Does God Still Love Me When I Mess Up?

Episode 3 tackles one of the deepest questions people carry: Does God still love me when I mess up? We talk about guilt, grace, and why our failures don’t cancel God’s love—because the Gospel was never built on our perfection in the first place.

Transcript

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So, we have questions. But they're questions that you haven't asked. Because either they're uncomfortable or complicated or even just a little bit risky. Questions that most people don't ask because they just don't want to go there. But in this podcast, we do want to go there because we believe that our comments is ready. So in this podcast, we want you to be your questions. Let's look at them together. Let's leave it. Let's go there. What's going on, Land of Podcasting, and welcome to our third episode of what we like to call here in this podcast studio. Let's go there. I'm your host, Ben Pucas, and I'm joined in the studio, as always, with my friend Russell Williams. You know, it's funny because this is the third episode that we've done. And to just give you an idea, we're always a few weeks ahead of releasing it out to the public, just so we're not behind and we're not scrambling at the last second and giving out a not a great product. And so this is the third episode that we're now recording, and we still haven't released it yet. So Russell and I are like, does it work? Do people like it? And so what we want to talk about though, because this is now Friday that we're releasing this, and so this is the third episode that you're listening to. We hope that you're loving the content. We want to ask you guys if this is something that has been a blessing to you, we make no money off of this, and we don't want to make any money off of this. We want to bless you with the content that we're giving. And so one of the ways that you can pay us back is not through money, we're not ever going to ask for that, but we're going to ask you if you can give us a follow on Instagram. Let's go there with Ben Buchus. I don't even at this point I haven't even made the Instagram yet. So if you can do that, and as we start sharing videos, would you be able to share them to your story? Would you be able to send them to friends? Send us their way because we believe the product that we're giving out is a product that you and your friends need because this is a world, as we talked about two episodes before, where we have a hard time asking the real hard questions and we want to be able to go there with you guys. Speaking of answering your questions, today's question is one that hits me really hard. And I think every single one of us listening to this can say that we've had this question before is does God love me less? Does God stop loving me when I mess up or when I sin? And so something that I want us to do as we start diving into the idea of questions that we're asking, I think one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves is not the question, but the why behind the question, like going to the root. Like, why is this a question that so many people ask? You know, as we start with the podcast, a lot of the questions that we're starting with are a lot of the most common questions that we got, most some of the most common questions that I've gotten personally as a pastor and as a friend, and even in my own head that I have. But we have to ask ourselves why. And when I think about it and I think about what's what goes on in my own brain and what goes on with people that I sit with and in coffee shops and have lunch and dinner with and the community of people that I do life with, is I think one of the main reasons we have such a hard time with understanding the love of God even when we mess up and we're not perfect, is because we really do live in a performance-based culture. And the the culture that we live in, everything we do is a positive or a negative reward or consequence that comes after we do it. If we want a promotion, we have to do well at work. We know that in even in friendships that we have with other people, that if we're gonna be a bad friend, we're probably gonna lose that friend. If we're in a dating relationship and we're not loving that person well and pursuing that other person, like we're probably getting broken up with. Even in marriage, like I've watched like friends when they don't work on their marriage, their marriage suffers and they reap negative consequences before or after that. And I think because of that performance-based culture that we live in, we assume that our love and God's disposition towards us and his love toward us is based off of what we do and the behavior that we have. And so as we dive into this question and as we get to see the roots behind it all, like I think what's super important for us to do is it's important for us to even talk about what sin is when we talk about messing up, like we talk about sin. And it doesn't take long. This could have been a 45-second long podcast. Like, yes, God still loves us when we sin. None of us don't see that coming. We all see where that was going. But I think sometimes when we believe that yes, God continues to love us and we look at the cross, we can actually minimize what sin actually is. Like, sin is not not a big deal. Like, even though yes, God loves us, sin is still not only just not a big deal, sin is a massive deal. Sin is the very thing that separated us from God in the very beginning. In the beginning, God created everything and he said that it was good, and it says that he walked with his image bearers in the garden. But then because of