Consider Your Ways Sermon Series Description Consider Your Ways is a series about what happens when God's people get comfortable putting themselves first. In 520 BC, the returned exiles had every reason to rebuild the temple — and every excuse not to. Sixteen years passed. Life got busy. Private concerns crowded out covenant obligations. The prophet Haggai steps into that drift with one of Scripture's most searching commands: consider your ways. Not your circumstances. Not your neighbors. Your ways. These two weeks walk through one of the Bible's shortest books to find one of its most urgent invitations — repent of self-centered priorities, reorder your life around God's presence and honor, and trust that the God who calls you to build will not abandon the work he has started. Because God calls his people to prioritize his presence and glory, we must repent of self-centered delay and trust that he will fill his house with a glory greater than we can imagine. Greater Than You Know Haggai 2 Watch From This Day Haggai 2 Watch Wrong House Haggai 1 Watch

We are not hiring currently About Peace Church Peace Church, located just south of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a vibrant community of believers dedicated to spreading the gospel and serving the needs of our congregation and the wider community. Founded in 1965 as an RCA church, Peace Church has since transitioned to a non-denominational congregation. Our theological roots are deeply Reformed, and we pride ourselves on being conservative and gospel-centered in our teachings and practices. Our commitment to the teachings of Jesus Christ drives us to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and spiritual growth is nurtured. We are proud to share that our dedication to spreading God's word and our community outreach efforts have not gone unnoticed. Recently, Outreach Magazine recognized Peace Church as the 29th fastest-growing church in America. This accolade is a testament to the hard work of our congregation and the grace of God. Our church is not just a place of worship; it's a community. From our passionate worship services to our engaging community events, every aspect of Peace Church is designed to bring people closer to God and each other. Function N/A Accountability Qualifications N/A Responsibilities N/A Professional Expectations Apply Now First name Last name Email Phone Position Cover Letter Upload File PDF Only Resume* Upload File PDF Only I am in agreement with the beliefs of Peace Church . * Submit

Built to Endure Prosper Christian Reformed Church Built to Endure 2 Timothy Mitchell Leach Sunday, September 27, 2026 Audio Built to Endure Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript 2 Timothy 2:1-13 Why do we think hardship means that we are wrong? It's easy to carry an underlying belief about the world that when we come up against something hard, it means something is fundamentally flawed. Think about a marriage: if something's hard, there's a temptation to believe not just that we need to work on something, but that maybe we've chosen the wrong person. Or think about a job: if God has called you to where you are and opened that door, wouldn't it make sense that everything would be easy, that there wouldn't be hard seasons in it? But we know that's not how the world operates, and yet we still carry a belief that everything in our lives should be good. I think we project that onto our future — a future version of our marriage with no conflict, a future version of our job that's totally fulfilling and never monotonous. Something in us says: if I don't have that, something must be fundamentally wrong. It's a question we don't often ask out loud, but why do we think hardship means that we're wrong? Big Question Why do we think hardship means that we are wrong? The good news is that God's word gives us a great encouragement here. Keep your Bibles open to 2 Timothy chapter 2, because we're going to see three sections within this passage: a call to endure the work, a call to remember the risen Christ, and a call to trust his faithfulness. We need to understand the context of where we're at in this letter. Timothy is discouraged. His mentor — the greatest missionary the church had known — is in prison and about to be beheaded for his faith. Some of Paul's closest companions have abandoned him in Rome, and false teachers have ravaged the church and are discouraging the people within it. In chapter 1, Paul gave Timothy one major command: guard the good deposit — keep what he has been given, and keep it true. Outline A Call to Endure the Work (2 Timothy 2:1-7) A Call to Remember the Risen Christ (2 Timothy 2:8-10) A Call to Trust His Faithfulness (2 Timothy 2:11-13) A Call to Endure the Work (2 Timothy 2:1-7) Verse 1 says, "You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus." Paul starts with Christ. He doesn't start with Timothy. Timothy is discouraged, but Paul doesn't tell him he needs a sabbatical or some more positive people around him. He starts with Christ, reminding Timothy that our strength does not reside in us. It isn't manufactured within us — it comes from the outside in. It is Christ's own strength that we have. Paul then tells Timothy to entrust what he has heard, in the presence of many witnesses, to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. The word "entrust" is the same Greek word we get "deposit" from. Paul gave the deposit to Timothy; Timothy is to receive it and then deposit it into faithful men who can pass it on. Timothy is not the destination — he's a link in the chain. This has been God's pattern since the beginning: Deuteronomy 6 commands Israel to teach these words diligently to their children, to talk of them when they sit in their house and when they walk by the way. The gospel is not something we simply put on a shelf and study. It's something that resides in us, consumes us, and changes us from the inside out, meant to be passed on to the next generation. It's easy to guard the gospel without sharing it, holding onto it so it never escapes. And it's easy to share a gospel that isn't guarded against false teaching — whether that's the health-wealth-prosperity gospel or some other error. Doing one or the other is easy. Guarding and sharing together, at the same time, is hard. That's why Paul gives three images in this passage: a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. A soldier has a job — when he's on the field of battle he cannot run away because he's afraid, and he cannot get entangled in civilian pursuits that don't matter to the war. An athlete competing in the games cannot cheat and still expect the crown; he has to run the whole race, all the way around the post. A farmer cannot force the harvest to come early — he has to wait, even when he's worked hard and wants to see the fruit of it now. None of these three — the soldier, the athlete, the farmer — think that hardship means something has gone wrong. A soldier in battle doesn't think, "this isn't how it's supposed to be." An athlete who is tired and whose lungs hurt doesn't say, "this is wrong, I'm done." That's where God challenges us: not to see hardship merely as a sign that everything is broken, but to expect it — to see that our suffering may be more than our own pain, that we're called to contend for something larger than ourselves. A Call to Remember the Risen Christ (2 Timothy 2:8-10) This section starts with "remember," but it's really "keep remembering — do not stop remembering." It's not that Timothy forgot the gospel or didn't know what he believed. It's that suffering has a way of shrinking our field of vision until pain becomes the biggest thing we can see. This is why we never graduate from the gospel. It's not just for evangelism — we need to hear it every single day of our lives. Paul points Timothy to "Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel." He's careful to call it "my gospel" not because he invented it, but because it's the gospel he received and is passing on — the true gospel Paul is telling Timothy to remember and be strengthened by. Bad theology isn't harmless. Think of the Catholic teaching that a person must be baptized to be saved, and parents who've lost an infant too soon to be baptized, grieving not only the loss of their child but hearing from their own church that the child is in hell. Or think of the person whose faith is strong and yet the diagnosis only gets worse — what happens to their faith when the promise of the health-wealth-prosperity gospel doesn't come true? Good theology propels us to worship. Bad theology brings us grief, and that's what Timothy is dealing with in a church where false theology has run rampant. The answer for Timothy isn't to find more uplifting people to be around or a better attitude. It's to keep remembering the true gospel — which will always meet resistance. In the Beatitudes, Jesus says, "Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account." An easy path doesn't mean we're right. Often when we hold bad theology, we're simply not a threat to Satan, so he doesn't need to bother attacking it. Paul writes, "This gospel for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound." That has been the confidence of every church under persecution, every missionary who has gone into a hostile country knowing they might lose their life for the gospel — the word of God has legs that no king, no emperor, no government can control. As Jesus said, "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Paul endures everything for the sake of the elect, that they also might obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory — not for himself or his own glory, but for the church, for other believers. Suffering doesn't need a reward waiting at the end to be worth it. Paul didn't quit when he met this kind of resistance because there were people who would not hear the gospel if he threw in the towel. A Call to Trust His Faithfulness (2 Timothy 2:11-13) These verses likely functioned as an early confession or hymn in the early church — the way we instantly recognize "Amazing Grace" from its first few notes without needing to hear the words. "If we have died with him, we will also live with him" is past tense, describing our union with his death through faith. "If we endure, we will also reign with him" echoes the farmer laboring for a harvest and the soldier enduring for a crown — it's the melody of this whole letter: guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame. "If we deny him, he also will deny us" mirrors what Jesus said in the Gospels — we cannot abandon the race partway through. Then verse 13 seems to break the pattern: "if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself." That's not a contradiction. When our faith wavers, when we are discouraged, when the world has shaken us, that does not stop God from being faithful — because his faithfulness is grounded in his own character, not ours. Hebrews explains that when God made a promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself, so that by two unchangeable things it would be impossible for God to lie. Christ will never become less Christ because we are weak. He cannot deny himself. This passage begins and ends with the same two realities: grace in Christ Jesus in verse 1, and Christ's faithfulness in verse 13. Timothy is commanded to do something, and that command sits between grace before the work and Christ's faithfulness after our weakness. Christian endurance is enclosed by Christ on both ends. We like to believe we have everything we need within us — the graduation-speech theology that says go out there and conquer the world. But telling a struggling parent or someone in immense grief to just try harder isn't only unloving, it doesn't work. It's true that God won't give us more temptation than we can handle, but that promise is about temptation, not suffering — Paul himself describes being given suffering in 2 Corinthians far beyond what he could handle on his own. We are not the hero of this story. At best, we are a supporting character. This whole story, all of history, is about one person, and that is God. I want to tell you about a woman named Perpetua. She was twenty-two years old, had an infant child, and was imprisoned in the fourth century because of her faith in Christ. We have entries from her diary written in prison, where her father came multiple times pressuring her to renounce her faith. Her pages are marked with grief over what would happen to her baby, because she knew she would be thrown into the arena. And yet in prison she didn't only focus on herself — her main concern was making sure other Christians would endure to the end, that they would remain faithful until they saw Jesus face to face. She could suffer for other believers because she knew her suffering didn't belong only to her — she was part of something bigger, and she was only able to suffer that way because she had the Spirit of the one who suffered not for himself but for us. Most of us will not be asked to enter the arena, but we will be asked, again and again, whether another Christian is worth the cost to us: parents enduring the inconvenience of teaching their children the faith, older Christians investing in younger believers instead of saying their time is up, church members caring for someone through grief that lasts longer than the sympathy around them, spouses staying present in a hard season rather than treating it as proof they chose wrong. Who is downstream of your endurance? Perpetua could suffer for others because someone had already suffered for her. Paul could endure for the elect because someone had already endured for Paul. And Timothy could endure because his strength did not come from Timothy — and neither does yours. Before you ever carried anyone else's burden, Christ carried yours. Before you ever suffered for someone else's good, Christ suffered for your salvation. Before you ever remained faithful through hardship, he remained faithful for you. So when hardship comes, don't assume that something has gone wrong. Endure by the grace of the risen Christ. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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Sin Prosper Christian Reformed Church Sin Gospel In Three Words Mitchell Leach Sunday, January 11, 2026 Audio Sin Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 39:27 Sermon Transcript Introduction As we look at this passage this morning, the idea of our guilt comes up throughout this. But we, as people, We are awful at dealing with our own guilt. We like to manage it. We like to try, at least, to manage it, because dealing with it would require honesty. And honestly, we would rather do anything else but reflect on what we've done. We are, as a people, really good at justifying the small things in our life, the smallipsies that come up from day to day, the things, the sin that bubbles to the surface. If we snap at our spouse, we're really good at justifying it. Well, it was a really hard day at work and the kids were crazy and I heard the wrong tone. Or maybe because you've gossip to you, you'd say, well, I'd say that to anyone. I'd say that in front of their face, knowing full well that what you're telling somebody, you're talking about somebody else, that you would never say that to the other person. Maybe you've lied to a friend because telling them the truth, being honest with them would hurt them. But it's easier to lie. You think, well, I'm actually being nice. If excuses were something that burned calories, I think all of us would be in the best shape possible. We'd never have any need for a gym. But the things in our lives, there are things in our lives that we know for a fact are wrong. There are things that we've done that we can't shake. We can't shake the feeling of guilt from those things. I want you to think about just for a minute. In your mind, the worst thing that you've ever done. I know how can you go from telling jokes to this serious, but it's a feeling of dread. It's a feeling of anxiety when you think about this. All of us can bring that thing to our mind. It's the thing we We hope that no one in here is a mind reader because they'd be crushed if they knew what we've done. All of us can think about this thing. We have at least one sin we hope never becomes public. It's one thing that owns us, causes us anxiety. There are some things we cannot justify, we cannot make right. So what do we do with them? That leads us to our big question this morning. Big Question: What can you do with your guilt? What can you do with your guilt? I think we try to do a couple of different things with them. One way that we try to deal with our guilt as a people is we try to justify it. We try to make up excuses for it. But oftentimes this doesn't work. We might go to a therapist who says, Well, you just need to have better self-talk. You need to accept yourself. But essentially, that's another way to deny or even to justify the guilt that you have. Another way that we try to deal with our guilt is to distract from it by using social media or our phones or games or watching the news or TV, maybe throwing ourselves headfirst into our jobs, always being busy, always doing something, trying to distract from this feeling of guilt. Another way that we distract from it would be to medicate ourselves, whether through prescriptions or non-prescription substances. We try to alter our state of reality to avoid our guilt. The last way that I think I see people do this is to try to make it right themselves, to try to atone for their own sins in some way, where you see someone who once had done something horrendous, now trying to live a perfect life, trying to live a life that makes up for the wrong that they've done. It's like a murderer who becomes a doctor to try to save lives. Might feel good. It might seem like the right thing to do. But yet, no matter how many lives you save as a doctor, that person doesn't resurrect. Not trying to lay guilt on us because there is a way for forgiveness. But I want us to see, to feel this tension that when we try to manage our guilt, when we try to manage our sin, there's nothing we can do alone alone. At the end of these things, our guilt still remains. There's not enough distractions, not enough excuses, not enough good works, not enough substances to make our guilt away. So the question remains, what can you do with your guilt? But fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So keep your Bibles open to Psalm 51. As we see this Psalm will answer this question, what do you do when you can't undo the things in your past, when you can't undo what you've done? David shows us that guilt can't be managed, but it must be brought to God for mercy, for cleansing, and for renewal. That's what we'll see in these three sections, Outline: A cry for mercy A confessing depth of sin Plead for renewal. David confesses his sin to God and pleads for mercy. That's what we see in this psalm. A cry for mercy So let's look at that first section, a cry for mercy, verses one through two. Before we get into the actual verses of this, we see that header that I read at the beginning of this. That is in the manuscript. This is part of God's word, and this gives us a context into what David is calling out and crying out to God. And David had been caught in sin, not just any sin, but he had been caught in a scandal so scandalous that it would make every evening news, it would make news forever. He murdered his friend in order to sleep with that man's wife. And all this comes to light in a shocking way. David writes this Psalm, though, as a way to show how truly broken he is over his sin and not just the consequences of it. And that's what we see in verse one. Psalm 51:1 says this, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. David It is crying out for mercy. Mercy is a word that we talk about a lot in church, and yet often we don't understand what it truly means. Mercy is more than just forgetting sin. Seeing mercy that way, or simply wanting to see mercy as a way to get sin to go away changes our hearts. It produces a spirit that is careless about sinning. Cheap grace minimizes sin, but true mercy exposes it and then carries it away. Seeing mercy as a way just to cover up, to make things better for right now as a bandaid, as a spiritual bandaid, makes it cheap. What happens is we will go on sinning, not really caring. We might even be tempted to sin and go, well, it's going to be okay because God's going to forgive me anyway. I know that this is going to happen. Mercy is a gift that God doesn't have to give us. Mercy is more than cheap grace. Mercy, theologically, we would say it like this, Mercy is God's compassionate and active love that withholds deserved judgment and offers forgiveness, healing and restoration to the undeserved, offering it to us. Martin Luther says it like this, "The mercy of God does not require merit or require good works from us, but it creates merits. It creates merit. Mercy finds us in our sin and calls us righteous in Christ." Which means that mercy never ignores sin. It transfers it. Mercy does not require us to be good people to get something from God. Jesus was good for us and traded places with us. Historically, the word mercy was used a lot more outside of a church building, outside of I don't know, religious vocabulary. Mercy was used in front of Kings. If you were charged with something or accused of something and you had no hope or you had an unjust or unfair trial Well, you'd throw yourself before the king asking for mercy. It was the last step. It was the last thing you could do before your life was taken. And David is crying out for that mercy in this confession. Notice what David appeals to, though, in this section. He doesn't appeal to his own marriage. He doesn't appeal to his own good works. He doesn't appeal to some promise in the future. God, if you do this and you forgive me, then I promise this will never happen again. He doesn't say that. He appeals to God's steadfast love, his covenant faithfulness, or the Hebrew word is hased, and it carries so much depth. It's littered all throughout the Psalms, this word has said. It means a commitment to his promise, God's commitment to his promise, regardless of how much it will hurt him when his people are unfaithful to him. The appeal is to God's own nature, not ourselves. St Augustine says this in commenting on this passage. "He does not say, David does not say, Have mercy on me because I deserve it, but because thou art merciful." This is part of who God is. David does not go to God promising some improvement. David knows that he has no leverage. He has no room to negotiate some better deal here. He throws himself in front of the mercy seat. He throws himself on God's mercy. The problem that is revealed in this Psalm for us is that sin does not require inspire us to find a new environment. Our problem with God isn't environmental. It's not that if we just worked harder on ourselves, if we had a little bit more commitment, we can't simply try harder. What this Psalm shows us is that it requires God to make things right. When our guilt is ever before us, we don't need a better plan. We need mercy. But that raises the question, how deep is our problem if mercy is the only solution? A confessing depth of sin And that leads us into our next section, Confessing Depth of Sin. David says something here that's almost upsetting when you read it In Psalm 51:4, he says, Against you, you alone have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. But we know the context of this. David killed a man. And then he gets to say in Psalm 51:4, Well, my sin's really only against you, God. That's not what David's saying here. He's not discrediting what had happened. He's not saying that he hadn't sinned against people. What he was saying is this is the heart of the matter. He's saying that at the heart of it, it's a lack of trust of God. Anytime we hurt people in our lives, it's foundationally because we do not trust God. If we trusted God fully and desired him fully, the people in our lives would never be hurt. John Owen writes this, Every sin has in it a contempt of God. Sin is first theological, then ethical. Sin is first a distortion of who God is, and then that plays itself out in the rest of our lives. Oftentimes, when I talk with people in their sin issues, it's not essentially the people in their lives. It's not primarily against the people in their lives that this is an issue. Men who struggle with lust, it's not because their wives are unattractive to them. It's because they don't trust God to be able to provide the deepest desires of their heart. People don't shoplift because they need a piece of gum. They shoplift because they don't trust God to provide for them. We're not anxious people because our worry somehow protects us from the fear in our life or whatever we're fearing. We're anxious because we don't believe that God is sovereign. When we sin, in that moment, we believe that God is insufficient, insufficient to satisfy, protect, provide, or rule. It's the same lie that comes to us that came to Adam and Eve in the garden, that God doesn't really love you. He really doesn't want what's best for you. So The answer that we hear from culture from everywhere is, who better to decide what's right and wrong for you than you? Who knows you better than you? That's the first step into sin. That's not what this passage says. It says, Against you, you only have I sinned. David is not minimizing the damage. He's locating the source. Sin affects our whole person. That's what we see in Psalm 51:5. He says, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. David's not saying here that his mother had done something wrong. What he was saying is, I have been sinful since I became a human being. In other words, none of us have to be taught how to sin, and everyone who's ever had a kid knows that. You don't have to teach a kid how to sin. They figure it out all by themselves. He's saying, I was sinful in my mother's womb. I was sinful from the time of conception. And any pregnant woman who's ever had bruised ribs understands that they're sinful right from the beginning, right? There isn't a moment that we exist, that sin does not affect us. The Puritan Thomas Watson has this to say, Sin is not only a wound, but a disease. I think oftentimes we talk about sin in church. We talk about it like it's the little whoopsies that we have every day in our life, the things that we commit every day. They absolutely are. Sin is absolutely that, but it also is something much more. It's not a wound. If it were just that, if it were just the simple actions that we do every single day, it would be a wound. It would be something that we could work on. It could be something that we ourselves could fix. But our problem is much bigger than that. Our problem is our sin nature, big capital S sin. Our problem is that we love sin in our hearts. Our problem is our hearts. Sinclair Ferguson, a modern theologian says this. Let's see. No. Says this, We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. The problem isn't simply a behavior that we have that we need to modify. It is who we are fundamentally. It's a reason why good works can't save us. It's because our bad works aren't the only problem. We need a whole new nature. It's why guilt won't go away with a better schedule, with being more diligent with being more disciplined. The problem isn't just what we've done, it's who we are. So what do you do with a problem that goes right to the heart? David doesn't promise to do better. He begs God to do what only he can do. Plead for renewal He pleads for renewal, and that's what we'll see in Psalm 51:7-12. David changes the tone of his prayer here from confession to a plea to be cleansed. And that's what we see Psalm 51:7. Psalm 51:7 says this, Purge me with hyssip, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. David is asking God to cleanse him, to cleanse him with hyssip. And that word cleanse is a really rare word in the Hebrew. And really what it means is to unsin me. It means to offer an offering on my behalf, to atone for me because I can't. David uses this word hyssup. It's not a word that we use hardly at all. Hyssup was used in the sanctuary to cleanse it, to make it clean. David essentially is saying, I want to be able to be in your presence again. I know what I've done has excluded me from that, has cast me out. But God, I desire you make me clean from the inside. And that's what we see in Psalm 51:8 when he He says, Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken, rejoice. It's a weird half of a sentence, half of a verse in this confession, in this plea. But What David is saying is a truth statement. Oftentimes, when a bone is broken, both now and in ancient time, if the bone healed improper or had time to heal before being set properly, a doctor or surgeon would have to break it again, to set it right so that way it would heal correctly. And that's what David is asking. He's saying, Set me straight, fix me, and I trust you to be the one who can do it. Make me whole again. God, I trust you to correct this, even if it means causing me more pain