Can we trust the Council of Nicaea? Why can the church feel this way? Because men cannot create new — correct theology — men can only discover it. Men can invent new heresy, but not orthodoxy. Men and women today and in antiquity can only recognize it. And this is what the modern church should find confidence in. As noted above, the implications of this inform nearly every subsequent theological position the church has taken since. The council of Nicaea was moved by the Holy Spirit to... Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach June 9, 2024 Theology, Church History It may be surprising to the average churchgoer that, the council that produced one of the most well-known creeds of the early church and solidified the orthodoxy — or theological position — of the trinity, has a bit of controversy surrounding it. Not everyone in academia can look back on this event with the love for the doctrines that came out of it, but with the weariness of the political and governmental influences that surround it. But contemporary Christians shouldn’t worry about this event being tainted by the forces behind its acceptance. Rather Christians should trust and even worship the beauty that was simplified and clarified by the work of the men who formed it. Main Issue The council of Nicaea was brought together — by the newly Christian[1] — emperor Constantine in 325 AD.[2]As Constantine came to power in the death of Emperor Galerius, Constantine found himself in a situation where he needed to unify the new republic of Rome. During this time theological divides seemed to be popping up in the newly legalized religion that Constantine allowed. So for the first time in the life of the church, pastors/bishops were welcomed without threat of persecution, to settle the division in the church.[3] The major doctrinal issue that backed by Arian — a talented Baucalis preacher — who challenged the view of the Bishop in Alexandria on his belief in Homoousion (or the doctrine that Jesus was of the same substance as God). Arian believed homoousion was Sabellianism,[4] and instead professed the belief in homoiosion (or the doctrine that Jesus was of a similar substance as God). To the modern outsider, this seems to be a minor bit of doctrine, that nerdy theologians like to debate in their free time. It seems like this is one of those fights that Paul warns against in Romans 16:17-18.[5] But the implications of getting this correct were critical for the church. Worship, and how it understands the God of the Bible, and many other practical parts of the church, hinged on understanding the person of Jesus correctly. In fact, this issue was so theologically important that is was impossible to look past each other’s view. Each side believed that the other’s view was so different that they were — ultimately — worshiping a different God. The implications of this were either — in Arian’s view — that Jesus was created, and that the son was not part of God.[6] Encouragement for the modern church During the actual council the view that Jesus was of the same essence as God was overwhelmingly adopted. Of the numerous bishops and clergymen in attendance at the Council of Nicaea (between 250-310), only two dissented. This was a huge victory for the ancient church but is also a huge source of confidence in the modern church. The modern church can look back on this event and find confidence that these men came out with the correct interpretation of scripture. Why can the church feel this way? Because men cannot create new — correct theology — men can only discover it. Men can invent new heresy, but not orthodoxy. Men and women today and in antiquity can only recognize it. And this is what the modern church should find confidence in. As noted above, the implications of this inform nearly every subsequent theological position the church has taken since. The council of Nicaea was moved by the Holy Spirit to see the Word of God correctly and identified Jesus as wholly God and wholly man. Whether that was the view of Constantine, or maybe just his wish, is irrelevant. The church can be confident in the beauty of the person of Jesus as stated by the Nicene Creed. If this were mere political pressure by Constantine, bishops would have revolted. They weren’t moved by fear of dissent. Here gathered at Nicaea were men who had been marked with scars from their previous persecution. They were not afraid of a man or the state. They feared God and in near unanimity, affirmed the truth of the Lord and Savior of the universe Jesus. [1] Or at least newly compassionate toward christian emperor. [2] Kenneth Scott Latourette, “Christianity Takes Shape in Organization, Doctrine,” in A History of Christianity, 4th ed., vol. 1 (Prince Press, 2007), pp. 154-156. [3] Bruce Shelley, “Splitting Important Hairs,” in Church History in Plain Language, 5th ed. (S.l.: ZONDERVAN, 2021), pp. 131-136. [4] Kenneth Scott Latourette, pp. 152. [5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ro 16:17–18. I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive. [6] Kenneth Scott Latourette, pp. 154. "So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding buildup this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understanding them”(Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.86). St. Augustine — accurately — describes that true comprehension of the Bible comes through a combination of prayer, faith, and an attitude of submission to God's will. It is by loving God and being compelled into action, Can unbelievers understand and interpret the Bible? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Come And Eat Sermon Series Description Come and Eat is a series about a Jesus who refuses to be your caterer. In John 6, Jesus feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, walks across a stormy sea in the dark, and then loses most of his following in a single sermon. The crowd loves the bread. They want more of it. They will chase him across a lake to get it. But when Jesus tells them that he himself is the bread — that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood to have life — the enthusiasm disappears. Over four weeks, we will watch Jesus reenact the exodus story at Passover, reveal himself as the true manna from heaven, say the hardest thing he has said yet in John's Gospel, and thin his own crowd down to twelve. The question John 6 forces is not whether Jesus can provide for you. He obviously can. The question is whether you will stay when he stops being what you expected and starts being who he actually is. Jesus is the true Bread from heaven who gives his flesh for the life of the world — and true disciples remain with him not because his words are easy but because his words are life. The Bread You Can't Buy John 6 Watch Flesh and Blood John 6 Watch Where Else Would We Go? John 6 Watch

