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Last week on the quest to build a life that matters, Pastor David powerfully reminded us there's a cost. Living a life that experiences mattering, a life that experiences meaning is gonna cost you something. It's not free and easy to live that kind of life. It's not supposed to be. It's gonna cost you energy, time, money. It will cost you your convenience, and somewhere along the way it's gonna cost you your will. Because God's will is gonna interfere with your will, and you gotta give up yours to do his. Somewhere along the way, it's gonna cost you to live the kind of life that we're talking about. And behind that question, this was a question you were forced to wrestle with last week. Am I willing to pay the cost to live a life that matters? But behind that question is a second question, the one we're gonna answer today. What happens when you're actually willing to pay the cost, but you still end up somewhere you didn't mean to go? You stepped into a pitfall, you took a detour. It felt like the right road, but the detour led you somewhere far away from where God ultimately wanted you to be. I've always had a decent sense of direction. Like if you if I go somewhere and I'm driving and I'm not following somebody, I can just about always get back there on my own pretty easy. But the more dependent that we have become on our phones for navigation, the more I've noticed my sense of direction diminishing. So now when I'm approaching a busy interchange like we have here in DFW, it's rush hour. There are 10 different lane options and five different exit ramps, all in about the same place, not to mention lane closures and construction and oh a last-minute wreck. My phone is telling me to do one thing, my gut is telling me to do something else. So in my last few seconds, I'm switching back between maps and ways to see which one agrees with me. Because the goal always for most males is to cut as many minutes as possible off of the original stated arrival time. It is the unspoken mission of our lives. So at this interchange where my instincts are telling me to go one way and my phone is telling me to go another way, I always pick my instincts. And most of the time my phone says rerouting, and it adds another 15 minutes to my arrival time. I should have just trusted the map. I can't tell you how many times my feelings and my instincts have led me to a dead-end gravel lot behind some sketchwaffle house somewhere. Okay. That is not a bad way to picture what we're talking about today. Every life quest has a road, but every road has pitfalls and detours that look like the right road to the point we're often fooled in choosing the wrong path. It feels like the right road. Our gut says it's the right road. Plenty of other people are taking this road, but it's not what the map said. And the map, in this case, in our life, is the word of God. And if you don't stick to the map, you're gonna wake up one day, no matter how right it felt in the moment, and realize you've been on the wrong road this whole time. And here's what makes this so dangerous: the biggest threats to a life that matters are almost never obvious sins. Nobody in this room is one bad decision away from robbing a bank. It takes a long time on the wrong road to get to that place. The real threat to us is more subtle than that. The pitfall doesn't always lie in doing something bad. Sometimes the pitfall or the detour to the real path is doing something that looks and feels completely right, all while our hearts are quietly being moved in the wrong direction, shaped by the wrong motives. Today we're gonna look at three of those pitfalls, detours that run parallel to the real road. They are populated by really good people doing really good things, but the detour takes us somewhere else entirely than where God wanted us to be. These three pitfalls were first arranged this way by a man named Henry Nowen in his book, The Selfless Way of Christ. We referred to it this week in your study guides. And if you haven't read the book, I encourage you to. It is brilliant, and it's very challenging to any of us in ministry or any of us that have a heart to serve others. The three most dangerous pitfalls. Number one, the need to be needed, this is our desire to feel useful, the need to be noticed, this is our desire to have influence, the need to be in control, this is our desire to be or to appear responsible. Now, none of that is a sin on the surface. Being useful to people, having some influence, carrying responsibility, that's all the raw material of a life of impact. So this isn't a message about these things being bad. It's a message about questioning the aim and the motive of our heart while we're doing good things. Before we look at the three pitfalls individually, I want to answer a deeper question. Why does this happen? Why is it that people who genuinely want to serve God, genuinely want to love others, end up without ever noticing the turn inward, somehow we start making serving about ourselves, where serving others actually becomes a manipulative way of serving ourselves. There's an old phrase for this. Martin Luther used it, he borrowed it from Augustine. It's a Latin phrase, incurvatis in say, means curved inward on oneself. It's the idea that sin isn't just committing the obvious most evil acts, sin is also the bending of the human heart back on itself, especially in the middle of doing good things. I'll be honest with you. This is going to be an uncomfortable conversation for good moral religious people. Because this is the place where we most often lie to ourselves. This is where we hide our hypocrisy. Because we do good things, but we never stop and question our motives, and a lot of things get done for hypocritical reasons. But the lie can be exposed by asking the simple question: what