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We're going on tour this fall. We're bringing the live podcast show to four new cities. We're coming to Nashville, San Diego, Chicago, and Birmingham, Alabama. If you've ever wanted to see the live podcast in person, go to jesusinthestreet.org tour and get your tickets. It's going to be a powerful night of worship, and the word that God is storing in my heart is going to be different and unique to each city we go to. So come out jesusinthestreet.org tour, get your tickets, and we'll see you in Nashville 6 San Diego, Chicago and Birmingham this fall. What's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Bryce Crawford Podcast. I'm Bryce, and today by the title of this episode, we're going to be talking about pursuing holiness. Guys, I pray that if you followed along leading up to this episode, the Proverb series, man, I pray that that was a blessing. You guys may comment below. If you guys want to see more Bible series. What book of the Bible should we do next? Yeah, that was an amazing series. Now, this message that is on my heart today has been stirring in my heart for a little bit, and I'm so excited to get to dive into it. You know, I feel like there's a lot of people out there. They feel bogged by their shame. They feel bogged by your guilt. And maybe that's you right now. Maybe you're listening to this episode and you know what you did 24 hours ago, you know what you watched last night, you know what you just clicked on before you clicked on this video. You know the thoughts that you have. You know things about yourself that no one knows. And you might be carrying shame, guilt and condemnation and trying to hide yourself from the Lord. And so today I really want to talk about pursuing holiness and what drives us to pursue holiness. We're going to be in Matthew, chapter nine today, verses nine through ten. Now, here's some context leading up to verse nine in chapter nine. Okay? Jesus just healed a paralytic man, and then he's gone into the city. And we're seeing in verse nine, as Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. So right off the bat, we know that after Jesus heals the paralytic man, he goes into the city, he sees Matthew, the guy writing this book that we're reading out of, and he says, follow me. The choice is yours to follow Jesus. Matthew follows Jesus. And as Jesus reclined at the table in the house. Behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? And that's where I want to stop right now before we continue. Does that sound familiar? Why would Jesus be seen with people like that? Can you believe what they're doing? Can you believe what he or she did? Why would he ever be associated with them? You know, a lot of people think that they. That they know my story, my testimony. You know, they hear, oh, I had anxiety and depression for four years, and I was going to take my life. You know, that's. That's the short summary of it, man. I know things that I've done that no one in this world knows that I've done, man. I struggled with it all. I struggled with pride. I struggled with people pleasing. I struggled with anger. I struggled with lust. I struggled with it all. I mean, dude, I got exposed to pornography when I was in the fifth grade and had a porn addiction from the fifth grade up until I became a Christian. I was a people pleaser. I was angry. I struggled with sexual immorality. I struggled with it all. I had a hole in my heart that was so big. I kept trying to fill this hole in my heart with everything but Jesus. And kind of similar to the deception a little bit, you know, back in this time period, the Pharisees, you know, the religious people at this time, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they were so focused on the doing. Their salvation was on what they did. Their rituals were not a byproduct of their faith. Their faith was the rituals that they did. Do you see what I'm saying? And now I'm reflecting on my own life, of all the times that I was on a quest for love. And I look forward in people, I look forward in sexual immorality. I look for it in my anger. I look for it in all these things, in my pride, all of these things I was searching for in my doing. And where did my doing lead? My doing led me to wanting to take my life. I was 17 years old, and all my doing led me to the point where I wanted to end my life, where I knew the only way to get the pain to go away was maybe if I just ended it myself. That was the game plan. And that's how you might feel right now. I mean, you might be listening to this and you might be saying, man, Bryce, I've tried everything. I'm trying everything. And my doing literally makes me hate myself. Your sin is going to make you hate yourself. Your sin doesn't care about you. The devil doesn't care about you. God cares about your heart. But you see, the devil makes this thing where he tells you, do that thing one more time, do that thing one more time. And he over promises a sin. And then once you bite into the sin again, he says, why'd you do it? He makes you confused. He