in the middle of it. I know I cannot fix myself, God. And then the prayer intensifies in its language. In Psalm 51:10-12, specifically in verse 10, he says, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Create, when he says create, It's one of the only times that that word pops up in the Psalms, but it's the same word used in Genesis 1 when God created the heavens and the earth. David fears separation from God, not only God, but his presence and the loss of joy that comes with it. Martin Lloyd Jones has this to say, The worst thing about sin is not that it makes us unhappy, but that it robs us of a sense of God. David uses this word to create because he wants... He's pleading with God. He's saying, God, I know I can't create It's impossible for us as humans to physically make anything new. We can't make new matter. And as impossible as it is for us to create anything new, it is impossible for us to create a new heart in ourselves. That's why David says, Create in me a clean heart. David knows that his heart isn't scraped. It's broken. Broken bones don't need bandaids. Our problem is that we oftentimes treat our sin small. We treat heart surgery like it's a paper cut. We minimize it, we hide it. We say, It's not that big a deal. I can handle this. I can manage this on my own. Main Idea: But when we make sin small, we make the cross small And that's our main idea for today. When we make sin small, we make the cross small. And when we make the cross small, we're trying to save ourselves. Our natural reaction to sin is to try to minimize it, to try to make it smaller, to try to make it manageable enough for us to be able to deal with it. The problem isn't that we want it to go away. The problem is the way we go about trying to make it go away, that we try to hide it, that we become like Adam and Eve in the garden. We run from God. We become like Aaron in Exodus 20 or Exodus 32 with a golden calf. We become like Ananias and who minimize, they hide from their sin. What Psalm 51 teaches us is that we should want our sin to go away, but our solution isn't to make sin small, it's to run to God, the only one who can deal with our sin. As Christians, when we try to hide our sin, we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to take care of it ourselves. Essentially, we're saying to God, God, it's not that big of a deal. I can handle it. Or really, God, thank you. Thank you for taking care of most of my sin. Thank you for doing most of it. I couldn't do it all myself, God, but now that you've done most of it, it's my turn to really put this in a way, really deal with it myself. I'm the one who's going to make it right. But that's not what this passage says. There are going to be some of us who want to live in this delusion where it is on us. It is on us to carry out our atonement, make it right with God. But that's not biblical. The Bible says that our sin is so big. The only way to make it right is for God himself to come and give us mercy. The only way to make our sin right is that the second member of the Trinity had to come to take on human flesh, to live a life that we couldn't and die trading places with us. In preaching this sermon, I don't want us to only feel guilty. I want us to feel a little guilty. I want us to feel that weight We can't make our sin small. We cannot be people who try to manage it, though. We're not made for that. We don't have big enough shoulders to bear the load that is our sin. And that's what makes us different than any other worldview. It's one of the things I find most comforting in our Christian faith. Is that when the world says, Try to deny it, distract yourself from your guilt, try to just push your guilt down. Christianity says, Our guilt was paid in full. Jesus himself was declared guilty on the cross in our place. Your one thing that we thought about earlier, that thing that lingers in the back of your mind, you can let go of because Jesus went to the cross for that and every other sin that you committed. And not only that, your sin nature. We don't have to feel the guilt any longer. The answer to What can you do with your guilt? Is that Jesus paid for your guilt. He has taken care of it. Your sin and your guilt was nailed to the cross with him. The Bible is emphatic that we are not the ones who can pay for our own sin. We cannot manage it. We cannot take care of it. It would be like standing on the pier at Frankfurt and trying to jump to Wisconsin. Sure, some of us can make it a little bit further, right? But whether you can make it one foot or 30 feet, we're nowhere close to the other side. We're nowhere near. It's not even worth talking about who jumped the furthest. Sure, there are times where we see more sin in other people, and it can make us feel good. But the reality is we are so far from God on our own. He's the who has to bridge that gap for us. We need a supernatural way to get ourselves across this chasm. We cannot do it. We don't need a new strategy to deal with guilt. We need to be rescued completely. This truth cannot just be good theological insight for us. It can't be just another way for us to develop our reformed worldview. It It can't just be spiritual encouragement. It can't just be pure motivation either. This has to change everything about us. This has to change who we are from the inside out. Application Call your sin what God calls it, not what makes you feel better First, call your sin what God calls it, not what makes you feel better. Most of us on our own, we're not trying to get rid of our guilt. We're just trying to cope with it, to rename it so we can live with it, to soften it so it doesn't crush us. We He didn't say things like it wasn't ideal or everyone struggles with that sin or I didn't really mean it that way or it was just a really hard season or whatever else we might say. But David doesn't say any of that. He says, My sin is ever before me. He doesn't try to manage it. He doesn't try to reframe it. He doesn't try to make it better. He doesn't try to dress it up in new clothes, hoping it'll look different. He doesn't wait for it to fade. He names it before God. And that's what confession actually is. Confession is not beating yourself up over it. That's trying to pay for it yourself. Confessing is saying to God what is actually true about us. John says it this way, if we confess our sin, not explaining our sin, not excusing our sin, not balancing them out, confessing them. Unconfessed sin lingers because it goes nowhere. It stays in the dark. It keeps working on us. It shapes our thoughts. That's why the guilt doesn't fade. It waits. So hear this clearly. Naming your sin before God is not the thing that's going to destroy you. We shouldn't be afraid of confessing our sin to God. The thing that will destroy us is holding it in, is holding on to it. And today, some of you already know what you've been hiding, what you've been avoiding. Maybe you've prayed about it, you've said to God, God, I'm really sorry, I'm never going to do it again, but you haven't really repented. But maybe you've never said that thing plainly before God. I don't want you to leave today with that being unnamed. Bring it to light before God. And if If you need help with that, we have elders here who would love to pray with you. I would love to pray with you. It doesn't have to be today. It could be sometime this week. Believe it or not, confessing your sin to a pastor or an elder is not only for Catholics. I can't be the guy who absolves you of your sin. Neither can Catholic priests, just to tell you that. But we can't walk with you through something that's crushing you. If we don't know what it is. I'm sure that I'm not going to get anybody who reaches out, but I'm also sure that there are people in here who really do need help. And I know for a fact, whether it's me or one of our elders here, we'd love to walk through this with you, not to shame you, but because we desperately want you free from your sin. All right, enough guilting you into it. Here's our next point of application. Let sin drive you toward God, not away from him. It's only the pharisees. It's only the spiritual pharisees who, when they sin, feel farther from God. Yes, sin does separate us from God. But when we are saved, when we are Christians, sin brings us closer to God. When we understand God, when we understand the cross, we throw ourselves to God because we know that he's the only solution. We become like a child with a broken toy who goes to their parents saying, I don't even know the first step to fix this. I don't even know what to do. That needs to be our heart posture. Repentance is the moment that we stop pretending like we can keep it altogether, that we know how to fix this. People who understand mercy, who know the gospel, know that it is the only thing that can save us from our sin, and therefore, we can actually grow closer to God. We can go to God saying, God, I know that I've done something terrible, but the only reason that I am not cast away from you and out of your presence is because of your goodness and your mercy. So what can we do with our guilt? We can't pay for it. We can't bury it. We We can outgrow it. We can bring it to the God who offers forgiveness, who can cleanse us from it. Here's the hope that our guilt, our guilt doesn't have the last word. God us. Jesus already dealt with our guilt. He was declared, he was condemned as guilty. So that way we don't have to bear our sin, our shame, our guilt any longer. Jesus died in my place to be my substitute on the cross, what I should have received so I can be his son. Jesus was treated like us so that way we could be treated like Jesus. When we say or think that it's not a big deal, when we say that about our sin, we're saying that about the cross, too. When we make our When we make the cross small, we make the cross small. The cross only looks unnecessary when our sin looks manageable. Let's pray Father God, we praise you for who you are, that you are good, and that you are good to us. God, I pray today that we would not leave here feeling condemned, but that we know that our sin is great, and because of it, the cross is even greater. God, give us a new passion for our salvation, for our forgiveness. Help us to stand before you and throw ourselves towards your mercy, because that's the only thing That's the only thing that can save us. Father, we love you, and we love to do your will, so help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Would you stand and sing our closing song, Grace, Greater than Our Sin. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Boast Only in the Cross Prosper Christian Reformed Church Boast Only in the Cross Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, March 15, 2026 Audio Boast Only in the Cross Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 34:04 Sermon Transcript To all who are weary and need rest, to all who fail and desire strength, to all who mourn and long for comfort, to all who sin and need a Savior, this church opens wide her doors with a welcome from Christ Jesus, a friend to sinners. Welcome to an online gathering of Prosper Christian Reformed Church. And I can say this now preemptively, man, the roads are terrible out there. Can you believe this weather? We're pre-recording this on Saturday so that way when we needed it, because if you're seeing this, we did, because we canceled church because we— the weather was just so bad. We wanted to include this last sermon in our Galatians series, Christ Alone, that really encompasses the totality of what we've been looking at in this series. And so we wanted to make sure that this was available for you because it goes along with the devotional series that we've been going through, the devotional plan that you've been going through, and we felt like this was a really good way to end this series. There will be some announcements that we'll send out in the email that comes along with this and some songs that you can sing at home that will go along with the service. But this is going to be an abbreviated message, abbreviated video service that will include the scripture reading and then the sermon. So let's jump into that scripture reading now. Scripture Reading Galatians 6:11-18 Hear the word of the Lord. See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they might not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. In the past couple decades, baseball teams thought they knew exactly what made a good baseball team, what players made a good baseball team. They were certain of this. Things like batting average, pitching stats like ERA, RBIs, the look of a player, the sound that the bat made when it hit a ball. All of these things were key indicators that led a team to either choose or pass on a player, especially when replacing a player. And then came the Moneyball era. If you've seen the movie Moneyball, you'll know what I'm talking about. This, this idea of replacing players, not as a one-for-one, but replacing them with maybe a couple different players that, that kind of Frankenstein their way into making the replacement that a team lost. This happened with the Oakland Athletics. They were a team that could not afford to compete with the New York Yankees, the team that had tons of money. This team had hardly any. And so they figured out an algorithm, figured out an equation to make players, to make a team out of misfits, out of a team that really didn't seem to— that nobody wanted, players that nobody really wanted. And it worked. They were able to compete at a very high level and it changed the game of baseball. But it exposed something: old metrics were comforting but they were misleading. Things that teams were certain of were exposed. Even though they gave them a sense of control, even though those old metrics or a sense of control for these teams, they didn't actually produce results. They didn't actually produce wins. And once they saw that, they realized that you can be sure of something, but you can still be wrong. And that's not just true for baseball; that's true for us. You can be sure of things in your life and still be wrong. Because we all live based on a metric. We all have things that we try to trust in that tell us that we are okay. And that leads us into our big question for this morning: What are you sure of? What are you sure of? Big Question What are you sure of? We all live on something that we are sure of. Everyone has a righteousness. Everyone has a metric. Everyone has a boast. The question is whether or not you can hold onto those things, those things can hold you, while you suffer, when you suffer. If