sin, it's not just not a big deal. It was a death-defining, relationship-shattering kind of deal. And so when God is asking us not to sin, which I think a lot of times we read scripture and we see that God is like this person in the Old Testament, and we even see punishments in the New Testament that He's telling us not to sin. I think we can think that God is just being this, this, this guy that wants to make rules and he wants to manipulate our lives, he wants to control what we do. But really, what God is doing is he's inviting us not to invite literal death into our lives. Like sin isn't just random rule breaking, like sin is destructive, sin distorts, sin brings death into our lives. You know, the example that I like to give uh is when your parents tell you not to run into traffic, and they always tell you that before you cross the street, you have to look both ways. Now, if we looked at our parents and we're like, you're just trying to ruin my life. Like, I can't believe it. Like I would love to run across the street without you telling me what to do. Like, but when our parents tell us to do that, they're not trying to ruin our lives, they're trying to save them. And I think a lot of times what happens is God is warning us, hey, sin is death, sin is destructive, sin destroys. And so stop running across the street without looking both ways. And what we end up doing a lot of times is because we're like, we're gonna do what we want. We don't look both ways before crossing the street. And then what happens? One of these days we get smoked by a semi going 55 miles an hour, and then we're laying on the ground and we're hurting and we're in pain and we're feeling that death and we're feeling that destruction, and we start going, this really hurts, so this must be God's punishment to me. Like God is making me feel the weight of this, and God is making me feel the pain of this because he doesn't love me anymore. When in reality, when you think about the theology of sin, the reason we got smoked by a semi is not because God did that. God didn't send the semi to do that to us, but he warned us that this is a consequence of sin. Just like a parent tells the kid, don't put your hand on the stove because it's hot. A parent can keep telling their kid that over and over and over and over again. And then eventually, when the kid does put his hand or her hand on the stove top, like it's not the parent's fault. The kid doesn't need to look at the parent and be like, How dare you hurt my hand? The parent's like, No, I've been warning you not to do that, and now you're suffering the consequences of your own sin. But sin is not not a big deal, and God truly hates with all of his being. It says that God has wrath towards sin because it kills the people he loves. But in the midst of all of that, in the midst of this sin, in the midst of the idea that this sin goes outside of the design of God, like God created things to be a certain way, created us to be a certain way and to be in relationship with him in a certain way, that even when we decided to sin and even when we decided to make ourselves enemies of God, it says in Romans chapter five. Right before that, it says in Romans 5.8, that even with all of this in mind, even the fact that he hates sin, even in the fact that it separates from him, it's rebellion against him, it says that God demonstrates his love for us. And that while we were still sinners, while we were still his enemy, while we were by nature children of wrath, Christ died for us. Like so, in the midst of us being his enemies, his love overcame the hatred, the literal wrath towards sin, so that he can save us from the thing that separated him from us. And so when people wonder, man, does God not love me anymore? Does God love me even less because of the mistake that I made? I think the oh, I want to bring us to Romans chapter 8, where it says, When God, who didn't even withhold his own son from us while we were his enemies, but gave him freely for us, how much more now will he generously give us all things? And so while we if while we were his enemies, he loved us and gave himself as a sacrifice for us, why then do we start believing that when we start sinning as his children, that now his disposition towards us changes? If God didn't withhold his own son, how much more will he graciously give us all things? And the thing that we need to understand about the love of God is that the love of God is unsteady and the love of God is unconditional. And I want to talk about why for a second, because we hear that a lot in the church, like God's love is steady and God's love is unconditional. And I'm gonna tell us the reason why in this moment. Because God doesn't just have love, it's not an adjective, it's not just a verb for God, it's a noun for God. God doesn't just have love, God is love. It's within his character to be anything other than love. And so when we make mistakes and when we go up and down, God's love does not go up and down to him because he is love. Like, think about the things that identify us. The things that identify me, like at the core, that will never change about me, don't change as the seasons go. They always stay true. My name is Ben Pukus, and unless I make some legal demand, which I'm not going to, my name will always and forever be Ben Pukus. I could be in prison for murder, my name is still going to be Ben Pukis. You know, I could do a really great thing, my name is still going to be Ben Pukus. God is love and he's never going to stop being love. His love is steady, and I think that's hard for us to understand as finite human beings because our love