plants the lies in your head because he doesn't care about you. He's trying to drag you down to hell with him because the battle's already won. Jesus has defeated him. He's trying to distract you from the freedom. Everything that Satan does is a perversion of the truth. It's a perversion of freedom. It's a counterfeit. He can't do it right. That's what he tricks us, man. He tries to confuse us. And then we get in these moments right now where we live in this society where you have to work, work, work, work, work for people's love or they want, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. And so the Pharisees have this idea of, I've got to do rituals to get to heaven. And let me just say something really quick, let me just clear the air, man. Doing for things for God is great. As a matter of fact, works will be something that happens. But works isn't what gets us to heaven. Our faith in the finished work of the cross, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, if we put our faith in him and what he did on the cross, that's what gets us to heaven. But our works, baptism, communion, confession, humbling ourselves, serving people, the fruits of the spirit, those things are a byproduct of our faith. So the Pharisees got a little twisted now. And my favorite thing about this passage right now is two things. Jesus does two things in this passage right now without verbally saying anything. The first thing Jesus does is he does not endorse the sin or sin that he's sitting within. There's this confusion in the body of Christ that, oh, you know, God's forgiven me so I can go do whatever I want because he's forgiven me. Paul says, absolutely not. The forgiveness and grace of God does not allow us to sin. It actually compels us and encourage us to run further away from sin. We don't look at the grace of God and say, okay, I can do whatever I want. We look at the grace of God, and say, thank you, Jesus, that you've cleansed me from my sins, and I don't want to do anything like that anymore. But the second thing Jesus does in this passage is he doesn't look for the back door. He's looking at the heart. You see, when Jesus is sitting amongst the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and the sinners, and the religious people show up, Jesus doesn't go, oh, shoot, where's the back door? Because he's embarrassed. He's not looking for the back door. He's looking at their hearts. He sees that the Pharisees are hungry for blood and not hungry for change. The tax collectors, the sinners, the prostitutes, they're hungry for change. That's why he's sitting with them. And the Pharisees say, why are you sitting with scum like this? Why are you sitting with people like this? And that was me. I was the people. I was the person that people were questioning. I knew my behaviors. I knew my sin. I knew things that I've done that you guys don't even know. I'm the scum. And when I'm 17 years old, I'm sitting in the Waffle House chair on the side sidebar next to the register, and I'm sitting there, and I know all the things I've done. And it's led me to the point where I want to take my life. I'm presented with this moment where I'm telling myself the same things. The Pharisees are talking about Jesus. I'm looking at myself, man, I'm such a dirt bag. I'm rotten, I'm worthless. I'm this, that, and the other. And what Jesus did to me that night in Waffle House is almost exactly identical to Jesus's response. Here. Here's what Jesus says in verse 12. But when he heard it, he said, those who are well have no need of a physician. But those who are sick, you and I are sick. We need someone outside of ourselves to save us. And then this is what Jesus says. He says, go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Jesus is quoting the prophet Hosea from the book of Hosea. You see, Hosea is a prophet, a mouthpiece of God. He's a holy man. He's a righteous man, the same way Jesus was holy and righteous. Jesus is literally God, though. And so no wonder they're saying, man, if this man is who he is, why is he hanging out with people like this? The same way Hosea was a prophet. You know, he was a holy man, he was a popular man, he's a well known man. And, and God asks Hosea to marry a prostitute named Gomer. And there were, there were two things why he did this. The first thing was to show Israel's impurity. You see, Israel was unclean. They were, they were doing crazy stuff. Sexual immorality, gluttony, all the above. And so the first reason is to show the people through Hosea. Marian Gomer, hey, there's a lot of impurity going on here. But the second thing, the same thing that Jesus is saying here in verse 13 is what Hosea says to the nation of Israel. And it's a prophecy over you and me. Jesus says, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The thing that compels you and me to pursue a holy righteous life is the mercy and grace of God. Grace is a free gift given to you and I that we don't deserve. Mercy is withholding what we do deserve. And because God withholds the wrath that we deserve on us, because he