Put grace to the truth

We were pastoring a church in New York until the month of August and we left the pastorate and today we began to travel, to preach, to meet our people again. And it is a pleasure to be here in the León de Judá where there are so many beautiful people, so many special people. Those who raise their voices do not worry, this is accommodated. Here we go, here we go. Glory to God.

As the weather is quite strict and does not forgive, even if it is hoarse, I greet my friend Jorge Ribera who has been kind enough to bring us from Milford, rather from Providence last night. And the best woman who gave birth to Venezuela accompanies me, Dolis, stand up and greet the brothers. She's been putting up with me for 30 years, that's why she's already earned heaven. They are going to give you the crown of patience, the crown of life for having endured this server for 30 years, 30 years.

But you still love me. That's important. If you still love me we can continue 30 more years and in 30 more years we will arrive here, good morning, brothers, how are you.

The Scripture, Saint John, Chapter 1. This hoarseness doesn't happen to me, but every 10 years, I've been preaching for 36 years, shouting from the four winds and who knows what happens to me. It once happened to me here at church a few years ago. From here I leave as an announcer at once.

Saint John, Chapter 1, verse 14. I thank you very much for the patience you can have with my voice situation. They already have it? Saint John 1:14.

"...And that verb was made flesh and dwelt among us and we saw his glory, glory as that of the only son of the father full of grace and truth."

Do you want to underline those last words? "full of grace and truth."

Let's talk about the two most important qualities of Jesus. Two most important qualities of Jesus. The first thing that John says is that the verb pre-existed with God and the verb became flesh, and let us not expect someone to explain to us in human words what it means for God to become flesh. There is no way to understand it. There is no way to understand what it means that God has taken human nature. He calls it the verb, or the word that existed before the creation of the world, of the universe, and there came a time when that verb became flesh, took on bones, took on tissue, made the human figure in the womb of Mary, was formed as a baby, he grew as any human being grows, he developed as any human being develops, he was not a magical child, he was not a strange child, he was not a child who drew attention because he carried a light on his head, or because there was something supernatural in him that distinguished him from the other children. He was a human being, and neither philosophers, nor theologians, nor doctors, nor anyone understand this. Doctors don't even understand the whole body they're carrying. Modern medicine, modern anatomy, cannot explain to us the totality of the functioning of the human body. Every day they are finding new discoveries, new advances, we still don't even know 100% of the function of the brain. As we pretend to understand the incarnation of God then. As we pretend to understand or would pretend to understand, break down into point a, point b, point each, point God, what the incarnation of God means, that God has become man.

But if you were God and became a man, how would you come into the world? If I were God and became a man, what characteristics would stand out in me? First, in us pride would stand out, that you come to speak to me, I am God.

Second, authority would stand out in us. When someone approaches us to contradict what we are saying, we would say: alabín, alabín, boom, ba, you disappear, ra, ra, ra. We would not accept anyone questioning us, because without being God and having been in a church and a ministry for a few years, and a gift borrowed because it is from the spirit, it is not mine, then we do not fit through the door and we walk on the tips of our nails because we say , 'I am not like ordinary mortals, I am a great servant of God. I don't drink that, I don't eat that, I don't do the other, and when we have some gift of the spirit in our lives, we tend to be very sharp with the people around us. If you are not as I believe, the devil, the devil or the son of the devil will take you. If you don't believe what I believe, imagine how many proud people there are in this world, if we had the power that Jesus had.

Oh, for example, do you think I would take a plane to travel? No, I would arrive at the airport and say, "come, so you can see that I have power." And I say, 'I'm leaving', to the south and I disappear. The mortals, the fools, the idiots, the morons who leave by plane, I disappear by the spirit.

Hey, what things we wouldn't do if we went and had the power of Jesus. You arrive at the house and find, I speak to the men first, and find a woman who looks like a mother hen, fighting, with screaming chicks, nervous, tense because of the situation of the day, and if we had the power of Jesus, if the We men had the power of Jesus....