is the real motivation for the good things I do? Prayer can be motivated by the need to appear spiritual. Taking that volunteer role or that board position can be motivated by the need to feel important. Generosity can be motivated by the need to gain influence. Serving others can quietly be motivated by the need to prove our own worth. Yes, selfish people occasionally do good things for selfish reasons. But this is bigger, a bigger conversation than that. The human heart, both your heart and my heart, is fully capable of taking something that is genuinely others focused and slowly bending it back toward ourselves. We start out serving them, but somewhere in the process, their gratitude feeds an unhealthy need in us. Their dependence starts stabilizing us. Their admiration starts telling us who we are. On the outside, the acts of serving and good deeds appear healthy. But inside, under the surface, our hearts are being curved back inward on themselves, and without knowing it, the motive of our serving, our adding value, becomes less about the other people and more about meeting our own needs. Now, here's what I want us to understand today before we talk about each of these pitfalls individually. These three pitfalls are not three ways to fail at serving people. They're three ways to succeed at serving people while it suddenly remains about you. And the telltale sign isn't in the work. The work can look identical regardless of what your motives are. The sign is what you're expecting in return for your service. What is the true motivation of your heart? Today I'm gonna do something intentionally that I usually try to avoid. This week I am leaning in more so to the material that is in your study guide. Most weeks I try to make the Sunday sermons complimentary to, but not redundant or repetitive. But the issue this week is different. It's deceptive enough, it's important enough that hearing it in one place isn't enough. It has to get drilled into our heart for more than one direction. So I'm being repetitive with the guide today on purpose. And it all starts in Matthew chapter 3. Jesus comes up out of the water at his baptism, and a voice from heaven says, This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Now watch what happens next. Not eventually, but immediately after Jesus' baptism, verse one of chapter four, then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The sequence here, the baptism and then the temptation, the Father's blessing and approval, and then the temptation. That sequence is not an accident. Jesus is able to respond to the temptations that we read about in the wilderness experience in chapter four, because his identity was settled before the temptations came. If the word of God is not your foundation and your identity is not firmly established in Christ, the enemy of your soul is going to rip you to shreds. That is the first principle we learn from this before we ever look at the actual temptations. Notice this. Every single one of the three temptations of Christ is disguised as a serving opportunity. They're all ministry proposals. Number one, turn the stones into bread. That's verse three. Number two, throw yourself from the temple, let the angels rescue you. That's verse six. Bow down and receive the kingdoms of this world. That's verse eight and nine. Temptation one, to turn the stones into bread. If you did, you could feed the hungry. Temptation two, throw yourself off this temple and let the angels rescue you. And if you did that, that would be an incredible, supernatural, unmistakable sign that God is real. There's temptation number three. Satan says, okay, bow down, I'll give you the kingdoms of this world. You can use that authority and influence to govern. Now, a lot of people read that last temptation and they say, Well, the devil was trying to offer Jesus something he didn't possess. Oh, but he does. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 4 4 that Satan is right now the God of this world. In this dispensation and age, Satan has a certain level of influence and power over the kingdoms of this world. And he was telling Jesus, I can give you a platform to rule and govern now. You don't have to wait on your father's timetable. Now, I know this is gonna be hard for us because we're so familiar with this story, but for a second, try to strip away Satan, try to strip away who's talking here, and just take what's being offered at the surface level. Every one of these things Jesus is offered sounds like a strategic plan for a significant life. With more bread, you could feed the hungry. With power and influence, you could prove that God was real. With this platform he's offering, you could govern. Not one of them, in and of itself, is a temptation to do something bad. Every one of them is a temptation to do something good. But in this case, the enemy was using the good to bait Jesus into doing the right things for the wrong reasons and on the wrong terms. You see, he never shows up in your life with a pitch for selfishness. He comes at Jesus with a pitch for his life to make an impact. And he uses good things to try to turn the heart of Jesus back on itself and compromise his motives. The three temptations of Jesus are, in a sense, three pitfalls or detours that are the most dangerous to us. Pitfall number one, being needed. The first temptation of Christ, turning stones into bread, is the temptation to feed yourself and others, and Satan is playing on our need to be needed, to feel useful. Being needed can feel like one of the most meaningful things in the world. Helping people, solving problems, becoming the person that others rely on. It can give real, legitimate purpose to your life. And there's nothing wrong with being useful. But serving others gets unhealthy the moment your own identity starts depending on somebody else needing you. At