Bobby Schuller - The Thick Skin of the Beloved
Well, whoever you are, would you stand with us? Hold your hands out like this as a way of receiving. We're gonna say this creed together. I'm not what I do. I'm not what I have. I'm not what people say about me. I am the beloved of God. It's who I am. No one can take it from me. I don't have to worry, I don't have to hurry. I can trust my friend Jesus and share his love with my neighbor. Thanks, you can be seated. It might seem extreme to say it, but it's very hard to be at peace in life if you're not at peace with God. God's world, this whole creation, everything that we're doing, if we're doing it when we're not at peace with God, there will always be this thing in us that will try and make God out of something else.
Today, I want to encourage you to follow Jesus. We can come boldly before God's throne because Christ was crucified and raised from the dead for us. So many of us, we don't ever make a decision. We just find ourselves sort of in between. Someone asks you if you're Christian, you might shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, I think so. My girlfriend dragged me to church last week". Or, you know, "I listen to Bobby's podcast sometimes". But really there's a big difference between that and saying, no, I'm gonna commit my life to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I want to encourage you today to make that decision and to follow Christ with all your heart, and you'll never be the same again. If you make that decision today, I want to encourage you, send me a text. Text me the word HOPE to the number on the screen. Now, I think, as a matter of philosophy, one of the most important human needs is to make progress. One of the most important human needs is to feel like, as you're going along in life, that you're doing better than you did a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. Yeah, you might have little dips, but in general the hope that yes, I'm doing better than I used to do.
Now, the world has a way in which they measure progress, and it's not bad, right? Maybe you have some of these measurements. Maybe when you get married, you have kids, your kids have kids, you become a grandparent; apparently that's the reward for being a parent. Your grandkids have kids, then you become a great-grandparent maybe. Or maybe it's financial gains, maybe in your business, you continue to grow by a certain amount each each year, by employees or products sold. Or maybe if you're in ministry, you measure it based on how many meals you've given away or people you've brought to faith or how your church is growing.
There are these outside visible things that we have in life, and there's a million others I could mention with academia or art or whatever it is, and you get awards or things that you can show, okay, I'm actually making progress in my life. The problem is, most of the time, we can't control all of those things, and sometimes we start to feel like, I'm not really making progress. So as a point of definition, I want to call this the kind of progress that the world measures, or the visible progress. But there's an invisible progress we can make as well, and that is the progress that happens inside. That is something that you can always control. You can always make progress in here.
Now, you can make progress if you're in a jail cell and have no...anything available to you. You can do that through prayer and meditation and learning and study. But how much more can you do it when you live in a first world country like America or Canada or Netherlands? When you have all sorts of books and podcasts and things that are made available to you, it is so easy, actually, to make personal progress, but it's also easy not to. And so today, I want to talk about one of the greatest things that gets in the way of us making progress in our life, and that's the fear of being weird. The fear of being called a name. The fear of what your parents might think about you, or even worse, what your kids might think about you. Fear of what teachers or others might say about you.
And the obvious thing that if you make progress, whether it's on the inside or the outside, you're going to begin to stand out from the crowd, and there are certain people who just don't like that. And weirdly enough, oftentimes those are the same people who love you. All right, we'll get to that. Today, the sermon is called "The Thick Skin of the Beloved". I want to make the point today that if we can build our lives around God's love for us and live in that love, that we develop a thick skin that allows us to do better and succeed more in life. There's this guy that paints my house, he paints my office a lot, super-nice guy. He drives a pickup truck, it's covered in, like, all sorts of cool rock-and-roll bumper stickers. He has long hair and tattoos.
My son always thinks he's a pirate. And I love this guy, and he always calls me, "Pastor Bobby, what's up, Pastor Bobby"? And this last week, he was at my house to paint the railing on a stairway going up in the top room, and I said, "How you doing"? And I went and shook his hands, the first time I think I've ever shook his hand, because right when I shook his hand, it was some combination of shaking the hand of someone, I had to look down and make sure he wasn't wearing a baseball glove. If you took a baseball glove and wrapped it in sandpaper, in other words, he had thick skin.
Now, we talk about thick skin philosophically; this guy literally had the thickest-skinned hands. It felt like, don't know how else to describe it. And I shook his hand, and the first thing that came to my mind wasn't how thick his hands were, it's how girly and feminine my hands felt. Instantly thought about, his are the hands of someone who does work, mine are the hands of an academic, you know? And I thought to myself, how do you get hands like that? And the obvious answer is, it comes from doing something, it comes from using your hands, it comes from experience.