I just saw a movie called 'Clic', if you haven't seen it please watch it and I'm not getting paid to promote it. But, the man came to have a universal remote control, a universal control for everything and if he wanted to shut someone up and he did, shshsh. Imagine if you had the power. Your wife fighting and you shshsh, and you are frozen, frozen until you say, 'come back my love'.

You get charged and you don't want to pay and you click and freeze. Advance time, delay time. Look, if men had the power to change time, what would women do if we had the power to turn back time? We would say, 'I'm going to get 20 years off my mind', because it's not that we get older, it's that the mirrors crack. And as we see ourselves in the mirror, cracks begin to appear. It's not his wrinkles, it's that the mirror cracked.

But, if we had the power to change things, what things would you not change? Let's see what John says about Jesus.

"....He came as the only begotten of the Father", listen, you and I are children of God but we are not the only begotten. Christ is different from us in his origin. Christ is different from us in his nature. Christ is different from us in the content of his being. No matter how much of a child of God you are, you are a child of God but he is the child of God. You will never become like him, I will never become like him. You will say but the Bible does not say that we will have a body, a body similar to his but not like his. We will have the ability that the body of the risen Jesus has, but we will never be like him because he is the only one.

You will want to repeat after me, 'the only one'. Do not believe the only you, tell the one next to you. "Don't think you're the only one." If they give me a little more monitor, they would help my throat please. He is the only one.

In a family, when there is only one child, he is spoiled, he is arrogant, he dominates the parents, he has no one to play with, so you have to invent a game for him. The only one is always different than when there is more than one. Now, Jesus is the only one in power, in grace, in authority, in everything. However, John says, we saw him and as we saw him, he says 'full of grace and truth'.

Now comes the message. A little more monitor for me please, if you'd be so kind. If you had to draw God, how would you paint him? With lightning in his hand, others would paint him with a stream of fire in his mouth, others would paint him what do I know, like an earthquake. Someone would paint it as an inaccessible light. John painted it in such simple words and says 'he is full of grace and truth'.

And we are going to study these two terms that are the characteristics of Jesus that are the characteristics that distinguish him from any other human being that has come to this planet earth.

Let us first enter into grace, full of grace. What do you understand by grace? There is another version, this one here, the international version, the new international version, it uses the term 'love' instead of grace. 'Full of love and truth'.

If you want to build a healthy church your message must contain love and truth. If you want to build a permanent and stable relationship, your relationship must have grace and truth, not just truth, because there are preachers who only have truth, they preach the truth, they tell the truth but they lack grace. They lack love. There are families that have failed to raise their children, parents who have failed to raise their children because they only have the truth to speak to their children, they only tell their children the truth.

Look at what time you arrived, I told you that I was going to kill you, I was going to hit you against the ground, that you arrived at this time. Why did you go with so-and-so? There are families, there are parents whose children don't talk to them because the only thing they find in their parents is truth.

You took marijuana. You are a drug addict, you are a scoundrel, you are this, you are that, you are that. And that's true, but there are people who end up siding with the one who only tells them the truth.

Husbands, who are going to deal with their wives and only tell the truth. And why are you late? You are always late. And why do I always have to wait for you? And why didn't you call? And why, and why? And no....the top thing is that the couple then argued. Tell me, tell me, I'm not telling you the truth. Tell me, you don't like me to tell you the truth, right? You don't like me telling you the truth. You don't like being told the truth, that's why you don't want to talk to me. And sometimes one leaves the house and the man, the woman accompany him to the parking lot, 'You're going to listen to me. You are going to listen to me. You are going to listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.’ And one goes..... aaaaaahhhhh. Pure truth.

Let me brother take this off. Look how I have my wife. Greg stepped forward but I have her there in truth. Aaaaahhhhh.... I grabbed my suit. So you have to have them in the truth. Respect your husbands. Be subdued.

No man said amen. It will be because they don't give him lunch if he says amen now. It will be because when you got to the car, and ....... you yelled there amen, yell at me here amen. Say amen here in the parking lot. That there is no one to defend you. The angel who protects defenseless husbands is on vacation today, tell me here now.