that point, helping isn't really about the other person flourishing anymore. Somewhere underneath, you start needing them to stay a little dependent on you because their need for you is what's currently making you feel like you matter. Here's a question to help expose the true motivation of our heart in this area. Am I adding value to them or am I using them to feel valuable? We have a word in the English language that describes when we're doing good things for others and not expecting anything in return. That word is called altruism. And behavioral scientists have studied altruism. They say that good intentions are not proof of good outcomes. They say that our desire to be liked and our sincere conviction that we know what's best for somebody else can create what they call the illusion of helping. You can genuinely believe you're helping somebody, but still be helping them in a way that keeps them stuck. We've all seen it. The parent that needs to be needed so badly, they keep bailing out their adult child in the name of love and compassion, but never realize their enabling behavior is protecting their adult child from the consequences of their actions, which is the one thing that can actually bring them to a place where there is the power to finally change their life. We've seen it in the leader who needs to be so needed that they've set the whole organization up to need them to the point it would fall apart if they weren't there. They never delegate responsibility, they never develop any other leaders because they have this need to be needed. Or we've all had that exhausting friend, the one that thinks it's their job to fix everybody's life, and they become the self-appointed parent within the Finn group. I mean, they're helping, and on the outside, the efforts look innocent enough, but it's often driven by their own need to feel needed. Good intentions are not proof of good outcomes. Pitfall number two, being noticed. The second temptation of Jesus to throw himself off the temple, let the angels catch him, that is Satan going after our need to be noticed. Our desire for recognition can dress itself up better than almost anything else. We do genuinely good things, but somewhere underneath, we're also hoping that somebody notices. And that's why Christian people that go out to serve the poor or they go out to serve at the homeless shelter or do anything along those lines, somehow it always seems to make it to our Facebook post or our Instagram reel or our TikTok story. But if our motives are completely pure, nobody has to know we did it. And definitely it doesn't have to show up and be celebrated on social media. But the fact that we do proves we crave the thanks. We need the recognition. We need somebody to confirm that what we did actually counted. But the moment recognition becomes the thing we're chasing, our serving stops being ministry and it becomes a performance. Jesus put words on this plainly. I mean, it's so plain, it's almost rude, okay? He says this in Matthew 6, verse 2 When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. Now I just want to pause for a moment about that last statement, what it means for them to receive their reward in full. That's a whole phrase in English. It is one single word in Greek. It is apicusin, and it's a Greek verb that means paid in full. And when Jesus uses this word, he's not talking future tense. He's saying, not saying they will be paid. He says these people he's talking about have already been paid. This is the word that was written on first century receipts when a debt had been paid off. It was done, it was closed on the receipt, apicusin, means paid in full. Notice the significance of this. Jesus is basically announcing judgment on the people who were being generous to the needy so they would get noticed. He's telling these applause seekers they have already received their full reward. He says, You want to be noticed? Good. You got noticed. That's all the reward you're ever going to get. You've already been receded. You got what you wanted. God is not on the hook to bless you for anything you do that's driven by your own need to be noticed. Jesus is saying, your motives determine who rewards you. If what you're after is earthly applause, then the earthly applause becomes your payment. And when you go after that and get that, then you have stopped heaven's flow of blessing into your life. You've already been paid, you've already been receipted, you got your full reward already. If what you're after is being noticed, congratulations, you got noticed. It's done. There is nothing left owed to you from heaven because heaven wasn't the approval you are after, you are after earthly recognition. Pitfall number three, being in control. The third temptation of Jesus to bow down to Satan so that he could gain influence over the kingdoms of this world. This is Satan going after our desire to control. This is one of the sneakiest of all three because it never announces itself as control. It comes into our life posing as our need to take responsibility. We're responsible people, or our desire to help others. But somewhere along the way, we start believing that we know better than God what the other person needs, exactly how they should change, and exactly what the outcome is supposed to look like in their life. And when that happens, helping people has turned into managing and controlling people. But the desire to control doesn't always show up with us trying to manage somebody else's life. Sometimes it shows up as you trying to manage the terms of your own exposure in a relationship you're supposed to be fully invested in, like a marriage. And we usually dress up our control in religious language. Jesus actually names a religious version of this in Mark chapter 7. He's talking about how people are avoiding caring for their aging parents in that