There is a gift in general in life, a thick skin of the spirit or of the mind that comes where, when people insult you or put you down or when you feel embarrassed about a certain thing, or maybe in your job asking for a raise or trying to make a sale, or if you're single asking a girl for her phone number or whatever it is, that in life, there's a sort of, that thick-skinned-ness is such a gift. And we know people who have it, the ability to be a little bit weird and stand out a little bit.
Well, if in the same way that my painter has thick skin on his hands from painting, you get thick skin on your soul from doing, from doing what? From doing the scary things, from doing the things in life that stretch you and make you feel uncomfortable. Thick skin is a sign of experience. And the way we do it is first by starting with these words that God says over you right now. This looks at you with all your baggage, all the ways you've messed up, all your sin, all the things people have said about you, all the secret things that you have in your life. God says over you, "This, this is my beloved daughter, this is my beloved son, and with you, I am well pleased". At the core of the gospel is hearing these words, believing these words, and making your whole life a response to this.
In fact, the more you say and believe that you are a beloved child of God, the more the world will tell you you are not. The more you live like you are a beloved child of God and live in that power, the more the world will call you all sorts of things. And the unfortunate thing about life is that if you're making a difference in life, you're becoming an enemy to somebody. Now, we don't want to think about it that way, but there are people who just do not like those who stand out from the crowd, especially when it comes to personal character.
And that brings us to our Bible verse today, Mark chapter 1, 4 through 11. The Gospel of Mark, interesting, Gospel of Mark was written, it was the first Gospel of the four that was written down. It's the early, early, earliest, and it could be probably called the Gospel of Peter. Most scholars believe that both Peter and Mark sort of sat down and wrote it together. Now, the gospels had been told, had been memorized, had been shared, but finally they said, okay, we need to just write this down so that people know what really happened.
And I think about this sometimes, the thing about writing down the first gospel, Mark and Peter maybe, I don't know, but imagine they sit down and they go, "How do we start this thing? How do we start the Gospel of Mark"? And one of them says, "Oh, I know, I know the best, best place. Matthew starts with Christmas, right, and John starts with a philosophical idea, but Mark, I know where to start. We should start, remember when Jesus was baptized and that cool thing that happened? We should start with that".
That's what they do. They start with a guy named John the Baptist, and they want to show you that John the Baptist is like Elijah fulfilling the prophecy in 2 Kings. He dresses in camel hair like Elijah; he eats locusts and honey, yum. And they're trying to show you that John is a weird guy, he's an outsider, he's a prophet, he's odd, he's condemning people for their sin, he's in mourning for the nation of Israel and the evil that it's done, and he's calling people to repent. I don't know if you've seen the new TV show "The Chosen," but it's very good, you should watch it. But they call him Creepy John in "The Chosen". That's a joke.
John the Baptist, and he says, "Someone's coming. I baptize you with water, but someone is coming whose sandals I am unfit to tie, and he will baptize you with fire and with the Holy Spirit". And Jesus comes, and he comes and he's baptized. Now, why would Jesus need to be baptized if he was sinless? That's a good question. Here's something that we're going to say. When Jesus is baptized, he receives grace from the Father. And if you can't understand that sentence, you don't understand the word grace.
Now, for sinners, grace is mercy, but the word grace doesn't mean mercy, it means, who knows, anybody here? Favor, unmerited favor. It's the power of God within us, and Jesus, the Son, is always living in the grace and power of the Father. He says so. And so when he's baptized and he comes out of the water, the voice of God tells everyone and him, he speaks to Jesus directly, "You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased". Powerful, powerful. And in that moment, Jesus is just continuing to receive power and grace from the Father.
Now, why, why did Mark start here? This is the foundation for what we call the gospel, and in simple terms, the gospel is God's plan to trade your place with his Son, that the beloved Son of God will become, in a way, sin, that you, a beloved child, will become righteous. And we don't have too much time, hopefully you've been coming here long enough, you understand this, but in short, it's the foundation for the gospel that, as Paul said, "He who knew no sin became sin that you could be called the righteousness of God". In other words, we can say for sure that if this beloved Son of God was sent to the cross for me, he loves me as much as he loves Jesus.
Now, if you really hear those words in your heart, it should stir you a little bit emotionally, that the beloved Son of God, Jesus Christ, is loved at the same degree that you are. If it were not so, he would not have sent him to die for us. Can I get an amen? If it were not so, Christ would not have died for you. And it is so. Wow, that's powerful. That's why the gospel is good news, that we can come boldly before God's throne and that we can look in the mirror and say, "You are the beloved son, you are the beloved daughter, you are the beloved child of God, and God is well pleased in you".