Full of grace and truth. There are people in churches who are only full of truth. Brother, why didn't you come to the service? I haven't seen him in about 15 days, the devil is taking him, right? You are not praying, surely you are already in sin again. Some people get upset when you go 15 days without coming to a service and instead of stopping and saying, brother, it's good to see you, I've been praying for you. The Lord will bless you. The Lord has something nice for you; what they begin is to tell the truth.

Do you know why some men don't like to go home after they go out? Because they have a truth recorder in the house. Why are you here at this time? Where were you? And some women, God bless them, start….let me see, let me see your handkerchief. What does it smell like. And what does one not smell like if everyone walks around wearing a gun, colonized and everyone who hugs you and greets you leaves you some of their perfume, and when you get home, the woman or man can start looking for the truth between quotation marks. Truth we say to hurt people. We say the truth, and it breaks the relationship between parents and children.

Do you know why children do not tell their parents the mistakes they make? Because they will only find punishment from them. They will only find truth. But they tell their friend, because the friend is not going to condemn them. The friend is going to tell them 'come on, give me five, man. Come on. What has happened to you, man? What's up, baby? Don't worry about, man. Don't worry, everything will be fine. Don't worry, the same thing happened to me. And, but if I tell my dad, he eats the peacock. Grrrrr...

How many people have ended up destroying their family or church relationships simply because we are true Christians. But we are not funny. Jesus had both. Hallelujah!

Full of grace and truth because if you just give people the truth it takes them away from you. And if you only give them love and grace, you don't make the difference between good and evil, the person will end up believing that life is a sport and that there is no right or wrong, there is nothing to obey, there is nothing to respect. It doesn't matter to smoke a cigarette than to take a pass of crack or heroin, it's all the same. Because if you only have grace, people will interpret that there is neither good nor evil here.

If the drunk boy arrives at the house, and drugged and you tell him........yofouafodufoauf.... you don't want any more. You want me to find you another crack pass, you want me to find you another pass... you want a little more, calm down. And when the police come, when people come to sell drugs, then you tell them, 'wait until he wakes up. He has no money now, I am going to complete it for him.’ That is grace, that is mercy, that is love. But love without truth breeds monsters.

That is why the most typical case in Scripture of what is true without love, and what is love and truth is in John Chapter 8. If you want to look up the reading, let's see how Jesus dealt with sin of a woman.

The Samaritan woman. This is not the Samaritan woman, this is an adulterous woman, although the Samaritan woman passed that degree because she had had 5 and the one she had was borrowed at the moment. This was a woman who was caught in adultery. Saint John, Chapter 8. Come with me, the religious, you can get off here and you don't give feedback, the microphone doesn't scream. Ok, because I already started to scream. We religious are like this: you saw so-and-so did not come, he gives it to him...... who sees it, who sees it. Look at him, but I saw him in such a place, in such a corner and he was raising his elbow,..dldldldldll and we arrived at the church, the religious do this: the one who has truth without love, arrives and says: 'let it happen. In which he grabs the microphone and I get up from a prophecy and say 'thus says the Lord drunkards will not inherit the kingdom of heaven'

Many people have left the churches because they have found a lot of truth and little love But let's see Jesus, put yourself in the skin, in the shoes of Jesus. They bring him a woman caught in adultery, still sweating. They had been in the middle of the sexual act, perhaps they grabbed the man by the hair because of the bows or it had been some of them themselves, because it was a trap they set for Jesus. They grabbed that woman, 'get dressed, get dressed', a woman there with her dress all torn and they threw her at Jesus' feet. The religious came, the law of Moses says that such women must be stoned. Was that true, yes or no? But they were only seeing the truth. Jesus sees the woman, they insist, the law says....

And there are people who approach you; I was in the pastorate, there are people who approach him and say 'and you are going to let the little brother so-and-so sing there in front. And you are going to allow so-and-so, who happened to this or that, to go read the Scripture there. Truths, truths, truths, but with a spirit full of rancor and contempt for people who have made a mistake.