Paniba Paniba Prosper CRC Paniba Paniba La Romana, Dominican Republic PANIBA is a Christian ministry committed to feeding the hungry, sharing the love of Jesus, and strengthening vulnerable communities in the Dominican Republic. Their heart is especially for children and families living in economically disadvantaged areas, where access to nutritious food is limited and basic needs often go unmet. Through weekly feeding programs, PANIBA provides nutritious meals to children to help them grow, learn, and thrive physically, mentally, and spiritually. These gatherings aren’t just about food — they include worship, Bible teaching, games, and intentional time to share the hope of Christ with young lives. In addition to nourishing children, PANIBA extends care to elderly and disadvantaged adults, offering monthly grocery support for those who otherwise have no safety net. The ministry partners with local churches and volunteers to meet both practical needs and spiritual hunger, demonstrating God’s love with compassion, dignity, and respect. Support Paniba

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

Office Administrator Jolene Sullivan Jolene serves as the Office Administrator at Prosper Christian Reformed Church, assisting the pastor and council with communication, organization, and day-to-day ministry support. Her responsibilities include preparing bulletins and email newsletters, coordinating volunteers and events, and creating various church communications and promotional materials. She also coordinates Prosper CRC’s Food Pantry and Food Distribution ministry, overseeing food ordering and supporting the volunteers who faithfully serve area families through this bi-weekly program. Jolene began serving in her current role in June 2025, having previously held a similar position at Prosper from 2005–2007. Jolene and her husband, Ben, have attended Prosper CRC since 2003. They have four children and one grandson, and are grateful to be part of the life and ministry of the congregation. Contact the Office Admin

Greater Than You Know Prosper Christian Reformed Church Greater Than You Know Consider Your Ways Mitchell Leach Sunday, May 24, 2026 Audio Greater Than You Know Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript Haggai 2:1-9 In the 7th month, on the 21st day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet: Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, who is left among you who 'Who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel,' declares the Lord. 'Be strong, O Joshua son of Jehozadak the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land,' declares the Lord. 'Work, for I am with you,' declares the Lord of hosts. According to the covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit remains in your midst; fear not. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine and the gold is mine, declares the Lord of hosts. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the Lord of hosts. This is the word of the Lord. In 126 BC, there was a Roman general who conquered Carthage. It was a 3-year campaign and finally after the city fell, he stood there looking at the city as it was in its ruins and he started to weep. And there was a historian there, it was his good friend, and he asked him why he was crying. He said, "This is a foreshadowing of what's going to happen to my city someday." Looking forward, looking toward the city that he had just conquered, it should have been a victory, should have been something that was a happy moment for him, but he looked at it and knew that one day this too would come for him. And that's what ruins do to us. They don't just tell us about the past. They make us afraid for the future. You don't have to be in ancient Rome to know this, to see this. You can just drive really anywhere, you see this. You've driven past a barn 1,000 times and one day it's leaning and then one strong spring storm hits it and it's down. Then it's just a pile of wood in a field. And something in us sinks in, not just because we feel like we needed the barn, but the landscape tells us that something's missing. Big Question Are things getting better or are things getting worse? We realize that things are in decay. Brings us to a question that we all ask, either out loud or in our hearts: "Are things getting better or are things getting worse?" Things getting better or things getting worse? We all ask this question and yet, as a people, we have a united answer to it. It doesn't matter what ethnic group you're from, it doesn't matter what location, socioeconomic status, what political party you voted for; we're all united in this. It doesn't matter what time period you're from; we can go back throughout history and see the way We've always said things are getting worse. Talk to somebody on the left. They'll tell you that institutions are failing, the planet is dying, or the system's rigged. If you talk to someone on the political right, you'll hear that morality is gone and the family is falling apart and that there aren't values like we once had them. Talk to a parent and they'll tell you that kids aren't safe in the way that they used to be. Talk to a grandparent and they'll tell you nobody knows their neighbors anymore. Talk to a 20-year-old who's trying to buy a house and says they can't, everything's too expensive. Talk to someone who's retired, and they'll tell you that the world they built is unrecognizable. Here's what's remarkable in all of this: nobody thinks the arrow's pointing up. Nobody thinks that things are getting better. Left, right, young, old, rich or poor, one thing that Americans all generally agree on is that the— our best days are behind us. Declinism isn't a political position, it's the air we breathe. And if that's the air we breathe out there, It's almost certainly the air that we breathe in here too. The church is not immune to this. And so are things getting better or worse? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So if you would, keep your Bibles open to Haggai as we're going to look at two major movements in this passage, in these 9 verses. First, we'll see God meets discouragement with his presence, Haggai 2:1-5, and then God promises a glory greater than the former in Haggai 2:6-9. Outline God Meets Discouragement with His Presence (Haggai 2:1-5) God Promises a Glory Greater Than the Former (Haggai 2:6-9) God Meets Discouragement with His Presence (Haggai 2:1-5) So let's look at that first section, God meets discouragement with His presence. This is all happening in a certain time and that time is important for us to understand. This is happening, this, "The word of the Lord came to Haggai the second time during the festival of Sukkot." This was a festival that was celebrated in Israel all the way up through Jesus' time. Jesus actually celebrated this. It was called the Feast of Booths. What would happen is Um, people would move out into the desert. They would sit in booths, they would sit in tents to remember Israel's journey through the wilderness. But this was also a harvest festival, which would have had to make people feel uneasy. Harvest is a time to celebrate bounty. It's a time to celebrate what God has done, what God has provided. And they've been in a time of scarcity. In Haggai 1, we saw God had given them pestilence. He had given them a plague. He had given them, uh, a drought on the land, and that they had not been able to harvest what they wanted. Haggai 2:3, God then asks 3 important questions, all 3 leading up to the last one. The first question addresses those who saw the last temple. The middle temple there that got destroyed in 586 BC. Some of those people were children when they saw— who were alive during this time in Haggai's life. They would have been children that saw the temple and had a memory of what it looks like. The last question that Haggai asks, or that God asks, is rhetorical. It's this: "Is this nothing in your eyes?" As they're looking at the new temple that had just been built, God's telling them it looks like nothing. God is naming discouragement that already exists. He isn't here saying, "Well, this isn't too bad. Let's look on the bright side of things." Why don't we just be optimistic here? Why don't— why don't we look at this as a glass half full moment? God does not dismiss their grief. He names it, but he doesn't let them— he doesn't allow them to sit in their grief or to let it be the lord over them. I think it's something important for us to understand. Oftentimes, I think in Christianity when hard things come our way, we so often want to be the people who respond by saying, "Well, God's on the throne and things are okay and it's going to be alright." And it's okay to feel that, to know and to trust that God has everything, that he holds the world in his hand. But Haggai, the book of Haggai, allows us to recognize when things are disappointing. When things aren't the way that they're supposed to be. The temple that was built was a shadow of what it once was. It was not nearly as glorious as what Solomon had built. Their grief was specific. Not just grief about the future in general, but grief that the future would not match the past. A belief that the best days of their people are behind them, that their building and what they're building now will never be what it once was. This is a moment where we have to pause as a church and recognize that God is speaking to us in this moment, not just the universal church, but here at Prosper. If you haven't felt those same temptations about this place, it's probably your first time here. You might be a visitor. I haven't been here long enough to hear every story, but I've been here long enough to hear the heartache. Prosser's been through a lot in the last 5 years. You've lost some tragically We've lost some pillars of this community. Some of your cousins, relatives, children, maybe they don't worship with us anymore. I've heard that a lot. I've heard that we've lost a lot. I've heard that there aren't as many children in the children's message. Each of those things are Haggai 3:3. Just dressed up in modern language. Does this seem as nothing in your eyes? See, there's a way to honor the saints who came before us, before us, that strengthens our faith. There's also a way to honor them that quietly accuses God of being less faithful now. To be faithful, to do this, to do this right, we must believe that God is still present, still speaking, still shaking, still building. Because I know this to be true: that the best days of this church are not behind her but in front of her. I know that we believe that too. I know that I've heard little things here and there and I've heard some of those heartaches But overwhelmingly, I have heard of the amazing things that God is doing here. Elderly people setting aside their preferences, praying that God would set aside their preferences in order to reach the next generation. Young people loving and coming to love the hymns that their ancestors have sung for generations. People stepping out of their shell and out of their comfort zone to serve. People who are battling addictions seeing victory over those same addictions. I've seen elders genuinely care for the people here. I've seen deacons serve widows and take care of widows and shut-ins unlike any other church I've been in. I've seen so many things here that are proof that we believe the best days are ahead of us. The God of Haggai 2, does not allow us to sigh over what used to be. He promises what's coming. That's what he does in this next section. He continues by saying, "I am strong and I am with you." He says, "Be strong." But that's not a strength that comes somehow from finding it within