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The Child Who Fulfills Every Promise Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Child Who Fulfills Every Promise Come Thou Long Expected Mitchell Leach Wednesday, December 24, 2025 Audio The Child Who Fulfills Every Promise Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 46:02 Sermon Transcript Introduction Some stories stay with us because they're beautiful, and some because they're honest. One of those stories for me is the book The Great Gatsby. It was a book that I hated reading in high school because the ending. The ending was so terrible. I realize now that that was part of the whole point, It was actually brilliant writing on the author's part to make you feel that bad by the end of the book. The Great Gatsby is not a book about romance. It was a story about what hope means, about what happens when you build your life around the belief that one thing, one relationship, one moment, one dream can finally make you whole. Gatsby built his entire life around the belief that Daisy, her love, would redeem him and make him whole. But it doesn't. And that's what makes the ending so unsettling, because in its ending, we see ourselves in Gatsby. We may not build mansions or throw parties, but we all build our lives around something we believe will fix us. Things we believe will finally make things right. Christmas is a season when those things rise to the surface. The lights are the brightest, the music is familiar, and the expectations are high. And when whatever we're counting on to save us feels closer than ever or it may be more fragile than ever. Big Question What are you counting on? What are you counting on this Christmas season? What are you counting on in your life? Most of us are counting on something, not something evil. We're counting on something reasonable, something good, something understandable. For some of us, we hope that this year will finally be different. Different than all the other ones. That relationships would heal. Family gatherings would go smoothly. Old tensions wouldn't resurface, and the ache that we've been carrying for years would ease. For others, we seek stability or success, needing to be right, being needed or being admired, or maybe for us as parents getting through this week without losing our minds with our kids at home, right? That's what that Christmas song is all about, right? Gatsby believed that Daisy could give him a future that would help him erase his past. We might say it different, but we often believe that If this works out or if that comes through, everything's going to be okay. The problem isn't that we hope. The problem is that we hope in things created. We place the burden on created things to carry the weight that only God can do to heal what is broken in us, to give us peace, and to justify our lives. Christmas has a way of exposing what we're really counting on because the expectations are higher. Emotions are closer to the surface. And if you ask any five-year-old tomorrow who didn't get what they want, disappointments hurt more this time of year, don't they? So ask yourself honestly: What would devastate you most if it didn't happen this year? What are you hoping will finally make things feel whole for you? What are you counting on to carry the weight of your happiness? Essentially, what are you counting on? The good news is that the Bible has great answers for us. We're going to look at two things tonight. A promise the world has been waiting for and that the promise is a son. So let's look at that first one. A Promise The World Has Been Waiting For When we think about where Christmas starts, we often think about the baby in a manger, or maybe we think about the angel coming to Mary, or we think about the star, we think about the wise men or the shepherds. But this story starts way before what Luke records in his gospel. The story of the advent starts in Genesis, starts in Eden. God had just created humanity. Everything was perfect, not just more not only perfect, but relationally whole. Nothing was hidden, nothing was strained. God walked with humanity, and humanity was at rest. It was the perfect that we longed for, the satisfaction that lasts. God had given Adam and Eve the first people one rule, and they broke it. As God was ushering them out of paradise, he gave them a promise. Someone would come to make right what they had made wrong. The promise is that the offspring of the woman would come to someone who would bring back that peace that they had lost. Every generation wondered, is this finally the one? That's what Genesis shows us, the genealogies, all that. It's tracing who would be the one to crush the head of the snake. And yet every generation was disappointed. The whole story of the Old Testament is a story waiting for the long-expected redeemer, the one who would make everything right, except chapter after chapter, book after book, we are left without a happy ending. No one could make it right. No one even came close. No one even filled half of the requirements that the job description required. And yet the Old Testament isn't a pessimistic book. There's hope littered throughout every page, a quiet whisper that God will bring us the one who will make us whole, who will make redemption possible. That's what makes Christmas and this Christmas story, magical. Not magical in the sense of escape, but miraculous in the sense of fulfillment. This isn't a story that distracts us from reality. It's a story that finally explains it. It's what transforms this season into a season of hope. It's the true reason we love this season, whether we understand it or not. Not for the presents, not for the music that we love, not for the family get-togethers. Why we love Christmas is because Christmas is an answer. It's an answer to a question humanity has been asking since sin entered the world. It's a question each and every one of us has asked deep within our heart. Who will come and fix the brokenness I feel? Who will come and redeem what feels lost? Who will make everything right? It's the reason we love Christmas. It's because the answer has come. The answer isn't another philosophy, another self-help book, another form of therapy, another thing. The answer is a person, and his name is Jesus. After centuries of waiting, the question isn't if someone would come, but who could it possibly be? The Promise Is A Son The answer that we see is the promise is a son. After centuries of silence, God speaks again, not to a king, not to a prophet, not to a priest, not to Jerusalem, not to someone important. He speaks to no one. He speaks to a no one. And yet he speaks. The promise is coming. God sends the angel Gabriel to Mary to deliver the world's greatest news. The promise from the garden would become incarnate. God would make good on his promise, even if he had to do it himself. The way that this story unfolds is wildly unimpressive. In fact, it's so unimpressive. It's impressive how how impressive it is. It is incredible. The good news comes to a teenager in a town that no one had ever heard of. But this is how God works. All throughout the Bible, God uses the unimpressive, the overlooked, the weak, the outsider, the stranger, the nobody, which is great news for us. Because if salvation required being impressive, being righteous, Being powerful or being all put together, we would have been disqualified before we had a chance to begin. The good news for us is that we do not have to be impressive for God to save us. This Christmas season, do you feel passed Do you feel unimportant? Do you feel like a nobody? Do you feel like you have nothing to give, nothing to bring? The good news is we stand before our creator who looks at creation and says, Look at what I do with nothing. Bring me your nothing. That's enough for me. God wanted to show that it is his greatness, not ours, that he needs. He will show his greatness through us, whether we are impressive or not. For generations, God's people had lived with these unanswered prayers. They married, they buried their children, they watched Kingdoms rise and fall, and still they waited. And yet Luke, Luke is telling us this wait is over. Jesus has come, but he's come unimpressively. Jesus comes and is born into one of the poorest households maybe in history. He's born into extreme poverty. When Jesus goes to the temple with his parents, just a couple of days after he's born, his parents sacrifice, which was a common practice in Israel. They sacrifice a dove, which indicates to us that they were one of the poorest people in all of Israel. That was only allowed if you couldn't afford anything else. In Nazareth, it was a particularly poor town, but that being said about what they had given, they were probably one of the poorest, even in Nazareth. There was a section that we can look back at through archeological digs and findings that there was a section of housing that people lived in that was carved out of a cliffside. Jesus probably lived there. Jesus's home, his bed was probably carved out of rock. Jesus probably lived in cold, dark cave. Jesus's life would show God's greatness through obscurity. He came not to be impressive. He was born in a manger, but he came to save. He came to redeem. And that's the message that Mary receives, that she will bear the Son of God. Let's look at verses 30 and 31, if you have your Bible still open. It says this, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you should call his name Jesus. She will not just bear any son. She will bear the long expected king. I think when we hear the word king, we think about the power that it takes. We think about Rome. We think about the Roman Caesars. That's definitely what the people of Israel thought of, that the king would come to be this king. That's what they were hoping And yet God had something else in mind, a king who would conquer by serving, a king who would seek his father like David did. That's what we see in the next two verses. Luke 2:32, it says, He will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there will be no end. Notice how the angel talks to Mary. She brings Mary through history, at least two historical people, that Jesus will fulfill the covenant that God made with David. This covenant from 2 Samuel 7 says this, "When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son." The promise That God gave David is the same promise he's giving to Mary. Jesus would be the king, the king of kings the world had been waiting for. And yet, he would not look like any king going before him. He would bring everlasting peace. He would defeat all of his and our enemies. But he would do this not by military conquest. He would do this by being conquered. He would be the one to defeat death itself by dying. The angel doesn't just talk about David, but he goes all the way back to Genesis, bringing up Jacob. The weeks leading up to tonight, we We've been studying the Book of Genesis and how it leads us on a path directly towards Bethlehem, the long-expected savior, the one who had crushed the head of the snake. We've been looking and tracing this person through the Book of Genesis. We saw that sin entered the world through Adam and Eve being tempted by the snake. God promised to reverse what had happened by crushing the serpent's head. Jacob was the father of the people who God would use to bring forth the snake crusher. Jesus would be the one to make everything right. The promise had narrowed from a people to a family, to a virgin, to a child in a manger. All of history is holding its breath for this moment. Main idea The long-expected deliverer and king has come The long-expected deliverer and king has come. Since the beginning, we needed a rescuer. We can see the constant and consistent downward spiral in scripture towards sin and away from God. We can see the misery that it brings to the world. In addition to scripture, we can feel this in our lives as well. With or without the Bible, we know that this is true. We know that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world we live in. There is something fundamentally wrong even in us. We see this and feel this when success does not satisfy, when relationships fracture, when guilt lingers longer than it should, when we achieve what we desire and still feel restless. And yet the thing that we've truly wanted, the thing that we truly need has come. The thing that would restore us came 2,000 years ago. And whether we want to admit it or not, we are still people, whether we believe this, we are still people who look somewhere else. We look somewhere else for something that will satisfy us, something that will make us whole. Christmas does not invent this longing. It exposes it. C. S. Lewis has this quote that says, "If I find myself in a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." The longing we feel in this world proves that we need a true salvation, not something temporary, not just another add-on, not just another scheme we can add to try to make ourselves happy. We need true and lasting salvation. What advent shows us is that we not only can't we chase down our own salvation, but we don't have to because God came to us. God became a man and dwelt among us. It's why we sing the song we sing earlier, Come thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free. From our fears and sins, release us. Let us find our rest in thee. We no longer have wait to find the answer that humanity has been waiting for since sin came into the world. We can find true rest in our savior. But because of sin, we could not get to God, so God had to come to us. Salvation did not come through effort, through improvement, through enlightenment. It came through incarnation. Such good news cannot remain good news unless it changes us. We can't just see this and remain unchanged. And that leads us into our points of application, Application Believe This story is more than good news. You can't encounter it in a meaningful way and not let it change you. You can't sample it. You can't use it only for inspiration. We must believe it. This is not another add-on to our life to make our life better. This is not another philosophy that we try to mix in with other ones to see if finally this will be the thing that makes us happier. If I add just a little bit more Jesus in, then my life can be a little bit happier. No. This is This is surrender. This is saying to God, I've tried to save myself, and I can't. I know I can't. I've tried everything. I've tried justifying my actions. I've tried using it and anything and everything to distract me or numb me from the feeling that I have inside that I know something is broken, something is wrong, a longing for something true, something real. God, I surrender that desire to try to save myself. I can't. I won't be able to. I've been trying to answer the question, what will save me all alone on my own? But God, now in this moment, I know that you've given me the answer. His name is Jesus. What we believe as Christians is that Jesus came and lived the life we couldn't. He was perfect. And he came to die. He came to die on a cross trading places with us. He took what we deserved. He was punished. Although he had done nothing wrong, what he deserved was everything good. He came to be punished in our place. That's what we deserve. We deserve to be punished, to be cursed. And yet the God who created everything came to bear our curse. And three days later, after he died, he rose again from the dead. If tonight you're hearing this for the first time and it's starting to make sense to you, if you believe this, I don't want you to pass up on this moment of what the Holy spirit is doing in you. This isn't something that you've done, that you've worked out intellectually. This is God working in your heart. Christmas is more than a story of acute nativity. It is a story that can transform every part of your being. If that's happening for you today, I don't want you to miss it. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand or do anything silly. But if after the service you want to talk, me and a couple elders will be up here in front, and we'd love to pray with you and talk about what this looks like. Rejoice But I want you to know one of your clear next steps is this, to rejoice. And for everyone who believes in the gospel, it is a call for us to rejoice. This is the greatest news in the history of the world. Our savior is finally here. This should cause us overwhelming rejoicing, overwhelming amounts of worship that we no longer have to seek out to save ourselves, that we no longer have to try to find the right philosophy, the right thing, the right person who will save us. He's here. He came 2,000 years ago to bear what we couldn't. This is the reason that we give gifts, is that Jesus came to be given. We give gifts because it's one shadow, it's one small way that we can embody what Christ did for us. So this Christmas season, rejoice, sing praises, pray, give gifts, serve one another, love one another, not out of a heart of trying to earn anything, not even because Jesus was just a good example, but because Jesus is reason to rejoice because God God had come to rescue us. Every one of us is counting on something. The world counts on progress. We count on relationships, success, health, control, something that we feel will make us whole again, something that will make it right. Again and again, those hopes end the same way. Unfinished, empty. But Christmas tells us something radically different. The answer did not rise from within us. Hope did not come from human effort. Salvation did not emerge from history's best idea. It came down! The eternal stepped into time. The creator entered his creation. The king laid aside his crown. He came not to be admired, but to be given. As church fathers have confessed throughout centuries: "that he, the bread might hunger, the fountain might thirst, the light might sleep, the way might be wearied by the journey, the truth might be accused by false witness, the judge of the living and the dead might be judged by a mortal court, that he, justice, might be condemned by the unjust, that he, the foundation, might be suspended on a cross, that the healer might be wounded, and that life itself would die." This is the God who came to us. He came to us so that those who are broken could be made whole. Christmas is not a story of humanity finding God. It's a story of God coming and finding us. The long-expected deliverer has come, not because we were strong, but exactly because we were helpless, not because we had earned him, but exactly because we were desperate. And tonight, the invitation is not to fix yourself. If you're hearing a message of, Try harder, be better, you haven't been listening. This is not about improving yourself. This is not an invitation to prove yourself worthy. The invitation is simply this. Receive him. Receive the long-expected deliverer and King who has come for you! Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are, that you are our King, that you came in the most humble ways. God, we talk about this as the humiliation of your son, Christ, to be born in a manger. God, to stumble upon the very ground you made. You came to bear our sin and our shame even more than we can comprehend. God, we thank you that we don't have to try to muster up the energy within ourselves to save ourselves. But you came to do what we could not do. God, we praise you. God, I pray that as we sing, as we reflect in what advent is, that it would be more than gifts, that it would be more than a family get together, but that we would rejoice that you have come to save us. Father God, as we sing our final song, help us to truly rejoice as people redeemed. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

The Blessing of Abraham Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Blessing of Abraham Come Thou Long Expected Mitchell Leach Sunday, December 21, 2025 Audio The Blessing of Abraham Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 31:16 Sermon Transcript Our scripture reading for this morning comes from Genesis 12: 1-9. If you have a Bible, or you can use the Bible in the seat back, if you don't, that is our scripture reading for this morning. We are in the third, fourth sermon in this series called Come Thou Long-Expected, where we're looking at the journey through Genesis of the promised seed or the promised offspring of the one who would come and crush the head of the snake. And this morning we're going to be looking at the call of Abraham. So Chapter 12, verses 1 through 9. This is God's word. Now the Lord said to Abraham, 'Go from your country and your kindred in your father's house to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abraham went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he departed from Heron. And Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son, and all their possessions in Hairan, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the Oak of Moroth. And at that time, the Canaanites were in the land. And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, To your offspring, I will give this land. ' So he built there an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. From there, he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, and Bethel on the west of AI, on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. And Abraham journeyed on still going towards makeup. This is the word of the Lord. Our world is broken. And it's not just us as Christians who see this. Secular writers and authors have seen this same thing, this problem that plagues this human project that we're a part of. In 1945, an author noticed this, and he wrote a book commenting on the human condition. The author, George Orwell, wrote a book, The Animal Farm. It's a story of a group of animals who revolt against their human owner to overthrow his power. They believe that the problem in their world was external. It was the farmer. That if they remove him, they can create a fair and just and equal society. And at first, everything looks good. The old rules are torn down. Equality is promised. But slowly, the pigs are the ones who are leading the revolution begin to change. They take more power. They rewrite the rules. They claim that everything that they're doing is for the good of everyone else. But the book ends by saying this, the animals looked from pig to man and from man to pig and could no longer tell which was which. The corruption got so bad at one point that one pig says, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a warning, as a warning that removing oppression does not remove sin. And And that revolutions fail when the human heart remains untouched. And that leads us into our big question, can our world be fixed from the inside? If we just change the systems, if we replace leaders, if we educate people better, if we rearrange power, if we pass the right laws or advance far enough in technologies, would this bring a just society? Would this fix our world? This is our modern cred that humanity, given enough time and refinement, can heal itself. And we see it everywhere. Every election promises a turning point. Every movement says that this time it'll be different. Every generation is confident that it sees with the last one missed. We don't just believe in progress. We need to believe in it. Because if our world can't be fixed from within, it means that the problem isn't just out there, but our problem is here. History interrupts our optimism. New systems produce old sins. New leaders repeat ancient failures. Power changes hand, but corruption stays put. The faces change, but the hearts remain. Animal farm isn't shocking because it's extreme. It's unsettling because it's familiar. The revolution that promised equality in the book ended up finding the same heart, the same desires, quietly climbing back to the top, which raises an uncomfortable question for us that we rarely ask. What if the problem in our world isn't simply bad structures, isn't simply having the right people in power? But what if it's our brokenness? What if the reason that every attempt at utopia collapses isn't because we were not trying hard enough, but it's that the human condition seeps into every new experiment, every new world we try to create? That's the tension that we're left with after the flood in Genesis, a cleansed Earth, and yet it's the same old story. So the question remains not just for scripture, but for us. Can our world be fixed from the inside? Or do we need help that is from outside our story altogether? Unfortunately, the Bible has answers for us, so keep your Bibles open to Genesis 12: 1. We're going to be looking at a large swath of scripture today. Our first section will be who will bless the nations. We're going to look at verses one through nine. And then the second section, we're going to look at the rest of the Book of Genesis. We're not going to go verse by verse, but we're really tracing what happens with this family and what will happen with this family. Before we hear God's promise to Abraham, we need to see the space that we're in. We need to remember how desperate the story has become. Genesis 3 starts off by showing us the fall that Adam and Eve brought sin into the world. But we don't get to move on further without God promising that he will bring someone through the offspring of Eve who will redeem all of humanity. But in the very next chapter, the offspring, Cain, murders his brother Abel. The promise line does not bring rescue, but it brings bloodshed. Sin becomes such a problem that by Genesis 6, God sends a flood to cleanse the Earth. And the people that we're left with after the Earth, unfortunately, look a lot like the people who were there before. What we're left with, still no savior. From Eden to exile, from family to flood, God has shown us a pattern. God keeps making promises, and humanity does almost everything it can to try not to fulfill it. The question hanging over the story is no longer, is this world broken? We know this world is broken. The question remains whether God will keep his promise to fix it. So let's look at who will bless the nations, verses one through nine. Where we're left at in this story after the flood is seemingly hopeless. There is no savior, is no redeemer, no one to crush the head of the snake. We're left in a world that has failed every test from God. And yet we see a God who speaks not in anger, but in promise. So let's look at verses one through three. They say this, Now the Lord said to Abraham, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I will show I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I'll bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you. I will curse, and in you, I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Notice what God is doing here, what he's saying, what he promises Abraham. He promises him a people, a place, and a purpose far bigger than anything Abraham could have dreamed of. We see now, again, in the story of Genesis, God is doing something. It's not just that something is happening. It's not just that the plot is moving forward, but God is doing something again. Notice what God doesn't say to Abraham here. He doesn't say, I will bless you so you can be more comfortable or that you can have an easier life or take these blessings and make them work for you. No, he says, I will bless you so you can be a blessing. I think that forces us to ask a question of ourselves, do we treat God's gifts as a way to bless others or as a way to become more comfortable? When blessing stops with us, it's actually no longering. This is not what God wanted for us. This is not the blessing that God wanted, or it's not what God wanted us to use his blessing for. It's not what God wanted Abraham to use his blessing for. His blessing. Is far bigger than that. It's not just that he will become a good nation or that he'll bless other nations. It's that he will be a blessing to the entire world, to all of humanity. It says that all the families of the earth will be blessed. This is not God choosing one family instead of the world. It's God choosing one family for the world. If God brings blessing to the world through ordinary obedience, I think we should ask ourselves, or maybe we shouldn't ask ourselves, Am I changing the world? But rather, Am I being faithful where God has already put me? I think we need to ask, How do we speak to people when we're tired? How do we handle frustration? How do we treat people who have nothing to give us? How will we handle those ordinary moments of quiet obedience? Because God will work mightily through them, far more than we think. I think that's how God changes the world through those little moments. Finally, in this passage, what we see is that the one who will reverse the curse from Genesis 3 is going to come from Abraham. The promise will happen. This is God reaffirming that his covenant is true, that God is sending a rescuer. This is a better sound. It should be a better sound in our ears than if we were stranded on a desert island and we heard a rescue plane, we all presently today, we all feel the after shock of the fall reverberating through our lives. Every time we see death in our world, every time we experience heartache, every time we're betrayed, every time we long for true satisfaction, and we can't find it, we can see that our world broken. Deep in our souls, we know there has to be something better than this. For the first time since Eden, the future sounds hopeful. Imagine being Abraham hearing this. Imagine what joy would have over load in his heart. We can narrow the scope on where the savior will come from. And yet there's a problem. Sarah is barren. Yet God will intentionally choose to use an unlikely woman in an unlikely way to bring forth the child of promise, just like he would hundreds of years later in a little town in Bethlehem. And that's what she does. She conceives miraculously and gives birth to Isaac. But even here, Genesis teaches us to hold our breath because God promises the blessing will come through Abraham, not from him. It forces us to ask, what will happen with this family? We get to this spot where Abraham is finally given a son. We have to think, is this it? Imagine you're an Israeli child hearing these stories for the first time. Maybe you're at some festival and your uncle is telling you about the story of Abraham. Moses writes the Book of Genesis in a way that forces us to ask every time we come to a new character in the Book, Is this going to be the one. He carefully authors this in a way that strings us along to force us to ask that question. We ask that with Cain and Abel. We asked that with Noah and his sons. And now we ask that with Abraham, who later becomes Abraham. But it isn't him. Later in the story, Abraham disqualifies himself. He has a child with his wife's servant. He lies about his wife being his sister. We see the fall reverberating through Abraham's life. We see him choosing to define what is good and evil in his own eyes. From this point on in Genesis, Genesis begins to repeat itself like a drum beat. Promise, hope, failure, death. Promise, hope, failure, death. And so now our attention turns to Isaac, Abraham's son, Abraham's son, who as a child, is part of a story that points directly to the gospel. Abraham is asked to bring his only son up on a mountain and to sacrifice him, and yet God provides a ram as a substitute. It's an example of how the Old Testament continually points to the need of a better savior. The Old Testament points to the need of the advent story. So Isaac grows up, and through his wife, Rebecca, gives birth to a boy. Isaac, the child of promise, grows old, dies, still waiting for the promise. And so now we look at his children, Jacob and Esa. God tells Rebecca that These two will be at odds, and they are. Jacob tricks his brother into selling him his birthright. Later, Jacob tricks his dad, Isaac, into giving him the family blessing. Jacob becomes the one who will carry out the promise he will be the new covenant representative, even though it disqualified him from being the one who could complete it by tricking his dad and his brother. It leaves us wondering, is this just another failed experiment. Jacob wrest with God and has renamed Israel. Jacob is the one who has 12 children. And at this point, the reader has to surely think one of these 12 has to be the one. Just a law of big numbers. It's got to be of these guys. A lot happens with these sons. They're important. They become the 12 tribes of Israel. And this is where we get the story of Joseph in the multicolor coat. A lot happens with these brothers that we can't cover this morning. But in the remaining chapters, what happens is that the promised family leaves the promised land in exile and moves to Egypt. And the story ends here in chapter 50, it's the last chapter, the last section of the book. It says, So Joseph died being 110 years old. They involved him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. The Book of Genesis ends not with a throne, but with a coffin. The promise alive, but the people are not. Joseph dies in Egypt. Like animal farm, Genesis ends with a dream still written, the world unchanged, staring death instead of deliverance. Hebrews 11 is the famous chapter where it recounts all of the Old Testament saints. It's called the Hall of Faith, all these people who had exemplary faith. It talks about Abraham and his family. It says this in verse 13, talking about these people, These all died in faith, not not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on earth. All the Old Testament, all of Genesis, the lineage This family looks from afar, not seeing the promise come through. No snake crusher. Every single person dies being disqualified from being the one who can defeat what Adam and Eve brought into the world. That's what we've been doing in this sermon series. That's why we've been tracing the seed of the woman, the offspring, the promise. It's all throughout Genesis. It's as if each character we interact with is crying out, 'Come thou long-expected Jesus? ' Genesis ends in death. No savior on the horizon. Time after time, people choose to define what is right and wrong in their own eyes rather than trusting God. Genesis is a genealogy of humanity's failed attempt to save itself. We cannot fix the world from the inside. We do not have the ability to. No matter how hard we try, no matter what tactics we employ, Genesis is clear, no one born in sin will be able to save themselves, let alone save anyone else. That