your certainty is built on performance, then your best day becomes your pride, will produce your pride, and your worst day will produce despair. Our culture offers dozens of different ways to produce these counterfeit certainties. Things like image: if I look put together, then I'm safe. Maybe it's morality. If I'm better than them, then I'm clean. It can be control. If I can plan it, then I can breathe. Maybe it's approval. If they like me, then I can feel secure. Maybe it's a religious marker. If I do the right things, if I obey the right laws, then God must accept me. But the reality is all of these things have the same flaw. They cannot carry suffering, they cannot carry guilt, and they cannot carry death. They never give peace; only more rules, only more things to check off our list, only more bars to jump over. And that's why Paul says false teachers want to show a good showing in the flesh. They want something visible, something measurable, a metric, a ruler, a proof that they can point to. That says, "Now I'm sure." So the question is unavoidable: What are you certain of? What are you sure of? The good news is that Christianity is not guesswork. God speaks to us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 6:11-18. We're going to see two major movements in this last sermon on Galatians. First, we're going to see false boasting exposed and then true boasting declared. This is the last all-encompassing kind of review of this sermon series that we've been going through in Galatians where we've been seeing Christ alone. That life in God starts in Christ Jesus, not in works. What we'll see in this passage is that the only legitimate boast for the Christian is the cross of Christ through which the world is crucified, a new creation has come, and peace belongs to those who walk by this gospel rule. Outline False Boasting Exposed: Confidence in the Flesh (Galatians 6:11-13) True Boasting Declared: Confidence in the Cross (Galatians 6:14-18) False Boasting Exposed: Confidence in the Flesh (Galatians 6:11-13) The Apostle Paul starts off by showing what false confidence looks like in real time—religious performance under social pressure. And that's what we see in this first section, this first section, Galatians 6:11-13. I'm titling this False Boasting Exposed. Confidence in the flesh. Let's look at Galatians 6:11. He says this: "See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand." Paul has been probably using a scribe to write most of this book and then he ends this last portion by writing it personally with his own hands. If you were to read the original letter from Paul, you would have seen larger letters. Scholars have speculated maybe it was the thorn in his flesh. Maybe it had something to do with his eyesight or maybe it had something to do with his hand-eye coordination. We don't know. But Paul is saying that he's writing this last portion himself. Paul wants the Galatians to feel, to see with their own hand, their own eyes, his handwriting and to know that this isn't a minor dispute. This isn't some secondary or tertiary church, you know, theology issue that we can brush under the rug. This is a gospel crisis and they must respond. It has to do with adding anything to the finished work of Jesus on the cross. And here's why people add to Jesus. Not because they're wicked always. But it's oftentimes because they're scared. And that's what Galatians 6:12 says, "It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised and only in order that they might not be persecuted for the cross of Christ." The circumcision party wanted men who weren't Jewish, who weren't born Jewish by birth, to be marked by the old covenant sign. This sign, circumcision, was to hold Israel, to hold God's covenant people until the Savior came. Why would they want this? Maybe it was because they believed that God would not accept them, accept these new Christians, unless they held to everything in the Old Testament. Maybe it was a love for traditions; they loved the Jewish culture. They loved some of these things that were emblematic of the Jewish faith and they felt like they were losing them as new Gentiles came into the faith. But one reason, certainly, and what Paul says is that they were afraid of persecution, specifically Jewish persecution. These Christian Jews who came to saving faith in Christ, were probably influenced by friends and family. These relationships that had been ongoing that these friends, these people in their family, maybe neighbors, having conversations with these new Jewish Christians. I bet you they were called unclean; being associated with Gentiles, outsiders, people that they weren't supposed to eat with, Jewish people weren't supposed to eat with. And I bet that these conversations weren't some thoughtful theological conversation. It wasn't some debate between Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis. I'm certain that this was everyday conversations between everyday type of people. People, Jewish people, not Jewish Christians, but Jewish people who weren't certain. They were already kind of afraid of this new Jesus thing. But now that they hear about these Jewish Christians mixing with these Gentiles who weren't forced to follow all of the Jewish laws, I bet you these people were kicked out of their families or kicked out of these social circles that they were once in. I'll bet you Jewish people would say, "You know, I can't believe that you would do this." Maybe, maybe if you ask them to become Jewish and, you know, celebrate all of the purity laws and become fully Jewish, maybe then you, who are a Jewish Christian, could come back in and be accepted; that it would be okay. Paul isn't trying to slander anyone. But this decision on what to believe should not be based on social pressures. It should not be based on these external things, these relationships that even we have in our life. The flesh does not just want to be good. It wants to prove. It wants to be seen as good. Legalism isn't just trying hard. It is trying to get a verdict without the cross. It is trying to get external validation to see people say, "Yes, you are good." People-pleasing isn't just wearing religious clothing. It is when you make faith a badge. You turn sinners into trophies. And that's what Paul continues on in Galatians 6:13. "For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh." Boasting in the flesh here means this: it's the equivalent of what happens when Christians celebrate over conversion. When we see a sinner come to saving faith, we rejoice. But these people, these Judaizers, these Jewish Christians, would not celebrate over someone becoming a Christian. They would celebrate when someone would become a Jew. They do this not because they actually want more obedience to the law. The sad part about this is that they fear the persecution. They just want to avoid persecution. And Paul says this because we cannot have confidence in what we bring to the table. We can't— Paul's telling them that they can't say, "God, I know that you've saved me but I'm more faithful than those other guys who don't get circumcised." And maybe we don't struggle with this today; we don't struggle with circumcision today. We've kind of handled that issue. We know what we believe on this today because Paul has given us something. And yet, we struggle with other things like the idea of baptism or being rebaptized. So many people today believe, well, I need to be rebaptized again as an adult because I didn't make the decision as a kid. I've heard this over and over as a pastor. My question to them is, do you think that you had a choice? If you feel like you don't have a choice in baptism, in being baptized, do you feel like you had a choice in being saved? Did God choose you or did you choose God? No, God chose you even in your infancy. Our baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant, just like circumcision was for the Old Testament. And the beautiful part of our covenantal theology, our covenantal baptism as people who baptize infants, is that it doesn't have to be us saying we made this decision. We get to live into this reality that God chose us even while we were sinners. Our confidence cannot be in ourselves, cannot be even in our own decisions, but they must be in Christ Jesus. And Paul doesn't just criticize their boast, he shows you what his is. He puts it on the table as the only safe metric for the thing we can boast in. That's what we see in the second section, true boasting declared, confidence in the cross, Galatians 6:14. True Boasting Declared: Confidence in the Cross (Galatians 6:14-18) As people, we so desperately want credit. We want to feel like we did something, especially when it comes to our faith. We want to feel like we didn't leave Jesus alone on the cross. We want to believe that if we would have been in the crowd, we wouldn't have shouted, "Persecute him," or, "Crucify him." We wouldn't have been, if we were a disciple, we wouldn't have scattered when Jesus was crucified. If we would have been Peter, we would have never denied him. And this comes from pride. But the reality is we are sinful. We don't have hope. We would have exactly done the same things as everyone else. This pride that we have that makes us believe that we would have been different is a faulty one. It leads us to want to add to our salvation. To try to prove to Jesus that we really mean it; that we are truly his. But we owe a debt. The Bible says that we owe a debt. And if you've ever been in debt, you know what that feels like, especially if it's been significant. If you've ever found out that all of a sudden you're in some serious financial hardship, some serious hole financially. The dread that comes from that is overwhelming. It can cause you to lose sleep. It can cause you to become depressed. It can cause a litany of emotions. But there is no greater feeling than discovering that you've missed something; discovering that there is hope or finding out that there might be someone who can rescue you from this financial hard spot. And the same is true with our faith. It is never fun to admit that we are in such a spiritual or financial debt that we can't get out of it ourselves. It's humiliating, in fact. And yet, that feeling is dwarfed when we realize the freedom, the relief that comes from being rescued. Paul says this in Galatians 6:14, he says, "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." When the cross becomes your boast, the world's scoreboard dies. You stop needing old trophies. Why would Paul say this? That our only boast is in Christ? Why would he have to say this? Because boasting in the cross in the first century, in the first century world, would have been a crazy thing to do. It would have been so, so weird. The cross was a torture method. It was a way to crucify, to kill criminals. It was shameful and everyone saw it that way. Every other person who had been crucified had been guilty in some right. You look at the people who were on the cross, who would be crucified, they were criminals, thieves, murderers. They were bad guys. Yet, for Paul, this wasn't shameful. It was the only reason for his boast. We cannot boast in anything. As people who are Reformed, who believe that God is sovereign over everything, even our own salvation, we can't boast in anything other than the cross. I won't be able to get to heaven someday and look at fellow Christians and say, "Well, you know, I came to saving faith when I was 15 and you waited until you were 18. Therefore, I chose Jesus a little bit sooner than you did and therefore I get a chance to boast." No, no, no, no, no. That's how people fall. That's how people become corrupt, being overconfident and not watchful. Because God is sovereign over everything. He chose the time, the exact right time for me to follow him. He chose the exact right time for my wife who was 18 to follow him. There will be no boasting for either of us. What is my only boast? Or what is my only comfort? That I with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. My only boast is in Jesus. My only comfort is in Jesus. My only hope is in Jesus. Let this be our prayer, Prosper. Let this be your prayer. Far be it from us to have anything pull us into confidence apart from Jesus. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. And that's been our whole theme throughout this series in Galatians. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Far be it from anything to pull us into confidence other than the cross of Christ. Paul continues on in Galatians 6:14. He says, "By which the world has been crucified to me and I to it." Paul is saying, "I have a new allegiance." And that alludes back to Galatians 1:4. It says this, "He who gave himself," Jesus, "who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age." That present evil age is the same idea that Paul's talking about that the world has been put to death. There is this age, this era, that is no longer. We are now under the reign and rule of Christ. Paul continues on, "For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation." The cross is the only place that pride and shame die together. The world says, "Prove yourself." The cross says it has been proven for you. The cross does not just forgive you, it frees you from needing credit. New creation means this: you don't need old markers to feel clean. You don't need old metrics to feel sure. Scars, for Christ, are not evidence that God has abandoned you. They are evidence that you belong to Jesus in a world that doesn't. And that new creation does not just change what you believe, it changes what you are willing to bear. It changes what will mark you. The only marker that counts is being sealed by the promised Holy Spirit. In fact, Paul continues in Galatians 6:17, "From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus." Paul is saying if you want a physical mark, if you want to mark your body physically, I'll show you one. Look at my scars. I am branded with the sufferings of Jesus. All of Galatians has been leading up to this point, has been leading up to this final paragraph, this final all-encompassing paragraph. Paul has been pleading with the churches that they cannot add anything to the gospel. They cannot require circumcision. They cannot require anything that would replace Jesus. Jesus. All, any of these things are things that people can do. All of these things that people could have pride in and use to rank themselves against other Christians, against other believers. If the way that we are saved is by any work of our own, then we have some reason to boast. I