers make their very guts squirm when they hear God spoken of as a Father. The twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault had very much that sort of issue. The bulk of his life's work was about the evils of authority, and it seems to have all started with the first figure of authority in his life: his father.

Fearful of having some namby-pamby for a son, Foucault Senior-who was a surgeon— did what he could to "toughen up" the little mite. That meant, for example, ghoulishly forcing him to witness an amputation. ‘The image, certainly, has all the ingredients of a recurrent nightmare: the sadistic father, the impotent child, the knife slicing into flesh, the body cut to the bone, the demand to acknowledge the sovereign power of the patriarch, and the inexpressible humiliation of the son, having his manliness put to the test.’

For Foucault, paternal power had not been used to care, to nurture and to bless, and so for him the word father came to be associated with a host of dark images.

One's heart goes out to the children of such fathers, and those of us who are fathers ourselves know that we too are far from perfect. But God the Father is not called Father because he copies earthly fathers. He is not some pumped-up version of your dad. To transfer the failings of earthly fathers to him is, quite simply, a misstep. Instead, things are the other way around: it is that all human fathers are supposed to reflect him—only where some do that well, others do a better job of reflecting the devil.”

Does that describe you? Whether it was a father or mother, coach, leader, pastor, some other authority, they hurt you and that pain destroyed your ability to trust God.

So now you’re in a place where you need verification before surrender. How many of you know that life rarely works like that?

We want to trust God, that he’ll do what he says, that he’ll come through. We want Jeremiah 29:11
I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

But are you willing to give Jeremiah 29:12-13?
12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

Did you see it? With ALL your heart. FULL surrender.

You have trust issues with God. I get it. But he might have trust issues with you. We give him pieces and expect him to give us all of him. And you know what is crazy, he doesn’t give his heart in pieces. Even when we give him parts he gives us all of himself.

Everybody wants God’s good plans but are you willing to seek him with your whole heart?

This is what being under new management is about. You trust him with your eternity. Will you trust him with your brokenness? with your outcomes? With your whole heart?

Proverbs 3:5-6
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; 6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.

If you are having a hard time trusting because you don’t have the full picture, that is what trust is - believing God in spite of your lack of understanding.

God didn’t tell me to trust him with what I know. He told me to trust him with what I DON’T know.

If you are going to embrace his Lordship, it means choosing to have no choice but to trust him.

Lastly, to embrace his Lordship, you need to understand:

3. He’s working for good.
Romans 8:28
We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: He's working for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose, and that means that the good work might not have you directly benefiting.

Are you OK with God sending you down a road that seems to have no direct benefit for you? We need to kill self centered my benefit only Christianity. Because it isn’t actually Christianity. We are not the center of God’s universe.

2 Timothy 4:5-8
Don’t be afraid of suffering for the Lord. Work at telling others the Good News, and fully carry out the ministry God has given you. 6 As for me, my life has already been poured out as an offering to God. The time of my death is near. 7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. 8 And now the prize awaits me—the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on the day of his return. And the prize is not just for me but for all who eagerly look forward to his appearing.

If your yes to God requires you always benefiting, you are missing the point of the race.

There is a story about a guy who went out into the wilderness alone for a camping trip. On the way, his car broke down. He remembered there was a ranger station a little ways away and with no cell service, it was his best hope. He grabbed some gear and his GPS unit and started in that direction. He hiked for a good while and decided to pull out his GPS unit to check where he was, only to have it fall and when he picked it up it wasn’t working anymore. He thought he was going in the right direction, so he went another hour or so. At this point feeling lost and frustrated, angry and even a little scared, he plopped down on a rock, looked up at the sky and screamed, “I just came out here to relax!” He drank some water and was about to start off again towards what he thought was the right direction only to hear a noise that sounded like a person whimpering. He looked over the ledge to find a woman laying there with an obvious broken ankle. He crawled down to her only to discover she’d been hiking alone, tripped, and had been there for more than 24 hours crying and praying for God to help her. He gave her water and helped her up and over a small ridge where he spotted the roof of the Ranger station. The only reason those events happened was because God needed him to work for the good of someone else.

If you are going to embrace your new management, you're going to have to understand that it takes all of you, but you also have to understand that while it takes all of you, it's not just for your benefit.

There are people around you who are going to be the beneficiaries of your full surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Family, this is not about blind, naïve obedience. This is about understanding the character and nature of God. People fail. They hurt others. They choose poorly. They are unfaithful. They beget brokenness out of their own brokenness. They perpetuate pain. You and I are included in that word "people."

But God does none of these things. Of any being known, he is the only one worthy of our love, our trust, our obedience.

Are you fully surrendered to him? Do you really love him?
John 14:15
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Are you willing to do what the Bible says to do?

Do you really trust him?
Psalm 37:5
Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

Do you believe his is working for good?
Psalm 100:5
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

If you could pinpoint one thing in your life that is keeping you from fully surrendering to God’s total management of your life, what would it be?

Whatever it is, that’s what you need to give him right now.

Let’s pray.

What is the Holy Spirit saying to you through this message?

How does he want you to respond?