leads us to our main idea. We long for a redeemer who will defeat what we couldn't. We long for a redeemer who will defeat what we couldn't. This longing is not accidental. It's not weakness. It's design. Genesis shows us that we were made to live in blessing, not under the curse, to flourish under God's rule rather than trying to grasp and to scramble for control. So when the world feels fractured, when relationships break, when our bodies fail, when justice ends. Don't stop longing. We can't stop longing. The problem isn't that we hope. The problem is where we aim our hope at. Every generation in Genesis feels the ache that surely this will be the one. And every generation ends the same way with another coffin. So we learn something crucial. If redemption is going to come, it has to come from outside the story. And yet we, as a people, continue to try, try to save ourselves. We try to redeem ourselves through success, through family harmony, through control, through being right, through getting back to how things used to be. I mean, especially in Christmas, that desire is there. The expectations intensify. Christmas tempts us to believe that this year, finally this year, Something will save us. Something will bring us what we truly need. But it doesn't. It can't. Advent, it's not what advent's about. Advent doesn't train us to hope harder. It trains us to hope rightly. And that's where Genesis presses on us, not to condemn us, but to prepare us. Because if we cannot receive a savior, or we cannot receive a savior if we are trusting in a substitute, and that leads us into our points of application. I've got to mix up here, but we're going to start with the second one. Let advent expose our false messias. Advent has a way of bringing out the false things we like to worship. And especially, especially this week, as we are just a couple of days away from Christmas, it reveals what we truly believe will save us. When time runs out, when emotions rise, when expectations peak, Whatever we believe, whatever we're counting on to make things okay, that's what you believe in. Ask yourself, what do you think would finally make things right? What would be the one thing that would happen that would ruin Christmas? What outcome are you quietly hoping will justify you? Advent doesn't shame us for these answers. It clarifies these. Whatever you ask to save you will will one day ask everything from you. This season, we don't just celebrate Christ coming. It reveals everything that we hope would have come instead. An advent doesn't end by telling us to try harder or to be better. It ends in pointing us to a savior who came anyway, who came even though we could not save ourselves. When the calendar fills and the pressure rises, our saviors, our false saviors, will reveal themselves. And it leads us to our second point, have hope bigger than your lifetime. Genesis teaches us something uncomfortable. Sin is never private. Adam's disobedience did not stay with Adam. Cain's worship did not just affect him. It fractured a family, then a culture, and then the entire world. Cain's legacy. His lineage is marked by violence. Lamech, his offspring, boasts about that violence generations later. By the time we reach Noah, it has invaded every aspect, every corner of creation. It travels quietly. Sin goes and multiplies when it goes unrepented. This is why scripture never lets us say, This is my life. I get to do with it what I want. I'm in control. Yes, our choices are personal, but they are never isolated. What you normalize today, someone else will inherit. What you excuse, someone else will... They will repeat. What you refuse to repent of, someone else will suffer from. But Genesis also shows us something hopeful. That grace is generational, too. God promises blessing through Abraham to a people Abraham will never meet. Faithfulness plants seeds whose fruit grow long after they're gone. And that's why Adam's hope is bigger than one lifetime. God works through families, through communities, through histories, not just single individual people or individual moments. So ask yourself, not only what am I allowed to do, but what am I allowing to pass on? Because your repentance today may interrupt cycles tomorrow. Your obedience may become someone else's safety. Your faith today may spare generations, wounds you will never see. So hope bigger than your lifetime, because both grace and sin echo far beyond us. Genesis ends with a death. But advent begins with a birth. Hope has come. Heaven meets Earth. Love has come down. Grace is clothed in skin, pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel. Jesus comes as our long-expected redeemer. The death that ends Genesis confirms terms the curse, but the death we see on the cross was there to end the curse. This is why we celebrate Christmas. This is why we celebrate Advent. Our savior has come. Our savior has come to take our place. Jesus came to be the better Adam, came to be the better Abraham, the better Noah, the better Joseph, the better Isaac. We talked about that earlier in the story that Isaac followed his father up a hill, carrying wood on his back, obedient even to the point of death. And yet a ram was caught in the brambles as a sacrifice. Jesus would come, and he would be the lamb who would be our substitute, following his Father up a hill, carrying wood on his back to take our place. We could not reach up to heaven, and so heaven came down to us. This is what we remember this advent season. We long for a redeemer who will defeat what we couldn't. Let's stand and pray together as we prepare for worship. Stand and pray. Father, we thank you for who you are, that you are a God who condescented, who came to us. You sent your son to take our place. Thank you for being our substitute, our savior. Thank you for humbling yourself to being born here on earth, humbling yourself to being put to death on a cross. God, we love you. We love to do your will. So help us do that as we respond in worship here this morning. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Before we get to our song, you guys can come up. Before we get to our song, I want to read this closing benediction, and then we will sing our closing song. May the God who calls us out by grace keep you from trusting in in what you cannot save. May your hope rest in Christ alone, the one promised to Abraham and given for the life of the world. Go in faith, hope, in peace. Amen. Go tell it on the mountain, the one that we've been waiting for, the King of our salvation. Born on this day, our savior, Christ the Lord. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere, that we can be forgiven. The weight of all our sin he came to bear. Emmanuel God with us, Emmanuel King Jesus, the savior of the world is born. Emmanuel God with us, Emmanuel King Jesus, savior of the world is born. Go tell it on the mountain. Humbly in a manger lay. Mercy sent from heaven. Angels till the sky with highest grace. Emmanuel, God with us Emmanuel, King Jesus, the savior of the world is born. Emmanuel, God with us, Emmanuel, King Jesus, the savior of the world is born. We tell it on the mountain. This baby born of Virgin birth, the ruler of all nations, the glory of our God has come to earth. Emmanuel, God with us. Emmanuel, King Jesus, savior of the world is born. Emmanuel, God with with us, Emmanuel, King Jesus, The savior of the world is born. We'll tell it on the mountain. This baby born of virgin birth, the ruler of all nations, the glory of our God has come to Earth. Emmanuel, God with us. Emmanuel, King Jesus, the savior of the world is born. Emmanuel, God with us. Emmanuel, King Jesus, the savior of the world is born. The savior of the world is born. The savior of the world is born. The savior of the world is born. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Blood on the Ground Prosper Christian Reformed Church Blood on the Ground Come Thou Long Expected Mitchell Leach Sunday, December 7, 2025 Audio Blood on the Ground Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 40:57 Sermon Transcript If you'd please join me and by opening your Bibles as we hear God's word from Genesis 4. It's on page four in your Bibles. We're going to read the whole chapter 1 26. Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again she bore his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought of his firstborn, of his flock, and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and of his offering. But for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. And whoever finds me will kill me. Then the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad. And Arad fathered Mehujael. And Mehujael fathered Methushael. And Methushael fathered Lamech. And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zilhah, Adah bore Jabal. He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal Cain. He was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal Cain was Naamah. Lamech said to his wives Adah and Zillah, hear my voice, you wives of Lamech. Listen to what I say. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is 77fold. And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called him Seth. For she said, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him. To Seth also, a son was born, and he called him his name, Enosh. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Genesis4 is one of the most tragic chapters in the Bible. We move from the hope of new life to the horror of the first murder, from the joy of a child being born to the grief of a son being buried. But from the beginning, the question that Adam and Eve would have had in their minds is, is this the one? Is this the child who was promised in Genesis 3? Is this the one who will crush the head of the snake? When Cain was born, the hope must have been electric. This is the firstborn, the miracle child, the one whom God helped bring forth into the world. But Genesis 4 tells us something sobering and important. Not every child of Eve is a child of promise. Not every sacrifice is acceptable. And not every worshiper worship rightly, worships rightly. Genesis 4 is not just the story of two brothers. It's the story of two ways to live, two ways to worship, and two lineages that would stem from here in Genesis 4. All throughout Scripture, as the dust settles, we see sin move from the garden into a family and into culture. And eventually it threatens everything. Sin does not just disappear after the fall, it follows into our worship. Because the first story we see after the Garden of Eden doesn't focus on work. It doesn't focus on marriage or politics. It focuses on worship. And this is why we need Christmas. Genesis 4 shows us that sin does not just break Eden. It breaks families. It breaks communities, breaks culture. And Advent is the story of God stepping into the world, that world that Cain built, a world of blood on the ground, a world where anger is in Our hearts and worship has gone wrong. It forces us to ask a question and wrestle with a question we often ignore. Does God care how we worship? Because if we. I think because most people assume that worship is simple, that if we are sincere, then that's enough. If I show up, then God will be happy. If I give something, well, God will accept it. But Genesis 4 shows us the opposite. Two brothers come to worship. Two offerings are given, yet only one is accepted. And here's the uncomfortable truth. Both men believed that they were worshiping God, and yet only one actually was. Genesis 4 shows us something that we would never guess on our own. Sincerity is not the same thing as obedience. That brings us back to our main question, our big question. Does God care how we worship? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So if you would keep your Bibles open to Genesis chapter four as we see these three movements in this passage. First we'll see worship and warning, the story of Cain and Abel. And then we'll see judgment and culture, Cain's legacy and a new beginning with Seth. And worship. Even after the first murder, Cain, God appoints a way to redeem his people. And that's what we'll see in this chapter. Let's look at this first section, though, as we see worship and warning through Cain and Abel, verses one through eight. So Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden. That's where we find. And that's where he starts this, this chapter. They have two children, Cain and Abel. And it's easy for us to look at this story through our lens of understanding the end of, you know, we see the whole context of the Bible. We even know the end of this chapter. But for a moment, I want you to think about what Adam and Eve must have been thinking when these two boys were born. Remember the prophecy that came from Genesis 3, that from the seed of the. From the woman an offspring would come to crush the head of the snake. They must have been thinking, it has to be one of these two boys. Cain was the farmer and Abel was the shepherd. Cain is the likely candidate here. He's the firstborn. In fact, look at how he is talked about in verse two or in verse one and two. For Cain says, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And Abel, he's only mentioned really as Cain's brother that she bore his brother Abel. Imagine that being your epitaph on your, you know, so and so's brother. You know, that's. That's all you were remembered as. But Cain seems to be the Likely candidate here. They grow up together, and clearly they're instructed on how to worship, right? They're told how to bring offering to God, that this is something that God delights in. So they bring an offering to God, and one brings something good and the other brings the best of what he had. But only one was appreciated. We'll see later, the heart posture between the two. But before we move any further, I want us to look at verse seven. Verse seven is a confusing passage, or it's a confusing verse, not just in the English, but in the Hebrew. This is a grammatically weird verse. It reads weird in English and it reads even weirder in Hebrew. So let's camp out here because I think this unlocks a lot for us. Verse 7 says this. If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. I think at first glance, when we read this, we read the if you do well, and it sounds like God is giving Cain a second chance. If you do well, if you bring another offering, then I will accept it if you do it in the right way. But that's not what this passage is saying. So what does God mean here? He's talking to Cain and he's saying, respond from this moment and act like the firstborn. In fact, that's what to do well means. The Hebrew word for to do well actually carries the connotation of act. Acting like the firstborn, acting in integrity, acting in a way that brings honor to your family. And at the same time, this word isn't about action, but it's about character. It wasn't about physical actions. This word to do well meant. To. Have the character that is honorable, to have a heart change. God isn't rejecting Cain's vegetables. He's exposing Cain's heart. Worship without obedience is not worship God. God gives Cain a choice here, an option to rule over sin, or it will rule over him. God's saying essentially to Cain, this is the moment to change your heart. Please change your heart, and I'll be right here. But Cain has that choice. And it says, sin is crouching like a vicious animal. And this is how sin works. It starts off small and it grows. It's actually what we see in James, chapter one. This is what the brother of Jesus says about sin. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. Then desire, when is conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown. Brings forth death. This is how sin works. It starts off small, it starts off as a seed, and it grows if we don't stop it. Cain becomes or believes that he has become like a train on tracks, that he has no option except what's set before him. And God is saying, no, stop, turn around, come back. You can come back from this. And yet he continues on the path set before him. And he kills his only brother. He allowed Satan to plant an idea in his mind and let that mature and become full grown. And sure enough, it brought forth death. Some people have commented on this word that sin is crouching at the door, and that it really should be translated as the crouching one in reference to a demonic presence or in reference to a demon. I think that there's something interesting here with that, to read this passage in that way. And if you do not do well. Sin is the crouching one, waiting at the door. And its desire is contrary to you. God is almost coming to Cain and saying, do you remember the enemy who tempted your mom and dad? Do you remember what that did? Do you remember how that tore? Tore a rip in the fabric of the universe. Look at what he did to the world. Imagine what he will do to you. God is gently calling Cain and asking him to come back to him, asking him, where does this path lead you, Cain? This is the first time in scripture that sin is mentioned. And how we are introduced to it is that sin will take you captive by force. Sin will dominate you. Sin will take its desire. Its desire is to go contrary to you. It's not to be a contrarian. I almost think that that language is too weak. The desire of sin is to go against you. It's to work like a parasite. It's to come inside you and absolutely take you over, to eat you from the inside out. This is true for us as well. For Cain, sin is there to do us harm. Sin always wants mastery over us. Sin never stays small. You cannot pet what God calls a predator. What you refuse to kill will grow up and kill what you love. Cain's story reminds us that no human being, no child of Eve, can reverse the curse. The serpent wasn't going to be crushed by the next generation. We needed someone greater. We needed someone born of a woman. But unlike Cain, sin is something that we must rule over. We cannot play with. We cannot believe the lie of Western civilization, that as long as it's not hurting someone else, that it really doesn't matter. No, sin will destroy us. Sin destroys us. It destroys culture. It destroys our community. The serpent may have spoken to Adam and Eve in the garden's ruin, but here his voice grows stronger. Sin was born in Genesis 3. It matured here in Genesis 4. And next week we will see it grow and take over the entire world and consume it. In Genesis 6, that leads us into our second point, judgment and culture. Cain's legacy in verses 9 through 24, so God comes to Cain like he did to his parents before, gently, with a question. He comes to Cain and says, where's Cain? Or where's Abel? Where's your brother? And Cain retorts back almost, I imagine, almost cutting God off before he can get the question out. I'm not my brother's keeper. I don't know. I don't know where he is. What God had just told him in verse seven to act like the firstborn. Cain retorts back so fast, saying, I'm not in charge of him. I will not act like the firstborn. I will not act in a way that honors my family or honors you. Cain lies to God and God will have none of it. And so he rebukes him then and there and gives him a curse. Cain's curse is that the ground will not produce what it used to and that he will be a wanderer. And Cain's response, I think, is so ironic here to say to God, this curse is too great. And that's the reality of sin. The consequences of sin are always greater than what we think that they're going to be. And the promises that sin make never live up to what it says it will. This is the reality for Cain. It's the reality for us. And even so, God promises to make sure that Cain will not be killed in his. In his obstinance towards God. God still promises to take care of him. Yet in Cain's, Cain's response to God, God's anger or God's gentleness is anger. He says that he longs for God's presence, and yet he went away from the presence of the Lord so quickly. What follows in this section? In this chapter, in verses 9 through 24, we see the line of Cain. I think oftentimes we get to a section of scripture, like a genealogy here, and. And we gloss over it and we move past it, and I listen, I get the impulse to do it, right? Genealogies are not super fun to read, except they're incredibly important. And you might still be thinking, of course he's got to say that he's a pastor, right? Genealogies, right. But they are important. Especially in Genesis. Genesis. The genealogies serve to point to something. In fact, Genesis itself as a book, is a genealogy with stories listed in between them. And the point of listing this genealogy, the point of listing these people, is to show the line of the promise. Where would the Savior come from? It's to list that line, and it's also to list the line of the serpent. That's what happens here, listing the line of the seed, Cain. You look at the way that he was talked about at the beginning of this chapter. He was the Promised One. He looks like he was the one who was going to crush the head of the snake. Or at least he was going to be the one that the line of the promise would come from. Right? And now how do we end the chapter? He's furthering the curse. And now he becomes the surrogate for the line of the serpent. The first murderer produces a culture of murder. Sin is not stagnant. It grows. It multiplies. Look at the last descendant that is listed. Look at verse 23. Lamech says, Ada and Zyla, hear my voice, you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say. I've killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is 77fold. Lamech talks to his. His. His relative, his. His ancestor, almost, you know, making fun of him, saying, you think that Cain was hard. No, no, my heart is even harder. Look at how harsh my revenge is. Cain's descendants, they don't make it out of the book of Genesis. In fact, they don't make it out of Genesis 7. They will die in our next sermon in the Flood. Cain's descendants are notable, right? They look like they've got some things going for them, right? They are the ones who forge instruments of bronze and iron. They build culture, they contribute, they build cities. But Genesis 4 tells us that you can be gifted, you can be productive, you can be culturally impressive, but if you worship wrongly, your descendants will inherit that worship. We think as people, that we can act as individuals, and that what we do will not affect anyone around us. Time and time again, story after story, not just in scripture, but in the world we see. What we do follows us in our children and our grandchildren and those around us. If Genesis 4 ended with Cain's descendants, the story of the promise would die in the very next chapters. But God refuses to let darkness have the last word. God raises up a new beginning. And that's what we see in our last section here, a new beginning. With Seth and worship. Verses 25 and 26. Here in the middle of this tragedy, God keeps the Christmas promise alive. The line of the snake crusher does not die. With Abel, God appoints another seed, Seth. A whisper that the promise is still moving forward, still alive, still moving towards Bethlehem. Notice how this chapter started. Notice how Cain is talked about as he's being born. I really look at how Eve talks about Cain. I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord, emphasizing that she's done this. Almost a clear and evident result of the fall, the first inclination of works righteousness. I have done this. God helped, but I did this. Now look how she talks about Seth. She says, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel. She comes to this realization, seeing what sin has done in her two boys. And she realizes that any gift from God, any gift that she's been given is from God. This isn't just another child, that this is the seed, that this is the offspring from which the promise will come. God promises to make right what man made wrong. The Heidelberg Catechism, question 6 reminds us of what humanity was supposed to be, is supposed to be. God created man good and in his own image so that he might truly know God, his creator, love him with all his heart and live with him in eternal life, happiness. Genesis 4 shows us how far we've fallen. But Seth's line shows us that God is still restoring people to what they were supposed to be. Worshipers. Instead of following the line of Cain, the line of achievements, the line that the world would follow. The rich, the powerful, the educated, the artistic influencers, the people who build cities. God will use the most unlikely people. God will go through the line of Seth, the third born. God will work through the seed of a woman, through someone totally unlikely, through a baby. This is to contrast everything that Cain has done. Cain's line is a story of downward descent into sin and misery. And Seth will go on to worship the Lord. This goes back to the beginning of the chapter. God is seeking true worship, something that Cain could not do, could not give God. But now sess line will. It's interesting. Enosh, his son. The name Enosh means mere man. This line will not be people who are impressive. This line will be the nobodies. It will be the shepherd boys, the ones who slay Goliath, the ones that come from nowhere. It will be kings born in a manger. But the beauty of this is that God is made perfect in our weakness that leads us into our main idea. Sin seeks to master us But God provides a new beginning marked by true worship. Sin seeks to master us, but God provides a new beginning marked by true worship. God is making a way a new beginning by giving us someone who would master sin by defeating it itself. And that would result in us worshiping God the Father. That's what Genesis 4 points us towards. That's what this whole story is about, about worship. God wants us to worship him not with external signs, but with our heart. I think we can come to church week after week doing the right thing, singing the songs, kind of playing church, but miss the heart of God. God looked at Cain's offering and he saw something. He saw something that no one else would have seen to anyone else. If Cain were sitting here right now giving his offering, no one would have batted an eye. It would have passed the eye test. And yet it was not good enough for God. Cain exposes a frightening truth that you can be in the right place doing the right rituals with the wrong heart and believe that you're worshiping and yet you're not. You can be standing in church, singing the songs, placing something in the offering, serving in ministry, all the while quietly withholding the very thing that. That God wants your heart. Cain wasn't trying to please God. He was trying to manage God. He brought an offering, but he did not bring himself. He participated outwardly, but resisted inwardly. He performed all the right rituals without surrendering the rule of his life. This is about worship. This is about your heart. That's why when God talks to Cain before he sins, he doesn't say, give me a better offering, bring me better fruit, bring me better produce. He's saying, I want your heart. True devotion means wholehearted devotion. We cannot come to God and give 15, 16 of our heart. We can't let him have a majority of our of our life. He has to be the Lord over it. He cannot be a mere consultant. We need to let him rule and reign over every aspect of our. Of our heart. One aspect of this leads us into our application that we must worship how God wants to be worshiped. This is the regulative principle in worship. This is. That's the nerdy theological word for it, but really in essence, saying that God gets to tell us how he wants to be worshiped. Yes, absolutely. We need to do the right things with the right heart. That's what this passage is showing us, that it's not merely just doing the right actions, the right rituals, and it's not merely just having a sincere heart, but doing them both together. Some churches will Say things like, as long as you're genuine God, God will be happy. I've seen churches over and over kind of water down the gospel, say, well, if your heart's in the right place, then that's, that's good enough. It sounds nice and loving. Sounds like trying to throw off legalism. It sounds like an attempt at trying to be genuine or authentic, one of those buzzwords that we like to say. But the truth is it makes worship about us. God has told us how he wants to be worshiped. I think in worship, our natural reaction, our natural response is to say, well, this is the way I want to do it. This is what connects with me. These are the songs I want to sing. This is the kind of stuff that I want to do. These are the types of worship elements that I think should be included in a worship service. These are the ways in which I'm going to worship God. Even outside of church, we say, this is how I want to do it. But have we ever asked God, how do you want to be worshiped? We become like people who plan a birthday party for someone else and yet plan things that only we want to do. I don't know if you've ever been around one of those people, but it's awful. I had a birthday party like that once. It was terrible. What happens when worship becomes about something we like rather than what God likes? Well, it becomes self serving, it becomes about the individual, it becomes about, I don't know, it takes that saying of that Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship. It takes that to its furthest extra extent. It becomes something that says, well, you don't really need to come to church if you want to worship God by yourself in your deer stand or at home or you know, on the golf course, wherever it is. Right. You can do that. That's fine as long as you're sincere. We have a heart shift here. God has given us things that need to be a part of our worship. Specifically, what need to be part of our worship in church. I think sometimes these are things that we overlook. And so my challenge initially, more than just knowing exactly how God wants to be worshiped, I want to challenge you to these things in a worship service that God calls us to, maybe you're not doing these things and that's the first stepping stone, is to do some of these things. God calls us and commands us in scripture to sing, to give, to pray, to read scripture, to, to sit under teaching and to serve one another. If you're not doing these Things. This is not a suggestion. This is a command from God that these are the things that we must be doing. I don't want to be mean, but if your heart right now is saying man, that seems like too much for me. I just want to say I'm so glad that Jesus didn't say that when he was hanging on the cross. I'm so glad that he didn't say man, this is too much for me. When we see what God calls us to do in light of our salvation, it is nothing. It is light. It is easy. It is an easy burden that we bear. It should be a joy. In fact, true worship is not giving God what we prefer. It is giving God what He has prescribed. And that leads us into our second point of application, mistake turn into two. This is something that has become a life principle for me. I learned this phrase when I was playing football. And yet it has spiritual relevancy. Cain didn't bring his best to God. He wasn't given a second chance either. God was trying to correct him. God was trying to tell him, cain, don't let your mistake turn into another. We all will make mistakes. It's part of our nature. We'll probably make a mistake today. But. The call for us is to recognize it, unlike what Cain did, to recognize our sin and to not take it one step further. We always have the option when we are letting in sin. Let us not turn our back to the Holy Spirit who's convicting us and calling us to repent. Don't allow sin to become full grown. This is a call to kill sin while it is still in seed form. I think sometimes we read passages like Genesis 4 and we think, well, sin isn't, you know, that bad because I would never murder. I could never do something like that. I mean, that would be so far outside what I'm capable of. And yet to see that is to minimize the sin that is inside you. Murder is anger all grown up. Adultery is lust all grown up. Stealing, embezzling is greed and envy all grown up. It's a seed form of the later thing. What is easier if you have to kill an oak tree? What is easier to kill it as an acorn or to try to chop it down when it's full grown? We have the ability to walk away from our sin when they're small, but it becomes much harder when they are ruling over us. Cain's story ends in wandering, but the story of the Gospel ends in worship. Genesis 4 shows us how deeply our sin has mastered us. But Advent shows Us how Christ has come master sin. And this is where the Christmas story becomes personal. The baby in a manger didn't come merely to inspire us. If that's all that we get away from Christmas this season, we have totally missed it. He has come to rescue us from the sin that mastered Cain and the sin that threatens to master us. In this story, we see that the ground drops drank Abel's blood. The world learned the cost really how costly sin really is. But centuries later, another son would bleed, not in a field this time, but on a hill. Not as a victim of jealousy, but as a willing sacrifice. Abel's blood marked the beginning of human ruin. Jesus blood marked the beginning of human redemption. Abel's blood cried out for justice. Jesus blood cried out to satisfy that justice. Abel's blood announced the spread of sin and death. Jesus blood announced the end of it. This is the wonder of Advent. The long promised offspring has come. The one whose heel would be bruised so the serpent's head would be crushed. Sin seeks to master us, but God provides a new beginning marked by true worship. Let us worship this morning. Let us stand and would you pray with me as we sing our closing song? Let's stand and pray. Father. God, we thank you for who you are. God, we thank you that you have given us a way to resist our sin, to run from it, to flee from it, to not let it rule over us. Father, I pray that you would convict us of our sin through your Holy Spirit, that we wouldn't feel condemnation because we know that your son was condemned for us. God, help us. Help us to stand and sing in worship longing for your second coming. God, help us to sing this next song. O come, oh come, Emmanuel. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Overboard and Overwhelmed by Grace Prosper Christian Reformed Church Overboard and Overwhelmed by Grace Jonah Mitchell Leach Sunday, November 2, 2025 Audio Overboard and Overwhelmed by Grace Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 34:49 Sermon Transcript Good morning. I am Alex. I serve as a deacon currently, and my wife and I have been attending gospel church for almost three years now. This morning's scripture reading comes from Jonah 1: 1-17. Please turn with me in your Bibles as we hear God's word. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son 'Emma' of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. ' But Jonah rose to flee to Tarsish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Jopah and found a ship going to Tarsish, so he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarsish, away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurled a wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had leaned and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call to your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish. And they said to one another, 'Come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. ' So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. They said to him, 'Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And what people are you? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. And then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, What is this that you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them. Then And then they said to him, 'What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? ' For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. And he said to them, 'Pick me up and hurl me into the sea. Then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore, they called out to the Lord, 'Oh Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood for you. 'Oh Lord, have done as it pleased you. ' So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. This is the word of the Lord. What happens when we run from what we know we're meant to do? This is our big question for this morning. What happens when we run from what we know we're meant to do? Maybe it was forgiving someone. Maybe it was admitting that you were wrong. Maybe it was telling the truth when it would be easier to lie. Maybe it was answering a call from God that scared you. This issue is so pervasive in our human experience that it's been written about in nearly every culture throughout all time in history. One of the most famous examples of this is the play Hamlet. You're probably thinking, Man, I wish I would have read that in high school, too. Yeah, they're here with you. But the reason that we are supposed to read that is that this touches on some human experience that we all have See, in the play, Hamlet's father is murdered, and Hamlet knows who did it. He knows what he needs to do, but he spends most of the play putting it off. He at one point says this, O cursed spite, that I ever was born to set it right. And that, in modern English, means why me? Why this? Why now? We've all been there at the crossroads between, O obedience and comfort between trust and fear. We've all been there like Jonah, standing on the dock, ticket in hand, feeling the tug of the Holy spirit, begging us not to board the boat. And yet, time and time again, we find ourselves aboard. Like Hamlet, who knew what he needed to do but couldn't bring himself to it, Jonah knew exactly what God wanted and ran the other way. And that's the story we see in Jonah Chapter 1. So stay with me. Keep your Bibles open as we look at these three points in Jonah. We'll see that God calls, God corrects, and God appoints. In this chapter, we see a God who saves his disobedient prophet as he flees God's word. So let's look at that first point. God calls verses one through three. Last week, we said that asking good questions of the text is important, and there are some important questions that we need to ask this week as well in this chapter. First would be, who is Jonah? Jonah is our main character. In this story, he fulfills an important role. It's important to understand what he does. He is a prophet, and a prophet in the Old Testament fulfills a certain position in redemptive history. They They speak to people on behalf of God. They are the mouthpiece for God's word. And that's what Jonah is called to do. He is called to speak a prophetic word to Nineveh. And that begs the question, where is Nineveh? Where is Tarsish? Where is Japa? It's important for us to understand these things. It's more than just geography, but it shows the heart of Jonah. Nineveh is in modern day Turkey. Tarshish is in modern day Spain. And there's 2,500 miles that separate the two. Jonah, in running away, runs to the farthest point West in known existence at the time. This is the end of the known world. This is how far Jonah looks to run away. He's not running away to the city, the next door neighbor city. He is going as far away from God as he can. So why was Jonah running? Jonah likely saw Nineveh not just as a sinful city, but as a threat to his people's survival, to Israel's survival. Preaching repentance to the enemy felt like helping the oppressor. And remember, during this time in Israel's history, there's rampant idolatry. Oppression of the poor, people taking advantage of the least of these, and general disobedience to Yahweh. Nineveh would become the capital of Assyria. And later, just after Jonah would invade Israel and siege warfare against the Northern Kingdom. Another question that we need to ask is this. Let's go back. Why would the author say, Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord? ' This is an important question that we can probably ask of almost any text that we read. Why does the author say this in this way? Well, let's look at verse three. Why does he say, 'The presence of the Lord? ' Says this, But Jonah rose to flee to Tarsish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarsish. So he paid the affair and went down into it to go with them to Tarsish, away away from the presence of the Lord. It doesn't just say that Jonah fled what God wanted or even fled God. It says that Jonah fled the presence of the Lord. We know that we cannot get away from God's omnipresence. We can't run away from that. But we can resist intimacy with God. That's what Jonah is doing here. The reason that this word is used is because Jonah doesn't just dislike what God's asking him to do. Jonah doesn't want anything to do with God. Jonah hates God's heart. The main idea of this book that we talked about last week is Do you pursue God's Heart? Jonah isn't struggling whether or not God is real. He doesn't have doubts about his faith. He isn't questioning who he believes in. He hates who he knows. Jonah doesn't have a location problem. Jonah has a Lordship problem. And part of this problem is perspective. Jonah believes that he understands reality better than God does. So Jonah flees from God, from the presence of God. He gets in a boat and sails to the end of the known world. God called Jonah to Nineveh, a place that Jonah was saying, God, anywhere but there. Where is that for us? Where in your heart today might God be calling you to that you would say, God, anywhere but there? Maybe is it to a new job or to be honest with someone about something that might offend them, but it's important for them to hear. Maybe to confess a sin struggle you have or to serve people who annoy you or to be kind to people that you feel like you don't need to be kind to. Where would you say, Anywhere but there, God? Rather than running to God, Jonah runs away. Rather than trusting God. Jonah flees. Yet God isn't done with Jonah, and that's what we'll see in this next section, is a God who corrects. Verses 14 through 16. God's correction isn't not an act of anger, but an act of love. So let's see what happens in this section. God creates a storm so strong, it's looking to sink the ship. So the sailors or mariners start throwing cargo overboard. It says that the mariners were afraid. I was hoping that this was a prophetic word for the tigers this year, but that didn't seem to come true. Throwing the cargo overboard doesn't work. It doesn't stabilize the boat. And so they wake up everybody on board and they find out that Jonah has been sleeping, and so they wake him up and bring him on the main deck. And they cast lots, or this is an old-fashioned way of rolling dice, and it falls on Jonah. They ask, Jonah, who are you? Jonah says, 'I'm a Hebrew. I fear the Lord. My God controls the Earth and the sea. Jonah gets caught doing something as someone who follows the Lord that isn't very fearful of God. I don't know if you've ever been caught doing something as a Christian that wasn't so Christian-like. I, as a pastor, run into this maybe more than the average person. This typically comes out when I play sports. Sometimes I'm a little bit competitive. Whether it's cards or the World Series, I'm I'm pretty competitive. Sometimes I can smack talk and I'll play sports with someone and talk to them after the game. My friend will come out and rat me out and say something like, For a pastor, you played pretty good. They'll look at me like, Man, you said some stuff out there and I have to go, Yeah, you're right. I did. It's a little bit embarrassing. I don't know if you've ever been in that situation, but... Jonas in this situation. He looks foolish because he's acting foolish. The solution In verse 12, he says, To throw him overboard. So the mariners, they don't want to do this right away, so they try to row back to shore, but that doesn't work. So they know what they have to do. They know that throwing him overboard will stop the storm. So that's what they do. They throw him overboard. And as soon as Jonah enters into the water, the storm stops. And as soon as the storm stops, the mariners start to worship God. They offer sacrifices. This incident shows us where Jonah's heart is. Rather than repenting, rather than saying, God, I'm sorry. I get that if I don't turn back now, everyone If someone's going to die, he says, Throw me overboard. I'd rather drowned. I'd rather die than do what you want me to do. More than that, I'd rather die than be aligned with you, then be caught on your team. But like I said, God is correcting Jonah. God's correction, God correcting us, is there to save us from sin. See, sin matters to God. It's more than just breaking his rules. I think as parents, we can get these things convoluted because oftentimes our kids break rules, the rules that we make for them, and they can be frustrating to us. It can absolutely be frustrating. It is disobedient. It's wrong when they do that. But there's a difference between when kids disobey and when kids do something dangerous. The response can be different. You can be frustrated when your kid doesn't listen to you, when you ask them to stay in bed over and over and over. That doesn't happen in our house, but I can understand how that might be frustrating. But it's different than when your kid does something dangerous. If your kid climbs up on a ladder that they're not supposed to and slips. You don't run and scold them. You throw your arms around them and say, This is why we have a rule for this. There's a difference as parents between breaking a rule and doing something dangerous. But to God, these things are the same. To God, sin is dangerous. It's dangerous to our soul. God's correction isn't out of anger. It's not an act of anger. It's an act of love. Often when God creates a storm in our lives, it's an act of mercy, not an act of anger. And that's what we'll see in this next section. We see God's love, grace, and mercy as God appoints in verse 17, God sends a fish to swallow him, to swallow Jonah. And we need to see this here in this passage, that God God could have just not done anything. God could have left Jonah alone, and Jonah would have died. Jonah asked to be thrown overboard, not as some step out in faith, knowing, I know God's going to send me a big old fish that's going to save me? No. Jonah knew what he was doing, yet God wasn't done with him. The word 'appoint' will come up a couple of times in this story, mostly in chapter 4 after this, but it happens here in verse 17. It's important for us to understand this word, understand what it's trying to communicate. God wants us to see that he is in control, that he is sovereign over everything. The Heidelberg Catechism says it best, What do you understand by the providence of God? Providence is the Almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures And so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty, all things, in fact, come to us, not by chance, but by his fatherly hand. God wants us to see. God wants Jonah to see that he's the one who takes care of Jonah, that he's the one who sustains Jonah, he's the one who saves Jonah. God is reeling Jonah back in, out of his disobedience. Most of the time when you hear a sermon on this passage, we get to this point, and a pastor will say, This is God judging Jonah. This is God disciplining him, this is God bringing him back from his disobedience through punishment. And that's absolutely true, that this is discipline, this is judgment, but it's also saving. I don't think we talk about that as much. Jonah could have died. God didn't need to do anything. He saved Jonah by sending him this fish. And these two ideas, judgment and salvation go hand in hand throughout the entire biblical narrative, throughout the entire biblical story. God is glorified in salvation through judgment. Whenever there's salvation, God is judging. This happens in the Garden Eden. When Adam and Eve, they will surely die by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And when they do this, God doesn't put them to death immediately. He saves them. Though he judges them, though he kicks them out of the Garden of Eden. Instead of getting what they deserved, God saved them because he wasn't done with them. And instead of getting what Jonah deserved, God saved him because he wasn't done with him. And that leads us into our main idea. Our main idea for this text is to fear God and to run to him. Fear God and run to him. Remember that we are supposed to do the opposite of what Jonah did. Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord. Jonah writes this book to plea with us, to beg us to run into it. We have to recognize Like I said before, that this problem with Jonah is a perspective one. We have to recognize that God's perspective is so much more infinite than ours. If we're lucky, we'll get 100 years on Earth. So far, I have 30 years of perspective on this Earth. I know a lot of you guys were wondering about my age. I wanted to slip that in there. I'm 30. I've got 30 years on this Earth, and yet I have the goal, Jonah has the gall, we have the gall to question God or to say to God, God, if you only gave me the chance, I think I could bring out a better outcome. God has seen eternity past. He was there eternally before he created anything. He's going to be there. He's seen eternity future. He's seen how the world ends. He's seen what happens next. God has seen every second of every minute of every day, of every month, of every year since creation. And we sit here and say, God, I think that with my limited perspective, I actually might have a chance to show you something here. No. This passage isn't just about being good because the consequences are bad. That's not the point of the sermon. That's not the point of this passage. It's not to obey because God might discipline you. He might send you a fish to swallow you if you're disobedient. That's not the point. The point of this passage is to fear God and to run to him, not from him. That leads us into our point of application, one of our two. This ought to change the reality of how we parent. We cannot parent children to obey just because the consequences are unpleasant or are harsh. We parent our children to obey because it's right and good for them to obey. We parent our children to love what is good, not just to love what is easy. It's easy to teach children the punishment game, right? And I was guilty of this for a long time until Elizabeth, my wife, helped me see the danger of it, right? The punishment game is teaching your children to obey because the punishment is going to be uncomfortable or it's going to not be fun for the kids. But if we do this, what we're doing is we're teaching our children to find the path of least resistance rather than the path of obedience. And this bleeds into our children's spiritual life. It bleeds into how they see God. If we just teach them to do the path of least resistance, that's why people come to church only when things are hard. That's why we turn to God in prayer only when things are hard. We don't come just because it's right. We don't go before him in prayer just because life is good. We go because we need something from him. It teaches our children to be sneaky, to get away with what you can get away with if no one's going to hold you accountable. That has devastating effects for our spiritual life. We obey because obedience is good. We obey because we love what's right Punishments are necessary. They are a necessary way to reinforce that belief. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a gentle parent at all. But discipline when punishments cannot be the primary motivator. Again, otherwise, we're teaching children to be sneaky. Jonah didn't like God's decision, and he threw a fit. God's here to show us in this book, to show Jonah that obedience in action isn't good enough. We need obedience in heart. We need a heart change. This has to be built on love and trust. God wants to show Jonah that he knows what's best for him. And we need to show our children that what we want for them is best. This book, God could have come down and just said, Jonah, I know what's right, and you need to listen. You need to do this. You have no reason to question who I am. You have no reason to disobey, and you're going to obey. He absolutely had every right to do that. And yet at the end of the book, we see God gently asking Jonah questions. We have every right as parents to come down hard, but that doesn't lead to true heart change. Being gentle with our children will. This leads us to our last point of application. It's this, that we need to trust Godly men and women in our lives around us. Too many times as a pastor, I see people making horrible choices with no input from the people that love them most. The reason that we do this, and the reason that we don't seek out people who love us, Godly men and women around us, is because we know what's wrong. We know what we're doing is wrong. We don't want someone to come and correct us. In my last church, part of my role was to to oversee the Benevolence Fund, which meant that at least twice a week people would come in to request benevolence, and 99% of the time, those people weren't in. They weren't a member of a church. They weren't in a church home. I wrestled with that. I was just baffled that that was the case. In the more and more cases that I saw, I had to come to the conclusion that being in a gospel community, being in a part of people who love you, who care for you, who can speak into your life, that that was a correlation for these people. These people didn't have people in their lives counseling them against horrific decisions that would lead them into terrible situations. That's one of the reasons that I'm asking you guys to have this, to have godly men and women in your life, around you. Find a friend who can offer you wise counsel. Or this is just a tip for men. Men, just ask your wives when you feel like you don't know. I know we say that as a joke, and sometimes we talk about our wives as nagging, But I think the reality is that as husband, sometimes we just don't want accountability. We don't want the wisdom that our wife has to offer us. If you don't have anyone, if you can't think of anyone in your life that can offer you Godly counsel, I want to take that away from you. You might have seen that in the newsletter, in the email that goes out in the last couple of weeks. But pastoral counseling is an offer that I offer to anyone here. It's something that's free. It's something that historically the church has done for 2,000 years. I think we're too fast sometimes to go to therapists or counselors when there are sometimes spiritual matters that we need to. I'm not saying that going to a counselor, going to a therapist is a bad thing. In fact, it's an important thing in different stages of our life. But some things can get handled by free counseling from a pastor. Not only is it a good thing that you'd get good biblical counsel, but maybe you'll save some money, too. I don't know. There's two for one there. As we come to a close, we talked about this this reality of salvation in judgment going hand in hand throughout the Bible. We see this all throughout God's word. This happened in the Garden of Eden. This happened to the Egyptians. They were judged through the Pharaoh's army. They were judged through the Red Sea to save Israel. We ultimately see this on the cross. We ultimately see this on the cross that judgment came down, not on us, but on Jesus, so that way we could be saved. We see this in this story. God hurled a great storm at Jonah. He hurled a great... He hurled his son at the cross. Jonah was thrown into a sea to calm a temporary storm, and Jesus was thrown into death to calm an eternal one. This is why we fear God. We We fear God because he has the power to crush us, and he doesn't. This is why we love him, because he's the only one powerful enough to save us. My question for you today is, where are you running? What are you running from? Where are you running from God in your life? I promise you, Prosper Church, the storm that you're fearing is the one that he wants to save you from. Fear God and run to him. Would you stand with me as we pray and we prepare our hearts for our closing songs? Father God, thank you for who you are, that you are the one who saves us, that you sent your son to be judged in our place, that we would not have to bear that, that we weren't the ones who were crushed for our iniquity, but you sent your son to be crushed for our iniquity. Father God, I pray as we respond in worship for who you are, that coming off of the heels of Reformation Day, that we would worship knowing that you are our only comfort in life and in death, and that we would proclaim that truth throughout all of our life. God, we love you. We love to do your will, so help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

A Gospel Worth Defending Prosper Christian Reformed Church A Gospel Worth Defending Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, February 1, 2026 Audio A Gospel Worth Defending Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 55:38 Sermon Transcript Introduction We're in a longer section of scripture today, but in order to get through this in eight weeks, we are going to have to cover some longer sections. This is all one cohesive thought. This is leading us one place in this passage. What we're going to see in this is one gospel, defended by faith and unified in Christ. There's a familiar story in scripture that parallels what we're talking about here. It might not seem like it at the beginning, but it's a story of Pilate. When Pilate washes his hands, it's this innocuous moment in the crucifixion narrative. Pilate knows that Jesus has not done anything wrong, and yet he fears the people. The people have become dangerous, and so he tries to compromise. He tries to keep his job. He tries to keep the peace and try to keep his conscience clean at the same time. So he calls for a bowl, dips his hands in it as if to say, This isn't This isn't my fault. This isn't my responsibility. I'm innocent of this, but there's the tragedy in it. He's trying to perform and to become clean without actually being clean. This isn't just a pilot problem. This isn't just a Roman governor's issue. This is an issue for all of us. This is a human heart problem. We feel dirty. We feel dirty when shame comes up. And yet we don't run to God. We often run to something that we can do ourselves. What makes you feel clean? I'm not talking about a shower. I'm talking about the things we do to make ourselves inside feel clean. Most of us have ways to feel clean. Sometimes it's out loud, but oftentimes it's quiet. It's in our head. For some of us, it's having a good week, doing the things that we said we were going to do and not doing the things that we know we're not supposed to do. For some of us, it's being needed or being right. For others, it's comparison or religious effort. And you can tell what it is by what you do when you fail. Do you run to God? Or do you wait to feel respectable again? Do you wait until, Well, I better get my life back together. I better try to clean myself before I go back to God. When you pray, do you feel like you need to bring receipts to God? When someone exposes you, does it crush you? Not because it hurts or they were wrong or you were wrong, but because you feel dirty again. Galatians isn't mainly a warning about open rebellion. It is a warning about religious drift, about Jesus plus something. In the moment your conscience needs something besides Jesus alone to feel clean, that's the sign that we've accepted a counterfeit gospel, one that isn't truly the gospel we find in scripture. So the question is, what makes you feel clean? And Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us, so keep your Bibles open to Galatians 1 and 2. We're going to see these three movements in this this letter, in this section of this letter. Divine origins of Paul's gospel Gospel unity without gospel addition Gospel truth confronted publicly What we see in this passage is Paul saying, If you want a clean conscience, you need a gospel with a clean source, one that comes from God and not from man. Divine origins of Paul's gospel Why does Paul go through the trouble of explaining who he is and essentially trying to tell the Galatian church, Hey, I'm an apostle. Why is he putting so much effort into this? It seems like a weird... I remember reading this for the first time as a kid and going, This feels like a boring section of this letter. Usually Paul's are filled with good information, and who cares that he's an apostle, right? Well, it's really important here. Paul says this for one reason. If the gospel comes from God, then churches in Galatia, you can't edit it. This is from God. It's not from you. If it's from man, you can pick and choose what you want. But if it's from God, you have to take the whole thing and you have to believe it. There were teachers pressuring the Gentile believer, these Gentile believers at this church, appealing to Jerusalem, to some authority coming from Jerusalem. Later on, we'll see that these were men coming from Jerusalem who said that they were coming from James. And you have to think how persuasive that must have been, right? These men in the Galatian churches going, Man, these are men coming from the brother of our savior, Jesus. These people must know what they're talking about. They were telling the Galatian churches that they needed to add on actions, adding on rituals on top of the gospel. Specifically, in order for a non-Jewish man to become a Christian, he must be circumcised. And this is why Paul is saying all of this. Paul is saying, I saw Jesus. I saw the truth. He revealed to me the gospel. Anyone who comes and tells you something different is telling you a lie. These men have distorted something. Paul says, I'm not here to say something that's going to make you happy. Look at Galatians 1:10 with me. Galatians 1:10 says this, For am I now seeking the approval of man or God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Paul is saying, I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to be a servant of Christ. I'm here to serve the church. I'm here not to make friends, but to make brothers and sisters. Paul is making it clear not only what the gospel is, but Galatians 1:11-12, For I would have you know brothers or brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul stacks three be claims on top of each other. This is not man's gospel, not received by man, and not taught by man. This is not a preference issue. This is a source issue. Paul then says, If you're wondering whether I made this up, if you're wondering whether or not this is true, look at my previous life. I used to be called Saul. That's who I was. I wasn't spiritually curious. I was violently oppressive of the church. I wasn't on some spiritual journey. I was on a mission to destroy the church, to persecute the church. I wasn't drifting from any tradition. I was exhaling in it. I was the best Galatians 1:13-14 say that he was persecuting the church. He was advancing in Judaism beyond his peers, more zealous for the traditions of his fathers than anyone else around him. In other words, if Christianity were just another version of the law, Paul would have loved this. But it's not. It's not law with gospel sprinkled on top of it. This is grace that radically transformed, and it radically transformed Saul into Paul. Paul wants to tell the churches in Galatia that he didn't make this up, that he didn't hear it from somebody else, that he's not a disciple of the Apostles. He's not like the men that came from James or said that they came from James. He's not someone who is discipled. He was not someone who was taught what to believe. He says, I heard this from Jesus himself. Jesus taught me this. What I know comes from God and God alone. And that's why he goes to great lengths saying, I didn't go to another person. I went to Arabia. I went to all these places. I spent 14 years before talking to anyone. No one taught me this. I was preaching this And what I was preaching, I heard directly from God. This is why Paul was so adamant in what we saw last week, that if anyone else comes to you to preach to you another gospel, whether it's an angel, or if I come back later and I teach you something that's contrary to what this is, let them be cursed, let them be anathema or condemned the gospel. It doesn't matter if they're from James or not. If they're preaching something contrary to what is true, they're preaching a different gospel. Paul's argument is simple. You cannot edit the gospel that you did not author. This message didn't come from a committee, didn't come from a tradition. It came from Jesus Christ. That's what makes us different from Catholic churches. Catholic churches hold scripture up the same with tradition. They believe that they're the ones who put the Bible together rather than what we would say is men recognize scripture. They recognize God's word, and we collected it, we bound it together. We didn't invent it. We cannot add scripture. We hold God's word to be the most authoritative thing here on Earth because it is God's word. This message isn't put together by man. The gospel wasn't authored by a committee or a smart group of people. It came from Christ alone. And the proof is Paul himself. The gospel didn't fit his old life. It demolished it. It radically transformed it. I mean, he had an incredible encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road in Acts 9:18. Here in Galatians 1:15, he says, But when he who had set me apart before I was born, in order that I might preach, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. Notice what Paul doesn't say. He doesn't say, Well, I was in a really spiritually dark place, and I found God. I went out and found him. No, he says, God set me apart. God called me. God revealed his son to me. And that's not Paul trying to brag about some spiritual achievement. That's God bringing a dead Dead man, bed, pulse of life. That's what Paul is talking about. The point isn't one, how important I am. I'm really special. Paul is saying God is the way. Jeremiah, he did it, initiates salvation. He's the one who initiates calling He always has. He always will. He did it with me. And what he says here, he'll do it with you. In fact, his call and what he says here is so similar to what we see in Jeremiah 1:5. It says this, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. Before I appointed you. And he knew profit to the nations. Paul's not waiting for a confirmation. This was that he was called. He was set apart Before his birth, he knew that he made him for, he was supposed to do. Looking back on his life, this is what God had meant. He went and... He didn't go and get confirmation from other people. He went and preached the gospel that Jesus had given him, and that this had been the plan from the beginning, that the gospel would go to the Gentiles, that the gospel would go to the nations. From Genesis 12, the covenant with Abraham was all about being a blessing to the nations. Paul's preaching then led to people glorifying God. That's what we see in Galatians 1:24, and they After he's talking about his former life, he said, You glorify God because of me. When you response that you get, share your testimony, when you talk about God, is that the response that you get, that people glorify God because of what you said. This is what our words about Jesus should do to other people. And this is why, as a pastor, it sometimes drives me crazy when I'll ask people to maybe share a testimony or to do some form of public speaking, and they say, I can't do it. I would be terrible at it. Well, in verse Galatians 1:24, the passage shows us something really important. It doesn't say here that they thought that Paul was so eloquent or that he had a neat story. Or Paul, they didn't marvel at cool in some way. They glorified God because of him. They didn't compliment Paul. They didn't marvel at how smart or how well-spoken he was. They glorified God because of the gospel he complained, because of what he was saying about God. When the gospel is real, it doesn't end in applause for the person speaking it. It ends in worship for the savior. That's what sermons are about. That's what makes a sermon different than a TED talk or a motivational speech. A motivational speech leaves a TED talk, might think to... With a set of to-do lists, maybe a worshiping. Feel inspired. A sermon leaves you worrying to you, inspiring to worship the God who's revealed this message to you. The question isn't whether you've had an experience and whether you've had a cool enough story to tell people. The question is, did communicate that gospel to people? People will want to worship that God. Gospel Unity Without Gospel Addition Paul goes to Jerusalem to defend the gospel and to guard unity. He's not checking his notes. He's not trying to compare what's What's going on here. He's confronting a threat. Let's look at verse one and two in chapter two. He said, I went up because of a revelation and set before them, though privately before those who seemed influential, the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain. He then talks about he went on for 14 years. Paul wasn't looking for permission. He was protecting the church. He's not going to Jerusalem to see the Apostles, to see if he was right. He was going to ask, Will we be unified? I firmly believe that Paul, if he would have got there, and even the Apostles had been preaching something different, he would have confronted them saying, No, I got a revelation. This is what the gospel says. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. But Paul puts his gospel, the gospel that he has been preaching on the table, he says, It's Christ alone. The good news of the gospel is believing in Jesus, is that Christ came to be your substitute, that he died in your place. Not so that way you could add things onto the gospel, not so that you could have a pleasant life, not that you could be healthy, wealthy, and prosperous. He didn't do this so that way you wouldn't have to go to hell and that you could get into heaven. That's not the gospel. The gospel is that we get God. The gospel is that we get to have the savior. It is Christ alone. So that way we could be declared clean in his presence, not by our effort, but by his finished work. John Piper has this to say, The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. The gospel is about getting God. Salvation is the cherry on top. God is the Sunday. It is the thing that we strive for. That is the price of belief of our salvation. Paul wanted to meet with the leaders to make sure that they were believing the truth, because even if the leaders added one thing on top of the gospel. The mission to the nations would have been collapsed. It would have collapsed into confusion. The problem that was happening in the churches was one of ethnicity. It was about Jews and Gentiles. The good news of the gospel that Paul is proclaiming is that it is for all kinds of people. There's nothing more that you have to do. You do not have to become a Jew in order to be a Christian. The good news is for all kinds of people, Greeks, Romans, people from Africa, people from China, Democrats, Republicans, Michigan State fans, and those God-forsaken Michigan fans. Yeah, thank you. Paul is preaching. This is for all kinds of people. You don't have to be a Jew to be saved. So Paul brings a living test with him. He brings Titus. This is what we see in verses three through five, that Titus is a Greek. He's uncircumstised, and yet he's a real believer. What will happen? That's the question that Paul is bringing. He's bringing Titus along to answer. What will happen? Is Jesus good enough for him? So let's look at this, verses three through five, or three through four, and then we'll get to five in just a second. But even Titus, who is with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek, yet because of false brothers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus so that they might bring us into slavery. Notice the strategy here. They don't deny Jesus. They're trying to add to him. Christostom says this about this passage, Their object was not to teach good doctrine, but to subjugate and enslave them, enslave Paul and Timothy. They call it a deeper devotion. They call it more steps of obedience. Paul calls it something simple. He calls it slavery. That's what it is. This also paints one One of the strangest word pictures that we see in, I think, all of scripture, that Titus, in order to find out who he was, that he wasn't a Jew, somebody had to, they say, they spied on him, and I can only imagine what that took to do that. But I think that's just a crazy word picture that is going on here. Any gospel that needs your contribution is not a deeper gospel. It is a different gospel entirely. The Belgian Confession says something really clear about this, and I wanted to put this up here. "To say that Christ is not enough is a most enormous blasphemy, for it then would follow that Jesus Christ is only half a savior." We do not believe in half a savior. Christ Alone is what we proclaim. Christ alone is what Paul wants the Galatian churches and us to know. We are saved by grace alone through Christ alone. We were brought to him by faith alone. Galatians 1:5 says this, To them we did not yield in submission, even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. Titus was not a Jew. He was Greek, and yet he is a Christian. Christians don't have extras that they have to add on top of the gospel in order to receive grace. This is why the Apostles accept Paul as an apostle, because Paul refuses not even for a moment. He refuses to waver on this gospel because one moment sets a precedent, and precedents become prisons. They enslave us. The gospel is good news that cannot be wavered on. Even in a situation where Paul could have tried to appeal, tried to seem more influential to seemingly a group of people who had some influence. Paul doesn't try to cut a compromise. He stands firm on the gospel. Paul is defending the faith, preserving the truth, and preserving correct doctrine. I think sometimes we talk about correct doctrine, and we feel like it's cold, it's stuffy, or it's boring altogether. But it isn't. Doctrine is what we're talking about here. Having correct doctrine is so important to our faith. Our faith is like a map, or I guess today it's really more like a GPS. I don't know how to read a map anymore. I think it's just a generation It's a professional thing. Anytime I go into a city, about every two years, I go to a conference down in Indianapolis. When I'm down there, I lose all sense of direction. I'm usually pretty directionally aware. I'm facing north right now. I feel like I am a walking compass sometimes. But when I get into Indianapolis, I am lost. I have no idea where I'm going. I absolutely live by my GPS. If I don't have my GPS in front of me, I could be going from the same hotel to the same Convention Center, and I'm lost. If I don't have that, I'm gone. I need it. A GPS or a map helps you get to where you're going. That's the point of it. But it would be silly for me to take my GPS out and put it on the ground or take a map and say, Okay, I'm back at the hotel now. It doesn't make any sense. The GPS is not the destination. The map isn't the destination. It helps us get to where we're going. It's a lot like doctrine. I think oftentimes we want a faith that is emotion-based. It is spirituality without doctrine. But good doctrine, it's like the phone. It isn't enough, right? I I can't stand on this and say, I'm there. I can't only believe in good doctrine and have a good faith. Doctrine points us. It gives us the directions to go to get to where we're supposed to be. It gives us the direction to get to an authentic faith. And yet, if we don't have good doctrine, if we don't have good directions, we will never arrive there. We will never arrive there without having good doctrine. Doctrine isn't a cage. It's a map that gets us to God. Augustine says this, The law was given in order that grace might be sought. Grace was given in order that the law might be fulfilled. Good doctrine shows us how we pursue grace. Truth without spirituality is just... Or Without truth, spirituality is just motion. It's no direction. It's just wandering aimlessly. We won't get to our destination. Bad doctrine doesn't just lead to bad worship. You'd think that that's what it would be. If we had bad doctrine, we'd get bad worship. Bad doctrine leads to a different God. It gives us directions to a different God altogether. Satan tries to use this against us. Satan tries to make us believe. That doctrine's boring, that it's cold and stuffy, and sometimes maybe that's on us for making it seem that way. Doctrine is not boring at all. Doctrine is what gets us to see the deepest glories of the The Creator of the universe, the God who saved us. Doctrine is not boring at all. It is more than information. It is a reality that allows us to see the infinite God of the universe, the infinite God of the Bible. It is beautiful. Bad doctrine leads to a different gospel all together. A different gospel that says either everyone's saved, that sin really isn't important and you can do whatever you want, or it leads a gospel that says, yeah, you need to be saved, but it's really based on what you do. It's really based on how you earn it. If the gospel includes your performance, then you will never know if you've done enough. But if the gospel is Christ alone, you'll finally be able to breathe. It'll give you rest. I think that's something that we need, something that we don't realize that the gospel can give us rest. And yet, no one is immune to drifting from the gospel, not even Peter. Gospel truth confronted publicly Paul could stand up to Peter, the man who walked on water with Jesus, the man who walked for three years following Jesus around, the man who saw our savior die, the man who saw the resurrected Christ. And he can confront him because Paul says he stood condemned in Galatians 2:11. This is pretty serious. Peter or as Paul calls him Cephas, because I think he was acting more like Cephas than Peter, he was distorting the gospel. And yet he wasn't demanding that people become Jewish in order to become Christians. All Peter was doing was saying there were certain Christians that couldn't sit with them. It seems like a middle school drama that you can't sit with me at lunch, and you can, but it's more than that. He's distorting the gospel because Peter drew back when he feared the circumcision party. He feared man. And that fear of man can even make someone like an apostle. Gospel, acts like Christ isn't good enough. Peter didn't verbally speak and preach a new gospel. He wasn't adding anything verbally to the gospel. He was practicing a new gospel. He didn't say that Gentiles aren't saved, he acted like they weren't clean. The problem was in eating, the reason that this is such a big problem is that Jews believed that Gentiles were unclean and that they couldn't eat together. And if they ate together, that they would make all the food unclean, they would make those Jewish people unclean. But if we're saved by Christ alone, if we are truly saved, This shouldn't be an issue. This is why this is such a critical issue. This is why Peter is not just making a bad choice. He stood condemned. He acted like they weren't clean enough to get close. This is Antioch, where Gentiles and Jews would eat together, one family united in Christ. And yet then pressure comes from these men, the circumcision party, which just branding-wise is a horrible name, but just doesn't seem like a party at all to me. These people weren't denying Jesus. Instead, they were just insisting that Gentiles needed an upgrade. Instead of standing up for the gospel, Peter blinks. In that culture, meals communicated belonging. Who was in, who was out, who was clean, who was unclean. The table drew the line. Peter, in doing this, had denied the gospel, essentially setting up two different kinds of churches. There's those who are really in, the Jews, and those who are just barely in, the Gentiles. Yeah, they're both saved, but we know who really God loves. In essence, Peter is saying, God is good, Christ is good, but not quite good enough to make you truly clean enough to eat with us. Peter's withdrawing wasn't just hurting people's feelings. It was rewriting the basis for belonging. It said that Christ, yeah, he can forgive you, but you must do other things in order to qualify for his love. Paul Paul says that there were more people that joined in in this hypocrisy. Even Barnabas got carried away. When leaders of the church falter, when they move away from sound teaching, whole churches crumble, whole churches move with them. So when Peter withdraw, he wasn't just avoiding tension. He was preaching a new gospel, but with his feet. That's what Galatians 2:14 says, But when I saw their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel. Essentially, that The word that says in step here was ortho padeo. Ortho means ortho, meaning straight, and padeo, like podiatrist, like a foot doctor. It means feet. Paul is saying these people were not just doing something. Their walk was wrong. In Greek culture, your walk, how you walked, it wasn't just a physical action. It was how you lived your life. It was living your life straight, living your life right. Paul says the conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel. Their conduct, meaning being not in step with the gospel, literally meant that they weren't walking straight. Their behavior made the gospel look crooked. And so Paul confronts him publicly because what he was doing was public. Peter was such an important figure. He an apostle. People looked to him to do the right thing. Paul says that he opposed Peter in front of all of them because the whole church was watching the gospel being played out. When something happens and it's private, we absolutely should confront people privately. But if I come up here and start preaching a different gospel, if someone falls publicly, doing something public, public in making the gospel vain, in adding to the gospel, in making it a different gospel, it needs to be confronted publicly. Everyone needs to hear the truth that what was said wasn't true. When you add anything to Christ, you don't just burden consciences, you break fellowship. And that was what was happening in this church. When you do this, you rebuild the wall that Jesus died to tear down. So in denying this, Peter has stood condemned. So Paul defends the gospel because he was defending the church. Main Idea: One gospel, received from God and defended without compromise The gospel is worth defending because it's not a minor doctrine. It's how dead people get transformed from death to life. It's how people go from guilty sinners into being declared righteous. It's how outsiders become full members of the family. The danger in Galatians is not that they stopped talking about Jesus, it's that they started adding to him. Jesus plus circumcision, grace plus law, faith plus proof. The moment you add anything to Christ on the basis of your standing right with God is the moment you don't add an upgrade to Christianity, you replace it, you take away from it. Paul doesn't call it a replacement that leads to injury or unhealth. This isn't something minor. Paul says that this leads to slavery. It takes you captive. Martin Luther, in commenting on this passage, says that we should respect Paul. We should follow Paul in his teaching. We should honor our parents, honor our rulers, even our pastors. But if any authority asks you to do anything, to bend the gospel, Paul is telling us here, we absolutely will not obey them. We obey Christ. We have a higher authority because the gospel outranks every voice, including our own. This isn't just a controversy for theologians. This isn't just some niche theological passage that's interesting to Bible nerds like me. This is a daily temptation salvation for Christians because our hearts love a plus religion. It makes us feel like we're in control, that we can take control and we can say, God, aren't you so glad that I did the right thing this week? Aren't you happy with me? It feels good to be able to say that. Yet if that was the basis for our salvation, we would never be able to be saved. Anything that we lean on to feel secure before God becomes a counterfeit. And so before we talk about false Gospels, we need to ask what plus religion is sneaking into our own heart, and that leads us into our application. Application 1.Refusing respectable slavery The danger in the Galatian church isn't that people stop using Jesus-centered language. It's that they started using something besides Jesus to feel clean, to feel safe, to feel accepted. So we need to watch the plus that tends to feel normal for us, especially in a place like this. It's not usually loud. It's not rebellion. It's not overtly a denial of the Trinity or a denial of Christ's Deity, but it's respectable substitutes. Things like competence, saying, I'm good. I've got life handled. Finding confidence in our reliability. I do my part. I don't rock the boat. Or maybe we use theology like armor. I believe the right thing. I'm informed. I can spot theological error. Maybe it's our busyness. I'm okay because I'm involved. I'm serving, I'm helping, I'm producing. Or maybe it's being the strong one. I'm okay because I don't need help. I'm not messy like anyone else. Or maybe it's comparison. I'm okay because I'm not like those other people that I see. None of these things are automatically bad. But when they become our confidence, when they start functioning like our own righteousness, that's when they become deadly. So here's the test. When you fail this week, when you blow it this week, what will you do? Will you run to Christ like he's enough? Or Will you pull back? Will you pull back trying to be clean yourself? And then when you feel clean enough, then you can go to God. Respectable slavery sounds spiritual, but it's hiding. It's hiding like Adam and Eve did in the garden. Well, I'll pray when I'm doing better. I'll go to God once I've calmed down. I'll feel close again when I've proven that I'm not that person. That's Jesus plus. That's Jesus plus a cleaner week, plus control, plus proof. And yet the gospel says something opposite. You come to Christ to be cleansed, not because you already are. Jesus has cleansed you. You cannot clean yourself enough to go before him. He's the one who has to clean us. So we must refuse respectable slavery when we see it in our life. Repent quickly. Stop performing for God. Receive mercy as a verdict. And make it right when you can. Apologize. Ask for forgiveness and take the next steps of obedience not as a way to pay back God, but because it's in devotion to him. A church is protected not by pretending we're clean, but by being the people who know where our cleanliness comes from. That leads us into our next point. 2.Practice table fellowship on purpose Practice hospitality. Now, what happens in the heart eventually shows up in our life. It shows up in our relationships, in the life of the church. In Galatians, Peter didn't preach a different gospel. He practiced one. He didn't make a doctrinal statement. He made a relational decision. He pulled back from the table and distanced himself. That was the preaching. It said, You're not quite clean enough. You're not quite one of us. And That's why table fellowship matters. It's because the table is where the gospel becomes visible. The question isn't only what do we confess, it's what do we practice. What does our life altogether communicate? What does the life of our church altogether communicate? There's a repeating danger in churches like ours. We can say everyone's welcome. We can put it on our website. We can put it in our bulletin, we can say it all the time. We can say everyone's welcome. But if we don't live that out, it doesn't really matter what we say. The patterns of our life communicate something something strong without maybe even intending to mean that. The issue is so subtle. The hidden social barriers, the relational things that make people feel like outsiders even before they get a chance to sit in the room with us. Belonging can quietly start feeling like you have to already know how things work here. You have to already know the right people. You have to know the names and the stories and the rhythms. You have to keep conversations light and pleasant. You can't bring your complicated, your messiness into a place like this. That's what it can feel like. No one writes up these rules, but When you're from the outside, you can feel it. You can feel it. It feels like maybe Christ welcomes me, but maybe I'm not sure as people do. There are people in our church, people in our community that desperately need to hear the gospel. There is something beautiful about this church. It's one of the reasons that we're here. There is a sense of family here that That is unlike any church that I've been a part of. And yet the danger is that we start to love the people so much here that we forget about the people out there. There are going to be people who visit our church. Being people who are radically transformed by the gospel makes it so that way we invite them in, that we don't make them feel like second-class Christians when they walk in. It means that we choose closeness over comfort, that we walk towards people that we might walk past normally, that we interrupt our default cycle. It doesn't mean that we can't talk to people that we love, that we've grown up with, that we've known forever, but we intentionally take a break from that sometimes to talk to people we've never seen before. I think that we should be a church that if you walk in here, that you've never been here before, that it's impossible to leave here without meeting people here. That it would be impossible to sit in here and walk out without knowing somebody. That we ask real questions more than, How are you doing? But how can I pray for you? And really waiting to hear truthful answers to that. If we're going to be a church that welcomes people, we have to live with messy. We can't pretend that we have it all together. None of our lives are together. People have messiness. That's part of church. That's part of the beauty of the church. We're a bunch of broken people that got redeemed by Christ, and we could live that faith out together. We don't have to pretend that we have it all together. We don't have to require that people come in already clean. Let the table preach what our mouths confess, that Christ is enough, enough to cleanse sinners, enough to unite strangers, enough to bring us together. We are a family here, united in one faith, united in Christ, not united in that we grew up here or whatever it is, that we were from the right family. We are united in one thing. This is one church made up of one family, not one church made up of multiple families, made up of multiple different groups of people. I want to push us on this because we have something so beautiful that ties us together. When the church practices that fellowship, it'll be impossible for us to not preach the truth of the gospel. Our actions will communicate it. When we preach the gospel verbally, it will be an exclamation point on how we've treated people. That's what I want for us. This brings us back to the question underlying everything. How do unclean people become clean? Because if we miss that, table fellowship just becomes being friendly. But if we get it, table fellowship is a living sermon, not only clean people, but cleansed people together. Landing The Bible gives us two pictures. The one we talked about before at the beginning was of Pilate, of trying to become clean yourself. Pilate washed his hands, trying to make him clean in the story of the crucifixion. But there's another story that we see in the Gospels of Being Clean. It's a little story that you could almost miss in all three of the synoptic Gospels, but it's in Matthew 9. It's so small. It's a story within a story. Jesus is going to to resurrect a little dead girl. And on the way in the middle of a crowd, a woman reaches out and touches his clothes. In Jewish culture, in Jewish law, a woman like that, touching anyone, touching anything would have instantly made it unclean, except with Christ. Instead of Jesus becoming unclean, he cleansed her. Do you see it? Jesus, when he makes us clean, he cleanses us so deeply that there is nothing we can do to dirty ourselves again. This is the good news of the gospel that we are cleansed wholly and totally, not by what we do, but what Christ has done for us. Christ takes our impurity. He took it to the cross. He became defiled for us. He became dirt. He became nothing for us on the cross so that way we could be cleansed, so that we could become exaltet. The gospel doesn't say, Come or become clean, and then you can come in. It says, Come to Jesus. He is your purity. He is your cleanliness. And that's exactly why the Book of Galatians matters. The moment that we add anything to Jesus on the basis of our cleanliness, whether it's circumcision, performance, respectability, we're not protecting wholeness anymore. We're denying the cleansing power of Christ. Prosper Church, we believe one gospel received from God, defended without compromise. Would you stand with me and pray as we prepare our hearts to respond in worship? Let's pray. Father God, we you and praise you for who you are, that you are a good God who has given us good things. You have cleansed us. You became dirty in our place so that we could be cleansed forever. That we don't have to come to church every Sunday questioning whether we've done enough good this week or whether or not we've done enough bad this week. We can come confessing, God, we haven't. We haven't lived to your standard, and yet we can still be accepted in. We can still be one with you. We can still have unity, not just with you, but with each other because of what you've done for us, because we were crucified with you and we've been resurrected with you. Let us sing your praises here and now as people cleansed, as people redeemed in your blood. It's your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Crucified with Christ Prosper Christian Reformed Church Crucified with Christ Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, February 8, 2026 Audio Crucified with Christ Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 46:03 Sermon Transcript Introduction/Big Question What brings people together? What brings people together? Or another way to ask that question would be, how do we determine where we belong? Culture says you belong if you perform, if you fit in, if you signal the right virtues. In the church, things can be similar. You belong if you behave. We can believe this. We belong If we clean up first, if we come from the right family or do the right thing, serve in the right ways. And yet both are the same move with the same motive, building our belonging based on our record. You can tell what you believe makes you belong based on what you're building it on. When you fail, are you sad or do you feel condemned? When you're criticized, do you feel humbled or do you feel erased? When you are excluded, do you feel disappointed or do you feel panicked? These are more than just emotions. They are a way for us to see where our standing is before God. What is our verdict system? What determines in our own hearts what we believe about where we belong? Galatians 2 is Paul saying that your belonging isn't built on your record, is built on something more. If our verdict is built on this, we will either become people who are crushed, people who are proud. And yet, either way, we won't have peace with that. And then Paul says something that's really shocking. In order for us to feel like we're in, in order for us to actually be in, our focus has to be on admitting that we're outsiders. Stop trying to get in by law keeping. What brings people together? And fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 2, as we see two primary movements in this passage. 2:15-16 — The Shared Problem: No One Is Justified by the Law 2:17-21 — The False Inference Rejected: Grace Does Not Promote Sin Paul is going to do two things here. He's going to tell us how people are made right God, and then he's going to protect that gospel from the most common misunderstanding that humans make towards it. In this section, what we'll see is that justification comes through faith in Jesus Christ because righteousness is not by law keeping, and to try to do so actually nullifies and denies the death of Christ. This passage that we're in today is a bridge between last week and next week. I think we could say that about all passages in this series, but specifically between Paul making a case for his apostelship to next week, what we're going to see is the truth of the gospel really clarified and explained. A Shared Problem: No One is Justified by the Law - Galatians 2:15-16. Galatians 2:15 says this, We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. I want to stop there. What Paul Paul is talking about, he's saying this ironically, he's saying to the Gentiles or to the Galatians, the way that you've been looking at this difference between Jew and Gentile, who can sit with who during mealtimes, is you look at them like Gentile sinners. That's what they would say about these Gentiles. Paul is saying, We're not like them. We are Jewish people, and yet we're going to see something here. And yet this is how the human heart works. It doesn't just break rules. It tries to use rules to create divisions among people. Rules are a way that we can say, Well, at least we're not like them. We don't break those rules. If you love rules more than you love what they're protecting, what you're doing is you're trying to use them in a way to leverage people. You're trying to leverage the law over people. It's a ladder for you to step above them, to get higher than them. If you're first instinct when you sin is not confession, but comparison, then you've turned the law into a tool for self-justification. The solution is not to hate the law. It's to see it correctly. God gave us the law in order to reveal who he is. Paul is not anti-obedience. He's not anti-law. He's anti-earning our salvation. Paul is essentially saying here, the the law is a good mirror. It's a good mirror. It's a terrible savior. The solution here is to see the law as good, and yet to see ourselves correctly as people who are law breakers. And that's what we see in this first part in Galatians 2:16. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith. Paul saying, Even though we were Jews, no one is justified by the law. And that's the core message of this letter, this epistle, is that of justification. Justification or being justified is a legal term. It was used in courtrooms. It still is used in courtrooms. And yet today, outside of the courtroom, outside of church, the word to justify something largely carries a negative connotation. Really, what it means is, and how it's used commonly today in culture, is to excuse bad behavior, to allow someone to get away with something that they shouldn't. You might say it in this way, somebody justified his friend's adultery because he, I don't know, fill in the blank. I don't know why there would be a good way to justify someone's adultery, but using it in that way. And it sounds like God is allowing bad things to go unpunished. When we read this word, it can seem like it's carrying this connotation. And yet this is what the Bible says, a good definition of the law or of what justification means. God declares a sinner to be righteous in his sight, not because the person has become morally perfect, but because God forgave their sins and counts them righteous on the basis of Jesus Christ. Justification is not a feeling. It is not a motive. It is not an emotion. It is a verdict. It is a declaration. It is a pronouncement over you. So the law, and what Paul is saying is the law is not something that can put you in a right standing before God. But why? Why is that? Why is it that we talk about the law cannot be something that we add onto scripture or it cannot be something that saves us? Well, first, no one can keep the law. We see that throughout scripture, but we see it in our own lives. We cannot even keep the laws that we make. If you had a tape recorder or someone had a tape recorder and they followed you around for your life, and they recorded every time you said, You should, whatever that fill in the blank is afterwards. You should eat your vegetables. You should obey the speed limit. You should, whatever. You would not be able to keep your own laws that you tell other people to keep, let alone the laws that God gives for us. The second part of why we can't use the law to save us is that the law, by its nature, is not something that saves us. It can't. Laws are there, whether by God or human laws. Laws are there not to save people. They are there to convict. They are there to reveal wrongdoing and evil. They show us when we've crossed the line. They don't bring us back towards it. See, God is pleased when we obey him, and yet when we obey him out of a heart of love. It's just like parenting. You love when your kids obey you the first time, when they do it out of a right motive, when you don't have to argue with them, when you don't have to try to twist their arm into doing the right thing. It's the same with God. Obedience can't reverse the damage that we've caused. It would be like speeding and getting into a car accident. Going the speed limit after that. There isn't an amount of going the speed limit after that that can reverse the damage done to your car. We need someone to take care of it. We need someone to fix it for us. Obedience can't reverse the damage. We don't need a second chance. We need a substitute. We need someone who will come and fix what we could not. We need grace. We need the gospel to rescue us. And that's why Paul continues on in verse 16, But through faith in Jesus Christ, so that we have also believed in Christ in order to be justified by faith in Christ, not by works of the law, because by works of law, no one will be justified. It is in faith in Christ that saves. And so what is faith? It might feel like this is another work, that this is something that we're adding on to Jesus, that faith is something that's required. No, faith is not a payment. Faith is not leverage. Faith is not a way for us to earn good standing with God. It's not impressing God with our sincerity or with our devotion. Faith is going to God with empty hands. Faith is saying, I'm spiritually bankrupt. I have nothing to offer. I have nothing to bring. I need to be saved. I need to be raised from the dead. Faith is what allows us to reach to God after we've been resurrected, after we've been raised from the dead, to be able to wake up and receive the grace that God has given us. It's why Jesus says in the Beatitudes, blessed are those who are poor in spirit, who have spiritual poverty. Because it's only then that we can realize that we need a savior. If we think that we're good, if we think that we have it figured out, if we think that there's anything that we can offer God to make him want us, to make him desire us on our own, we don't have it. We've lost it. We have to say, God, there's nothing that I bring. Faith is not a work. It is a response to God's grace. It is a response to his grace. And anytime we think that we can add anything to it, we start to determine who gets to be in and who gets to be out. And that's the problem that the Jewish people had. That's the problem that we see in this book. The Jews thought they knew who was in, and they were sure that it was them. They knew that they could follow the law, that they could do whatever. They had the right relationship with God. And they knew that Gentiles, they were sinners. They were out. Yet the gospel says the opposite, not about Jews and Gentiles, but about that mindset. If you believe that you're in, you're out. If you know that you're outside, you're an outsider, you're in. If your confidence is in, well, I'm basically a good person, and I take my faith more seriously, or I take my devotion to God more seriously than others, I'm from the right background, I'm from the right family, I've cleaned up my behavior, God knows that I'm trying really hard and I do the right things. If that's where your confidence is in, then you're using the law like the pharisees used it, not to repent, but to essentially Collect a case together for yourself to try to declare your own verdict, to try to twist God's arm into seeing, See, I really am innocent. And that's not how justification works. If that's how you see your standing before your God, you can't come in. But if you know that you have no hope before our heavenly Father, if you see your identity outside of Christ, if you see your identity as As with the Gentiles, as a sinner, if you feel crushed by the weight of your sin so greatly that you believe you have no hope to get into heaven, then you're in. The doorway into Christ is not competence, it is confession. The only people who Jesus can justify are the people who stop trying to defend themselves, stop trying to be their own lawyer, their own advocate, and accept the advocate of the Holy spirit. If it sounds like what we were talking about earlier, that God is justifying or allowing sinful people to go unpunished, you're half right. God does let sinful people go, but he doesn't let them go unpunished. He does justify the ungodly, but he doesn't erase sin by just sweeping it under the rug or letting it go. He erases sin by placing it not on us, but on his son, where justice is satisfied, where mercy is sealed. The moment that we say free grace, the moment that we talk about free grace, there are two fears that commonly come up. The first is that the moral person feels chaos and that the guilty person will feel condemned. Paul answers both. He says, First, grace is not permission to sin. And second, grace is power to change. Charles Spurgeon says it this way, If Christ has died for me, then I cannot trifle with the sin which killed my best friend. The false inference rejected: grace does not promote sin - Galatians 2:17-21. In Galatians 2:17, Paul continues on. He says, But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners. I'm going to stop right there. Our natural posture of our heart is to put people into two camps, good guys and bad guys. It's always how we've seen the world. It's a human problem. We've always done this. We put two groups of people. It's us versus them, this group versus that group. Regardless of whatever group you find yourself in, the group that you're in is always the good guys, right? No one ever puts themselves in the bad guys side. Whatever side you are on, it doesn't matter what you've done or what your group has done, you're the good guys. Yet God is telling us, We cannot look at the world this way. This is not how the world operates. Every other works-based religion says, You can divide up the world into good and bad people because it is based on what you do. Christianity says, The whole world is running directly towards hell. We are all sinful. Verse 17 says, Whether you are Jew or Gentile, we too were found to be sinners. All of humanity is sinful. Sin is the great equalizer. It puts us all on the same playing field. It's the beautiful thing about Christianity. It's what makes Christianity different from every other works-based religion. See, if you're a Mormon, those outside of Mormonism, those are the Gentiles. If you're Muslim, everyone else is an infidel. If you're a modern day Jew, everyone else is goyam. If it's based on works, our salvation, our right standing with our creator, then they're There is a divide. There are good and bad people. There are people who obey the law, and there are people who don't. Christianity says, That is not how this works. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. Christianity says, Everyone is an outsider. No one gets in. We are all running directly away from God. If you are a Christian, it is not because you are a good person. You are a Christian because Christ has died for your sins. You are not a Christian because you grew up in the right family or in the right church or said a special prayer at summer camp, whatever it is. Our right standing with God is not based on an I statement. It is based on what he has done for us. Christians are the only people who can say, We are getting into heaven without bragging about it. It is not a boast. It is not prideful to say that we get to be in heaven because we did nothing to secure our ticket into heaven. Christians are the only people who say, I get into heaven, and it's not because I'm a good person. It's because I've admitted I was a bad person and I was saved by an even better savior. So now the question is this, and that's what we see in the second part of Galatians 2:17, If Christ saves by faith, is Jesus then promoting sin? It says, Is Christ then a servant of sin? Paul goes on to answer, Certainly not. For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. Paul emphatically answers, No. Christ does not promote sin. In no way does he do this. Jesus already tore down the dividing wall of hostility, the barrier that was set up between the Jews and the Gentiles in the temple. Jesus tore it down. There was a literal wall that said only Jews could get closer to the Holy of Holies. Gentiles had to stay out. When Jesus died on the cross, he tore down that dividing wall for Christians, for the church. This is what the Galatian church misses, had missed so clearly. They this unity that Christians can have, this unity that the church has that is second to none. There's nothing that unites people, that brings people together, that makes them belong in the way that Christ does. There's a mission trip that I was on when I was a youth pastor. We were working on a 30-foot roof. We were putting metal roofing up on this. I don't remember if it was rainy or had rained earlier that day, or if it was early in the morning, they were still due on the roof, but there were places where we couldn't step because it was too slippery. I was at the bottom of this. I was on a ladder, and I was reaching to grab some screws out of my tool belt, and all of a sudden I heard three noises is three kids sliding down. They had stepped where they shouldn't, and they were coming directly at me. I grabbed the gutter. I had nothing else to grab, and it knocks me back. I almost fell. But we stopped these three kids from from falling. I mean, off of 30 feet, it would have been tragic. We sat down afterwards and just realized how scary that moment truly was. I don't want to say it was a near-death experience, but it was something It was something nearly dramatic at minimum. Of the kids I stay in contact with, I like to stay in contact with a lot of the students that I've had the chance to pastor, those kids, those three kids that fell, are some of the three closest kids I stay in contact with. And I would like to say we just had a better relationship, but I think it's largely due to that moment. It's true with men when they get out of the military. There is a relationship that they have with men that they've served that almost no one else can understand because the brothers that they serve with are some of the only people on Earth who understand exactly what they went through. There's nothing like a near-death experience that brings people together. And yet, as Christians, we don't have a near-death experience. We have a shared death experience. That's what Paul talks about in this passage. We have all died. We have all gone through the excruciating pain of died, crucifying ourselves, putting ourselves to death. What Jesus says in Matthew, that we go and sell everything we have to buy the treasure hidden in the field. We let go of all the passions that we once had. We let go of all the things that we held on to so tightly, and we've sold it all. There's something excruciating in that. But now we've been raised with Christ. That's what it says in Galatians 2:19, For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God. Might be that I might live to God. Galatians 2:20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. In the life I now live, I live in the flesh. I live by faith, sorry, in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. This is all set in faith, not faith in faith, but faith in a person, faith in the one who loved me, faith in the son of God. Look at the motivation here. The motivation is love. It's not a global love, although God absolutely loves the world. This love that we see here is individual. It lands on specific people. It lands on you. Christ loved you. God loved you. Not because we were lovable, not because we've cleaned ourselves up first, not because we've earned it, not because we bring anything inherently within ourselves. We don't have any special talents within ourselves that makes God go, Well, okay, he's got this How can I get it? Well, that makes me love him more. No. Love came first, and he gave himself for me, not merely as a teacher, not merely as a martyr, not merely as an example. Christ came as our substitute He came to take our place, taking what we deserve. So when you hear that grace promotes sin, that this theology that we believe gives us a license to sin, It gives us the ability to just say, Well, if I sin, well, Christ will forgive me. It'll be fine. That is clearly wrong. That's what Paul is saying. Absolutely not. No, certainly not. Grace does not lead to sin. If you believe that, you don't understand what grace is. Grace is not permission, it is power. Grace unites us to God. That leads right into Paul's Closing Line, Galatians 2:21, I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. You can nullify grace without denying Jesus out loud. You can nullify it by adding something to it. Jesus plus effort, Jesus plus law keeping, Jesus plus an improvement plan, Jesus plus my spiritual resume. If I can add to God, if I can add to Jesus, then I could have saved myself. There's no reason for the cross. If I can add one thing, if I believe that Jesus took me to the one yard line, he's handed me the ball, and he's saying, You go score. If it's just one yard, right? Because it's a Super Bowl Sunday. If it's one yard that I can do, then it needed to be on me the whole time. Then I could have saved myself. Then what Jesus did on the cross Essentially was divine child abuse. If I can save myself, if I have the ability to save myself, then it's on me the whole way. It's not just the last step. If I can get right with God by my performance, if my obedience can declare my verdict, then I need to be the one to make it right. Then Christ died for no purpose. The cross becomes unnecessary. It becomes an add-on. It becomes optional. Instead of Jesus being my own only hope, he becomes one of them. He becomes one way. And Christianity just becomes another ladder. It becomes, how obedient are you? How good are you? It makes our only boast not in Christ, but in ourselves. Paul's point is this, you do not get You get wholeness by climbing a ladder. You get wholeness by living out your union with God, dying to yourself and becoming alive in something better, in something new, alive in Christ. So the false inference is rejected. Grace does not make Jesus a servant of sin. Grace makes sinners new, and he makes Christ central. That leads us to our main idea. Main Idea: We are justified by faith and alive in Christ. We are justified by faith and alive in Christ. The gospel is not what we offer God. The gospel is what we receive from God. We don't seal the deal. Christ sealed it when he said, It is finished. There is nothing we add on. Jesus didn't get up on the cross and said, Well, now I've got it started. That wasn't his last breath. Jesus said, It is finished. To add anything on to Christ after that is to make him a liar on the cross. This is the wonderful part about being a Christian. If you feel like you've done too much, too much evil, if you feel like you're an outsider, congratulations. The good news of the gospel is that it's not on you. Whether you were good, whether you were born in the right family, you did everything right, or you lived the most morally corrupt life you could have. It's not on you. There isn't a single thing you can do to make you outside of the love of Christ that he has for you. This is the good news of the gospel, that we don't even hold ourselves to Christ, that he is the one who holds us to him. It simply does not matter what you have done. Paul was a murderer. Paul was a murderer. I mean, look at every character in scripture. God does a great job of painting every character, except for one, in a negative light. There isn't a single person in here besides Christ who isn't a total screw-up. If you think that he can't use you, he used Paul, a murderer. The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you. There isn't a sin that the blood of Christ cannot redeem, cannot make right. And that's a call for us as a church. There's something here, an application before we get to our application, for us as a church, because if Christ receives sinners by grace, we as a church cannot demand people to get themselves cleaned up before they can start worshiping with us, for people to start earning their seat before they sit down. We do not clean people up and bring them to Christ and bring them to Jesus. We don't clean them up first. We bring people, and Jesus cleanses them. Every church is tempted in two directions. First, to make people pretend they're clean or to invite people to become brand new. Church, we have to be that second church. We cannot force people to act like us, to do X, Y, or Z, to dress like us, to sing like us, to perform a certain way in order to be accepted here. Except for the gospel, which we will never move away from. We will never dilute the gospel. As long as I'm your pastor, that won't happen. We will never move from this. We will never lower the bar. But as a church, we can't ask people to perform. We can't ask people to pretend like they're not messy. If we demand that people aren't messy in order to come worship with us, Sunday morning, we'll have zero people. I won't be able to be here. We are all a mess. I'm not saying that we all have to dress a certain way. We don't have to all lower our dress standards. Sometimes I like wearing a suit and tie. I mean, I'm weird. I understand that, but sometimes I like it, okay? But we cannot pretend that dressing up, that looking clean on the outside, doesn't mean that we're not messy. One of my favorite things about this is my grandpa was one of the men who had faith that I aspire to. He was an incredible man. He was a farmer. And during harvesting season, he would come in straight out of the combine with a hat on, with overalls on, and he would be dirty. He'd be a mess. He'd be dusty. And I remember thinking, how awesome is that? He He would have looked at himself and gone, I don't have the right clothes on. I still have a hat on. I haven't showered today. And yet he said, I'm going to take an hour, I'm going to take an hour and a half to be here on Sunday to worship. If you have to debate whether you're going to be here because you feel like you're too messy. If you're wondering whether you need to... If you're running late and you're going to show up, you're going to miss the first part of worship, come. I'd love for you to be here for the whole thing. I think the whole thing is worth it, but come. If you're coming in your overalls out of the field, come. If you haven't showered today, If you're physically messy, come. If you're spiritually messy, even more of a reason to come. I would so much rather you come messy and experience Christ, experience the worship here, experience the God that we see in scripture, than to try to stay at home and fix yourself. That leads us into our points of application. Use justification as a weapon against guilt and pride. Justification means God's verdict over you is settled. It is God banging the gavel and saying, Innocent. It is not up for renegotiation today. So this gospel hits on two two opposite sins. It hits on guilt that says, I am condemned, and it hits on pride that says, I am better. When Satan comes and assaults you this week, when he comes against you and he says, I know what you've done, and you call yourself a Christian. I saw you in high school. I saw you in college. I saw what you did then. I saw what you did last week. How dare you call yourself a Christian? We can say, Satan, you're absolutely right. That was the old me. That was the old Mitchell. But I am raised in Christ, and you have no longer a claim over me. The gospel sets sinful people free, sets sinful people away from the condemnation that we feel from the judgment that we feel from the enemy. Heidelberg Catechism, question and answer 60. The answer says this, part of the answer says this, Although my conscience accuses me, yet God, out of mere grace, imputes to me Christ as as if I never committed any sin. What beautiful language that encapsulates the gospel here. When your accuser comes and says, You are not good enough, we can say, Absolutely, I wasn't. But Christ was good for me. When your heart says, Prove that you're worth loving this week by trying harder, being better, you can say, If righteousness were through me We're through the law. Christ died for no purpose. Absolutely not. I will not try to make my obedience pay Jesus back. I could never pay him back. I will not nullify grace by doing it that way. And when your pride shows up by saying, Well, at least I'm not like them, you can say, We, too, were found to be sinners. I, too, was found to be morally corrupt, to be It's an absolute mess. The beauty of the gospel is that the cross is at a level playing ground. It is at eye level for everyone. We are all equally convicted of sin before God. It is only because Jesus was my substitute that I have even the faintest hope of being right with God. Live in union with Christ as the engine of Holiness and unity. Union with Christ means dying to the old self and living with Christ. So Holiness is not Earning acceptance. Holiness is living from acceptance. Use the gospel for your Holiness. When tempted to say, I will try harder and be better, tell yourself. That is not who I am anymore. I've been crucified with Christ. Fight sin from identity. Fight sin from identity, not for identity. Use the gospel for unity. Stop ranking Christians as somehow on a different letter, on a different rung in the ladder. There aren't JV Christians. In fact, there is no such thing as a good Christian. It's my least favorite heresy that when people say, Oh, so and so is such a good Christian. There's no such thing as a good Christian because a Christian is not based on what you do. If someone asks you why you're a Christian, you cannot answer in the first person. You cannot answer by saying, It's because I grew up in a Christian home, or I went to Bible camp and I said a magic prayer, or because I decided I wanted to get baptized. No, you are a Christian because Christ, because he. You must answer it in the third person. You cannot be a good Christian. Christianity is not based on what you do. Therefore, it cannot be based. You can't be good at it. You are either a Christian, you are either in Christ or you aren't. We are all justified the same way, so we cannot despise one another. We can't put each other into categories of good Christians and bad Christians. We are all equally in the same category. We are sinners, and some of us have accepted and received the grace that Christ offers. This is why the church has always had a radical unity. It's why some of you might have Some of you might have a struggle with people, even in your own family, connecting deeply with them, where you can connect with someone across the country, across the world, maybe even someone who doesn't speak the same language as you. You have nothing in common with. And your own brother or sister, your own father or mother, you cannot connect with them on that level because you have a shared death experience with that person who you may have never met. You can't talk about that with maybe even someone in your own family. We are called, we are bonded, we are unified in something radical. Why is it that we can be alive in Christ? Because Christ came to be death for for us. Through the law, I died to the law, meaning that the law could never save me. It put me in the grave, but God did not keep me there. The gospel is not, Try harder, be better. If that's at all what you've heard, get your hearing check, because that is not what this says nor what I have said. The gospel is, Jesus came to die for your sins, to be your substitute, to raise you from death to life. He came to be what sin deserved, to be death, to be the separation, to be judgment for us so that we could be what grace received. We can be life, forgiven and accepted. Christianity is not a moral betterment program. It is not behavioral modification. It is life transformation. It is a new source of life and identity. So here's why you can be alive, because he entered death for you, because he took your verdict, and now he shares his life with you. The gospel is not work your way to life. The gospel is: die with Christ and be alive with Christ. We are justified by faith and alive in Christ. Let's stand and pray and respond in worship for the God who has raised us in him in newness of life. Father God, we praise you and thank you that we are no longer dead, that we no longer are ourselves. God, that Satan has no longer a claim on us because we can say, We are alive in you. Father, I pray that we would live as renewed people, that we would live as transformed people, whether we've heard this the first time today or we've heard this a hundred times before. God, let this be a well of living water bursting out of our souls. God, let us declare in this next song that you are holy, holy, holy as people who have been radically transformed. Let us love one another because you first loved us. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

No Other Gospel Prosper Christian Reformed Church No Other Gospel Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, January 25, 2026 Audio No Other Gospel Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 46:17 Sermon Transcript In the early 1900s, a Dutch painter named Hans van Maeger pulled off one of the most famous art fraud schemes in the history of the world. He would paint lost paintings in the style of a famous painter named Johannes Vermeer. They were so convincing that these paintings that he painted, hung in museums, hung in galleries. They were authenticated. They were displayed in wealthy people's homes. People paid a fortune for these. They praised them. They defended them. They built reputations on these paintings. But after World War II, van Merger was accused of selling these paintings to the Nazis. And to prove that he wasn't a traitor, he made a startling confession that they weren't authentic paintings, that they were his, that he was the one forging these paintings in this famous Johannes Vermeer's name. To prove this, he painted them under supervision, and they realized that this was all a fraud. The startling part of this is that this isn't just about art, but this is about who we are. This goes to our hearts. The counterfeit didn't succeed because people hated the originals. The counterfeit succeeded because it looked close enough and people wanted it to be true. That's something that we can relate to. Part of what we believe, if we're honest, is what we want to believe about this or that. It's what we want to be true. And that's what's so dangerous about a counterfeit gospel, because it uses Christian vocabulary. It feels It feels spiritual. It feels maybe even more obedient. But it suddenly shifts the foundation away from Christ into your performance. It asks, that's what Galatians will ask us this big question today and throughout the entire eight-week series that we're in. How do you know you're not trusting a counterfeit gospel? A counterfeit gospel is anything that makes your standing with God depend not on Christ, but Christ plus something. Jesus saves, but you're the one who finishes. Grace gets you in the door, but your performance, your works, they are what allow you to stay in the room. It's subtle because you can say all the right words about Jesus, but then quietly believe or start putting your trust in Jesus plus. So what is your Jesus Jesus plus? Is it Jesus plus being a good parent, being morally consistent, being well respected, being theologically correct, having your life under control? Here's how you can tell whether or not that's true for you. When you pray, do you find yourself silently listing reasons why God should answer? When you sin, do you avoid God until you've cleaned yourself up enough and then you can go back to him? If someone criticizes you, it's not their words that hurt. It hurts because your reputation might be tied with your righteousness. When you're having a good week, when you feel like you've been obedient to God, do you feel more confident that God will be pleased in you? This feels spiritual, but it's not maturity. It's actually Jesus plus something. And that's what Paul says in this passage. This is not growth. This is abandoning the gospel, which is why Galatians begins the way it does, with not a list of demands, but with an announcement, grace and peace, because the gospel is not Jesus plus something. It is in Christ alone. In this series, we are going to see... It's an eight-week series starting today through Galatians. And why this series? Why now? Why go through this? Because counterfeit Gospels are prevalent, and they confuse us. They don't just make us question things. They slowly change what Christian we are. Galatians is an emergency letter written by Paul to these churches. It's written to Christians who have started to believe, Yeah, Jesus saves, but there's something else that I've got to do. Paul says, That's not growing, that's not maturity, it's desertion, because the gospel is in grace alone. What Galatians will show us is this, God justifies and forms his people by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, creating a church that lives free without drifting back into performance. What we'll see in this passage is two main movements. The first is verses 1-5, the truth from an apostle. And then we'll see in verses 6-9, a call to believe in no other gospel. Let's look at this first section, Truth from an apostle, verses 1-5. Before Paul confronts the counterfeit gospel, he reminds them what the real one is. He starts with three anchors. Who sent Paul? What has Christ done? And who gets the glory? When we start a new Book of the Bible, it's always good to step back and try to look at it from maybe a 10,000-foot view. So we're going to ask ourselves some questions that apply to this whole letter that we'll see here. First, one of the questions that we should ask is, who is the author? Changes a lot. Who's writing this? The nice thing about a letter is it says it right at the beginning. Look with me at verse one. It says this, Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. The author is Paul. Paul, who is an apostle. An apostle is someone who is sent by God, who is taught by God. What Paul wants us to see is this is not my authority. This is not second-hand. An apostle is a man commissioned by the risen Jesus, authorized to speak in Christ's message with Christ's authority. Apostles are the only people who are allowed to write scripture. So Paul isn't giving us his take on what's happening in these churches. He's not giving his opinion on what's happening. This is Christ's truth being claimed through the apostle Paul. If the message is from heaven, then we don't get to edit it. Paul is saying this message did not come from human, from human opinion, and so it cannot be edited by human opinion. No committee, no crowd, no culture wrote this, revised this, or approved this. We don't get to inject our feelings into our faith. We don't get to inject how we feel about Christ as if it's truth. We have to come back to the source itself. That's what we'll talk about next week a lot. But let's move into another question. What book is this? This is a book of the Bible. What book is this? We said it earlier. It's a letter. A letter has some different unique parts to it. And one of those unique parts is the introduction to it. This follows a typical start to a Greek letter. There is an author, who it's from, and then there's some qualifications, that he's an apostle, and then it says who it's to. I think it's good just to pause there and realize that there is a recipient to this letter. There was an original audience for this letter. As we read this, as we interpret this, as we understand this, how we understand this has to be the same way that Galatian churches understood this. It can't mean something else to us today that it couldn't have meant to them. These are churches in Galatia, in this region of the Middle East, in modern day Turkey or back then in Asia Minor. This is actually a unique letter because it's not to one particular church. Like Ephesians was to the church in emphasis, one church, or to the Corinthians, there was a church in Corinthians. This is to the churches or a collection of churches in this region. Galatia is a Roman providence, not a city. What else makes this a letter is that there is a purpose to it. There is an intended response that is invoked by this passage. Anytime you write a letter, I know that we don't really write letters anymore. So anytime you write an email or a text, there's a purpose to it. There's something that you're trying to communicate. There is an intent on what you're trying to get across. And that's what we'll see in this passage. The intent is actually written right in the greeting. That's what we'll see in verses 3 through 5. Verses 3 through 5 show us the gospel in just a short couple of verses. So let's look at verse 3 and 4 right now. Grace to you in peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father. Notice how Paul starts here. He starts with grace, peace. He doesn't start with a list. He doesn't start by, Here's a list of things you need to do to try harder to be better. Not works, but grace. It begins with an announcement that the center of Christianity is not what you do for God, But what Jesus has done for you. That Jesus did not come to improve you. This is not a moral betterment program. He came to rescue you. Grace is not God helping good people. Grace is God rescuing helpless people. Paul doesn't say that Jesus came here to give you 10 tips on how to live a better life. Jesus came to bring you back to life. He came to resuscitate you, to bring you out of cold death, not by removing you from the world, but by breaking the world's claim on you. Paul wants the Galatian churches to understand from the start that this is about not your works, but the work of Christ Jesus, and that there is no other way. That we have sin, we have an issue, we needed to be rescued. But Paul clearly tells us that Christ is the one who gave himself up for us to deliver us from that sin. We cannot continue in this series until we understand that. Paul cannot continue in this letter until the Galatian churches understand what the gospel is because he's going to spend a great deal of time, the rest of this book, confronting false beliefs. Paul ends this greeting with a focus on the glory of God. Look at verse 5 with me. To whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Legalism always looks religious, but it steals God's glory. Because performance If performance is the difference maker, if our effort is really what brings us over the edge to be able to be saved, then we get some of the glory. Paul starts with worship because the gospel ends with worshiping Jesus because he is alone the one who did it all. This letter is written in an important time. This is actually the first New Testament book in the Bible. This is the first writing in the New Testament. The church is in a really early stage. It's really young, and it's being assailed by Satan with counterfeit versions of the gospel. If this is the gospel that Jesus gave himself and that God gets the glory, then you can see in this next section why Paul gets so shocked, he gets so angry, because the moment we add anything to the gospel, it's not an upgrade to Christianity. It's an attempt to try to replace it. That's what we see in this next section. Believe no other gospel, verses 6-9. In every other letter that Paul writes, it starts off with Thanksgiving. I I thank God, my God and Father, for you. I remember you always in my prayers. I'm so thankful for the way that you've done this or that. But not this letter. This letter starts off a little different. It's an alarm because it's an emergency. Look at verse 6 with me. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you into the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Paul is saying, Galatian church, you've abandoned the gospel, the one and only gospel. There isn't another one. It happened so quickly that I love the word that Paul used here. I'm astonished. It's almost surprising. It's like when your kids are naughty and they do something so naughty that's almost like beyond their capabilities that you're almost impressed how naughty they were rather than being mad. I don't know if you've ever been there as a parent, but I have. Paul is almost saying, I'm astonished at how fast you went from believing the gospel to something else. It's almost impressive. Not only are they deserting the gospel, but Paul says they are deserting the one who called them into grace. To change the gospel is not a preference issue. It's not what we want. It is a relationship issue. You don't just leave doctrine when you abandon the gospel, you leave a person. To To tweak the gospel is to walk away from the one who rescued you. That word called in this verse, or to call, is a pretty broad word. It really could be translated just really the way that we talk about calling people, to call to someone, the way that you call to your kids. It's time for dinner, or it's time to leave, or it's time to do some chores, and your kids will say, I'm coming. They never They never are. And then you say, Okay, for real now, come on downstairs. And they say, I'm on my way, but they're not on their way. And eventually, what has to happen, you have to go up to your kids and say, Come on, it's time to go. I mean, come on, wear your socks. That's a big deal in our house at I don't know about you guys, but socks seem to just disappear. But it's different. The call that we see in this passage is different than the call that we use in our household. When God calls It's not passive like when we do it. It is active. When God calls, creation responds. When God said, Let there be light, he didn't have to try to convince the light to shine. It happened. When Jesus calmed the storm, he didn't have to say, Wind, would you mind calming down? Waves, could you just even out a little bit? No, it immediately calmed. There is power in the call we see from Christ, the power that the Galatian churches have abandoned. The Galatian churches have been plagued with false teaching. The main issue in the Galatian churches was legalism or adding to scripture, taking God's word and saying, Let's put more on top of it. And on the surface, it seems like a neat idea. God's word is so important. What God commands is so good. Let's not even get close to But what we're saying is God's word isn't sufficient. I need to put more on top of it. When God said, Thou shalt not commit murder, what he meant was that we shouldn't have any weapons. I know that wouldn't go over in this church at all, but I like guns, so I thought that was good, but whatever. The message that these false teachers are proclaiming is Jesus is important, but really, he's not enough. You You need to be able to do something to really make God happy. Believe in Jesus, yes, absolutely. But then you need to do these other things. You need to take on these Jewish identity markers, primarily circumcision, but also these food laws and the calendar laws and other things that go along with it. In other words, grace gets you in, but really it's your obedience. It's the law that keeps you there. They weren't just rejecting Jesus. These false teachers were redefining him, saying, Yeah, he's important, but he's really not sufficient for you. I think we hear this and we say, This sounds obviously wrong. Come on, Galatian church, what were you thinking? But why this is dangerous is that it sneaks up on us. It feels like seriousness. It feels like Holiness. It feels like maturity. But it's not. It's not growth. It's subtraction. It takes away from the gospel. Because every time we say Jesus plus something, Jesus is actually not enough. This was a threat to the church. This has remained a threat to the church, adding something to Jesus. But the truth is that this came from within the church. This wasn't outside persecution coming in. This was people within the church saying that. And I promise you that if were there hearing this for the first time, it wouldn't have seemed obvious to you. It wouldn't have been alarming. It wouldn't have been like, you wouldn't have stood up and said, No, that's false teaching. You can't say that. It would have been absolutely incredibly subtle because the danger of false teaching, and in this case, heresy or a belief that puts you outside of saving faith. The danger of false teaching is that is never a blatant denial of the Trinity or or God, or the Deity of Christ, or the Virgin birth, any of those core tenets. It is much more subtle than that. False doctrine would have looked like obedience. People would have said, We're just protecting Holiness. We're really just trying to make sure that people really are committed that they're really belonging to what they're covenanting to belong to. I'm sure that there would have been those who would have said, We're just trying to follow what we've always believe, what we've always said That is true. Martin Luther says this about these false teachers. The false teacher pettles his deadly poison as the doctrine of grace, the word of God, and the gospel of Christ. That's the strategy. Dress up slavery, which is really what it is, as maturity. False Gospels don't look like rebellion. They feel like taking your obedience to another level. They feel like leveling up in Christianity. Satan disguises as false teaching as something that looks godly. That's the danger of this, is that this is a false gospel. The gospel means good news. It looks on the surface like it's good news. But this good news isn't outright denied. It's distorted. You cannot add Christian language to an alternative message and repackage it as good news as the gospel. If this happened today, if this heresy wouldn't have popped up when it did in church history and it made it all the way to 2026, I guarantee you that we would be hearing people in this saying, This is a secondary matter. We shouldn't divide on this. We shouldn't make this a big deal. And yet Paul is emphatic that this is a big deal. He calls it desertion. It's a big deal because it undermined the good news of the gospel. It goes back to our salvation. That's the reason that this is so important. It's not because we're just redefining Jesus in a different way. We need to make sure we're theologically correct. No. If we believe this false gospel, our salvation is not based in what Christ has done. It is back to Morganism. It is Islam. It is based on what you do, not what has been done for you. It's a belief that says, believe in Jesus. But really, you got to do these other things. Let's keep more rules on top of the finished work of Christ. It makes Christ a liar when he hung on the cross and said, It is finished. If we add into our faith Jesus plus, what we're saying is, he didn't really mean that. Adding rules to grace nullifies grace. Grace is given as a gift. It's fundamentally, it's not earned. Paul would have rather divided the church than allow it to be damned. And that's what we see in this next section, in this next passage of scripture here in verses 8 and 9. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, I say now, or so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel, contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. This is strong language. That word accursed means to be cursed. It means to be placed under God's judgment, not in a surface-level way, not like, Oh, I'm going through a trial. No, this means to be damned. It means to be cut off. It means anathema. Paul wants to be clear here that you must believe this gospel so clearly that I could come and visit you again. And if I am preaching something different, you would tell me to get out of town, to go away, and that you are actually cut off from Christ. That you are anathema, that you are cursed. Paul says not just him, but he says an angel. He doesn't even appeal to the other apostels. He doesn't even mention James or John. He says, going right to an angel. If an angel, seemingly a revelation from heaven, were to come to you and preach something different, usher them out of your sight. No messenger outranks the message itself. This is serious. Paul is cursing people here. He's cursing those who are pointing people, directing people away from the curse remover. Paul has a right to be mad, not because he's trying to protect his reputation, because there are souls on the line. The people who are doing this are the people inside the church. Paul has a right to be furious at these people. People inside the church, in the name of Jesus, are pointing people away from the grace, the freedom that comes from Christ alone. The gospel is so important that it cannot be added to. We are saying that it has to be Christ alone. We are saved by Christ who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father. No rule, no authority, no tradition, no leader, no Pope, nothing. No one can add to the gospel. Nothing is allowed to. Nothing is able to make the gospel better than it actually is, than it already is. We were saved. So here's the diagnostic for you. To feel at peace. It needs something besides Christ to feel at peace. You've been handed a counterfeit. You've been handed counterfeit gospel. And that leads us to our main idea. This is life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Epistle, the main idea, this is the melodic line that will weave itself through this entire by the law. Entire letter. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by how we actually read. The gospel is received, not achieved. It's a moment that we have. It's not by some feelings, some spiritual moment that we have. It is because we stop trying to save ourself and being our own savior. The gospel doesn't just comfort you. It replaces what you're trusting in. If Christ is enough for your standing before God, then you can finally stop adding to it, proving yourself and trying to earn it. John Stott has this quote that says, The gospel is not good advice. It is good news. That good news does not come with a list of upgrades. You You don't improve it. You receive it. There's a story that I like to tell about the idea of a farmer and a carpenter who are good friends, two friends. The farmer understands this alone is the faith through, or being justified by faith that Christ elites. It feels like he has to earn a way to be saved. And yet his friend, the Carpenter, really struggles with the Carpenter to build them. So one day, the farmer asks his friend, the Carpenter, to build him a for one of his fences. The thing about a fence or a gate is that it has to be perfect. It cannot be too long, otherwise it'll hit the post and it won't latch. If it's too short, it won't hit the latch at all. So the Carpenter finishes it and the farmer goes out to inspect it with him and it's perfect. It works great. And as he's thanking the Carpenter for building this gate, he goes over to one of the hinges and starts unscrewing it and starting to add a four by four to it. The Carpenter says, No, No, you can't do that. That will ruin it. You can't add anything to it. If you add to add to it, it'll actually break it. The farmer says, Exactly. Actually anything to it actually takes away from it. To add anything to the gospel on what takes away from it. Justification is the main hinge. Another gospel is not in which religion turns. This is what John Calvin says. Another gospel is not a small tweak. It doesn't give it an upgrade. It breaks the hinge. So the question isn't whether you believe in Jesus. The false teachers here believe in Jesus. They said, Yes, absolutely believe in Jesus. We're not saying don't believe in Jesus. The question is, Whether Jesus is the whole reason you believe you're accepted by God. And that leads us into our points of application. First point of application is this. Sorry, it's hard to read. We'll fix the slides for next week. The The first point of application is this. We'll always know the gospel by spotting Jesus plus. A counterfeit gospel, for your faith, sound like this. Jesus started it. He's important. He's the most crucial thing. But here's how you finish it. Here's the list of to-dos. If your answer is anything yourself, what do I treat as proof that God accepts me? If your answer is anything but Christ, then you've started to add to it. And maybe your plus might be Jesus plus being a good parent, being morally consistent, being theologically correct, being productive, being respected. Sometimes the plus isn't rules. It's just vibes. It's Jesus plus my sincerity. It's Jesus plus my spiritual intensity, plus my prayer life, plus my church involvement, plus my devotional life. Legalism isn't always rules. It's any attempt to make Christ insufficient. Too many Christians are pulled away by false doctrine, by false teachers, by false Gospels. Employees who have family members, coworkers, friends, who are children, parents, even yourselves, being exposed to different Gospels every single day, being exposed to different Gospels which are distorted, which in actuality are Gospels of no worth at all. Every day, Satan will try to pull us away from something ultimate to something that seems good, something that seems like obedience, something that seems like another level in our Christian faith. He pulls us from the pre-eminence of Christ, from the ultimate salvation, which is found in Christ alone, to something good. And that's the difficulty that we have to watch out for. We have to know the gospel and be pulled away from it into something that says, Here's Jesus, Jesus plus my slavery on top of it. If your gospel is circumstances, performance, then is that leads us into our next point, then even in a dark age, it won't own you. That leads us into our next point of application. It says this, The world not scare us, and then in parentheses, or as much as it does. We are rescued from the evil or the present evil age. That's what Paul says. It doesn't say that we will be sucked up, beamed up into another reality. It says that it won't have its hold on you. It won't have rule over you. There's this lie that we believe believe as humans, and it's as old as humans have been around. It's this lie that we believe that the world is just getting worse and worse and worse, and that we have to solely, we have to be the ones who stop it. I feel this. We talk about things in culture. We talk about the things that we see, and we go, Man, it's never been this bad. We forget that at one point in Genesis, that one-third of the population were murders. It's never been that bad. But We think it's bad. And we do. We see the world doing evil things. I don't want to minimize that. There are things in this world that are evil. There are public figures acting in ways that they shouldn't. Wars starting. Everything that's happened in Minneapolis in the last couple of weeks. There is brokenness all around us. I don't want to deny that. But what the gospel gives us is the ability to stop living like the headlines are sovereign. Stop acting like cultural darkness means that somehow Christ is losing. The world is still broken, yes, but it's not ultimate. It doesn't mean that we need to isolate ourselves and withdraw from everything. We still actively need to be a part of making God's kingdom come, his will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. What it means is that terrible things can happen in this world, and we can know that we've already been redeemed, we've already been rescued from it, that we've already been delivered from it. What the gospel shows us is that Jesus, he took the curse that Paul pronounces so that way we could receive the grace Paul announces. The warning in Galatians is real because the gospel is real, because the cross was real. Jesus could have been the one on the cross, even in the garden of Gethsenevi, to turn He could have been the one who deserted us. Maybe there's an argument that said that he should have, but he doesn't. He remained on the cross. Jesus became forsaken. He he became the one who was deserted. Jesus took everything that we should have received, the desertion from the Father, and took it in our place. He became forsaken. So that way we could remain. So as we leave, don't add to the gospel. Don't try to improve it. Remain in it. The gospel is not something we graduate from. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Let's stand and pray together as we prepare our hearts to respond in worship. Let's stand and pray. Father God, we praise you for who you are, that you are a God worth worshiping, that we can rest knowing that our salvation is secure because we don't hold ourselves to you, that you hold ourselves to you. You hold us to yourself. God, that life with you, freedom in you cannot come from our own worship, our own righteousness, our own devotion, but it comes by faith in you. God, help us to find that freedom from the law and a freedom that we can find only in you. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Faith or Works? Prosper Christian Reformed Church Faith or Works? Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, February 15, 2026 Audio Faith or Works? Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 45:53 Sermon Transcript Introduction/Big Question Are you a hard enough worker? That question's everywhere. It runs our life. At work, are you producing enough? Are you valuable enough? At home, are you doing enough? Or are you showing up at home at the right time? In your head, are you keeping up? Or are you falling behind? The trap is this. We don't keep that question in workplace or on our own effort in our physique or in how we're keeping up with ourselves. We often drag this question into our souls. We start asking it spiritually, Am I a hard enough worker for God? Am I consistent enough? Am I obedient enough? Am I disciplined enough? Most of us don't doubt that God exists, but we doubt whether we've done enough for him. It feels like a humble question. It feels like a A reasonable one because if you ask that question, you always know if you've tried hard enough. You always know that you've tried, but you never know if God is pleased. Is it healthy for us to ask this question of our spiritual life? And fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 3, as we'll look at three movements through this passage. Outline The Galatians experience The spiritual pattern The law's function Verses 1 through 14 are going to show us something important here, that God justifies and blesses his people by faith alone, not by works of the law, as shown in the Galatians' experience, Abraham's example, and in Christ's curse bearing death. Where we are in the series: Where we're at in this series, we're in an eight-week series right in the middle of it. We're in week four. So far, what we've been seeing is this is a letter written from Paul to churches in Galatia, that this is a letter unlike all the other letters that Paul writes. This is Paul fighting for the gospel, trying to bleed with the Galatian churches that our faith is not based on works, that it's not Jesus plus anything. That doesn't make or improve Christianity. In fact, it takes away from it. That there's a crisis identity also within the church. There's this tension between who is in and who is out, who belongs in the church? Is it based on performance or is it based on faith? Paul has defended his message up until this point and his mission proving that he was an apostle, really trying to say that this gospel is not from man, but from God, and that he's going to confront anyone with it, even if that means confronting the apostle Peter. Week in and week out, what we've been seeing so far in Galatians is that life with God comes by faith in Christ and not the law. The Galatians experience faith, not law, brings the spirit Galatians 3:1-5 Paul comes back to the false teaching that he addressed at the beginning of this letter. He doesn't start with a lecture. He starts with something that is meant to shock the Galatians. He's saying, This is so absurd that you have forgotten the gospel, that you've left it, that it must be that you've been put under some spell. The word here that we see in verse one is the word bewitched, and literally the way that that translates in the Greek is to cast an evil eye. Really, it means to confuse so badly that you can't see what's obvious. This was a superstitious language that was used in the Greco-Roman culture. They believe that they could catch a curse. They could catch being cursed by someone or being being bewitched by someone. Paul is saying, How did you get the gospel so clear when I was with you? Then, How did you get it so wrong? Galatians 3:1 really could be translated this way, "O foolish Galatians, who has cast an evil eye on you. It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly, publicly portrayed as crucified." Paul is trying to use a play on words here. He's not calling them stupid, but what he's saying is, You're acting like people who can't see. You're acting like people who have been put under a spell. And what should have been the thing that kept them clear was the end of this. It was before your very eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. The Galatians didn't personally see Jesus crucified. So what does this mean? It means that Jesus's death was public, not in the sense that they watched it. In the sense that Paul's preaching put the cross right in front of them, like a billboard, like a public portrayal. The cross was not a footnote. In the faith of the Galatian church, it was the center of it. Paul moves from this verse into the rest of this section, Galatians 3:2-4. He's going to ask four important questions, four rhetorical questions, not because he doesn't know the answer, but he wants them to remember what they've already experienced. So Galatians 3:2 says, Let Let me ask you only this. Did you receive the spirit by works of law or by hearing with faith? He's going to ask these questions, How did you receive the spirit? How did you meet God? How did you experience the life of God? Was it through works? Was it through the law? Was it through faith? Paul is forcing one question through this. Did God come as a boss, paying you a wage, or did he come as your father, giving you a gift? There's one thing as hard workers we hate. It's a thing that's hard for us, especially in our culture, to deal with. It's being a charity case. Paul is saying that we need to be a charity case. It is not by works of the law, but it is through faith, something that we cannot earn. Paul is asking, did you work the spirit up? Is it you that mustard this Did the energy up? Or did the spirit come down to you like a gift? Paul's point is simple. We don't receive God as a wage. We receive him as a gift. He's not a paycheck. He is a blessing. He is something that we've gotten, we've received without any effort, without any of our earning towards it. Grace makes you a charity case before it makes you useful. In other words, Christianity begins the moment you stop asking, What do I deserve? And start asking, What can I receive? The spirit comes to you in the way that charity comes. It's never something that you purchase, but it's always something that you're given. He presses that same question on into sanctification as we look at verse three. Are you so foolish? Having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected in the flesh? He's saying, God started this. He's the one who initiated this. Are you then going to be the one who perfects yourself, who finishes it? Religion says, I obey, therefore I am accepted. But the gospel says, I am accepted, and therefore I obey. Religion wants to give us performance first and then a verdict later. But the gospel gives us a verdict. It declares us righteous. It declares us justified. We obey out of that. It was God who began the work in you. Who do you think is going to complete it? Are you really that convinced that your effort can outdo Can we outdo what the Holy spirit can do? This is not just a question that Paul is asking the churches in Galatia, it's a question that we should ask ourselves. Can we outdo with our own effort what the Holy spirit spirit can do in us? Paul continues on to Galatians 3:5, Does he who supply the spirit to you and work miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Again, God is the one who supplies the spirit. God is the one who works. God is the one who moves. And God is the one who gives life. He doesn't do it because we've earned it. He does it because we needed it. He does it because he's gracious. Paul is saying that there were some some miraculous things that were happening, some amazing things that were happening in the church in Galatia. And he's saying, Who did that? Was it the Holy spirit or was it you? I think it's a humbling question. For us as a church, if God's going to move us to where he wants to move us, if he's going to call us to where, or if we're going to go to where he's called us to be, we can't be like the church in Galatia that says, Well, this is on us now. This has to be led by the spirit, perfected by the spirit, communally, but also individually. Think about times in your life where God has moved. Why did he do it? Why did God move in and through your life? Whether it was the moment that you became a Christian or just a moment where the Holy spirit did something miraculous in and through you. Was it a time that you cleaned yourself up, that that you got yourself together, that you perfected yourself in the flesh? Or was it exactly the very moment that you needed his grace, that you needed him to step up and do something amazing? God is the one who supplies the spirit. God is the one who works the miracles. God is the one who works in and through us. Paul's begging them, Don't you see church in Galatia? It was never with you to begin with. Our works. Our works can never save us. I think oftentimes we think about our good works, our righteousness, even as Christians, even as people who aren't trying to earn our salvation, we think about our works as on par with the works that God does. In terms of righteousness, if we could give our righteousness or our righteous works a number on a scale of one to 100 or whatever, we would say, often wrongly, That our righteousness and what God does, his righteous works, are about the same. Our good works are on the same level with him, and we think about it that way. When we do something good, it's about as good as what God does, those good works. And yet our righteousness and his righteousness are not even on the same playing field. When we do something, it is not the same level of what God is doing. In fact, for us to use our good works in order to try to manipulate God into receiving blessing or to receive salvation or to receive anything from him is something that disgusts God. It is something that is repulsive to God. In fact, in Isaiah Isaiah 64. Isaiah says this, We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. This is a very charitable and a very kind way to interpret this passage. This passage, the word polluted garments, is really so much more foul than what is translated here that I really don't want to give you what exactly it says. But it is disgusting. Our righteousness and God's righteousness are not on the same level. I think about it like this, like children's artwork. When you get artwork from a young child who loves you, it is something you want to put on your refrigerator. It's beautiful. It's Wonderful. It's an expression of their love for you, and it's amazing. But if we're going to be objective about it, it's bad art, right? We can all say that, right? It is. It's not the quality of the art that we love. It's the heart behind it. It's the same with our works, our righteousness, our good. If we do them as an act to try to manipulate God, to try to get something something from him. It's bad art. It's objectively no good. But when we do it out of a heart of love, when we respond to the gospel and want to obey him, we want to do his will, he loves it. It is beautiful in his sight. I don't want to minimize that God doesn't like obedience. He absolutely loves obedience. But an obedience in trying to get something from him is like a polluted garment. If we're going to try to use our righteousness against God, God sitting there going, if you're trying to twist my arm by doing good works, good luck, you and me are not the same. Our righteousness is not leverage that we can use against God. God's love for you is independent Love your obedience to him, which brings us an incredible amount of freedom. When we understand that God loves me, when God loves us, we don't have to perform for him. Just try that this week. Feeling, embracing that freedom that you have. You don't have to earn his favor. He loves you. He is proud of you. You don't have to You don't have to be the one who is perfect in your devotional time, is amazing at your prayer life. Those things are great and good. But if you're doing them to try to make God happy with you, God is already happy with you. Live in the freedom that comes with that. The gospel does not say, work harder. It says, Stop bargaining. When we realize the love that God had for us and has for us, It allows us to go from, Man, I have to obey. I get to obey. There's this great hym by John Newton. He was the one who wrote Amazing Grace. This was a hym that was never put to music by him, but it's one of my favorite, I don't know, hymns or poetry that I've ever experienced in Christian literature. It says this, Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before, since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more. To see the law by Christ fulfilled, to hear his pardoning voice, transforms a slave into a child and duty into choice. When we see the beauty of Christ, our pleasure and our duty aren't Two different things. They are the same. Our duty is something we choose to do. Our obedience to God is something we love to do. Transforms a slave into a child. God loved you before you were born. He loved you before the world was created. He wanted you to trust and follow him, not because of your works, not because of your obedience, but because of your faith. This is always the pattern. And Paul starts off with an experience. He This is how you experience God, Galatians church. The Scriptural Pattern in Abraham: Abraham was Justified by Faith (Galatians 3:6-9) It comes down to a question of belonging, question of who gets in, who are God's chosen people. Paul's move here is brilliant. It really is. He picks someone out of the Bible that no one can argue with. Paul picks Abraham. Everyone agrees on Abraham. Galatians 3:6 says this, Just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, Why does Paul bring up Abraham besides that nobody can argue with him? Abraham was the first Jew. He is the family tree. If anyone could be saved by their bloodline or got in by effort, it would have been Abraham. And yet, here's the shocking part. Abraham was not justified by works of the law. He is justified by faith. Genesis 15:6 says this, And he believed the Lord, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Abraham didn't bring a record. He didn't bring his credentials. He brought empty hands. He believed, and God counted it to him as righteous. This was always the pattern. This was always the plan. And that's what we'll see next week in our passage. If you actually want to be part of the chosen group, part of the sons of Abraham, which is what verse seven says, it cannot be based on works. It cannot be through law keeping. It must be through faith. The truest Jew is not the one who has the right DNA. The truest son of Abraham, the truest member of the chosen people, is the one who has Abraham's faith. Belonging always has been a promise. It has never been about performance. Then Paul goes deeper in Galatians 3:8, he says this, And in scripture, Forseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preach the gospel beforehand to Abraham. Do you hear how bold this is? Paul is saying the gospel does not start with Paul. It was preached beforehand with Abraham. And what's the message that we see here? The message is this, that in you shall all the nations be blessed. God's plan was never to keep God's blessing to one people. From the foundation, from the birth of God's people with Abraham, it was all about being a blessing to the nations, to every family, to every person. The problem is the way that the Judiaizers or the circumcision party, when they read that passage, how they would have read that passage is like this, when they heard in you, they would have heard in your line, in your blood, in your family. To get into Abraham's blessing, they would have said you had to become a Jew first. But in you does not mean in your DNA. It means by you, from you, through you. Abraham's family was meant to be an instrument, not a fortress. The Jewish people, Israel, were meant to be agents of the blessing, not hoarders of it. It's one of the wonderful things about the Christian faith. Did you know Christianity was the first religion to say, you don't have to belong to this certain people group or this nationality or this ethnic tribe or be a part of this region, you can belong no matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, what language you speak. Have Have you ever wondered the difference between our Bible, our sacred text, and a lot of other sacred texts? If you're a Muslim, you have to read it from the Arabic. The reason why is the official language of Islam is Arabic. Why can we say that this English Bible is still God's word, even though obviously Jesus did not speak English? It's because the first language, what was the first language spoken at Pentecost? It was every language. The gospel does not belong to one group of people. That was intentional. The blessing comes to all kinds of people, and the blessing is this. You can have God. You can belong to God by believing. You can be justified by faith. If all the other nations had to be justified, had to be justified by their works, they had to be Jewish first, it would have absolutely guttied the gospel. The promise to the nations would have been erased. And even Abraham's own story would have been negated. Galatians 3:9 continues on, So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. Not the man of works, the man of faith. Paul knew what our hearts do next when we hear faith. He wants us to respond truly, but he knows as humans, we hear faith and we want to grab the closest measuring stick. We want to make sure that we're doing it right, that we can be good Christians, that we can obey, and that we can belong. He shows us the other side of reliance, that it does not bring blessing, but it brings curse. The Law's function: It Brings Curse, not Blessing (Galatians 3:10-14) Galatians 3:10 says this, All who rely on works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed be everyone who does not abide in all things written in the Book of the law, and do them. Before we go on, what is a