could have done more. I could be enough. For God to save me. You could get into heaven and say, "Yeah, we're all here in heaven, but, you know, I was the one who never missed church in 30 years," or, "I was the one who gave more than anyone else," or, you know, "I really, you know, I accepted Christ before you. You had waited until you're in your 20s, 30s, or whenever you did." No, that is not what we get to boast in. And this is our main idea. Paul says, "Boast only in the cross." That's our main idea. Boast only in the cross. Main Idea Boast only in the cross The gospel is not just how we start as Christians. It is a daily necessity. We are all sinful people, even after accepting Christ, even after being marked by the promise of the Holy Spirit. We need the gospel daily. We never graduate from the gospel. If you get tired of hearing messages or songs about the gospel, about the saving grace that comes from the gospel, then you don't understand the gospel. We are not saved by what we've done. We're saved and held to Christ by the cross. If we are saved by what Christ did for us, on our behalf while we were sinners, then what right do we have to claim that we are better than it or better or worse than any other Christian? How can I make rules for entrance into the kingdom if someone else has paid the price for me to get in? I can't. I get in. I get into the kingdom. I get in because he said so. He's the one who took my place. The cross is the only hope for every and any sinner. Application Stop letting the fear of people edit the gospel — Galatians 6:12 So what does boasting in the cross look like for us tomorrow? It looks like refusing people pleasing and it looks like reinterpreting our suffering. So let's look at our first point of application; it's this: Stop letting the fear of people edit the gospel. Just like in Galatians 6:12, Paul's saying that these Judaizers, they don't want you to get circumcised because they want you to be more obedient. They don't follow the law themselves. They want it because they don't want Jewish people to persecute them. They want to be able to be in relationship with their friends and families and neighbors who look down at them. When you feel the pressure to fit in, with your friends, with your coworkers, with your friends or your families. Ask yourself, "Am I avoiding offense of the cross to keep my approval?" This is the most dangerous way heresy creeps into our life. It's not through false teaching, mostly. It's through those everyday conversations we have with people that we don't really want to offend them. And maybe we know that what they're saying might not be biblical but it's easy for us to go along with them. We like the people that we're talking to. We want to stay in those same kind of relationships and so we subtly change what we believe in order to fit in. This is a dangerous, dangerous thing for us. And so the challenge for you is this: When you feel yourself going against what Scripture says? Well, stand up for the word. Stand up for what Christ did. Let your boast only be in the cross, not in your relationships with others. Jesus says that he comes not to bring peace but with a sword. He will divide us against the people we love because the world will naturally want to fight against truth. And we need to be people who believe in the Word. I've been in many conversations like this where people will say, "Well, you know, Paul said this and Jesus said this and they seem like they contradict. They seem like, you know, they don't get along. So we got to go with what Jesus says. We got to be red-letter Christians." And there hasn't been a bigger or maybe more subtle undermining belief system in the church. We are not red-letter Christians. Every word in God's Word, in Scripture, is spoken, is breathed out by God. The words of Paul are just as authoritative as the words of Christ. We have to be people who come back to his word and believe even if it offends the people around us. Reinterpret your suffering — Galatians 6:17 The second point of application is this: reinterpret your suffering. If you carry hardship, if you're going through a hard season, don't assume this is God punishing you. Sometimes the marks of Jesus are what faithfulness costs in a world that resists the cross of Christ. There are going to be times in your life where you're going through a trial, where you're going through hardship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that God is disappointed in you or something's wrong. Sometimes when we fix our eyes on the cross and we see the narrow road, the narrow path that lies before us that's marked with suffering, we have to choose it. We have to choose to walk through hardship knowing that the joy that is set before us in the cross of Christ is more beautiful, is more satisfying, than anything else. If your treasure, if your boast is only in Jesus, then the trials and sufferings along the way will be nothing, will be light, will be an easy affliction. Oftentimes, those trials are there as a filter to weed out people who are lukewarm in their faith. So persevere. Do not run away. Paul calls these marks the marks of Christ. The things that can refine us into the Christians, into the people that God is calling us to be. Why is it that we can boast only in the cross? Why is it that we can boast even in our suffering? It's because Jesus became a curse. He wasn't a boast; he wasn't something that people bragged about when he was hanging on the tree. In Matthew and in Mark, it says that we aren't supposed to look past people; it says that we're not supposed to call out, "Raca," against people. It was this word that meant You nobody. And as Jesus was hanging on the tree, that was what he was called. He was not a boast. He was not something that people had confidence in. He was something that people said, you no one. He took our place. We were supposed to be called no ones. We were the people who God was supposed to look at and say, depart from me, I never knew you. You are no one. Yet that's what Jesus heard while he was crucified. Jesus took our place. Jesus was treated like us so we could be treated like him. Therefore, we can boast only in the cross. Closing Prayer As you're sitting there at home, let's pray together knowing that we are bound more than just by being gathered together, but we can gather together in the spirit this morning as the weather prevents us from meeting in person. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are. We praise you for this series that, that taught us that life in you comes only through the cross of Christ, not in our works. God, thank you that we are able to have faith in you and that it is separated from works; that we do not need to earn our way to have a right relationship with you but you have made it possible by sending your Son. God, I pray that if there is anyone who does not believe this, that they would come to this saving faith. God, that they would believe this gospel because it transforms every single part of who we are. God, whether we've heard this for the first time today and are accepting Christ or we've believed our entire life, let us be transformed not by my words but by the words that you've given us in this letter. God, your gospel, your good news, is so satisfying. God, let our only boast be you. Be the cross of Christ. A thing that should be a shameful thing, but God, it is the most glorious reality in all of human history, all of the world, all of eternity. God, let us bear these marks. Let us boast in you alone. God, we love you and we love to do your will. So help us do that today. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Hear this blessing, this departing blessing that comes right from the end of this book. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

God Prosper Christian Reformed Church God Gospel In Three Words Mitchell Leach Sunday, January 4, 2026 Audio God Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 42:52 Sermon Transcript Introduction Every generation has heroes. Every generation has people we look to who have made it. In our generation, one of those people surely has to be Tom braided, a seven-time Super Bowl winner and a shoe in for the Hall of Fame. He's one of the people that we look to that has completed everything that society has asked him to complete. It is the one that we look to to see that he should be satisfied in what he has accomplished. And yet, he said this in a 60-minute interview, "Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think that there's something greater out there for me? I think there has to be more than this." This is not just success talking. This is restlessness. This is not just his story. It's ours, too. Because we all have something we think will finally make us feel like we've arrived. Something we hope will prove to others that we're enough. Maybe that's our job, something in our relationship, our appearance, our parenting, and our performance. But no matter how far we climb, that feeling still lingers. It whispers behind each of our winds. It echoes through all of our failures. And so this morning, I want to ask us a question that might haunt us, a question that we don't ask out loud. And it's our big question this morning. Big Question How do you measure up? How do you measure up? That hunger to be enough, to measure up, to silence your inner critic is something that all of us feel. What would it take for you to feel like you're enough, to feel like you've made it? Is there enough money? Having enough children. If your children get into the right school or get the right sports scholarship, maybe it's not with your children, but being someone, becoming someone that people admire, getting the right promotion, marrying the right person, having the being able to retire at a certain age or to retire to a certain place. But who is the judge of these? Who is it that we're trying to please? If it was us, if we're just trying to please ourselves, then we would have been able to do that, but it isn't. Even when we hit the goal, the goal that we've set out to accomplish, we don't feel secure. We feel anxious or empty or hard. Hungry for something more. The question that we are left with is, who are you trying to measure up to? That restlessness isn't new. It's just dressed differently. This is an ancient feeling that we all have. In ancient times, in ancient world, it was a moral question. It was, what do I need to do in order to satisfy the gods? But because, of course, we're in an enlightened society, we don't talk about that anymore. We push that to the side. And yet the feeling remains. We have the consistent desire to become something. This is something in all of us. We feel this drive to become something, not to stay as we are, but to be something more. For some of us, it's to feel like we're attractive enough, for example. That might be a feeling that you have. It's something that has no end. The question of, Am I attractive enough? Well, the question would be, For who? Well, maybe to find someone to marry. But even if you find someone to marry, that feeling is still there. There is no one who can affirm you enough, no person who can give you that feeling of security, of feeling worthy. What happens is that we have invented an image of ourselves that we think we should be, and then we enslave ourselves to it. We are to become, in some sense, our own God, to measure up to that, to please it. But the problem with doing that is that we alone know how rotten we are. We alone know all of our inner thoughts that disgust us, all of the things that we're glad no one else knows about us. In trying to become our own God, we realize that we cannot atone, we cannot make right the wrongs that we've committed. There are no sacrifices, no rituals, no resumes, no amount of wins can make us feel clean. So the question is, how do you measure up? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Habakkuk Chapter 1, as we see these two movements in Habakkuk. Outline: Habakkuk's complaint God's God's response Or what do you do when God's justice feels delayed? And then what does God actually require of us? As we look to this first one, this passage teaches us that Habakkuk asks God to execute judgment against evil. But as we'll see, in asking God to act, Habakkuk finds himself exposed. Because if God is truly just and holy, who among us can stand in his presence? Series Overview We're starting a series, a three-week series, where we're looking at the core essentials of the gospel. It's something that I'd like to do every January as we start a new year, to be grounded in what the gospel is. Over these next three weeks, we will look at this week, the Holiness of God and what he requires of us. Next week, we'll be looking at the depth of our sinfulness and our inability In week three, we'll look at the cross and how Jesus saves sinners who cannot measure up. This is an attempt for us to see the gospel clearly. This week, we're going to be looking at the Holiness of God, not just as an attribute, but as a standard. Habakkuk might feel like a weird passage to go to, and yet, as we see, it pulls no punches. It shows us that God sees is evil, and especially the evil in us. Habakkuk answers the question, what does a Holy God actually require of us? And so let's look at this first section, Habakkuk's Complaint What do you do when God's justice feels delayed. Habakkuk is prophesying before the final days of Judah's fall and capture by Babylon. This is a time in Israel's history when Israel is divided into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. The northern kingdom, and this is where it gets confusing, the northern kingdom in Israel is also called Israel. The Southern kingdom was the more, and I say this with an asterisk, more faithful. And yet during this time, Judah, the Southern Kingdom, was about to fall. He looks at the moral collapse of his own people. Violence, injustice, and idolatry to plague the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And Habakkuk is begging God to do something. That's why it says that this is a complaint to God. But God responds. He says, I'm doing something here. I'm sending the Chaldeans or sending the Babylonians. Habakkuk is grieving the sins that he sees in Judah. He's asking... He sees that God is telling him that he's going to raise a foreign army, one even more wicked than That's what we see in verses 15 and 17. So if you would just look at that for me. This section is confusing. As Habakkuk is complaining to God, he switches who he's talking about. At first, he addresses God, and then in 15 and 