If you don't hear anything else I say, if you don't hear this and hear everything else I say today, I messed up. You have to hear today that just right where you are with all the challenges you are going through, because Christ died for you, you, God loves you. You are the beloved child of God, that's number one, and number two, in you he is well pleased. Can you believe that? He's pleased in you, and not just in what you do; he's pleased in you. He loves you, and we've got to believe this, and we have to build our whole lives in response to this. Can we do that today?
Now, if we are building our lives in response to God's love, that means we can trust him with our death; that means we can trust him with the death of people we love; that means we can trust him with our past and our future; that means we can trust him with our shame, our fear, our loss. It means we can have faith to believe that even whether we're young or old, there's a miracle coming, there's a door that's gonna open, there's gonna be dead that's gonna be raised to life, there's gonna be a song that's going to be sung, there's gonna be a new chapter written. We must believe that if we believe we are the beloved of God.
Can we believe that today? Let's do that. If this really happened, then it means my past and my future are in God's hands. Okay, here's something to remember when you leave this building. The same boiling water that hardens an egg softens a potato, okay? The same boiling water that hardens an egg softens a potato. Isn't that like the kingdom? To make hard things soft and to make soft things hard? To make robust things fragile and to make fragile things robust? The only difference between the two is what's on the inside, and this is the thing, that so much of life that will break a person won't break you because of what's on the inside.
If you get these words, my friend, inside of you, you're not what you do, you're not what was done to you, you're not what you lost, you're not what you're going through, you're not what you experienced, you're not what your parents said about you, you're not what your teacher said about you, you're not what your kids said about you, you're not what your church said about you. You are the beloved of God, and he's pleased in you. If you can live there, you can get some thick skin, and you can go through life and become the person you are called to be. Every single person has two choices in life. You have one of two choices. You can choose to be less than you were made to be, or you can choose to be all that you were made to be.
What will it be? If you choose to be all that you were made to be, you choose to be criticized and ridiculed. It is coming. And if you choose to live in that, you choose to live in the love of God, and the longer you do it, the less you'll care about what people say and think about you. It's time to get weird for God. Today's the day. It's a good day to get weird for God. Anybody that knows me knows I am not a lot weird, but I am a little weird. Thank God, thank God for that. Thank God that your pastor is a little bit weird.
Any pastor that's not a little bit weird on the outside is a lot weird on the inside, let me tell you from experience. Anyone who is so worried about what's visible is not worried usually about what's invisible. And it is important that we focus on what's happening in invisible places in our lives, that we're working on what's in our heart more than we're working on how we look. So if we live in this, where we're working on what's invisible rather than what's visible, there's a lot of things that we can do, but here's three good ones.
Number one, you can change the meaning that you ascribe to negative experiences. If it's in God's kingdom, it doesn't always mean what we think it could mean. We can change the meaning of insults for us, we can change the meaning of setbacks, we can change the meaning of breakups, we can change the meaning of deep loss. It may not mean what you think it means if it's in God's loving care. Brother Anthony, my brother, is very good looking, and he's always, before he was married, always had a girlfriend, like, after every other, you know. And he was dating this girl, she was wonderful, and he was serious about her, and he said, "I think we might get married". And one day he comes to me and he says, "Bobby, we broke up".
And she broke up with him, you know how I know? Because he said it was mutual. That might have been mutual, but somebody sat down and reached their hands across the table and said, "We need to talk". All right, so it was not mutual, I don't think, but anyway. And I could tell he was heartbroken about this thing, and a couple of months go by, and now that she's not dating him, you can see all of this stuff that he didn't see when they were dating. And he said to me, "Wow, I dodged a bullet".
Now, think about the meaning that you ascribe when someone leaves you, and then you find out later it wasn't the person you thought. Perhaps ascribing too much meaning to that is a mistake. Perhaps it's better to say, what if we can say this, that some of the things that we think are happening to us maybe are happening for us? That didn't happen to Anthony, it happened for him, and it happened for his girlfriend probably too. Another great friend in college was engaged. He was one of the most, and still is, a great man, but his fiancée broke up with him and he became a different person for like two years.
I think it's easy when we are abandoned, when we're left, and we go through hardship and we go through loss, to ascribe meaning about ourselves to that event. If they left me, that means I'm X, Y, and Z. If they said this about me, that means I'm X, Y, and Z. If they fired me, that means I'm X, Y, and Z. If my church kicked me out, that means I'm this. If I... whatever, and we go through these experiences in life, very negative experiences, and we ascribe big, big meaning that God has not ascribed to those events. But if we can ascribe to ourselves, "I am the beloved of God, I live in his love and care; this is sad, this bothers me, I'm frustrated about this, but I'm not going to ascribe too much negative meaning to this," you will find that you'll make better progress in your personal life.