loves us so much, that compels us to repent. He sees the heart. It's about repentance. And that night when I'm confronted with Christ and man sanctification, this process of becoming holy man, you know, that's a whole nother thing for a whole nother day. But let me tell you right now, if you're struggling with giving it all up to God, today's the day that it starts. You don't have to keep waiting and be bound by your sin. It's day one now. This might be your wake up call. I mean, look at King David. He's a man after God's own heart, right? We know him all as a man after God's own heart, but what does he do? He goes through this lengthy process because he's bound by sexual immoral morality where he sleeps with another dude's wife and then kills him to cover up the fact that he got her pregnant. Does that sound like a man after God's own heart? But it's a man after God's own. What? Who Heart. Why is David a man after God's own heart? We see repentance, change of lifestyle in King David. I mean, you read Psalm 91. Give me a new clean heart, God. King David's crying. Psalm 139 Search my heart God know me clean my heart. King David is known as a man after God's own heart. Even though he has a past, he's been transformed because of repentance. And submission to the finished work and the holiness of God. Because when we see the love of God, the mercy of God, and we see that he's righteous, that very thing and character of God compels us to live the same exact way that Christ lived on a holy, righteous, blameless, spotless life. We want to live the same way Christ has lived because he first loved us. The mercy of God compels us to do so. We need to pursue holiness. So if the mercy and love of God is what pursues us for holiness, if the mercy and love of Hosea is what called Gomer out of her lifestyle of prostitution and sin and sexual immorality, then what is the thing that gives us friendship and holiness with God? Here it is. You ready? Here's the key. Psalm 25, verse 14 tells us about holiness. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him. If you want to live a holy, righteous life, you have to learn to fear God. And I don't mean cower in fear, but when you know that you've been loved by God and you've received the mercy and grace by him, you develop this deep affectionate respect and awe of God because you know he's holy, you know he's just. And so because you have this deep affectionate awe and respect for God, it empowers you to live a life of humility, self control, patience, walk in the fruits of the Spirit and not in the fruit of your flesh. When you have a fear of God, you submit yourself to the character and the teachings of Christ. If you want to pursue holiness, we need to fear God. But why would we want to fear God and submit to someone? Because we know his love has been shown to us through mercy and grace of His Son, Jesus Christ. And if you're saying man like this is something that I've never had, when in order to get something you've never had, you got to do something you've never done. Maybe you haven't been fully transparent with God and you can say, man, God knows all of me. But if you've given God 99% of yourself, and there's one of yourself that you're withholding from God, you're still unknown by Him. And because you're withholding even just 1%, you can't experience the fullness of God's love because you have this barrier between you and him, like he's an all knowing God, but you're trying to withhold secrets from Him. And so if you want this freedom that you've never had you got to do something you've never done. If you're sitting here and listening or watching this episode, I don't care if you're alone in your room and you just watched a bad video. I don't care if you just blew up and said some things and done some things that you're not proud of. I don't even care if you're listening in a group or watching this on a TV with your roommates or in the car with your mom and dad, man, you can close your eyes and bow. And I want you to pray with me. And we're going to ask God to do two things, bring the conviction of the Lord on us. But number two, let the love and mercy of God compel us to a holy and righteous life. Jesus, we thank you that your love and mercy has been shown to us. God, would you allow your love and mercy to seep into our hearts to allow us to live a holy, righteous, blameless life? God, we want to become holy, and you make us holy. The blood of Jesus cleanses us, God. We thank you for that, God. Second of all, would you just lay your conviction on us, God, we want more of you. We want to become more like you, God. Bring conviction in our lives so that we can continue to become more like you. God, we love you. Thank you for sending your son for us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for showing us mercy. We love you, God. In Jesus name, amen. Guys, thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode. If you guys like it, subscribe to us on YouTube. Follow us on Spotify, Instagram and TikTok. Bless you guys and see you guys next week for the next episode.