us, right? This isn't a Disney movie. This is not, you know, the end of the story is not, "You had it in you the whole time." The story here is be strong because I am with you. Be strong in the work, not because your work looks promising, because I am the one who is with you. The promise is not that the work will always even look impressive. The promise is that his presence will make the work worth doing. The person who loves their idea of being strong will eventually collapse because the idea has no power to sustain what it promises. The person who trusts God, trusts what He commands, that strength will endure, not because that they are impressive, but because of the One who they rely on. All throughout the Bible, anytime that there's been a command to have courage or to be strong, it is never one that says, "Find it within you. You have the courage. If you just unlock these things, if you just try these tips, and you can finally become the man that you're— man or woman that you're supposed to be." Whenever God commands strength, whenever he commands courage, He does so and then immediately after he says, "For I am with you." This biblical pattern is not for strong people to do big things. It is for a strong God to, to use weak people. That weakness is the point. All throughout the Bible, God uses the weakest. The overlooked, the people who have no, no right to be able to be used that way. If God were to only use the smartest, the strongest, the fastest, the people with most, the most power, we would say, well, God's good at picking a good team. But because God uses those who are overlooked, who no one would pick to lead, who no one would pick to do the things that God picks them to do. All throughout the Bible, it shows that God is the one who's glorious. It puts his power on display, not ours. So why, why can God be with his people here in Israel and during this time but here with us today? It's because he is a God of covenant. He is a God who is faithful. That's what we see in Haggai 2:5. Haggai 2:5 says this: "According to the covenant I made with you when you came out of Egypt, my Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not." Another way to say that would be like this: This is the covenant commitment I made to you in Exodus. God is telling Israel that my promise to you is stronger than anything that you could have done to kill it. And that's the foundation of everything that God says next. Before God tells them what he's going to do, he reminds them of what he's already promised that he will do. His future glory rests on his past faithfulness. The same God who brought them out of Egypt, is the same God who kept the covenant with them in the wilderness, is the same God whose Spirit remained with them after the exile, the same God who promised that he would be with them as they rebuild his temple, is the same God who says now, "I'm not finished." So the next words are not merely comfort for us; it's a promise. God Promises a Glory Greater Than the Former (Haggai 2:6-9) God does not merely meet their discouragement with his presence. He meets it with future glory that is greater than anything that they lost. And that's what we see in this next section. God promises a glory greater than the former, Haggai 2:6-9. Haggai 2:6 says this: "For thus says the Lord of hosts, 'Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land.'" God continues by saying, "I'm about to do something. I'm about to upend history itself." That word that he uses for shake here is important because it's the same word that he used and that Moses used when he described what happened on Mount Sinai, that the mountain shook. God's using that language intentionally. He's saying what happened at Sinai is going to happen again. Sinai shook and God soon will shake the the world again. But not just them, not just Israel, not just everything around them, but the nations. He's saying the oppressors you have, I will shake, I will upend, I will disrupt history. I think we know this to be true. We know this to be true about what God promises us that he will come back one day and that he will make everything sad come untrue; that everything be made right in his second coming. I think we would confess that; we know that that's true. But it's so easy for us to live like it isn't. It's so easy for us to forget that. I think we have, without realizing it, stopped believing that God shakes things. I think we believe that God comforts, that he heals, that he inspires. We've forgotten that that he overturns, that he shakes the world. Haggai is telling us that the current arrangement of power is not final. It wasn't for Israel and it isn't for us either. The God who shakes the nations has not retired. Then he moves on to something even greater in Haggai 2:9. He says this: "The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the glory of 'than the former,' says the Lord of hosts. God had just told his people that the, the temple that they're looking at is a disappointment. And then he says something so encouraging here in Haggai 2:9. He's not telling them that the temple will be bigger or more beautiful, but he says, 'My presence will be made greater than it was before. One quick kind of thing that we don't get in our English version of this text, God is saying that this is one temple. He's saying this might be two different buildings, two different constructions, but this is one temple. There is one continuation of what God has promised to do. The building might have changed, but God's promises didn't. And that's how God does things. The temple is one continuous story from the garden to the tabernacle, from Solomon to Zerubbabel, from Jesus to the church to the new creation. Every step of the way is one promise, and that promise is the same one we see here. It is a greater glory in each step. Each step along the journey gets better and better. And I want to say this, make sure that you understand this clearly. I'm not saying that every step along the way is going to feel good. This is not a message saying that everything is going to be alright and everything's going to be fine. God brings disappointment in our life. He brings things that are