So number one, yeah, if we live in God's love, it means that we can change the meaning that we ascribe to those negative things that we experience. Okay, if we live in the beloved of God, here's another thing we can do: you can stop negotiating against yourself. In business, this is a classic thing that new people in business do. You negotiate a deal, and then the person you're negotiating against just starts doing the negotiating for you. "Let me lower the price even more, let me do even better". And this drives, if you're an attorney, you probably experienced this before, if you have a client and you're litigating something.
This drives attorneys crazy, of course. You've maybe heard me use this experience before, but many of us as Christians are like this. The Bible says that Jesus is our attorney, and we're in the court of law and we're being judged. And there we stand, and where you're, like, at your little table, and you're the defendant, and you're on trial. And Christ is standing next to you, and the Father is the judge, and then on the other side of the room is Satan, who is called what? The accuser of the brethren, so he's the prosecutor and you're the defendant. And the prosecutor stands up, Satan stands up and says, "He is a sinner, he did this, he's a loser, he's whatever," all of these things that he says about you.
And Christ stands up and says, "No, he's not, he is this, this, this and this". And you stand up and you say, "No, the prosecutor's right, I'm this, this, this and this". And the attorney looks at you and says, "What are you doing"? I think in life, very often, this is what we do. We condemn ourselves, we destroy our miracle, we cut out faith, we put others down, we side with Satan by saying this over other people. And at no point does the Bible tell us to do that, right? The Bible tells us to confess that we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, that we are the beloved of God, that we are mountain movers, that we stand in the present kingdom of God, that chains will be broken, that mountains will be split, that rivers will flow, that the deserts will will run green again.
See, this is the kind of life that we're called to live. But that's a little bit weird, isn't it? It's a little bit weird. Who here is ready to be just a little bit weird for God? You know what the Bible calls us, the church? The Bible calls us a peculiar people. If you're not a little peculiar, you got a little adjusting to do. Time to stop caring about what so many people say about you. Care about what God says about you. He says I'm on your side, he says I love you, he says I'm for you, he says I'm behind you, he says I forgive you, he says I bless you, I heal you. I open doors for you. I'm setting things right for you. I'm making the crooked path straight for you. I'm destroying every every assignment against you. I'm destroying every weapon set against you. Time to believe that. Time to get a little weird, guys, and time to work here on the inside.
So if you believe, if you believe in the beloved of your life, you can also, unless maybe they'll stop, big, big, big one, you can stop hustling for approval, stop worrying compulsively about what everyone thinks, your neighbors and your sister and your parents and your whatever. And this is what the world does, hustles for outward visible things. And those visible things are important. No doubt money is important, your house is important, your job is important; these are important things that matter to God. But God tells us, focus on the kingdom, and those things will get taken care of.
What does that mean? Focus on what's invisible, and the visible will appear. If you focus on the visible, the visible will become invisible, meaning they'll go away, and we don't want that, right? So hustle, hustle for sure, but not for approval. Here's what you hustle for: you hustle for the inner life. Pray more than other people pray. Give more than other people give. Read more than other people read. Make bigger goals than other people make. Do the kinds of things that develop you on the inside, and it will begin to show on the outside.
And trust all of your life that you're going to stop, man, some of us are carrying around these really horrible words that somebody put on us. Maybe your parents said you'll never be good enough. Maybe your sister said you are a... whatever, fill in the blank. I remember my uncle, he was a pastor, my uncle grew up in this church. You know what his pastor called him when he was like 16, 17, and was, like, a good kid? Because he had long hair, his pastor called him Charles Manson, Charles Manson. And every time he would do something, make a mistake, come in to a, you know, Bible study, like, "Oh, here comes Charles, Charlie Manson, coming in late".
Now, we don't see a lot of that as much anymore, but people still do it, and they especially do it online. And it's amazing how we can take a word from a complete stranger, that's really much more a reflection of what's going on in their life, and let it be a part of us. I just rebuke those words, get them out of your life, get them out of your mind, out of your heart forever. Those are not God's words. But let the Word of God be in your heart, and let it abide in you forever. And begin to build inside what you want to see on the outside, and your life will never, ever be the same.
Again, you have two choices. You can choose to be less than you are made to be, or you can choose to be all that you are made to be, and you cannot live in those old words if you want to be all that you are made to be. Emerson said, "It's not what is behind you or before you. It's what's within you". Let's get it on the inside, guys, let's get those words inside of us, nurture them, care for them, and continue to develop within us that inner life.
Father, we thank you for your Holy Spirit, and we thank you for the word that says over this person listening to me now, he, she, is the beloved child of God, in whom you are well pleased. We believe it, we live from that place, and we thank you. It's in Jesus's name, and all God's people said amen.