curse? We need to answer that question. I think oftentimes when we hear the word curse, we think of curse words, we think of witches, we think of magic, right? But the biblical idea of cursing is so much more than that. A curse is God's judgment. It's a failure to live up to his covenant requirements. A curse always comes from a covenant. Anytime a covenant was installed in the life of Israel, there were blessings and curses promised for those who believed it and would do it and those who wouldn't. You might think, Well, that's not so bad. It doesn't sound so bad. God's judgment from a curse means that it's his judgment without mercy. It means he weighs He gives up everything that you've done every time you've broken the law, and he judges you without his mercy. He gives you what you deserve. He gives us what our wages demand. Romans 6:23 says this, For the wages of sin is death. Our works earn us death unless you can keep the whole law, unless you can keep all 613 Commandments in the Old Testament all the time. This is a contract. It's not getting paid, half paid for half work. You have to do it all, all the time, keeping every commandment. You either keep all of it or you're cursed, judged, hopeless, dead. The law to use it like it can save us leads to death, to curse, to brokenness. Right here, the gospel becomes more evident than ever. It becomes more than advice, it becomes a rescue because God doesn't just tell us that we're under a curse. He sends us someone to stand under that curse for us. The good news is that Jesus has saved us. And that's why we can't work hard to fix things. Grace makes you a charity case before it makes you useful. Galatians 3:13 says this, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. It all comes back to the most important moment in the life of any Christian, the crucifixion. That something amazing has happened in our place, something substitution. We should have lived and died by the law. We are lawbreakers. We are cursed. And yet Christ became a curse for us. In our place, Jesus was condemned. He was cursed. That's why Athanasius says this, He became what we are, that we might become what he is. The cross is where your earnings go to die. The law tells truth about you, but it cannot save you. And all of this happens for a very important so that in Galatians 3:14. So that in In Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. So that is so important. If you write in your Bible, circle those two so that. Paul is telling us the intent of this passage, what he intends the Galatians to understand by it. The goal of the covenant of Abraham was Jesus, that all kinds of people would come into the family, this beautiful family of God, so that we could have God, so that we could have the promised Holy spirit with us, so that we could have God himself, not through works. Part of this is that God wanted to make sure that we knew that we could never have the delusion of controlling him. If we earn our salvation, if we earn his favor, it means that we can control him. If our righteousness, if our good works can make him like us more, means that we have control over him. And yet all we can do is respond. We can reflect his glory. The beautiful part about that is that we get his glory. That's the blessing here. Is that we get him. That's the freedom in all of this. Is that God is not someone we manage. God is a glory to behold. We are made to be mirrors, not marketers, not people who earn his love, people who reflect his glory. When you stop trying to control him, you finally get what you were made for. That you were made for his presence, that you were made for his favor, that you were made for himself. Mirrors do not strive. They do not achieve, they don't bargain, they receive light and reflect it. And that is the Christian life. Main Idea Faith brings blessing, law brings curse - Christ redeems us. This is the foundational reality of what we believe as Christians, that we are people who are redeemed, that we cannot save ourselves. That word redemption is an economic term. It means to purchase, to buy back. One of the pictures that the Bible paints of our spiritual reality is one of debt, that we owe a debt that we have no ability to repay, incapable, and that we have to admit that we are spiritually bankrupt. That's hard. That's hard for us. We're blue collar, middle class people. Working hard is one of the greatest virtues we can have. Wives, if you didn't get your husband a gift today, you can. You can tell him that you're so proud of how hard he works. There's nothing as a husband that... There's very few things as a husband that you love to hear more. We love to hear this. This is such a good part of who we are. It's part of the reason I love being a part of this church. We have tons of people who wake up early, who work hard. I love that about us. But God is telling us that that cannot be true of our spirituality. Jesus did not get up on the sermon of the mount and say, blessed are the middle class in spirit. ' He said, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit. ' We have to be people who recognize that we are spiritually bankrupt, that there is nothing that we can do to save ourselves, that we are charity cases. There's a scene in a book that I love. It's called The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. The This book is about a bus full of people coming from hell and going to heaven, having the ability to stay there if they'd like. They all encounter someone from their life on earth who is in heaven now. A scene Seans between saints and ghosts play out. And that's one of the scenes I'd love to read for you here because I think it absolutely embodies this. If you can't read that, I'm going to read it aloud to. The ghost says this, 'Look at me now, ' said the ghost, slapping his chest, but the slap made no noise. I've gone straight all my life, don't you? I don't say I was a religious man, and I don't say I have no faults, far from it, but I've done my I've done my best all my life, see? I've done my best by everyone. That's the chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn't mine by rights. If I wanted a drink, I paid for it. If I took my wage, I'd done my job, see? That's the I was, and I don't care who knows it. It would be much better not to go on about that now. Who's going on? I'm not arguing. I'm just telling you the chap I was. See, I'm not asking for nothing but my rights. You may think that you can put me down because you're dressed like that, which you weren't when you worked under me. I'm only a poor man, but I got to have my rights. Same as you. See? Oh, no. It's not so bad as that. I haven't got my rights, or I shouldn't be here. You will not get yours either. You'll get something far better. Never fear. There you go. That's what I say. I haven't got my rights. I've always done my best, and I never done anything wrong. And that's what I don't see is why I shouldn't be or why I should be put below a bloody murderer like you. Who knows whether you will be. Only be happy and come with me. What do you keep arguing for? I'm only telling you the chap I am. I only want my rights. I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity. Then do so at once. Ask for the bleeding charity. Everything here is for the asking, and nothing can be bought. Grace makes you a charity case before it makes you useful. That's the question. The question isn't whether you've done enough, whether you're religious enough, whether you've obeyed enough, whether you've done enough good works. The The question is, have you asked for the bleeding charity? Have you asked for the bleeding charity today? Christianity is not a marketplace. It is a mercy seat. If you believe that you're too good for charity, you're saying that you're too good for Christ. How do we respond as charity cases? Application: Receive charity This week, allow someone to help you. Allow someone to serve you. Do not be so prideful that you can't accept someone's help. I think it's easy for us I think for many of us, it's hard to see people on the same level. We always want to feel superior to people. We don't want to let people help us. When we let people help us, we become equals with them. If that's something that causes you to be unsettled in your heart, to be equals with people, we don't understand the gospel. We are. Receive charity. The second point is this. Practice charity This week, find one way to give, given a way that you can't be paid back. As people who have been redeemed, bought, been given charity, we must give graciously and generously. Look for someone. Look for a way that you can help someone, not because you're trying to be better than them, not as a power move, but you're trying to embody the gospel in a tangible way. So find a gospel-centered charity that you can give generously to. Maybe one of our missionaries, if you need help finding that on our website, we have a new web page that allows you to find their a living platform that you can give right to them. If you're not giving here, I challenge you to pray about what it would look like to tithe, not because we necessarily need the money, but because you need that in your spiritual life to trust God with your money. Maybe you're asking, what if it's going to be hard for us financially? Or it might not be the right time to do that. The truth is, that's the point. Gospel-shaped generosity hurts. Look at the cross. If generosity from God was something that didn't hurt, God wouldn't have went to the cross for us. He went to the cross. He suffered for us. Our generosity ought to cost something. It ought to make us feel uncomfortable. What would it look like for you to embody the generosity of the cross in your daily life? Landing As we come to a close, there's a danger here. Even in this, we can turn generosity into a new ladder, into a way to try to work the curse off of us. So how do we have the power to both receive charity and to practice charity without trying to earn something, without trying to try to take control? The only place Christ is the cross. Is that Christ became a curse for us. The curse that he bore was so much more than physical. I think sometimes we think about the physical nature of what Christ took, the lashes, the nails in his arms and his hands. The cross was infinitely more painful because it was spiritually torturous. It was the first time in the history of the Trinity, in the relationship of the Trinity, that Jesus was not loved, but he was hated. On the cross, Jesus heard what we should have. Depart from me. I never knew you. He was told that he was not loved. He became a curse for us. Because of that, we get what he deserves, that we get to become children of God. We get the blessing that Jesus received, the words that Jesus received at his baptism. This is my son or daughter in whom I'm well pleased. As a Christian, you get to hear that over you, not because of what you've done, but because of what Christ has done for you. We are already loved. That is the blessing that we get to receive. Hear this, faith brings blessing, law brings curse, and Christ redeems us. Prayer Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are, that you are God who is rich in mercy, that you allow us to be saved, not by our works. That we do not have to muster enough effort up in us to be pleasing to you, but you are already pleased in us because you are pleased in your son. God, we thank you that he became a curse for us so that we do not have to try to pay for the wages of our sin, which would have been death. Thank you for the gift that we have in Christ, the free gift that we have. God, help us to sing as people who have been redeemed. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Heirs of the Promise Prosper Christian Reformed Church Heirs of the Promise Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, February 22, 2026 Audio Heirs of the Promise Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript Introduction In 100 years, when we look back and look at what shaped our culture, what shaped our society, historians will look back and see one of the most powerful forces wasn't movies or music or books or TV shows, but it'll be advertising. Advertising has been one of the most formative things in our culture. It's shaped almost every facet of our society. It's totally remade and reformatted how we do social media, how we do the radio. All types of things are formatted by advertising because ads Ads don't just change what we buy or what we do. Ads aren't selling us simply products. They're selling us a new identity, a new person to become. A famous example of this is in 1920, Listerine ran a famous ad in newspapers around bad breath. Up until this point, most advertising, especially around things like Listerine, were about the medical benefits of it, the hygiene that you could get from Listerine. But this ad campaign was about the social implications that you get from using The stream. The message was basically this, you might be the person that people are avoiding. You might be the person that nobody chooses. You might not even know why, but it's your bad breath. I know in 1920, they were ruthless. They weren't just selling antiseptic, right? They were selling, don't be rejected. In the 1950s, the ads changed because we had televisions in almost every home. This was something that changed for us. We went from imagining a new life to being able to see it. And in the 1990s, that changed into not just identity branding or identity marketing. It went into lifestyle, right? Don't drink Pepsi because it's tasty, it's good, and you like it. Look at all these people who drink Pepsi. They're successful. They're cool. Don't you want to be like these people? It's why we have celebrities who endorse products, right? If my favorite athlete eats whatever cereal or some cereal, well, if he likes it, then I want to be like him, and therefore I'll buy what he is promoting. When you notice this, when you see this, you'll see it everywhere. The message isn't buy this, it's become this. It's not, here's what this does for you. Here are the features from it. Here's who you'll be after you buy it. The deeper effect on this is that it trains us to look at ourselves, whether we're in or out, mostly based on what we buy. But there is a validation system there, a sense of, am I okay? Am I in? Do I matter? That leads us to the big question beneath all of this. Big Question What defines you? What defines you? What are the things that set you apart? The things that make you, you? What is it about you that tells people who you truly are? Is it that you're affiliated with a political movement, whether you're progressive? Are you trying to be on the right side of history? Well, the drawback in that is that progressives today, or progressives 10 years ago, what they believed progressives today would call bigoted, and it's totally antiquated. Well, maybe you want to be conservative. You want to hold to good values. Well, Conservatives have moved farther left in the last 10 years than Liberals have. Conservatives are not further left today, but in terms of where they started and where they ended, Conservatives have moved the most in that time frame. Maybe your identity statement is you're self made. You've made it here by yourself. You're your own boss. The danger in believing that is there are circumstances outside of your control that can change that in the blink of an eye. We are not self made. There's no part of us that if we're honest with ourselves, we realize that, yeah, we might be hard workers, but there's been a lot of luck. There's been a lot of circumstances that have made us that way. Maybe our identity statement is that we're attractive. We want to be appealing to people. The truth is our looks will fade. We will get older. Things change on us. Maybe your identity statement is that you're a hard worker. But the truth is everyone needs rest. So either we'll lie about how much we work or we'll deny ourselves the rest that we need. And maybe you're one of those people that think that you're above all of this and you're like, you know what? I really don't care what people think. That might mean that you're the biggest liar of them all in this group. But the truth is, if you really get to that point where you don't care what people believe, you've done something really harmful to your own soul. To cut yourself out of community, to feel that loss of relationship is really a sad thing. But whatever it is, whatever it is we try to define ourselves with, that thing insists on us continuing to To prove ourselves by it. We have to keep earning the right for that thing to define us. And so our identity becomes a treadmill. No longer is it good enough just to be self made or your own boss. You have to earn more, conquer more. There is no end goal in your... If attractiveness is what you're going for. There's no end goal. You won't be able to get enough Botox, enough whatever in order to satisfy that. There are many things that we try to use to define ourselves, but I want to ask you this question, what is it about you that you say to yourself? Or what is it about you that you say to others? When you meet someone new, what do you hope people will ask you about yourself? What is it about you that you wish you could just share with them to show them that you are a valuable person? Or in other words, what defines you? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 3. Paul is going to ask us some questions in here. He's going to dig into some things. Really, what came first? Law or rules? Law or promise, really. What really defines God's people? The answer is that promise comes first. Christ fulfills the law, and faith receives it, and that reality creates a whole new identity. We're We're going to see two major movements in this section. Outline Before the Rules: The Promise (3:15–22) After the Rules: The Heirs (3:23-29) Paul is doing something surgical here to our heart, to every heart in the room. If we're saved by promise, why the law? Underneath that is an identity question. If we're saved by faith, if we're saved this way, what does it mean about who we belong to? How do people become children of God? Paul is going to get these two things, show us that promise is came first and can't be rewritten and that the law is temporary until Christ. A sentence that summarizes this passage, the content of what's going on in this passage would be this, God's saving promise to Abraham is fulfilled in Christ and received by faith, rendering the law temporary and establishing a new unified identity for all who believe in Christ Jesus. Before the Rules: The Promise (3:15–22) Paul starts with a human example here in verse 15, because everyone understands contracts to some extent. We understand that once they're signed, once the ink has dried, you don't go back and change them. Once they've been agreed upon, you can't add new things that nullify it. And that's what he's saying in verse 15. To give a human example, brothers, even with a manmade covenant, no one annulls or adds to it once it's been ratified. Paul understands that our heart loves adding to things. We love the fine print. This idea of Jesus being our savior is great and wonderful unless we want to rank ourselves against each other, which is the desire of all of our hearts. If we're saved by grace, if we're saved by the full work of Christ, well, I can't say that I'm better than so and so or that so and so is worse than me or maybe I see so and so, and they're doing so good. And if I could just try to be like them. If we're all saved by Christ, by grace, we're on the same level. If this is true of our human contracts that we can't go back and change them, how much more true is it with God? Once the terms are set, we don't get to add to the fine print later. We don't get to say, Okay, yeah, it's saved by Jesus, but it's also performance. God gave Israel the law. He did. And that was confusing for the Galatian churches, but Paul wants to make it clear. The promise to Abraham, the promise of salvation came first. The law came after. 430 years later, that's what he says, meaning the law is not the foundation, but the promise is. He made the promise to Abraham, and then he gave a law to Moses on Mount Sinai. And this is how God works. This is what Paul is trying to tease out. Anytime salvation happens, it's salvation first, it's saving work first, and then a A requirement of obedience. Look at this. Even in these two covenants, there's a promise, there's salvation, and then there's obey. Look at even in the Ten Commandments, the first line of the Ten Commandments is this. I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. It doesn't start with, Here's the first commandment. It is, I'm the God who saved you. Now, obey. Almost every book in the New Testament starts out that way. Here's the first half is how you're saved, and the second half is about how we're supposed to live. So what is this promise that Paul is talking about? Let's look at verse 16. Now, the promise is, We're made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and your offspring, who is Christ. Paul is not trying to play a word game with us here. He's trying to make a point about the gospel. He's trying to say that the promise is not ultimately It's certainly about ethnicity. It's not about the offsprings, the people who share the same DNA with Abraham. It is about who comes from Abraham, the Christ, the promise. It's about Jesus, the promise has a center. The promise is a person. It's not a group of people. Jesus is the offspring that everyone was waiting for. He was the one who is going to crush the head of the serpent. He's the one who's going to fulfill every promise. That's what 2 Corinthians 1:20 says, For all the promises of God find their yes in him, in Christ. That is why it is through him we utter our Amen to God for his glory. God wants us to see. He wants the early church to see that it's not about ethnic boundaries. It's not about the people group. It's about Christ. That is the offspring that matter who come from Abraham. It doesn't matter who the literal people who descend from Abraham were. It matters that Jesus came from this line. The family of God is not defined by a bloodline, not defined by DNA, but they are defined by, are you a part of Abraham's Christ. So then what is the purpose of the law? What should we do with this? Well, it's a great question because Paul asks it next in Galatians 3:19, why Why then the law? Because Paul is anticipating that we would wrestle with this because this is the human heart. Anytime we are introduced to these two ideas of either justification through works or through faith, we tend to screw it up one way or the other. When we receive the law, when we receive rules, we naturally want to be people who say, well, I'm going to be justified by these rules. I'm going to make more rules to add on top of it so that way I define who is a good person, who is a bad person. I can make sure that I'm one of the good people. If we're defined and if we're saved by faith, we ask the question, What in the world are these laws then here for? Is this total anarchy? Do we not need to follow the law at all? Is the law even a good thing? I'm really fortunate that I didn't have to come up with that answer, but Paul does. In Galatians 3:21, he says this, Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not. For if the law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would be indeed through the law. Do we need to follow the law? Is the law a good thing? Yes. And yes, the reality is you cannot love God and hate his law. I feel like as Protestant Christians, we do such a bad job of embodying that and talking about that, that God's law is a good thing. We As protestants, we've nailed justification by faith alone. We know that. But we really struggle what to do with the law. Should we love it? Should it be a good thing? It absolutely should be. I mean, Psalm 1 says, blessed is the man who delights in the law of God, who meditates on it day and night. The law is something that we should write on our heart that we should love. The law is not our foundation, but it is the fruit of our salvation. It works like this, promise first, salvation first, and obedience out of love coming from that. The law is a good thing. It's a great thing. It has many purposes. I'm going to mention three right now. The law allows us to keep us from evil. When we get things screwed up in our hearts, when things go wonky with our desires, the law is a great safeguard for us to go, You know I feel this in my heart. I want to do this in my heart. And yet I know God's law says something different. It restrains evil in us and in the world. It acts as a mirror. It shows us that we can't obey every Everything that the law commands and that we need a savior. And thirdly, I think we don't talk about this hardly at all. The law shows us who God is. If you look at the Ten Commandments, each and every one of those Ten Commandments is an identity statement about who God is. When God says, Do not commit adultery, what he's saying is, I am a faithful God. When he says, Do not murder, God is saying, I am the life. I am the life giver. Each and every one of those statements, we could go back and look that God is telling us something about who he is. God's rules can do many things, but one of the things that they cannot do is create life in a sinner. The law and faith, I think sometimes we think of as two ends of a spectrum, but they aren't. They're not opposed to each other. They're not two things that you could be on one side or the other of. The law and faith are both good, are both necessary, but they need to be in the right order. Galatians 3:22 says this, But the scriptures imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus might be given to those who believe. Paul gives us this picture of the law of a jail cell. The idea that Paul is setting out there is that this is supposed to imprison us. The law put us in a spot where we couldn't pick the lock, we couldn't get out, and it showed us that we only have one way for salvation, and that's by the promised faith in Jesus Christ. Every passage of scripture in the Old Testament leading up into this point was showing us, even with our own effort, that it only showed a deeper need for a savior. So the law was given to see our sin, and the law is not rival to the promise. It's a servant of the us. It hems us in until Christ comes and brings it out. And that's what we're going to see in this next section, After the Rules: The Heirs (3:23-29) Paul's picture is movement. It's moving from being a captive under the law into being guarded and then into being adopted. The law did not save God's people. The law held them until Christ came. The law is temporary. The law was not is temporary. The law was temporary custody, and that it exposed our sin until God's people were able to see Christ. Then law became the guardian. Galatians 3:24 says this, So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. That word guardian, it's a hard word for us to understand. We don't have a concept for what this word was in first century Judaism and first century Israel in that area. What would happen is wealthy people or people who could afford it would hire a slave to instruct and to essentially, in some ways, parent their children. This master, this tutor, this guardian was not a babysitter. It was someone who would discipline the children. It supervised their behavior, restrict their freedom, transport them, teach them. That's what Paul is saying happened with the law. It taught us. It restricted them. It restricted us. It disciplined them. It was their guardian, but it was never their father. It was never their inheritance. Galatians 3:25 goes on to say this, But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith. Meaning that we don't live under the supervision of a guardian anymore. We live in sonship. That we are no longer held captive by some tyrannical master. The law, as a guardian, can only say you're wrong, you're screwing up, you're not there yet, you're guilty, you need to do more, you need to try harder. But when Christ comes. It's that Christ came to say, You're right, you're enough, you belong, and you're right because I was good for you. We are not punished by our tutor, our guardian anymore. Christ was punished for us on the cross. Because of that, we can be welcomed into this new family. So who can come And that's the question that Paul goes to. Remember the tension so far in this book. Paul's writing this book. Paul's explaining this because there's this rift. The Galatian church believed that there were these two sections, these two kinds of Christians. There were those who were fully Jewish, who really followed all the rules, who became circumcised, who did all the right things in order to become Jewish. And then there were these lower Christians, these Gentiles who didn't really fully obey everything. His question is this, who can come in? And his answer is anyone. Let's look at Galatians 3:28. This is the crescendo of this movement in in this book. There's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Paul's building this point up. Guys, you have separated yourself. You have made distinctions among you. You've tried to sit with other people. You've tried to exclude people from when you eat lunch together. Guys are acting like middle schoolers at lunchtime. When Paul brings up this list of people in verse 28, what he's saying is, and this would have been clear and obvious to anyone reading this book in the first century who is Jewish, these were the gates in the temple. If you were a Gentile, you could only go so far. There was a gate that they said, No, you can't come in. If you were a slave, you could only go so far. And then there was a gate that said, No, you can't come in. And if you were a woman, there was a gate that said, You can only go so far, you can't come in. These were levels. The temple was the place where God's dwelling place rested. How you accessed God. The beautiful part of what Paul is telling us in Galatians is that there is no distinctions. It does not matter who you are, what person you are, where you come from, what background you are, what your socioeconomic status is. We all have the same access to God by faith. It is not what we do. Ephesians says this, Paul also wrote the Book of Ephesians. He says this, For he himself, Jesus, is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. This is a direct reference to these walls that were built in the temple to say, You can't come in. In his flesh, he broke down these dividing walls. Jesus has torn them down. Paul is calling this church out to say, You cannot build them back up. In Christ, you belong. You can have full access to God, no matter who you are. So who is part of God's family? Who is part of God's covenant people? It's anyone who hears and anyone who believes. Because of that, you are an heir. Paul is saying you wanted to restrict access to people that they could be truly part of God's chosen people. He's saying, you don't even understand what it means. You don't understand. If you're trying to restrict people based on whether they were a Jew or not, you don't really actually understand what it meant to be a Jew. These people, This promise was not based on their obedience to the law by doing certain things. Their acceptance into God's covenant people was always by faith. The real offspring has always been those who believe, and it's still true today. So the gospel isn't just there to forgive you. It absolutely does that, but it's there to adopt you. It doesn't just get you out of trouble. It brings you into a new family. Main Idea Live as an heir of God's promise in Christ Live as an heir of God's promise in Christ. This means that you are no longer defined by a record. You are defined by a promise. It's not by what you achieve. You don't have to audition. You belong because of what Christ has done for you. Do you see what this means? It's not just that you belong, but you get an inheritance. You You have the legal right. You have the promise of something to come. By being an heir, you are promised. You are promised access to him. You are promised the wealth from the Father. This is why it says that you are sons of God, that you will get something. It's actually interesting here that it doesn't say sons and daughters, but it says sons. And Paul is using that language on purpose. And I want to clarify something in the language that we use here. Paul is not saying that to be sexist. The Bible isn't antiquated. What Paul was saying is that you become a son. Because in this time, who was it who got the inheritance? It was the son. Paul is actually saying something profoundly progressive for this time. He's saying, Anyone, whether you are a slave or you're free, whether you're a Jew or a Gentile, whether you're a man or woman, you are a son now. You are fully an heir. You have legal right to what the Father has to give you. The wealth that the Father has, you get to be a recipient of, which means that you get God. The wealth, the inheritance, isn't that we just get to be in heaven with God someday. I think too many of us think that that's the goal, as long as I get to heaven. But I think that if that's our only goal, we'll get to heaven and hate the God that we meet there. The whole inheritance is that we get God. Getting to heaven, the peace that we get from our salvation, those are fringe benefits. The whole thing is that we get God. Our great privilege of the gospel, the great privilege of the gospel, is our communion. That's what John Owen says, Communion with God is the great privilege of the gospel. Our Our inheritance is the promise that God is going to fulfill every desire of our heart, every true longing that we have. If you want true safety, God is your mighty fortress. Do you want to feel joy? He is our joy. Do you want to be loved? God is love. Do you need rest? God is our rest, our peace. Do you want to be enough? God declares you righteous. He says, Son or daughter, you are enough. So the question is, are you living like an heir? Or are you living like an orphan? Are you still praying like you have access, or are you still trying to earn an appointment with God. Application Stop living like sonship is an audition. If you're in Christ, you're not on trial. You haven't earned a spot in the family, you have been brought in. You already have been marked with the family name. You are in Christ. You are a Christian. When we