17, he's talking about the Chaldeans, the he, or the him in 15 and 17, or the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the people who are about to conquer Judah. When he says he brings up all of them with a hook and he drags them out with his net, the he in that sentence is the Chaldeans. These people described are brutal, proud, and godless. Their economy is based on fishing, and that's why this is what the complaint is that they worship their drag net. They offer sacrifices to it. These people worship their own power, not the living God. What you really need to understand about this section is that it's part of a complaint where Habakkuk is saying, There is evil in the world that is offensive to you, God. Please do something. Habakkuk is pleading with God to act with justice. It's the same cry that we make when we look around at the world and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't measure up to what's right. Or when we look at our own lives and we know that justice is deserved. In doing this, this complaint, in doing this outcry to God, he does something remarkable. He affirms some amazing truths about God. Even if Habakkuk is confused, Habakkuk does not accuse God. He anchors himself in what he knows to be true about God's character. And that's where we turn now. Look at verse 12 with me. We're going to look at that first half of the verse. Are you not from Everlasting? O Lord my My God, my Holy One, we shall not die. This is a model of faith under trial, under fire, under tribulation. Habakkuk does not interpret God through his own set of circumstances. He's not taking his own worldview, his own lens, and imposing that on who God is. He sets out with this complaint and says, I know who you are, and I don't want to get this wrong. Habakkuk does not begin with defiance. He begins with worship. It's not a denial of suffering, but it's confessing that God is a covenant God, that he is faithful to do what he says he will do. Habakkuk is complaining, yes. But look at how he approaches God, framing his complaint in the nature of who God is, guarding himself from seeing God incorrectly. Rather than shrinking God down, to make him easier to deal with. Habakkuk does something amazing. He lets the full weight of God shape who and how he talks to God. The second part of Habakkuk1:12, he says, "O Lord, you have ordained them as judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof." This isn't just a poetic statement that Habakkuk makes. When he says, O Rock, he's declaring, You are still my foundation. You are still the thing I'm standing on. I'm confused. The world may seem like it's falling apart, but you are the thing that I will hold firm to. The other part of this verse is the name that Habakkuk uses to declare who God is. He says, O Lord, it's all capital letters in your Bible if you look at it. In verse 12, it's important this name. This is the covenant name of God. This is the I am. This comes from Exodus 3:14, where God is meeting with Moses in the burning bush, "Moses asks God, What shall we call you? And God says this. God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, said, Say this to the people of Israel." I am has sent me to you. This is God revealing himself to, to Moses, to humanity. This is the first time that we get God's name, and he tells us who he is. This is the name that God gives us to call him, the name Yahweh. It's the Hebrew word to be. Yahweh is not just a name. It is a revelation. It tells us about who God is, that he is self-existent, not dependent, and not derived, that God just is. That's why he says his name is I am. Not I will be, not I have been, but I always am. This is a mystery at first. It's hard to comprehend because we're dealing with the infinite part of who God is, that God never came into existence, that he will never cease to be. At first, this answer that we see in Exodus of what is your name? Kind of seems like a dodge. It doesn't seem like a genuine answer. It doesn't seem like a real name. And yet this is the name that God uses 6,000 times throughout scripture. It's revealing something about God to us. He's showing us who he is. And it's okay that he's a mystery, that this idea of God never having a start date, never having a beginning, always being there and being eternal. It's okay. Because if God were small enough for us to understand him, he wouldn't be big enough for us to worship. God is eternal. God is unchangeable. He always has been this way. He always has been, and he always will be. He was eternal before the creation of the world, and that he is not in space. He's not just out there. He's distinct from his creation. The thing I love about the name of God is it tells us that this is who God is and that this is who God will always be. It's also the covenant name or the name of his covenant faithfulness. When he tells us his name here in Exodus, he's telling us that he's near to us, that he cares for us enough, cares enough for us to keep his promise to us. The way in which scripture reveals God's name reveals who God is to us. Reveals that he is holy. The word holy is a word that we use a lot in church, but it's a hard word for us to understand. The idea of something being sacred or holy or set apart is a foreign idea in our culture. We don't have these spaces set up in our world anymore. The idea of God's Holiness can feel distant. So I want to take just a minute to define it for us. God's Holiness is all of who God is and all of what he does. God's Holiness is all of who God is and what he does. I want to say just for a second, this sermon is on The character of God, the nature of God. This is the hardest thing to do in 30 minutes, and in fact, it's impossible. We will not cover the breadth and width of God. We could be here for 30 years, let alone 30 minutes, and we won't cover it. God is infinite. That's part of who he is. And so if you're feeling part of this going, Man, I feel like he's missing part of who God is. Yes, I absolutely am. We're focusing on God's standard, the standard that is within himself, his Holiness, the standard that we can't get to. In defining God's Holiness, it's important to be precise. And this is a general definition. And if you're sitting here going, I think that we could be a little bit more precise. I want to give you this theological from the book definition, so that way you don't email me later. Okay, sounds good. Here we go. It's a little confusing, so bear with me. Holiness is his transcendent fullness, his worth, and the beautiful harmony of all his acts with that worth. Do you guys understand that? You guys track it with me? It's okay. Holiness is all who God is and what he does. Holiness is all who God is and what he does. It's all of God's attributes, all of his actions brought together, not in conflict with each other, but in perfect harmony. It's the idea That God, God's mercy, his kindness, his wisdom, his justice, his Almighty power, and his truth are all formed in his Holiness. They're all part of his Holiness. They're not distinct. It's the doctrine of the simplicity of God. It's not that God is somehow simple or a simpleton. But what it means is that we can't divide God. He's not a pie that we can cut into pieces. We can't take a piece of a piece of his justice, a piece of his kindness. God doesn't operate in sections either. He operates in all of these things together at once all the time. They're part of who he is, and they're not in conflict. God's wrath and his mercy are part of his Holiness, and they don't contradict each other. God's justice and his grace work together, not against each other. God is perfect. And all of these things are part of that perfection. That perfection means that God is good, God is righteous, and he's the one who defines what is good and bad. And that means that we don't evaluate God by our own standards. God does not conform to what we believe is just, what we believe is right. We must be the ones to conform to his justice, to his holiest, to His righteousness. And that's what we see in Habakkuk1:13. That's what Habakkuk talks about in verse 13. He says, "You who are of pure eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he." This is where we begin to feel the weight of that righteousness. God is not just eternal. He's not just unchangeable. He is pure, so pure that he cannot even bear to look at sin. He's too holy to overlook it. This is not just bad news for Babylon. It's not just bad news for Habakkuk or bad news for For Judah, this is bad news for every human being on the face of the Earth throughout all time in history. God cannot look at evil. So what does this mean for the sins that we justify daily, for the things that we go unconfessed to the people that we're closest with, the things that we hope no one will see, the things that we hope no one will notice. This is the starting for us as we answer the question, How do I measure up? Not by looking at ourselves, but by looking at God, who is too pure to even look at evil. This passage really digs into the truth that it's important for us. It's too important for us to miss how perfect God is, how pure he is, that God will not allow sin to go unpunished. God cannot look at wrong. He hates evil and sin. It is so ugly and repulsive to him that he can't stomach to be around it. And this challenges a view of God that we have often. Often we look at God and we think about Jesus. I think we often think about this picture. I don't know if you've seen this picture. We see meek and timid and mild Jesus. He looks like he needs us to stick up for him. He looks like he's soft on sin. He looks like he would say, Don't worry, it's not a big deal. But that's not the picture of Jesus that we get in Revelation, the one who his best friend could not stand before. He falls down as if he's He said, God must hate sin. He will punish sin. He will not say it does not matter. God's love is directly tied. His love what is good is directly tied to his hatred of evil. If God is to love something good, to give mercy, it has to be tied to how much he abhors evil. The more that we love God's purity, the more that we will grieve our sin as we become more and more like him. Evil is the opposite of God, and that's what we see in this passage. God's Response And as we look to God's response, we'll ask this question, what does God actually require of us? God answers Habakkuk, but not in the way that we might think or might expect. He doesn't offer a detailed explanation to Habakkuk or an emotional reassurance. Instead, he gives a vision, a statement. He says, Habakkuk, write this down. This needs to be told to other people. Write it down on tablets because I want it to be permanent. That's what he says in Habakkuk2:2. He says, Write the vision, make it plain on tablets so that he may run who reads it. This isn't a private insight that he's giving to Habakkuk. This is public, something solid, permanent, invisible that he wants all of Israel to be able to see. Habakkuk2:3 says, "If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay." I think many of us don't like to wait. And Habakkuk is reminding us, especially when we're waiting for justice. God's saying his justice will come, but it will come on his time, but it won't be late. It will be perfect. Then we come to one of the most important sentences in the Bible, Habakkuk2:4, "Behold, his soul is puffed up It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith." That verse, half about pride, the other half about faith, becomes the dividing line for two types of people. Those who rely on themselves, their own goodness, their own power, their own plans. That's what the Bible calls puffed up. That's what God calls puffed up. And then there are those, because they've seen that they cannot measure up, that they've seen God's standard and they realize there's no way that I satisfy that. There's no way that I measure up to that. These people live by faith. This is the second half of that that becomes the foundation for everything that Paul writes in the New Testament about salvation. In Romans 1, Galatians 3, Hebrews 10, they all look back at this moment. The righteous, the justified will not live will not live by works, will not live by the things they see in the world that they can measure up to. They will live by faith. Martin Luther would later say that "this one verse opened the gates of paradise for him. He would say, I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy of God, justifies us through faith. Thereupon, I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise." Now, here's what this means for us. The problem isn't that we haven't measured up, that we haven't become self-actualized, that we haven't reached our potential. The problem is that we can't. We cannot measure up. Not to God's standard. Biblical faith is not some vague idea in a general idea of God. It is looking outside of ourselves to someone specific who has already measured up for you. And that is the gospel. That we are saved not by measuring up, but by admitting we can't and trusting in the one who measured up in our place. Main Idea God's perfection sets a standard that no one can reach God's perfection sets a standard no one can reach. God's Holiness sets a standard that we can't reach. And yet we try, we try over and over again. No one can reach this alone. All of humanity is desperately trying to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. Well done. All of us want to be known. All of us want to be accepted. And yet we can be known and accepted by people around us. There is a longing to be accepted and known by God himself. That's why we try to exhaust ourselves in performing, trying to be good enough, smart enough, successful enough. And even when we get there, even when we cross the arbitrary finish lines in our life that we set for ourselves, we always think, What's next? We become like Tom braided with three Super Bowl rings going, I think more and more would be good. We become like Solomon, who on his 300th wife goes, You know what? I think 301 is going to be the ticket for me, right? I think that's a guy who didn't have honest friends around him. Dude, 301 is not going to be it for you. It's not just ambition. What we have is a spiritual hunger. And that hunger is older than you. It goes back to Eden. It's etched in our souls. It's part of what it means to be made in the image of God. That we long to be known and accepted. We long to measure up, to be okay in God's eyes. And this is why we preach the gospel. This is why as a pastor, I'm committed to preaching the gospel to you as offensive