culture, and they were using God as an excuse. He says in Mark 7, verse 10, for Moses said, honor your father and mother, but you say, if a man tells his father or his mother, quote, whatever you would have gained from me is Corbin, that is given to God. In order for us to fully grasp what Jesus is saying here, we've got to know what Corbin means. There was a Corbin law in the ancient Jewish world. Corbin is a Hebrew and Aramaic word that just simply means a gift or offering that is dedicated to God. And here in Mark 7, Jesus is criticizing people for misusing that tradition to insulate themselves and control their exposure in relationships, in this case, the relationship with their parents. It is basically a religious loophole where people could declare that their money and their property was Corbin. They could declare that it was dedicated to God and the temple. But the catch was the person kept control of and use of the property all the rest of their lifetime. But because it had been given to God, the money couldn't be used for any other purpose, like caring for your aging parents. And here's the hypocrisy. A man could legally declare Corbin that his money and property were dedicated to God, and that single declaration released him from the messy, exhausting, costly obligation of caring for his own aging parents. He didn't have to move them in, he didn't have to sit in the room with them and watch them decline. And the thing, the very thing, he used his way to buy himself out of that responsibility was dressed up as a gift, generosity, a gift to God. The gift was real, but the actual function of the gift was to gain control over his exposure in his relationships with his parents. Now listen, this isn't just about money. Every one of us has something, some kind of currency we're willing to hypocritically exchange in an attempt to insulate ourselves and control an outcome. It looks like the husband who works extra hours to provide. Nobody can criticize provision. It's actually commanded in the Bible. But when the overtime keeps showing up, exactly when things at home get emotionally hard, the paycheck starts functioning as Corbin. A real gift, a real value added to the family, but the actual function of the gift is keeping the man out of a conversation that would cost him more than his time, his vulnerability. It looks like the wife who serves everywhere at church. She leads ministry, she runs the women's group, she's at the building, church building four to five nights a week for the Lord, all while her marriage at home has gone south and nobody's addressed it in months. Her serving is real, but it's also the most respectable possible reason to not be at home in this difficult season. It looks like the parent who acts as the spiritual head of the house on paper. They lead the family devotions, they pray over their kids at night, but they've never once sat with their teenager through a hard conversation about what's going on in the teenager's life and actually listen. The devotional time is genuine, but then it's a safe, controlled, respected way to present a structured version of your presence as a parent that never requires an unscripted, vulnerable, exposed version of you. Each of these examples are our own versions of Corbin law. None of them are wrong on their own. Providing is good. Serving at church is wonderful. Leading your family in devotions is incredible. But here's the question: Was what you gave chosen because it helped them most or because it cost you least? There's actually well-established psychology that addresses this. Researchers have been looking into this for decades, and one of their central findings is environments that support another person's autonomy produce healthier growth than environments that try to control outcomes. And here's what that means: healthy help doesn't make people more dependent on you. The goal of parenting was never to raise kids that need you to make every decision in their life forever. The goal of leadership was never to build teams that can't function when you're not around. The goal of discipleship is to never disciple someone who is always dependent on your insight for every single choice they make. There's a measuring question here to figure out where we are with this third pitfall. Is my influence increasing their agency, their autonomy, and their dependence on God, or is it increasing their dependence on me? Because if your version of helping people is a subtle way for you to remain indispensable in their life, it may still look like adding value. But to use Augustine's phrase, your heart is in curvatus in se, your heart is being turned inward on itself. It has become more about you than it is about them. And just bluntly, that's selfishness. So if being needed, being noticed, and being in control are all pitfalls, detours, counterfeit roads that run parallel to the real road, where's the real one? Jesus showed us the real road. He modeled the only kind of life that never gets curved back on itself. It's the road of downward mobility. And it's described beautifully by Paul in Philippians 2. He says, in your relationship with one another, have the same mind as Christ Jesus, who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in the appearance as a man, he humbled himself by being obedient to death, even death on a cross. Jesus never grasped for position. He didn't seek to be noticed. He didn't need to control the outcome of how any of this went. He willingly took the posture of a servant, nevertheless, to my will, your will be done, he said. He humbled himself all the way to the cross. It was a life that was constantly moving downward in a world that keeps shouting to us to climb upward. But the path that Jesus took is the right road. Not just doing more good things, but becoming the kind of person who can actually serve somebody