hard. I don't want to move past the pain and suffering, the miseries that we experience in this life. So it doesn't mean that every congregation gets bigger, that every budget gets easier, or every generation looks more faithful than the last. But what it does mean is that the story God is writing is moving towards His glory, not away from it. The overall direction of God's— of God's story, of God moving is better and better. There's a reason for hope. We see this all throughout the Bible that Jesus is the greater temple. Jesus is the greater Jonah. He's the greater Solomon. The new covenant is greater than the old covenant. The heavenly tabernacle is greater than the earthly one. The latter glory of the gospel surpasses the fading glory of the law. And that's what this is about. It's about God's glory becoming greater and greater every step of the way, every step of our faith, every, every moment of our life. Everything that we do is about God's glory. I love the Heidelberg Catechism but the Westminster Catechism asks this question: What is the chief end of man? It's to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. That's our primary purpose as people is to glorify God because glory is the only thing that will be left throughout all eternity. Revelation 21:23 says this, I think this is beautiful, "And the city had no need for sun, of sun or moon to shine on it." for the glory of God gives it its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. We will have no need for sun in heaven. We'll have no need for the moon to illuminate where we go and what we do, because the glory of the— of God will be great enough, great enough for us to see. That's what we will use to see. God is promising this glory to the temple, but also to the church as well. Haggai 2:9 is the Old Testament seed of the entire pattern of God's glory and how it grows over time. The people in Israel's time in this passage were mourning the glory that they lost in the temple that Solomon had built. They were mourning something. That was always meant to be surpassed. They were weeping over a candle, right, right as dawn was about to break. The temple looked unimpressive because they were judging it by its components— how it was built, the stones that it was made of, the wood that it was made out of— and God was judging it by his promise. And that's what we need to hear. If ever our numbers feel small, if ever our budget feels tight, if ever we feel like culture has won and we have no hope, whenever we're discouraged, when it seems like everything is in ruins, God is telling us that he is about to shake everything up. Not to try harder, not to put more on our shoulders and just give a little bit more effort, Not to remember what used to be. He's imploring us to trust him, to trust him, to not look inward, not to look at us, but to look at what he's done, to look towards his faithfulness. Notice what God gives in the place that looks unimpressive. Haggai 2:9 ends with peace; not size, not wealth, not Not visible success; peace. The peace of his presence and the peace of his covenant. And ultimately, the peace that comes through Jesus Christ who makes peace by the blood of his cross. And that changes everything about how we look because if he can bring peace through a crucified Savior, then we have to admit that our eyes are not always a good judge of what God is doing. The cross looks like defeat. It looks like weakness. It looks like the end of the story. But God called it salvation. God called it victory. God called it glory. So the question is not, does this look impressive to me? The question is, what has God promised? And that leads us into our main idea. Main Idea Judge the work by God's promise, not by what your eyes can see. Because we worship a God who's faithful. Not just as a component of who he is, but that he is faithfulness itself. Look at your life. Look at what God has done all throughout the Bible. Has he ever failed you? Has he ever failed his people? All of God's promises come true. And yet, it's not just about being an optimist. The temple was disappointing. It was. And yet, God would use it for his glory and in even greater glory than what was there before. All throughout the Bible, God takes disappointments and turns them into testaments for his goodness and for his glory. Abraham waited decades for a son. David was anointed king and then spent years hiding in caves. The disciples followed Jesus and then watched him die on a Friday. Every single one of these stories looked like they were dead while they were living in it. And yet none of them were. And neither is yours. So what do we do with this? If God is the one who turns disappointment into glory, what does it look like to live like we actually believe that? Application Pray for What God Has for This Church — Haggai 2:9 Our first point of application is this: Pray for what God has for this church. If we judge by promise, not by sight, then our prayers need to match. Stop praying for what Prosper was or for whatever your home church is and start praying for what God says it will be. This is not the same prayer, right? One looks backward and the other looks at God. This week when you pray, when you pray for your church, when you pray for this church, don't pray, God, give us what we had. Pray, God, show us what you're building. Anytime God resurrects something from the dead, he doesn't bring it back to what it used to be; he brings it to an even greater glory. And that's Haggai 2 in a prayer and that's a prayer that God answers. Work Because God Is With You — Haggai 2:4 Second point of application is this: Work because God is with you. God commands us in this passage; God commands Israel to work. But not just to work because they've got great ideas and they can conquer, they can do the right thing. He says to work because God is with you. So teach children even when there are fewer than there used to be. So sing with conviction even when your voice seems stronger than it used to be. Invite a neighbor even if you think that they'll say no. Serve in the nursery, visit shut-ins, disciple a teenager, encourage an elder, give faithfully. Pray for someone by name. Not because prosper is impressive but because God is present. Haggai talks about God's glory filling the house. Everyone was expecting something like what had happened at the tabernacle. In Exodus 40, it says, "Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, and everyone praised God." Everyone was weeping. But that didn't happen when this was finished. When this temple was constructed, Jewish rabbis have recorded that the Holy Spirit was missing and it seemed like God has broken his promise because he said there will be a glory in this, this place that is greater than what left it. But he hadn't broken his promise. 