as it may be, as offensive as saying, all of you are sinners in here, each of us, all of us, me included. We are all sinful people in here. I'm committed to this. I will not be a pastor who preaches self-improvement, who preaches morality alone. I don't preach against morality, but I'm not going to preach just morality. Because if God is as holy as Habakkuk tells us, then any message that tells you just to be better, to try harder, either waters down who God is or tries to hide how broken we are. And here's the irony. It's only when we give up trying to earn it, only when we finally rest in God, that's when we can stop measuring ourselves, that we can try to stop measuring ourselves against other people because we've been declared righteous through Christ. Moralistic messages go one of two ways. A message that says, Try harder. If you just have a little bit more faith, you can do it. It leads us to pride or despair. It leads us to say, You know what? I am good enough. I have done that. I see those things, and, Yep, I am good. Or we look at ourselves truly, we see God's righteousness, and we see that we can't measure up. But the gospel, it meets us in the middle. It says, Yeah, you know what? You aren't good enough. There was one who is good enough for you. His name is Jesus. How do we then change the way we live right now? Because a faith like this isn't passive. It isn't one that just... It's not one that we leave in the seats as we leave here this morning. It's not vague. It's not an idea that we just agree with. It is truth that invades every fiber of our being, transforms who we are from the inside out. So what is a life that rests in God's righteousness looks like? Application Let God be God It leads us to our application. Our two points of applications. The first is this, let God be God. Our instinct, especially when life is painful or unjust, is to make God smaller, to make him more manageable, easier for us to wrap our minds around, our arms around. We want God, a God who affirms our expectations, who fits our logic, who doesn't make us feel uncomfortable. But the real God, the God that we see in Habakkuk in all of the Bible, refuses to be boxed in, refuses to be tamed, refuses to be made smaller. We like to make him safer. We like to make him a little bit less holy, a little bit less offensive, easier to follow, easier to ignore. But Habakkuk won't let us do that. God's word won't let us do that. It clings to the truth of who God is. Even while Habakkuk is wrestling with it, he grounds himself in who God is. We must stop trying to edit God and learn to worship him as he has revealed himself in God's word. Live by faith, not by perfection That leads us into our second point, live by faith, not by perfection. If you've been crushed by perfectionism, Discouraged by your inability to do enough. Tempted to fake it. Tempted to try to measure up so that way someone else would affirm you, desperate desperately trying to cling to some validation that the world can give you. This vision that God gives Habakkuk is for you. Whether you feel like a failure or you're exhausted from trying to look successful for people. This passage offers relief. The righteous don't live by effort. They don't live by image or legacy. They live by faith, not in themselves, but in a God who is intensely holy, perfectly just, and who, by sheer grace, justifies the ungodly. How do we let go? How do we let go of this feeling like we have to measure up? How do we stop playing the game that everyone else is playing in our world, trying to justify ourselves, trying to feel good enough? By what power can we be set free from this? It is only by the power of the cross, the power that promises that we will not be seen as ourselves as sinners, but we will be seen as Jesus, the Son of God. 2 Corinthians 5 says this, For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. On the cross, Jesus took all our sin and shame. He was treated like us. He was told that he didn't measure up. He was condemned or damned to hell. He was told that he wasn't enough. The Father had to treat Jesus like us in order to treat us like Jesus. God's perfection sets a standard that no one can reach. And yet we can be okay with not measuring up. We can leave here today being okay with not hitting the benchmarks the world has for us because Jesus measured up for us. He became the measurement for us. We couldn't keep the law, so Christ became the law for us and died so that we could have new life set free from the law in him. Let's stand and pray as we prepare to sing our closing song. Would you stand and pray with me? Father God, we thank you for who you are. We praise you that you are holy, that you are just, that you are perfect, and that your standard is perfect. God, you are so big, so infinite, so righteous, that you are worthy of our worship. And we are, we rejoiced in that truth. We rejoiced in the reality that you are not small enough for us to wrap our heads or wrap our minds around that we cannot make you small for us. But help us to live in that tension, to live with that discomfort. God, let us boldly go before your throne, trusting you. God, let us move forward in this new year, knowing who you are and knowing who we are in you. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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Wear the Chains Prosper Christian Reformed Church Wear the Chains 2 Timothy Mitchell Leach Sunday, September 20, 2026 Audio Wear the Chains Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript 2 Timothy 1:8-18 Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me, among whom are Phygelus and Hermogenes. May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains. But when he arrived in Rome, he searched for me earnestly and found me. May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day. And you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus. This is the word of the Lord. What would make you back down? That's the big question for this morning. Oftentimes, as we think about our faith, we think about the convictions that we have, and a question like this prompts us to answer pretty quickly: well, nothing, nothing would make me back down. I remember growing up in youth group — spiritually traumatized as a kid, no, I'm just kidding — where someone would ask: if someone were to hold a gun to your head and ask you to deny Christ, would you back down? And of course, we're reading Scripture that says if you deny me, I'll deny you in front of my Father, and we'd say, of course not, we wouldn't. But backing down looks a lot different than denying the faith altogether. Most Christians don't wake up one morning believing and the next morning completely rejecting the gospel. Backing down happens a little more subtly. It happens quietly, when we become kind of vague about what we believe, when we soften what we believe. Big Question What Would Make You Back Down? For us, convictions are easy to hold when there's no pressure, when there's no external force challenging us. But all of a sudden, when we're in a room and someone questions us about our faith, and we know there are people in the room who disagree with us, people we maybe want to impress, those convictions become a little more threatened. Maybe holding a conviction, or speaking one clearly, threatens a relationship — with a loved one, a family member, or just a friend. That's when we find out what we actually believe; that's when our convictions come under threat. We tell ourselves this probably isn't the right time, and there might be wisdom in that. But sometimes what we call wisdom is really fear. Our culture tells us the lie that you can believe whatever you want as long as it never costs anyone else anything, as long as it never offends anyone, and it never puts you outside the respectable majority. If we can only hold convictions as long as other people approve of them, we're really trapped by the people around us. So what would make you back down? I think there are things in our lives that would. But fortunately, this passage gives us a great encouragement on how not to back down, and where we get that power from. So let's keep our Bibles open to 2 Timothy 1 as we look at these three sections throughout this passage: first, refuse the shame of the gospel; second, embrace the cost of the gospel; and third, guard the shape of the gospel. Outline Refuse the Shame of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:8) Embrace the Cost of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:8-12) Guard the Shape of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:13-18) Refuse the Shame of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:8) Last week we looked at an overview message of this entire letter, this letter from Paul to Timothy. Paul is in jail in Rome; he's about to be murdered, about to be beheaded for his faith. And he's writing — this is his last letter — writing to a man he loves, a young man who's a pastor in Ephesus. The theme, the melody that weaves itself through this book, is this encouragement to guard, endure, and preach the gospel without shame. That's what we're going to see in this passage: an encouragement from Paul, as he continues after reminding Timothy to fan into flame the gift of God. So let's look at this first verse: refuse the shame of the gospel. After encouraging Timothy, he tells him this in verse 8: “Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God.” This section is the application of verse 7. Verse 7 told Timothy that he does not have a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-control. This is the application of that: do not be ashamed, because you have the Spirit living within you. And yet, in a culture of shame and honor — the culture Timothy is in as he's receiving this letter, probably a culture we don't quite understand — Timothy has every reason to feel ashamed. His mentor, his spiritual father, is in jail. It's one of the most shameful things that could be associated with you. Paul names two of Timothy's potential shames: first, the testimony of our Lord, and then, of me, his prisoner. Timothy could distance himself from the message, or he could distance himself from the messenger. Either way, shame would create distance between him and Christ. In this culture, your reputation was how you were able to do things. Your right standing as a son or daughter, as a mother or father, as someone in the military, as a worker or a master — how you behaved in the role society had for you determined how you were able to function. It was almost more important than your wealth. Associating with someone in prison was one of the most shameful things, and on top of that, the gospel itself brought cultural shame. Christianity is centered on the proclamation of a crucified Messiah. Roman crucifixion existed precisely to humiliate people publicly along with brutally torturing them — there are records of people whose great-grandfathers were crucified being identified and mocked for it generations later. In Roman culture, only the worst of the worst ended up on a cross. So Paul is not asking Timothy to stand behind a respectable religion. He's telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Savior the world crucified, the world humiliated. For Timothy, this isn't about denying the gospel outright — it's the temptation to become soft, to become a little more quiet about what the gospel says. Shame does not usually appear as outright denial. More often it looks like silence, being vague about what we believe. The shame we feel about the gospel, especially in the face of people we disagree with, creates distance. You're not necessarily denying Christ; you're just making sure nobody can tell how closely you're associated with him. For pastors, and for Timothy, this kind of shame looks like choosing not to preach a specific text, choosing not to preach through a specific book of the Bible because we know its contents might offend a certain group of important people, or an important person who might leave if we said some of the things we know are true. Maybe it means not having a hard conversation — the right conversation — because it may make a relationship harder. Joining in suffering means we embrace the fullness of the gospel. Think about what happened on the cross. Jesus had the opportunity to walk away from it all. As he's sitting and praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood, he has the ability to walk away. And yet he doesn't; he chooses the cross. He chooses knowing that he's about to be humiliated, knowing that he's going to be shamed. If Christ was willing to do that to save us from our sins, what does it say about us if we're embarrassed to share in even just a little bit of that suffering? Embrace the Cost of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:8-12) Paul continues, beyond asking Timothy not to be ashamed, to embrace the cost of the gospel. Verses 8 through 12 start with this: Paul is asking Timothy to share in the suffering, and this makes no sense on the surface. Not only is Paul asking him not to be ashamed, he's asking him to share in this suffering. He's saying, Timothy, I hope you end up where I am — come on, we're going here together. This isn't optional; this is something we are going to do together. So how can Paul ask this? He can ask it because he knows that suffering does not mean God's plan has failed. Look at verse 9: “He saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” Before Timothy suffers anything for Christ, Paul reminds him of what God has already done for him. Paul can ask Timothy to do this because he knows the gospel is worth it. He says we are saved — and look at the irony of that. Paul's saying, I'm going to die, but I'm saved. You may die, you might endure terrible suffering, but you're saved. You may not be saved from a Roman prison, you may not be saved from execution, but you will be saved to eternal life. Notice this in verse 9: Paul describes God's actions as completed before they even touch a human response. What God has done is already accomplished. Timothy was saved and called to be a pastor without his permission — that's what we see in this verse. And it shows us that whatever happens to Paul, and whatever might happen to Timothy, is not a shock to God. Whatever happens in our lives is not a shock to God. When things look like every plan has been broken, when we question how this could be God's plan — this is not an accident that overtook the plan. This has already been accounted for. In fact, this is the plan. Verse 10 shows that: “And