More Than Forgiveness Series

So hey, good morning and welcome to this place that we call DCC. It is so good to have you with us this morning, that’s always true, but especially true if you are brand new. We want to give a special shout out and welcome to you if you were here for the first time last weekend on Easter and are giving us another shot today. Thanks for being willing to do that. It means a lot to us. So, last weekend was the biggest attendance ever in the history of this church. Just 8 years ago 204 people attended DCC on Easter weekend at Sand Creek High School, last week there were over 21 times that amount, over 4300 people. The best part about that is this we are cutting a check for $21,590 to Springs Rescue to help the homeless of our city. We don’t have the total yet from all of the other 37 churches that were a part of our COSIloveyou Easter initiative, but the total is quickly approaching $200k. We are still trying to track down numbers from a few pastors. It is very much like herding counts. I promise you that you will know as soon as we do.

If you are fairly new to this place before we go any further we want to make sure that you know that all of your story is safe and welcome here regardless of how it reads, you belong with us regardless of what you believe, even if it doesn’t line up with what we happen to believe, and you have walked into a place today that is full of people, not who used to be like you, tolerate or put up with people like you, or fix people like you. We can’t fix anyone. You have walked into a room today full of people exactly like you, people who have made mistakes, hurt people, been hurt by people, have parts of our lives and stories that we would like to change, erase, delete, and do over, people that all have things in our lives that we hope to, want to and need to overcome. That’s why we are doing this series.

ILLUST> About 10 years ago Adidas did an ad campaign with Gilbert Arenas who was an NBA star with a tag line that said this “when no one else believes in you, believe in yourself”. That really resonated with me at that point in my life. Just a few years before I had resigned from the church I was leading at the time after having an affair and blowing our lives up. My wife Stacy had decided to try and fight for our marriage and I was in some pretty intense counseling at the time trying to overcome the unbelievable mess that I had created. So I printed out the quote from Arenas, framed it and sat it on my desk. When no one believes in you, believe in yourself. One day I came in to my office and saw that my wife Stacy had taken it out and wrote Greg, I believe in you, love Stacy. I still have that to this day. The fact that someone who had experienced the very worst of me said I believe in you touched something deep in my heart. It began to uncover something that had been there all along that I had missed in all of my years in the church, my desire and need for more than forgiveness in my life.

I am not alone in that. There’s a lot of us sitting here today who have spent a lifetime missing this too. so, if we really want to overcome I think we have to talk about that. If you weren’t here last week we identified 3 questions facing one of Jesus closest friends Peter heading into the very first Easter that we all seem to wrestle with too. Can I overcome the promises I’ve broken, things I’ve done, and the conclusions I’ve reached? We really didn’t resolve things for Peter last week. So let’s jump back into this there today. How will Peter overcome where he finds himself in this moment of his life having just done what he promised not to do, denied Jesus three times and now ready to stand eye to eye with Jesus? Could it be that the last of those 3 questions, can I overcome the conclusions I’ve reached is every bit as important as the first two? Let’s jump into this, talk through it and see.

If you brought a Bible we are going to be in John 21. If you don’t have a Bible they are back on the back tables that you can grab right now if you would like if you close or on you can always grab one on your way out. As always you can hit our app or the You Version app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So here we go John 21 starting with verse 1…