What do you say? The law says.... Jesus did not tell them, that is a lie because you cannot deny the truth. If you find someone drunk and someone says to you, 'I was drunk,' and you say, 'No, I was dancing rock and roll. He was dancing rock and roll. He was not drunk, any time'.

If they find you kissing a person who is not your spouse or doing something wrong, the other will say, 'no, I think he was dreaming, he was seeing...' No, The truth is the truth.

Men have the specialty of disguising and diverting the truth. First commandment of the masculine code so that the woman does not discover you: deny everything. Never acknowledge anything. Say, these are your things. Those are the people, they are the others, they are suppositions, but the truth must be recognized.

If you are going to restore a sight, if you are going to raise a character, if you are going to form a stable relationship between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, between wife and wife, you will never build a permanent relationship with the denial of the truth.

Is it true that your husband drinks? No, no, no, that's not true and people see him with 10 cases of beer on his head. Is it true that you have problems with your partner? He says, no, no, no, my husband is the archangel Gabriel, poor him.

What do you say? The adulterous woman at his feet. They only had the truth. How did Jesus handle the case? He treated him truthfully and with grace. Hallelujah!

And he told him "the one of you who is without sin should be the first to cast the stone" because it turns out that the sins of which we accuse people, generally we have been victims of them or of some Similar. And that is why the Scriptures say that when the Lord told them 'the one of you who is without sin should be the first to cast the stone', it says that they went from the oldest first and then the youngest. And why do the oldest go first? Because the older we are, the more sins we have to remember.

So if you are an old person and only tell the truth, and only accuse and only point, remember this moral, this teaching: the old go first because they have more sins than the young.

And then he says to the woman, 'Woman, where are those who accuse you? They all left, and she tells him 'they left'. Now kill me then. But give it to me in a Christian way, a single blow to the head, don't make me suffer too much, because you are a rabbi too, you are one who knows the law and you know that they were right: the law says... and Jesus he told her, 'woman, I don't condemn you either.' I don't condemn you, that's grace. but he also told him the truth, 'go and sin no more'.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is a character in novels, that he will only gloss over his sin and never point it out, and never confront him, you are completely wrong. But if you believe that Jesus Christ is the ogre of religion, if you believe that Jesus Christ is the counterpart of the coin, a bitter being, a being that only comes to condemn, a being that only goes around looking for defects, you are also mistaken in that perspective. because he is full of grace and truth, he is full of grace and truth and if we imitate the Lord when we have to deal with a family situation, an ecclesiastical situation, a personal situation, a couple situation, we have to put those two elements if we want to heal people: Truth and grace.

How many here need grace. How many need truth. Oh, it's just that I don't like to talk to my mom because she's chicichcicici all the time, it annoys me. The boys at this time almost do not like to talk to their parents, because as they leave the father or mother is telling them, 'look, there is this, that there is that, that in the places, take care of here, no Park the car that way.' Oh, mom, oh, do you think that I was born yesterday, that I am a newborn girl? Because you don't want them to tell you the truth, but if you want to tell your children the truth and for them to hear it, give grace to the truth.

She wants to tell her husband that she has gotten fat and ugly. Don't tell him, you are competing with a Chinese toad, you are competing with an elephant. There are ways to tell the truth to people, gracefully. I'm telling you, ready, as the Colombian says, ready.

How do you tell someone they are ugly without offending them? Because the one who only tells the truth says, 'I don't care what you think because I am like that, right through, I tell things as they are.' If you are like that, you will not have friends. If you are only right through you will not have people, you will have people who are afraid of their language. It says, 'here comes the flying arrow. hide. Here it comes. Be careful what you are going to say because there are people who take pride in the way they communicate the truth.

For example, when we were newlyweds, sometimes my wife would cook and overdo the salt. Salt was very cheap and fell in abundance. It was, it is not one of the cheapest products on the market. How did I tell her "this is salty and not even the devil will eat it"? How did he put grace to the truth? I discovered a way to do it, so what I said, she always asks me 'and how is the food?', 'very good, could you please get me another glass of juice or water? It is a way of telling her, you missed the salt hand, without offending her.