500 years later, after the temple was built, the presence entered it. Not with thunder, not with a cloud, not with an overwhelming display of power. It was a young mom carrying a baby. The glory came. Luke records, in the Gospel of Luke, he records Simon saying this: "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation," that you have prepared in the presence of all the peoples a light for revelation for the Gentiles and a glory for your people in Israel. Simon said that when he met the baby Jesus as he entered the temple. The glory finally came. A greater glory did not come because the temple was more impressive. The greater glory came because Jesus walked into it. But it came far lower, far more humble than anyone had expected. Not a glory that kept sinners at a distance, but a glory that came so close that sinners could touch it. This is the greater glory. It's Jesus, the true temple, the presence of God with us, and the sacrifice for sinners. Because the glory of God is seen most clearly not in a building, filled with a cloud, but in the Son of Man lifted up on a tree. At the cross, the true temple was torn down and on the third day it was resurrected; it was rebuilt. So now, peace is not found in a place. It's not found in a physical location. Peace is found in a person—Jesus Christ crucified for sinners. That is why we judge the work not by God's promise, but by what we see. And not by what we see with our eyes, but by God's promise. Because our eyes would have looked at the cross and we would have said, "This is nothing." But God looked at the cross and said, "This is his glory." Church, hear this. Judge the work by God's promise, not by what your eyes can see. Let's stand and pray as we respond. And we're prepared to respond in worship. I'm going to invite the worship team to come forward at this time. Let's pray. Closing Prayer Father God, we praise you for who you are. We praise you that you are a God who remains with us, who promises and delivers on that promise. Father, help us not to rely on what our eyes can see but on who you are; that you are a God who is faithful and that your promises can be trusted. Father, I thank you for all of those who paid the ultimate price to serve our country so that way we could gather in a place like this, this morning. God, it's true, greater love knows nothing than this, that someone someone would lay down their life for their friend. Thank you that people have laid down their life for us to be able to worship in that freedom. God, help us to respond to your word this morning in worship and by glorifying you. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Is God Able To Forgive Sin Without The Cross? God cannot simply blink at sin and allow it to disappear magically. There is always a cost involved. The Bible is clear about the reality that we are sinful people (Genesis 3:6–7; Isaiah 59:1–2; Psalm  51:4). And the Bible states that there must be a penalty paid to make what was wrong, right again. God is just (Gen 18:25; Deut 32:4). Isaiah 5:16 says, “But the LORD of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.” Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 23, 2025 Bible, Theology Could God the Father have forgiven sin without Jesus dying on the cross? Would it have been possible for God to do this? Whenever we ask questions like these, our knee-jerk reaction is to think, “God can do whatever he wants.” But the implications of this question will show us a lot about what we believe about God. If God could On one side if God can forgive sin without Jesus dying on the cross, then what we see happen to Jesus at the end of the gospels is totally unnecessary. To say that God could forgive sin without the cross makes what happens at the end of the gospels a worthless act of torture towards his own son. If God cannot On the other side, it seems like saying God cannot do something is putting a rule or law on God that supersedes his power as if there were a higher authority that he had to submit to. If God can’t why can’t he? So which is it? Imagine you invited me and my family over for dinner, and after dinner, it is revealed that my youngest child has broken a window in your house. Not just any window but your big beautiful bay window that faces the road. In that situation, you have two options. You can demand that I pay to fix it. This would be just. My child broke a window, I should pay to make it right. Or you can forgive me. But in that situation, someone still has to pay, but rather than it being the offending party (me), the cost is shifted to the offended party (you). It’s not like this is something you can leave broken. Similarly, God cannot simply blink at sin and allow it to disappear magically. There is always a cost involved. The Bible is clear about the reality that we are sinful people (Genesis 3:6–7; Isaiah 59:1–2; Psalm 51:4). And the Bible states that there must be a penalty paid to make what was wrong, right again. God’s Justice God is just (Gen 18:25; Deut 32:4). Isaiah 5:16 says, “But the LORD of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.” [1] Wayne Grudem, the Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary defines what it means that God is just in his profound book Systematic Theology, “God’s righteousness means that God always acts in accordance with what is right and is himself the final moral standard of what is right.” [2] God is Who He is God’s justice or righteousness is a very part of who God is. So rather than thinking that God not being able to forgive sin must be him submitting to a