audition for Christianity, it sounds like this. If I'm consistent, then God will be close. If I'm clean, then I can belong. If I do enough, then I'll be safe. But Paul's point is the opposite. You are sons through faith. You have put on Christ. You are heirs according to the promise. And so your obedience To God is not an audition. It is a response. You're not working for adoption. You are working from adoption. So here's a mini diagnostic for you this week. When you sin, Do you run to God or do you avoid him until you've cleaned yourself up, until you feel worthy again? That avoidance is orphan thinking. The gospel makes you a son, so stop trying to impress your heavenly Father who loves you. Start being honest with yourself and run to him. Heirs pray with access, not distance. A child does not schedule an appointment to ask for their father's help. Tim Keller has this quote. He says this, The only person who dares to wake up a king at 3: 00 AM for a glass of water is a child. We have that access to the Father. A child comes close. The law keeps us distant. When we try to use the law as a way to gain access to God, it keeps us separated from him. But in Christ, we are no longer under a guardian. We don't have to ask for permission to go to God anymore. In Christ, you have sonship. That's why I love praying. And then starting my prayer was saying, Let's pray to our heavenly Father who loves to hear our prayer. Your Father loves to hear when you go before him. So pray like you belong. When you believe this, your prayers will sound like, Father, I need mercy. I need wisdom. I need strength. Not, God, I'm sorry to bother you. I know that I've been a mess. I know that I've screwed this up. I know I'm not worthy. The truth is, we know that we're not worthy. But that's why it's called a promise. That's why it's called grace. Real practices for yourself this week is when you have an option to pray in a group, pray first, not last. Pray honest, not performatively. And pray in the moment that you're tempted, not afterwards, not after you've already lost. Heirs serve One of the easiest ways to tell whether we are living like an heir or not is how we treat the church. Whether we come as people who are spectators, whether we come as consumers, or whether we come as sons, as a family. A consumer will ask, did I like it? Was the worship good? Did I feel inspired? Did I feel motivated? Did I feel refreshed and rejuvenated like it's a spa? Did it meet my needs? Was it worth my time? But if it's a family, when you meet with a family, you ask things like this, where am I needed? Who can I help? How can I carry the load? If you're an heir and you see yourself, you see this as your family, you don't come here to earn a place. You already belong. So you don't have to need to be served. You don't have to look at church as some value statement. Was this a good return on my investment? Did I get out of it what I put in? No, you are free to serve. Orphan thinking says this, I'll help when it fits my schedule. I'll help when I feel appreciated. I'll help when it benefits me. When you see yourself as a son, when you see yourself as an heir, your thinking transforms to this. I received the promise, everything by the promise. So I can give without keeping score. This is what verse 28 does in a church. There's no VIPs, no spectators, no consumers, no second-class Christians. One body, one family. Family. If we are all one in Christ Jesus, then ministry is not just my job. It is a shared joy that we all participate in. So here's the concrete challenge for you guys. Here's the call for you guys. Pick one place in our church to serve in the next three months. There is a place to serve for every person, for every stage of life. Not because we're trying to prove something. Don't serve because you think it's just the right thing to do. Serve because you're already an heir, and this is a family. Serve where it's unseen. Serve with children in the sound booth or the slides or meals or visiting someone. The goal is not just filling holes. We don't have a crisis. We're not short on volunteers right now. This is good for our soul. This is good for us. So don't ask, do I have to? Heirs ask, how couldn't I do this? Landing As we come to a close, most of us don't like to think about death, not because we're afraid of death, but we're afraid of being alone. We're afraid of being unwanted. That's why we hate the idea of being in isolation. That's why in prison, being in isolation is one of the worst things. This is why inheritance matters, because inheritance means you have a name, you have a home, you have a father. The gospel says that inheritance is not primarily an object, primarily a thing that you can hoard, the thing that you can have. It is a person. You don't just get peace, you get God. Revelation 21 says this, And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. ' And God himself will be with them as their God, and he will wipe away every tear from their eye. And death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. Verse 7 says this, The one who conquers will have his heritage, and I will be his God, and he will be my son. Heritage, sonship, not visitors, but children. That's what Galatians 3 tells you. It tells you how to get, not by performing, not by adding fine print, not by adding more requirements onto what Christ has already accomplished perfectly on the cross, but by faith in Christ. In Christ, Jesus, you are all sons through faith. So there's no second class Christians. There's no inner circle. If you have Christ, then you have the inheritance, and he will wipe away every tear from your eye. Hear this, live as heirs of God's promise in Christ. Prayer Let's stand and pray as we prepare our hearts for worship and to respond in worship. Let's pray to our heavenly Father, who loves to hear our prayer. Father, we love you. We thank you that we do not have to work harder to save ourselves, that there isn't one shred, there isn't one small piece of this that is on us. God, I praise you that we are your children, that you see us as your son. God, help us to live as heirs this week, free from the guilt, free from the temptation to try to prove ourselves, to try to rank ourselves. But help us to live in the freedom that you give us. Help us to believe that we are your sons and daughters who you are well-pleased with. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Freedom That Bears Fruit Prosper Christian Reformed Church Freedom That Bears Fruit Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, March 8, 2026 Audio Freedom That Bears Fruit Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 38:20 Sermon Transcript Introduction In the year 2000, two researchers from Stanford set up an experiment. It was an experiment to see how we respond to different amounts of options that we have. What they did is they set up two different stands in two different grocery stores where they were selling jam. They were allowing people to sample different types of jam. I don't know why they picked jam, but they did. One stand had 24 different options. The other had six. The one with 24 had tons of people come up to it because there's lots of options. It drew a lot of people in, but nearly almost no one ended up buying any of the jams from that stand. When there was as a contradiction or as an opposition to that, the stand with six, only six jars of of jam had tons of people who ended up converting and buying the jam. The researchers concluded that the reason for this was when we have too many options in front of us, we actually become unhappy with either the choices we make or we get this idea of decision fatigue. Almost no one bought anything from the place that had more options. But when there were six people decided. We believe as a people that when we have more options, we have more freedom to choose, to choose what we want, that we will be happier. But research shows, and I think the Bible is going to show us that that actually is the opposite, the opposite of the truth. The truth is that we are a people that need some restrictions on what we can and can't do. Having more options, we know, leads us to being more unhappy. If you've had kids and you've given them more than one option, and even then, even when you give them one option, they tend to still not be happy. It's true with us, too. We believe that we want the ability to do whatever we want to do. But when we experience that, we know that that's not freedom. Big Question How can you truly be free? How can you truly be free? One of the dominant stories, one of the rising cultural phenomena or cultural movements in our world right now is to say that freedom means having no authority. In fact, any authority is oppressive. Our modern impulse is to think of the word danger or to feel danger when we hear the word authority rather than safety. Some of the most prevailing thought leaders in our culture, some of the most secular prevailing thought leaders in our culture affirm this idea, affirm the idea that any authority is oppression or that it's an intentional effort to take away our rights, our free, or it's just a power grab. This is why there are these undercurrents rising up. It's an increasingly popular idea, to say things like to have a boss is bad. Any parents or family structure is oppression. Spiritual authority is manipulation. Political officials we increasingly call dictators. Police become something that we talk about as a machinery of our own oppression. But is freedom devoid of authority? Is Is it fair for us to have structure? Is it fair for us to have rules and for us to have people that we listen to? Or is true freedom individual autonomy? Sociology, psychology, and God's word argue against that, argue that authority is a good thing in our life. The right authority is a good thing. So our question, how can you truly be free? Or how can you be truly free? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 5 and 6. Outline Freedom Must Not Be Surrendered to Legalism (5:2–12) Freedom Must Not Be Abused by the Flesh (5:13–26) Freedom Must Be Lived Out in Community (6:1–10) As we look at this passage, this longer passage, to summarize it in one sentence, the guts of what this passage is saying is this, Christian freedom is not freedom to serve the flesh, but freedom to walk by the spirit, fulfilling the law of love as a spirit forms community that bears one another's burdens and does good to all. This passage is in a context. We've been going through the Book of Galatians in this series so far. This is our second to last sermon, our second to last passage in this series. But the end of Galatians 4, Paul has just gotten done comparing two different things, two women and two mountains, Mount Sinai, where the law was given, where the Ten Commandments was given, and Mount Zion or Jerusalem, where God's promise is given. He also compares Hagar and Sarah. The reason that he does this, the reason that Paul compares these two women, is that he's trying to say, he's trying to tell us that when Abraham received the promise, there were two things that he did. First, he tried to take hold of the promise himself. He tried to, in essence, bring the promise to fruition by himself. He tried to actually save himself by having a child with the servant of his wife with Hagar. Later on, then he steps into trusting God, trusting God's promise by faith and that the salvation would come through God's promise and having a child through Sarah. The passage ends by saying that we are no longer slaves to the law, that we cannot try to save ourselves. And now that we have this freedom, it leads us into this section. Freedom Must Not Be Surrendered to Legalism (Galatians 5:2-12) So far in the Book of Galatians, we've talked a lot about works, righteousness, a lot about faith, faith. Because the Book of Galatians talks about this, that's why we've been bringing it up in this series. And circumcision is the issue that represents this tension between works and faith in these churches. So why is this such a big deal? Paul says that it nullifies the gospel. And Paul isn't just nitpicking a ritual here. He's protecting the gospel. Because once you add anything, whether it's circumcision or baptism or whatever it is, to say that in order to be saved, you must do these things. You must believe in Jesus, but you must also do these things. You're not simply adding another step for someone to climb. You're adding, you're replacing embracing Christ. And that's what Paul says in Galatians 5:2. Paul says this, Look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumvision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. Paul is essentially saying, If you say that this thing must happen in order to be saved, Christ is meaningless, which is, it seems like an overreaction by Paul, right? This is one thing, right? Who cares, right? It's just one thing, one more thing. It's not changing the religion. Obviously, still believe in Jesus. But Paul's point is brutal. You make circumcision necessary. You add one small aspect to it. You're subtracting the whole savior. Christ cannot be part of your plan. He has to be your only hope, or there's no hope at all. If you want to replace Jesus, Paul is saying, if you want to replace Jesus, if you want to add God works to your salvation, fine, but you must keep the entire law. That's what verse three says. And then James 2:10 comments on that same point. He says this, For whoever, for whoever keeps the whole law, but fails in one point has become guilty of it all. Legalism always sounds nice, right? It sounds like we're putting up more rules or we're just safeguarding. We're putting up guardrails so we don't get close to the edge. It's just add one more thing. But the law never lets you add just one more thing. The law demands everything. See, either you obey all of it or you're guilty of breaking all of it. If you want a law-based righteousness, you don't get partial credit. It's not like school where you can get an A, B, C, or even D to pass. It is a pass fail. And if you fail one thing, you failed it all. Trying to add Jesus, to your rituals of what will make you whole will not work. Jesus is not a commodity. He's not an object. He's not some philosophy that we add to our life to make it better. We add to our life to make it feel more meaningful or to feel righteous or to feel like we're good enough. He's not some magic salve that we put on ourselves that somehow makes us holy. Jesus is a person. We don't believe in a philosophy Christianity isn't a philosophy, it's a history. That's the good news of the gospel is that Christianity is not 10 tips to be holy. Christianity is Jesus died. It's a historical event. It happened. And believe. Paul is not saying that obedience to the law is wrong, but what he's challenging us against is adding something to our faith in order to subvert the gospel. Galatians 5:5-6 say this, For Through the spirit by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love. That Galatians 5:5, when it talks about hope, is a different hope than what we talk about in America in our modern culture. When we talk about hope, we're saying we hope that it doesn't rain tomorrow. We hope that there's good weather. When Paul talks about hope, what he's saying is there is something He promised there is something sure that we can put our hope and that we can be sure of. Notice here in this what Paul counts, what Paul is moving towards. He says it's not circumcision, not uncircumcision, not badge wearing, not virtue signaling. It's only faith. And real faith is not alone. Look at what Paul says. He doesn't end it by saying faith working towards being happier for something He says, faith working through love. Our freedom comes not by being self-reliant. The law tries to promise you things that it cannot come through on, that it cannot deliver. It tries to promise that you can do it yourself. It tries to promise and tell you, you know so many other people have let you down. Everyone else in your life has let you down. If you just add enough rules to your life, you can be the one you count on. You can be the sure and steady anchor, the thing that holds you to righteousness. You won't need to rely on anyone. If you can do these things right, then you can finally be good enough. But that's not what Jesus says. That's not what scripture says. That's not what Paul says. Paul says, the Bible says, Galatians says, Freedom comes through the spirit of God. Paul is so frustrated with the slavery that comes from believing that Jesus is not enough that believing that you need to add Jesus plus circumcision, that he says this in Galatians 5:12, I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves. Paul is saying, If they want to believe, if you want to believe that circumcision can save, then I wish that you would just take one step further. If you believe cutting part of it off is good, is going to save you, then just keep going. To sprinkle Jesus on top of the other things that we believe will save us or just to make our life better is to have a different Jesus. Again, it nullifies the gospel. Yet this grace that we've received cannot be abused. Freedom Must Not Be Abused by the Flesh (Galatians 5:13–26) Paul shifts from finding life in the law to requiring us to be obedient and not abusing it. The good news is that we hold on to and that we can hold on to is that we have been forgiven of all of our sins through Jesus Christ. Mark talks about this. He records Jesus saying this to a crowd. He says, Truly, Jesus says this, Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man and whatever blasphèmes they utter. We all who have put our faith in Christ have this promise that all our sins will be forgiven. We are people who have been set free from the burden of trying to save ourselves to keep the law. And all of our sins have been forgiven. So to now live as people who do not care about the sin that we commit, to live like sin does not matter is essentially to look Jesus in the face on the cross and to spit on him, to absolutely disrespect him. Jesus has paid, paid it all. Our sins are forgiven every a single one of them. And then to continue to live, to heep on more sin that Jesus had to pay for on the cross is to totally disregard what he went through. Galatians 5:13 says this, For you were called to freedom, brothers. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. Opportunity here is a military word. You 're almost talking about a military installation, a military base, a temporary military base. Paul is saying, Don't use grace as a base of operations for the flesh. Flesh is not just your body. It is the old you. It is being self-centered, being self-ruled, being allergic to God. And notice Paul's direction here. It's not through freedom to serve yourself. It is through love, serve one another. Freedom is new life in the Holy spirit. The world says, freedom means having no master. Paul says, freedom is having a new and gracious master. Not sin, not self, but the Holy spirit. Freedom isn't what we think of when we hear it in an American context. Freedom is not being able to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do, and no one can stop you. Freedom, biblical freedom, is the ability not not to live our lives running after the sin that our flesh desires, running after our sinful nature. It's the ability to resist the lie that Satan told Adam and Eve in the garden, that you really can't trust God, that you are the one who needs to make the decision for yourself. There's no one better than you to decide what's right for you. So where does this ability, where does this power come from? The ability to resist sin, where does it come from? It comes from the spirit of the living God, the one who resurrected Jesus from the dead, the one who's inspired scripture, the one who changed every heart of stone to a heart of flesh, to be able to love God. You don't beat sin. You don't beat the flesh by gritting your teeth, by trying harder, by having more discipline in your life. You beat the flesh by walking with the spirit. The Holy spirit doesn't just point you to Christ. The Holy spirit pours Christ's life into you. And what comes from this new life in Christ while being formed in the spirit? It's one of the most famous passages in scripture. It's the fruits of the spirit. Galatians 5:22 says this. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such things, there is no law. Paul says, Against such things. That word such really means that there are more fruits of the spirit. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of them. Notice Paul does not call it the work of your willpower. He calls it the fruit of the spirit. Fruit is what grows When new life is inside you. His fruit is what true freedom looks like. Love that serves, self control that resists, gentleness that restores. Paul is saying, Galatian churches Jesus, you have got it all wrong. Trying to save yourself, trying to add more things to the gospel will not work. Good works do not earn your salvation. If you want to do great works, You have to confess that you've done evil works, that you are evil. And through that, through the faith in Jesus Christ and confessing our sins, we will be given a Holy spirit, who produces good works in us that only he can do. The gospel is clear that you cannot do anything to be saved. But the other side of this is that those who understand the gospel are filled and filled with his spirit desire to see good works pour out of us. People who understand the gospel produce good works from the Holy spirit. Those good works are not just meant for you individually. They are meant for the community, not just how we live behind closed doors. They are meant to be a blessing to the people of God. And that's why Paul goes straight to community in chapter 6. And that's what we see in chapter 6. Freedom Must Be Lived Out in Community (Galatians 6:1–10) One of the clearest proofs of the gospel is not private feelings, but how we treat sinners. As people who understand that we, too, are sinners, that we are only saved by someone else saving us, that we can't contribute anything to our salvation other than the need to be saved. When we see people fall, we don't let them fall alone. We do not let them, we do not ostracize them. We do not cast them out. We love people. We bring them back. We embody the gospel when we love others like Christ has loved us. Someone says this, Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Caught here does not mean caught by someone else. It means being tangled in sin when someone is stuck. The goal of this is not punishment. The goal of this is not to make people feel more condemnation. The goal of this is restoration, to restore people, to prepare what is broken, to bring them back. It is more than just the goal of the church to do this. It is the duty of the church and all of its members to seek right relationships with others. When we have been wronged, we don't have a right to isolate from people, to cast people away from us. It is our duty to seek right relationships with people. If Christ came to us while we were still sinners, we do not have the ability, we don't have the right, we don't have the permission to run away from those who have hurt us, who have sinned against us. We have to restore them. That doesn't mean that every part of the relationship goes back to the way it used to be, but it means that we have a right relationship with those people. That's what forgiveness means. Paul guards against us. Every part of this passage, what it means to live in the spirit means to live in community. Look at verses 25 and 15, and in this whole section. Paul is talking about loving each other in community. How will people outside of the church know that we are Christians? They will know that we are Christians by how we love. This is our natural response to being liberated from believing in ourselves, from believing in our own efforts, from believing in Old Testament rituals, from believing in our own ability to earn our salvation. Mission. The gospel naturally causes us to love our neighbor. It says that we cannot try to rank ourselves with other people in the room because we are saved not by something that we did. We cannot withhold community from those who have sinned and repented. This passage says that we cannot be passive in trying to grow our faith and obedience to God. This letter in this section takes a strange twist. This whole book, this whole letter has been Paul almost yelling at the churches in Galatians, You can't save yourself. You can't add anything to your salvation. It's only by faith. And then here at the end of the book, Paul is demanding almost that we are obedient in these categories. Why would he do this? Why would he spend so much time saying, It's not about your obedience that saves you, and then demand our obedience? It's because to love God is to obey him. When we've responded to the gospel, obedience is a good thing. Paul is never against obedience. He's saying, Obedience in order to save is worth nothing. This section is actually almost a perfect retelling of John 14. Jesus is talking to his disciples, and over and over again, he says, If 'If you love me, you will keep my Commandments. ' 'Whoever has my Commandments and keeps them, them he it is who loves me. ' Verse 23, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him. ' I think I got another slide. Chapter 15. Later on, it says, If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, it will be done for you. By this, my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit, so prove to be my disciples. The point of our salvation, the point of being saved, is that we glorify God in obeying his Commandments, in obeying his word. Good works are what we were created to do. They are not what saved us, but they are what we were created to do. Ephesians 2:10 says this, For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. This is what Paul is saying in Galatians 6:9-10 of Galatians. Let us not grow weary of doing good works. And so then let us do good to everyone, and especially the household of the faith. Freedom creates a new community, persistent, patient, and doing good, especially to those inside the church. So Christian freedom is not a private possession. It is a spirit formed love that shows up in a church. Freedom looks like gentleness with sinners, humility about yourself, and a burden bearing love for one another. Main Idea Freedom in Christ expresses itself through spirit formed love Freedom in Christ expresses itself through spirit formed love. Freedom isn't about putting on an act. It's not putting on a performance. We can't dress up and play Christians. Galatians gives us no permission to do that. Freedom is believing the gospel and experiencing it through the Holy spirit. Too many Christians come to church because they know it's the right thing in their head. They believe it's the right thing, more of a knowledge belief. But our flesh becomes a salesman selling slavery advertised as freedom. Internally, too many people will come to church today in the global church, and they will sit in a service, and they will wish that they really weren't there, wishing that God's rules for them, God's call for them to be obedient was different. They wish that lying wasn't wrong, or wishing that God wasn't so strict about sex, or God would relax his rules on gossip or greed or coveting. Oftentimes, we wish that God would allow us to do the things that we desire to do in our heart, the wrong things. In some in some twisted way, we believe that that is what freedom is, but it's not. God's word is clear that that's not freedom. Paul calls it slavery in Galatians and in Romans, he calls it the wrath of God. When God delivers us over to the desires of our hearts, to the desires of our flesh. Paul calls that the wrath of God. Freedom isn't the ability to do whatever you desire. Freedom is the ability to say no to the sins that once were the master over us. Not new rules, not better habits. It is about total life transformation. There's a power through the spirit that comes into our life. St Augustine, he's an early church father in the 400s AD. Before he was a Christian, before he was a prolific pastor and author, he was incredibly sexually immoral. After becoming a Christian, after In his conversion, he later ran into a former lover who was passing him on the street trying to get his attention, and he was walking past her. Finally, she came up to him, trying to get his attention, trying to pull him back into some relationship. She goes up to him and says, Augustine, it's me. And he looks at her and says, I know. Yes, but it isn't me. That's what happens when there is a new power, when there is a power that comes through the Holy spirit. We do not have to say yes to the old sins that once mastered us. We get to look at the sins that once ruled our lives, and we get to say, yes, but it isn't me anymore. The Holy spirit's power allows us to see sin as something we mourn over. It's not about what we can get away with anymore. It's not about what we need to do to get right again with God. It becomes something that we wage war against. The first proof that the Holy spirit is at work is not its intensity, it's not our intensity, but it's love. Because the spirit does not just free you from sin, it frees you for others. Application Restore those who sin Galatians 6:1 I'm taking my applications right from the text. I feel like when Paul gives it to us this clearly, when God's word gives us applications this clearly, it's better than anything I can come up with. So let's go with what God's word says, and I think we'll be all right. Restore those who sin. This isn't optional because the gospel has restored you. If Christ moved towards you when you were caught, then we cannot move away from others when they are caught. Sin isolates, sin hardens people. Leaving someone alone is not kindness. It is spiritual solitary confinement. It lets the wounds fester. So practically, what this means for us is is that we move towards people who have fallen. We don't gossip about them. We speak truth plainly to them. We don't gloss it over. We don't try to hide it. We don't sweep it under the rug. We call for repentance, and we offer a path back, but we also stay with them on this path as they rebuild. We do this with gentleness, not minimizing sin nor crushing the sinner. It's why when this happens in the church, if this happens here at Prosper, we won't just hope that someone walks alongside with someone. We will dedicate one or two people to walk with them in love, in gentleness, because sin is truly bad for us. Do not believe that you are immune to certain sin Galatians 5:3 The passage says, If anyone thinks that he is something, he deceives himself. It is It's easy for us to see in our culture unspeakable evil. It is all over the news, especially now. And it's easy for us to look at that and say, there is no way that I could ever do anything like that. There's a story of a Jewish man who was part of a trial to capture and to convict one of the Nazis who had absolutely decimated his family, killed every single person in his family, all of his friends, one of the people who had served in the concentration camps. And it was later I think it was in the '60s or '70s. And this man whose family had been slaughtered by this man, he walked into court when this Nazi soldier was coming under trial. And this man absolutely wept. He became undone. And a reporter came to him later and said, why was it seeing this man again and the memories of all of your family and friends? And what was it that caused those emotions? And he told a reporter, it wasn't any of that. It was, I saw him and I saw myself. I realized that I am absolutely capable of doing everything that that man did. I am no better than that person. To look past someone's humanity, or to say that you could never commit whatever sin that they did, whatever crime that they did, is to look past their own humanity. Most brutal sins do not show up as random. They start off as small sins, and then they grow and grow. They are acorns. They are sin in acorn form. Then if we don't kill them early, they become full-grown oak trees. It's the minor sins that are all grown up. Small compromises, small secrets, small lusts, small dishonesties. Unchecked, they do not stay small. Whenever you say, I could never, you have fallen for the first lie of Satan. You believe that you are better than others. You believe that your humanity is somehow different than those wicked subhuman people who could do that. No, no, no, no, no, That temptation. That's how people fall. That's how people become corrupt, being overconfident and not watchful. There are so many stories in the Bible of people who in power end up becoming corrupted and falling. You look at the story of David who kills one of his best friends in order to marry that man's wife. You look at that and you go, well, look, there's a clear example of how all power corrupts, how all of this is wrong, how authority is somehow an evil thing. That is not why that story is in the Bible. That story is in the Bible to show even the greatest people can fall when they don't kill sin, when they are not absolutely vigilant to the small sins in their life. Paul says this, Keep watch over yourself. Stay humble. Take temptation seriously. And when you see someone fall, don't ever say, That could never be me. How do we resist the desires of our flesh, these sins that show up small? Maybe they've grown big. How do we deny our flesh? How do we die to our flesh? It took a better flesh, a greater flesh sacrifice. On the cross, Jesus gave up his flesh. In a moment, we're going to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and we're going to hear a familiar phrase. We're going to hear a familiar verse. On the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and broke it, saying, This is my body. This is my flesh broken for you. ' It took a better flesh. It is our flesh that should have been broken as a payment for our sin. And yet our savior, the word became flesh. Absolutely and totally for the single purpose of that flesh being torn to shreds, so that way we could have freedom over the desires of our flesh. Prosper Church. Freedom in Christ, expresses itself through spirit Let us not forget this, especially as we turn to the Lord's Supper. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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

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