The suit, women sometimes have to work with their husbands because they go into the closet and put on their dress and come out, 'oh my love, how do I look, what do you think about going out?' And they do so and men are so stupid sometimes, we are so clumsy to tell them the truth, and we say 'oh look, that suit, it looks better on a giraffe than on you.'

I don't I know if your wife, but mine, she changes one, two or three suits before going out. And I know... that is a feminine good, not an evil but a good of the feminine nature, because they like to look pretty, elegant, and the first thing they want to ask is you, but if you are not funny, ago .......

They prepare something very nice for her, for example, once I bought my wife a necklace while we were engaged. When I tell this she bows her head humbly. What did I know about a necklace or precious stones if what I needed was the guayuco to be Tarzan? I came from the jungle, from the mountains. They put a diamond and any stone on me and I did not know how to distinguish them. And I wanted to give her a gift and I bought her a necklace of stones, not precious stones, because they were colored, river rock stones that were in fashion, and I bought her those stones, but the stones that if I had been more intelligent, I wouldn't give it to her. I buy thinking about my physical integrity later, not to use it as a weapon against me. And I take it to her and say, 'my love', my first gift to a woman. Tarzan in New York. I was missing the monkey and the vine and I told her, 'my love, here is this necklace.' She saw it, 'do you think I'm going to wear that?' He told me the truth, but without grace.

Afterwards I didn't want to give him anything. And if you don't like it. And maybe some couples have problems in that sense because the wife doesn't know how to please her husband because when he doesn't want something he tells him, down the middle street. I don't like how you kiss. How do you tell him? You put your trunk like a rhinoceros to kiss. It is not like that. There are ways one can seek to speak the truth gracefully.

And let's finish this. If you do not do like Jesus and put love to the truth, and to love put truth, we will have a society, a family, a church, an unbalanced couple. Husbands, if your wife is afraid to tell you the truth, it is because you lack grace. Or the woman lacks a little grace to tell the truth.

I have been approached by people at some point who have told me, what a message.... recently as a pastor a member of the church approached me and said, 'your message does not reach me '. 'His message does not go beyond the pulpit.' The truth wanted to come out and it made me say, 'Look, the problem is not the message, it's that little bit of brain that you have. The problem is not with me, the problem is with you.' It provoked me to tell him the truth.

I remembered Chavo and told him 'bear with me, brother. I am learning to preach. Every day we are learning. In some way ask the Lord that the word may reach you and that you be blessed with the message. That my answer. I put grace to the truth.

Bow your heads for a moment. He was full of grace and truth. We have to recognize, Lord, that there are people who are hurt because we lacked grace. There are women and men who were caught in their faults and we lacked the grace to treat them.

Help us not to negotiate grace or truth, to be firm in character, moral, ethical, spiritual, family approaches, but to be graceful with the people around us; to grace our relationship as a couple; to add grace to our relationship with children; to give grace to our relationship with the brothers in the church; to put that love, that tint that gives the truth a power that it does not have without grace. Because truth without grace can become a spiritual purgative. And grace without truth can become a little theological soup that in the end says nothing. A minestron of thoughts that do not specify anything.

Help us to imitate the only begotten of the father, who had all the power to disappear what he wanted and change what he wanted, however, having the truth in his hands, he gave grace to the truth. May our pulpits be full of grace and truth. May our children come to us in confidence, that we will not only tell them the bitter truth, we will tell them the truth with grace. May our wives and husbands not be afraid to say and share because there is grace on the other side.

Thank you Lord. If I want something from Jesus, it is not power, power is given to any lout, to any person and they use it without knowing what they have. But grace, love is not exercised without conscience.

Bless our children. Blessed are our parents. Blessed are our shepherds. Blessed are our brothers. Bless our friends. Help us to get to the office tomorrow, to work tomorrow, not only with the truth of criticizing the one who smokes and saying that hell and that the coming of Christ, but that we go with grace because what is going to impact people the most when After all, it is the grace that we put on the truth. Thank my Lord. Hallelujah!

We give a round of applause to the Lord. Full of grace and truth.