without needing our service to come back around and validate us in some way. But here's the deal: you're not gonna fix this by trying harder to have pure motives. Nobody has ever white-knuckled their way to a pure heart. The only way anybody, any of us, avoids these pitfalls is by what we've been saying this whole series. You gotta already know that you're valued before you can give value away to others with a pure heart. A person that is secure in their identity doesn't need the applause. A person who is secure in their identity can let somebody else grow up and not not need them as much, need them a lot less, and that doesn't destroy them. A person who is secure doesn't look for hypocritical ways to avoid responsibility. Here's another question you can carry out of the room today, and it's simple enough, it'll still be relevant Wednesday. When I help someone this week, what am I really hoping to get back? If the honest answer is nothing, okay, you're the heart of man is deceitfully wicked, the Bible says, so just make sure you don't rush to the answer. But if the heart of the answer is really you want nothing back, you really want them to flourish, then you're on the right road. Keep walking it. But if the brutally honest answer is something else, don't lie to yourself. If the brutally honest answer is something else, just bring it to Jesus. The same way you would bring anything else to Jesus when you sense that your heart is being curved back on itself and you're selfish in one of another area of your life, bring this to Jesus. He's not shocked by it. He's the only one that has ever walked into that wilderness and been tempted by these same kinds of temptations and never fell into any of the pitfalls, which means he's the only one that can lead us out of this wilderness and transform our own hearts when we want to do good things, but we keep doing good things for selfish reasons. I um I I I finished the message uh yesterday, like finishing touches, and Haley was getting on the plane to go to Florida early this morning and wasn't gonna be in church trying to make it to church in Florida to be there with Addy tonight. And um so she's like, Hey, I'm I'm not gonna be there on, I'll be on a plane. I can't watch the live stream. Um so I know you always preach over your sermon, so just preach it to me. I'm like, really? You're like when we throw down and preach right here with just you. She said, Yeah, just go. Yeah, I know you like to preach, so just do it with me listening. I said, All right, it's gonna be 27 minutes or so, just going all out. She said, Go. So, just me and her, I just laid it into her, man. I'm just like, bam. When I got done, she said, Well, you just messed me all up. She said, Now I'm questioning everything. I'm I'm questioning why I do what I do for the kids. I'm questioning why, like I'm all messed up. I said, That's the point. We lie to ourselves about this. We can see the wrong in everybody else's motives, but we never question our own. The point is to step back and say, God, am I doing good things for the wrong reason? Is my heart in curvatis and say, Is it turned back on itself and I don't even know it? Show it, show it in me. I don't want to get to heaven and stand before you and you say, Oh, you already got your reward. It's already been paid. You you've been receded for that because you all you did it for the wrong reasons. You didn't do it for me, and you didn't do it for them, you did it for you. So may God expose our hearts today and mature us and grow us so that our motives are pure. We want to honor Him and love them without the expectation of anything in return. Would you stand with me today across this room and across our campus family? And I'm gonna ask our entire um prayer teams at all of those campuses if you can come um and prepare yourself today to pray. Listen, we're gonna be here to serve you in prayer, whatever your needs may be. You need miracles, maybe you feel the Spirit of God pulling your heart toward Christ, and you've never you've never surrendered to him. Today is the day. That's why we're here in this moment. We'd love to introduce you to Jesus. Um, and and and and and you can respond to him today, right here in this moment. We want to pray with you. I realize the heart of this message is leaving this room and maturing, discipling. And so let me challenge you in your groups this week. This material is in your study guides. Get into this. Like James 5 says that we're transformed when we confess our faults one to another. So in your own private time and in your groups, you're like, you know what? To be honest, I think I like I was doing this to not feel guilty. Like I wasn't doing this to love my mom, I wasn't doing this to serve my kids, I wasn't doing this for so-and-so. I honestly was doing it so I wouldn't feel guilty. And if I'm doing it so I won't feel guilty, I'm not really doing it for the other person, I'm doing it for me. If the whole reason I'm doing it is so I don't feel guilty, it's about me. So God, search me, try me, know my heart, change me, mature me. And as we confess those things to the Lord and one to another, James Vice says, that's how we're healed and changed. So, Lord, from today through the hundreds of groups and thousands of people that'll be meeting to study this throughout the week, would you let deep work be done in our hearts to make us more like Jesus? Don't let us lie to ourselves anymore. Let us question, don't let hypocrisy live here in this space anymore. Pull the curtain back, expose it, change us today, and let us love people well. Healthy help, Lord, for you and for them. Lord, will you bless them and keep them? Make your face shine down on them, be gracious to them, turn your countenance, their direction today, and give them peace. In Jesus' name. Amen and amen. These altars are open. God bless you.