is not steady. We have love, we are not love. And because of that, our love has strings attached to them. The relationships we have have strings attached to them. And I think one of the biggest issues when it talk when we're thinking about the steadiness of God's love is I hear this from people, man. I know Jesus, like I know Jesus loves me. Like I see, I see what he did on the cross, I see what he did in the New Testament, but I've heard this recently, but when I think about God the Father, God the Father doesn't love me the same way Jesus does. And that even goes into the thing that we've even talked about before on this podcast, is it's really hard for me to follow God because I think there's it feels like there's two different gods. There's a God of the Old Testament and there's a God of the New Testament. The God of the Old Testament is wrath, and the God of the New Testament is love. And I think we have to check our theology. If we believe to ourselves that Jesus loves me, the Son loves me, but the Father does not, we have poor theology because Jesus is God. He is the image of the invisible God. If we want to know what God is, what he looks like, what he says, what he does, like we have to look at Jesus Christ because he's the image of the invisible God. If you want to know how God views you and how God feels about you, you don't need to look any further than Jesus Christ. And so the devil plays crazy games in our head. First of all, he dangles sin in front of our face and tells us it's not a big deal, just like he did with Adam and Eve. And then we start sinning and we start experiencing the consequences of sin. And then he starts making us believe that that God's like hating us and wants us to suffer and doesn't want us to experience the good life. No, God is inviting us to the good life, and God is inviting us not to sin. And the devil just continues to distort the good things that God puts in front of us. He starts to make us feel the devil starts to make us feel like this this life that we live in, the relationship with God that we're supposed to have has to be this perfect kind of relationship. Like we're not allowed to have any kind of imperfections. And again, I think that has to do with the culture. Like I think about myself, I'm an athlete by nature. I played three sports in high school, and because of that, I became very performance-based. Like I have to do the right thing all the time. Because if I don't, man, in a basketball game, I'm not hitting my threes, I'm playing bad defense, you know, I'm missing layups, I'm not finding the open man. Like I gotta be careful because the coach is gonna put me on the bench. And we relate that to God. Like we have to be perfect. And when you look at scripture, especially when you look at the apostle Paul, who says, I'm the chief of all sinners, who says, Why do I not do the things that I want to do? And why do I do the things that I don't want to do? Like I haven't yet gotten to where I need to be, but I press on towards the goal. And when you look at scripture, God is not expecting us to be perfect. That's why Jesus came. That's why we have the Holy Spirit now. But what I believe our imperfections are supposed to do is not make us feel like God hates us, but what our imperfections are supposed to do is they're supposed to scream our need for God. Like we were not self-sufficient to call ourselves out of the grave. We did nothing to earn the love of God. It wasn't our Bible reading, it wasn't our potential that he didn't foreknow us and go, wow, Ben Pukas is going to be a really dangerous weapon for me. So I need to make sure that I save him and put him in my Lamb's book of life. No, I was laying in my grave and I was dead. And what can a dead person do other than nothing? I was laying there, I was doing nothing, I had no potential in life, and for no other reason than God's love and mercy, he called my name out of that grave, and I walked out of that grave and I responded to my God. So then why do we then walk out of the grave and we start believing that we need to be sufficient in ourselves? Like what our imperfections are supposed to scream is Jesus, I need you as much today as I needed you when I walked out of that grave. This sin that entangles me, this devil that's a roaring lion seeking somebody to devour, seeking to devour me. Jesus, I need your strength. I need your I need your guidance. Jesus, I need your power just as much the day that I got saved as I do now. And so the question I think we need to be actually asking ourselves when when we're asking, does God still love me? Because I don't think anyone thought that I was gonna say, Yeah, God stops loving you when you sin. I think the real question that we need to be asking ourselves, and this shows a really big hard thing, is not does God still love me when I mess up, but does God still like me when I mess up? Is God mad at me? Does God have his arms crossed? Is he disappointed all the time? And and and I know we are are are counting down the time right now, but I want us to take a second. I know you're you're listening wherever you are, either on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Like I want you, when you think about God the Father, when you pray to him, when you mess up, I want you to think about his disposition towards you. How does he look at you? When you're crying out to him, does he scowl? Is he fr is he the coach when you're not performing? Like, sit on the end of the bench until you can come out here and you can start performing. Because I think that's why we ask this question. Man, I know God loves me, but does he like