which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” This has always been the plan — since Adam and Eve, since God promised Eve that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the snake, since God promised Abraham that his offspring would bless the nations. We see it when God promised a better king to David, and we see it in the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus. And we will all see it one day when we are brought to our eternal home, when death shall be no more, neither mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away. This is the gospel Paul was not afraid of. Later he even calls all his suffering “a light and momentary affliction.” So when Paul tells Timothy to guard the gospel, he's not asking him to preserve a religious tradition because Paul simply preferred it. Timothy has been entrusted with the announcement that God's ancient purpose has been accomplished in Jesus Christ — the most important news on the face of the earth. That's the deposit. God's purpose before the ages began, accomplished in Christ throughout history. Paul was appointed as an apostle to proclaim it, and now Timothy must guard it, receive it, and pass it on. That's how the gospel works: it started with Christ, it was proclaimed through the apostles, given to the church. Our job is to receive it, guard it, proclaim it, and hand it on unchanged to the next generation. Disciples make disciples — the chain of our faith cannot end with us. Paul can suffer death itself because death has been dethroned. Christ abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. Rome can kill Paul, but Rome cannot take his eternal life. This is what happens when we have our loves in order. Paul is the worst prisoner to have — tell him to stop preaching the gospel and he says no. So they throw him in jail, and what happens? He converts half the guards. So they say, fine, we'll put you under house arrest — and he writes half the New Testament from house arrest. So they say, this can't continue, we're going to put you to death — and his answer is, “to live is Christ, to die is gain.” You can't take Paul's greatest treasure from him. When we have our priorities in order, when we see eternal life, life and immortality brought to light — there's no amount of suffering this world can throw at us to make us back down. This is why Paul can say in verse 12, “I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed.” Paul is not fearless because he thinks the suffering is painless — that's not the promise here. The promise is not that if you have enough faith, your suffering will be eased, that you will have it easy. Some of the most faithful saints have gone through some of the most tremendous suffering; there is no direct correlation. Do not hear, just because our name is Prosper, that if you have enough faith God will take your ailments from you — we're not health-wealth-prosperity gospel, I promise. Paul is fearless because he knows suffering cannot take Christ from him. Guard the Shape of the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:13-18) Paul has told Timothy not to abandon the gospel itself, but now he tells him something even more specific: do not alter it. That's what verse 13 says — “Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me.” This idea, that we are not to alter the gospel, is something our modern church in America has largely overlooked. I've been part of churches, I've seen churches, that do this. It's a modern strategy; there are church consultants who would advise churches like ours to do something like it. Essentially, it's preaching a message so widely acceptable across a wide variety of Christians that it isn't offensive to anyone — something you could hear whether you were Methodist, Lutheran, Reformed, Pentecostal, or Baptist. There are churches where you can sit and think, “that pastor must agree with me,” no matter which background you come from. Watering down the gospel to a point where nothing feels offensive also means it no longer has teeth — it lacks the power, it lacks the truth. We say, well, this part of the gospel will be offensive to some, so we won't talk about it here, in order for more people to come. The idea is: let's grow the church as large as we can, and to do that we need a message everybody can hear. Churches that do this would defend themselves by saying they're just trying to promote unity, to bring denominations back together. But the truth is, you're no longer guarding the shape of the gospel — you're no longer guarding the gospel itself. If you make the pool shallower, it feels like everyone can swim, but the truth is you just lack water. That's the opposite of what Paul is telling the church to do. Paul is telling Timothy to follow the gospel he's been given and not to change it — to guard the good deposit, as we see at the end of verse 13. A deposit, in the world Timothy lived in, meant something different than it means to us. Someone would entrust something valuable for a season — like their grain harvest — to another person while they traveled, and that person would swear before God not to change it. This was one of the most sacred oaths you could take. By taking someone's deposit and guarding it, you were guarding their future — whether or not they would survive the winter. Receiving a deposit means you don't change what you've been given; it's sacred language. Timothy understood that guarding the good deposit wasn't accepting a general set of philosophies or principles. Paul's gospel, given to Timothy, was something Timothy would either follow faithfully or not. There wasn't wiggle room. When you guard the good deposit, you don't water things down, you don't pull punches. And church, I'm asking you again, hold me accountable as your pastor — never to be swayed by preaching a wider message just to get more people to fit into our church, never to take the teeth away from the gospel, never to pull punches. For us, even individually, trying to have a faith that meets the lowest common denominator leaves us with a faith directly opposed to what Paul is calling Timothy to. We must be people who embrace the cost of the gospel without shame — that's our main idea this morning. Now, this can sound like Paul is saying, be tougher, have more courage, stop caring what people think. But that's not what Paul is doing. Look at where the power to do this comes from — verse 14: “By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” Paul does not say, be brave because you're really strong, Timothy — this isn't a Disney movie; the answer isn't that you had it inside you the whole time. He says, Timothy, be faithful because Christ is worth it, because Christ has saved you, because Christ will keep you by the power of the Holy Spirit he has given you. This changes how we hear the command. Christian courage is not pretending the cost is small — the cost of the gospel is real. You may lose approval, comfort, relationships. Paul lost his freedom; Paul lost his life. But the gospel gives you something infinitely greater than anything faithfulness can take away. So the question is not merely, am I courageous enough? The question is: do I believe that Christ is worth whatever faithfulness to him might cost me? And the answer to that shows itself in the ordinary moments of our lives — which is why we have two applications this morning. First: do not edit the gospel for your audience. Whether you have the privilege of speaking to a large audience or to someone individually, do not edit the gospel for your audience. We're not allowed to change it, because we cannot make it better. The gospel isn't like a car where you can swap out the parts you don't like for an upgrade — there isn't anything we can add to it that would make it better. We also don't get to change it because we are not the author of it, we are not the owner of it. We're like an aunt or an uncle: you get to hold your niece or nephew, you get to be part of their life in a meaningful way, but it's not yours — you don't get to hand out discipline the way a parent would. It's the same with the gospel. We get to steward it, we get to receive it. We do not get to edit it, and we don't let it go out changed. That matters because all of us are tempted to present a version of Christianity that we think the person in front of us will accept — talking about God's love but not his wrath, forgiveness but not sin, heaven but not judgment, Jesus as Savior and friend but not Lord. That doesn't mean every conversation requires explaining every facet of the gospel — wisdom matters, tone matters, timing matters. Paul himself says to hold these sound words “in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus,” to do it in a loving way. But there's a difference between being wise about what you say and being ashamed of what the truth is. Our job is to guard what we've been entrusted with, not to change it. Second: guard against doctrinal drift in your own life. Have you ever wondered why a church that was doctrinally sound fifty or sixty years ago has come, over time, to believe things that would go directly against what Scripture says? You almost look at that and think, their grandparents would never have allowed the church to go in that direction. How does that happen? We're not talking about style or how churches do ministry — we're talking about doctrine, the belief statement of a church. This happens because, as much as we like to say culture is “out there” and we reject it, the truth is we are all influenced by culture, and more often than not we bring it within the church and let it permeate our beliefs. Take the issue of homosexuality — for nearly 2,000 years it was one of the core beliefs the church had almost perfect unity on, across every denomination, until the last hundred years. In fact, the great majority of churches in America that now affirm homosexuality as not sinful made that decision only after the Supreme Court ruling — it wasn't until culture said this was allowable that churches decided to reconsider. Satan will always use what's popular to make believers feel crazy for not believing what culture says, because we implicitly believe it too. So where in your life do you soften on things because culture says they're okay? It might not be that specific issue — it could be consumerism, or any number of things culture tells us that directly oppose our Christian faith. Deep down we believe the lie that God wouldn't ask us to believe something that would cost us relationships or popularity. Doctrinal drift doesn't begin with denying everything outright. In the churches that drifted into believing troubling things, it didn't happen overnight, and it usually didn't even happen within a decade — it happened slowly, beginning with people no longer guarding what they'd been entrusted with. So know the Word, know what Scripture says, know what you believe, and don't let the spirit of our age catechize you more deeply than Scripture does. So how can we guard this good deposit? All throughout the Bible we see that humanity, on its own, cannot. Adam and Eve failed to guard what God entrusted to them. Israel failed to guard what God entrusted to them. Fear makes us shrink back; shame makes us silent; suffering makes us want to let go of what's important. We can do this because Jesus didn't let go. Christ faithfully guarded his commission, guarded what was entrusted to him. Adam came under the curse because of his disobedience, but Christ willingly bore our curse — he was cursed because of his obedience. Paul says elsewhere that Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Jesus went to the cross because he was obedient to the Father; the Father treated Jesus like us so that he could treat us like Jesus. Jesus remained faithful to the Father all the way to death, and through his death and resurrection he abolished death — the death our unfaithfulness deserved. And now the risen Christ has given his Holy Spirit to his church. Paul's command here is not “try harder,” “be better,” “find the strength within yourself to guard the gospel.” He says, “by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” Church, the gospel you are commanded to guard is the same gospel by which God is guarding you. So embrace the cost of the gospel without shame. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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Josh and Mandy Shaarda Freedom In Christ Prosper CRC Josh and Mandy Shaarda Freedom In Christ Uganda Josh and Mandy have dedicated their lives to making disciples and strengthening the church in East Africa, particularly in Uganda. They serve through Resonate Global Mission alongside Freedom in Christ Ministries, partnering with local pastors and church leaders to equip them with discipleship resources and training so that individuals, families, and entire communities can be transformed by the truth of the gospel. Their work goes beyond teaching — they walk alongside local churches, helping leaders multiply disciples who live out Jesus’ love in word and deed. A significant part of their ministry has focused on prisons, where they share the gospel and train believers who, in turn, lead worship, start Bible studies, and boldly proclaim Christ’s freedom to others inside and outside prison walls. Josh and Mandy’s vision is to see Jesus’ church in Uganda equipped to transform the nations — building up leaders who will continue to spread the good news throughout Africa. Support Josh & Mandy

Jonah Sermon Series Description The book of Jonah confronts us with a searching question: Do we really want God’s heart—or only His help? This five-week journey through Jonah invites us to wrestle with God’s mercy, His mission, and our own resistance to His grace. From a prophet who runs from God’s word, to pagan sailors who fear the Lord, to a wicked city that repents, Jonah exposes the surprising breadth of God’s compassion. Along the way, we discover that God relentlessly pursues not only the nations, but also the hearts of His people. This series will help us read Jonah rightly, see ourselves honestly, and respond humbly as God reveals His heart for the lost, the undeserving, and even the reluctant believer. As we trace God’s saving work through judgment and mercy, we are invited to stop running, to fear the Lord, and to seek God not merely for His blessings—but for who He is. Do you desire God’s heart? More Concerned for the Plant Jonah 4 Watch The Day the Worst City Got the Best News Jonah 3 Watch The God Who Saves in Spite of Us Jonah 2 Watch Overboard and Overwhelmed by Grace Jonah 1 Watch Jonah - Overview Jonah 1 Watch