me? Is he disappointed with me? Am I just the am I just the worst child that he has? Am I the ugly stepchild? And that man, what I need us to understand is that that is not the disposition to God. Those are the lies from the enemy himself. Because I think what we naturally do is we just imagine that God is naturally annoyed and frustrated and disappointed all of the time. There's a guy by the name of Thomas Goodwin. If you get a chance to look him up, he's actually really a deep thinker. He was actually living in the 1600s. He's, I guess you can consider one of the church fathers now, since I was, you know, 400 years ago. And what he actually talks about is this theology where when we ask the question, like, does God still love me or does God still like me when I sin? I think what we're really trying to wonder is we know that God has love, but when I sin, does his wrath overshadow his love? And what Thomas Goodman talks about is like, no, actually, when you look at the cross, we see that God's love actually overshadows his wrath. And he goes into this deep theological topic that yes, God is a just God and he will always be a just God, but his wrath is not something that is infinite. Like, think about it for a second. Like God has always existed. And I want us to think about did God have wrath? Did God show his wrath before the fall in Genesis chapter three? There's nothing to be wrathful over. He lived in perfection and community within himself. And then when he created everything, he said that it was good. There was nothing to be wrathful over. And then when you look at the other side of things, that when we're gonna be with Jesus for forever in eternity, there's not gonna be wrath there either because sin is going to be a distant memory, death is going to be a distant memory. And so wrath is something that hasn't always existed and won't always exist. But the one thing that will always exist is the love of God. Because as we talked about, he is love. And so if we have to wonder, does his wrath overshadow his love, we don't need to look any further than the cross to show that that is not the case. Like I just think we got to speak this past weekend over Easter and we preached on Lazarus here at Fellowship. And it's a verse that everyone loves to memorize in vacation Bible school when it comes to Lazarus, and it says it's the shortest English verse in the Bible, and it's Jesus wept. But right before that, it says that when Jesus is looking at the weeping at Lazarus' tomb, it says that he was deeply troubled. That word means angry, like intensely angry. Like, see? Like God's angry at Lazarus, God's angry at these people. Like, no. What I believe is happening there is he is looking at the situation and he's going, it was never supposed to be this way. My people are experiencing something they were never supposed to experience. Mourning and weeping were never supposed to be words in their vocabulary, tombs were never supposed to exist. And I think he's angry towards sin and he's weeping because of the compassion that he has for his people. Like that's God's disposition to us when we sin. He's like, it's never supposed to be this way. But the people that are experiencing all the things that they're experiencing, I have compassion for them because it wasn't supposed to be this way. Like Jesus was angry, but his wrath was towards sin, and his love and his mercy were to the people, and his compassion were to the people that were experiencing the fall. And so we have to remind ourselves that when we are falling, like we don't need to look further than the cross to know the love that he has for us and the love that will continue and always be steady for us. And so, does God still love me when I mess up? Like, yes, absolutely. Like, his character won't allow him to do otherwise. Does he want to see you flourish? Yes, he wants to see you flourish. I believe that's why God's disposition towards sin and us with sin is is begging us like don't choose death, don't choose destruction, don't choose the things. Like what I love Matt Chandler, he's one of my heroes. He's the guy I listen to every single week, and he's somebody that I would love to meet one day and just be like, thank you for pouring into me for years. He gives this example about a lion, and and uh he's watching some nature show, and it's when nature, when predators attack or something, and there's this lion that this guy had since it was a cub, and they're like best friends, and you know, trained it, and you know, he tells the lion to sit and it sits and tells it when to eat, and they use this lion for model shoots, like they lay on the lion, like treating this lion like some sort of golden retriever. And as you know, based off of the title of the show, what happens is this model is laying on the lion for some odd cologne commercial. You know, those cologne commercials where you're like, what is this about? Oh, right, cologne at the very end. They're like, de jure. And this lady gets torn, mauled to pieces by this lion. And the trainer was like, I was shocked by that. Like, I could not believe the lion did that. And Matt Chandler just goes, How are you shocked by that? Like, this is one of the only predators in the animal kingdom that only knows how to rip and tear. And he goes, and I think that's how we view sin. And I think that's how we view sin. We don't think of that as a big deal. And then when we start feeling the consequences of it, we start looking at God and being like, God must hate me because of what I'm going through. And I just see the God of the universe going, No, you got mauled by a lion. You got mauled by sin in your flesh and by Satan himself. Like you're not mauled because I mauled you. You're mauled because you played in the ring with the lion and you signed yourself up for destruction. And so God is asking for us to run away from sin. Like, don't, that's why he says, put to death the desires of the flesh. That's why he says flee from sin. That's why he says, put off the flesh and put on the spirit. Not because he's trying to rob us, it's because he's created life and he knows what life is supposed to be. So when we think about sin, like the question is then what do we do with sin? Like, okay, so Jesus forgives me, and Jesus loves me, and God the Father loves me, and he likes me all the time, and there's grace. So that means I can just continue to sin. Right? Like the answer to that, I hope you know, is no. That doesn't give us liberty to do things. Love limits liberty. Jesus didn't set us free on the cross just so we can go back to chains. Because at the end of the day, we are serving one master. And Romans chapter six talks about we're either slaves to righteousness or we're slaves to Satan, either to righteousness or unrighteousness. And so when we continue to choose the flesh and continue to choose sin, it's going to lead to our destruction. Like that lion is always out there trying to get you. And so for us in this room, what I'm not talking about is now that he loves us and now that he likes us and now that there's grace, shall we continue to sin knowing that grace may abound? By no means, as Paul says. And so if you are listening to this, do not use this as an excuse to sin. Because if you have unrepentant sin in your life, I've been there, my people. I've been there more times than I would like to admit. Unconfessed sin. Hear me say this with the most amount of love. It should make you uncomfortable. It should hurt. It should make you lose sleep at night. Because God is too kind to allow us to continue to be mauled by a lion and not bring up the idea that there is a better life out there for us. And so if we are living in unconfessed sin, the end of the day, like we talk about the idea of struggling against sin. Like if you're not confessing sin and you're unrepentant in your sin, you're not struggling against sin. You're getting dominated by sin. You're getting dominated by the line. You're getting mauled every single day of your life. And that is not, hear me say this: that is not and will never be the abundant life. What I'm talking about with the sin is not the unrepentant sin. It's the sin that we want to, and we're we're trying to put to death and we're cutting our hand off and we're gouging our eye out. And it's like, why do I do the things that I don't want to do? And why do I not do the things that I want to do? Like, that's what I'm talking about. It's the sin that so easily entangles us, and it's the ongoing battle, and we will never be finished products on this side of eternity. And so for that kind of sin that we're confessing and we're bringing to the light and we're trying to find healing in, like when we go into that sin and when we fall into that sin, we need to remind ourselves in that moment. Hey, this is what the cross is for. Like, so as we land this plane, does forgiveness of sin and the fact that God will never stop loving us and God will never stop liking us, does that give us an excuse to sin? The answer is no. But the way that God has designed us to live life is that as we know that we have will always be accepted, as we know that we will always be loved, as we know that we will always be liked by the God of the universe as his children, talking to believers here, we then live out of the fact that we are accepted and then we perform based off of the fact that we are accepted. We do not perform to be accepted, we are accepted, so therefore we perform. We don't fight for love, we fight from love. We don't write for righteousness, we write from righteousness. That's the way that he designed us to live. And so does God love you? Yes. Does he like you? Yeah, yes. Look at the cross. But if you are feeling that that weight of sin, don't allow it to make you run from God. Allow it to make you realize that you need Jesus just as much now as you did when he called you out of that grave. Let the imperfections go. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, would you be with me? Let your let that that imperfection and that that longing to find righteousness lead you to community and lead you to be in the light, not to find an excuse to continue to sin, but trying and fighting against sin every single day. And so does he like you? He will always like you. He will always love you. And the invitation that he's giving is I've given you potential life. Will you take it or will you not? And so that concludes this episode, episode three of this podcast. We did three in one week, Russ. Can you believe that we did all of that back to back to back? So from now on, we're gonna be releasing one episode at a time. And next week's episode is going to be singleness. We're gonna be talking about how do I navigate my singleness when it feels like everyone around me is either dating, engaged, or married. Story of my life. And next week we're gonna be able to talk to the guy who wrote the book on singleness, which if you don't know, it's me. So until next week, we'll miss you guys. If you have questions, man, please DM us, go onto the Google Forum, ask the question, share our content. That's the way you can pay us back. Let's get this into the hands of as many people as possible. So next week we'll talk about singleness. But until then, Pookie out.