higher authority, think about it as God not being able to go against his very nature. This is also called the doctrine of simplicity. “God’s simplicity entails that his essence and existence are identical, signifying that there is no composition or division within the divine nature.” [3] This means that God is what describes him. The way we describe God doesn’t divide up his essence but is who he is and how he acts together. God tells us this in Exodus 3:14, when, “God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God therefore cannot “throw off” his justice for a moment to forgive universal sin. To do this would make him cease to be God, as his justice is part of his “Godness.” God’s Wrath Because God is perfectly righteous, he has a perfect hate for sin itself. “It is his indignation at sin, his revulsion to evil and all that opposes him, his displeasure at it and the venting of that displeasure. It is his passionate resistance to every will that is set against him.” [4] This is what we call God’s wrath. J.I. Packer, who is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential theologians of the 20th Century, connects God’s holiness to his disdain of sin when he says, “Every facet of God’s nature and every aspect of his character may properly be spoken of as holy, just because it is his. The core of the concept, however, is God’s purity, which cannot tolerate any form of sin (Hab. 1:13) and thus calls sinners to constant self-abasement in his presence (Isa. 6:5).” [5] God’s wrath is something that we can feel uncomfortable with. The idea that God hates not only sin, but even certain people is unsettling to us in the global west. In recent years liberal theologians have argued that this idea is false and paints God as a vindictive deity. What this essentially boils down to is whether God can be both good and just at the same time. But this objection isn’t an enlightened response to this doctrine. This has been a point of contention since 300 AD. [6] But this — like the idea of God’s justice — is part of God’s character and nature, and it is beautiful. God’s wrath (or deep hatred of evil) has always been a part of his character. God’s holiness has been — throughout history — something that sinful man has had to deal with when encountering the living God. System to Cover Sin This is why understanding the whole Old Testament is so important. As Christians, it is easy to focus our attention on the New Testament because it seems like that’s where the best parts happen. As someone who loves theology, the New Testament is easy because it almost reads like a Western theological work. Yet neglecting to understand the essential ways that God worked throughout the Old Testament will leave us to make major errors in our theology. One main area this happens today is around the idea of atonement. Mankind’s problem — since the fall — has been that we cannot interact with a holy God. So, back in Leviticus, God lays out a system to atone for sin through the sacrifice of a goat on Yom Kippur (or the day of atonement). This goat would — ceremonially — take the place of the people, and would die for their sin. The reason for this is that the blood of an animal symbolizes its life. Something’s blood is needed to take the rightful place of our own. One life needed to be substituted for our own. This system was a foreshadowing of what was to be fully realized in the New Testament by the death of Jesus. Because while this was the system God set up for Israel, the blood of bulls and goats couldn’t satisfy God’s wrath against our sin. We needed someone to come to take on our sin so that we could be made right with God. We needed, not an animal, but a human to die to make right what man had made wrong. The Good News of the Gospel When Jesus went to the cross he took the full wrath from God the Father for sin on himself. Jesus would die for all those whom God had chosen to be his children. Romans 3:22–25 says “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” [7] The important word to focus on is the word propitiation. It’s an uncommon word in our vocabulary. It means to appease the wrath of a God. This passage is saying that Jesus (on the cross) was the thing that satisfied the wrath of God for sinners. In other words, Jesus traded places with me on the cross, because he received what I should have received. He got the full measure of God’s wrath for my sin. And in return, I get to be treated like Jesus should have been treated. This means (among many things) I can have oneness with the Father, freedom from sin, eternal life, and favor in the eyes of God the Father. It’s like our analogy earlier. On a cosmic scale, there are two options for us. We can either receive justice for our sin. This is what Hell is. It is us paying the price for our sin, which requires an eternal death because our debt is against an eternal God. Or we can receive forgiveness because Jesus took Hell on himself. He paid, in full, the penalty for our sin. Theologically this doctrine is called penal substitutionary atonement. This is a fancy way to say, “Jesus traded places with me on the cross (substitute), paid my penalty, and has atoned for my sins.” This is the core message of the Christian faith and the reason we worship God. He paid for my sin and took my place. This is a kind of love that is unbelievable. It is the kind of love that propels us to worship and sing Nothing in my hands I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling; Naked, come to Thee for dress, Helpless, look to Thee for grace: Foul, I to the fountain fly, Wash me, Savior, or I die. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 5:16. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 203. Brandon Smith, “God’s Simplicity,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018). Tony Lane, “God’s Wrath,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018). J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993), 43. Origen, “De Principiis,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Frederick Crombie, vol. 4, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 278. “Now, since this consideration has weight with some, that the leaders of that heresy (of which we have been speaking) think they have established a kind of division, according to which they have declared that justice is one thing and goodness another, and have applied this division even to divine things, maintaining that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is indeed a good God, but not a just one, whereas the God of the law and the prophets is just, but not good” Origen refutes a heresy that distinguishes between a good God (Father of Jesus Christ) and a just but not good God (God of the Old Testament). He argues that this view misinterprets God's nature, as it fails to recognize that divine justice and goodness are not mutually exclusive but are harmoniously unified in God. He challenges the heretics' understanding of justice and goodness, illustrating through scriptural examples that God's actions, whether seemingly harsh or compassionate, are always just and good. Origen emphasizes that God's justice is not merely punitive but aims at correction and improvement, revealing a deeper, harmonious nature of divine justice and goodness. Origen concludes that the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament is the same, both just and good, rewarding and punishing appropriately. He encourages a deeper understanding of the Scriptures to appreciate the unity of God's nature, rejecting the dualistic view that separates God's justice from His goodness. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ro 3:22–25. If you look at any human relationship – any meaningful one at that – you will find injustice from either party. It is inescapable, humanity defaults toward relational injustice, not towards relational justice. We inflict harm to those we love, and those who love us. Humanity has a strange propensity to cause brokenness in relationships. We do this not just in our horizontal relationships, but in our vertical relationship with God. How is man made right with God? How is Man Made Right With God? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Judgement and Mercy Prosper Christian Reformed Church Judgement and Mercy Come Thou Long Expected Mitchell Leach Sunday, December 14, 2025 Audio Judgement and Mercy Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 56:58 Sermon Transcript While they're being seated, would you please take your Bible and turn with me this morning to Genesis 6. It's right in the beginning of your of your Bible. Genesis 6. We're going to read a few verses, and I'll try to direct you because we're not going to read consistently. We're going to read, skip a few verses, then read and skip a few and go again. So I'll try to help you understand where we're going. Genesis 6, beginning with just verses 5 through 8. Passage of scripture we don't read all that often in scripture, but listen carefully to what God has to say to us this morning. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regreted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. I want to pause there. Does that surprise you at all? So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I'm sorry that I've made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Now, if you will, go with me to verses 13 and 14. And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. Then drop down with me to verse 16 of chapter seven. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded, and the Lord shut him in. Would you pray with me for just a moment? Father God, we give you thanks for your word. Lord, it hurts that you looked at us, human beings, and said, I'm sorry I made them. Father, help us to understand you want a love relationship with us. And then Lord, help us to open our hearts and to literally love you with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength the way you want. Introduction Some stories stay with us because they say something true about us. This morning, one of the stories comes from an unlikely place. It comes from the movie Groundhog Day. I bet you didn't think I was going to say that this morning. Groundhog Day, for the four of you who haven't seen the movie, is a movie starring Bill Murray. He plays a character named Phil Conners, a man trapped in an endless loop. Every morning, he wakes up. It's the same day over and over again. The same mistakes, the same temptation, the same patterns. Nothing he tries can break the cycle. No indulgence, no escape, no effort. It's funny on the surface, but the reality is it's haunting. It teaches us a haunting truth that we can relive the same day thousands of times and still be the same people. We are all like Phil. We need more than just a new day. We need a new heart. And that's exactly the problem that Genesis 6 shows us. Humanity didn't need another opportunity. It didn't need another reset. It didn't need another try better next time. The world had been given a second chance after Eden. And sin simply went with it. And that's the big question that this passage asks us this morning. Big Question Do we just need a second chance? Isn't this what we believe in as Americans in the West? Isn't this what we believe in in second chance? Is the power of second chances? We tell each other that people are basically good, that we're shaped mostly by our environment, and that deep down we're capable of becoming our best selves if we just get a fresh start. If we We have a new year, a new habit, a new relationship, a new school, a new career, a new resolution, we tell ourselves, if I could just start over, I can fix myself. And it sounds hopeful. It even sounds compassionate. And we want to believe that this is true. We see this language all over in our culture saying everyone deserves a second chance. We all just need a clean slate. People change. Give them a chance. Give it time. And it feels It feels right because we want this to be the solution. A second chance is simple. A second chance is manageable. A second chance keeps the problem out there in our circumstances, in the environment in which we're in rather than in here in our hearts. But then real life happens. We get a second chance, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and we keep finding ourselves in the same loop in the same situation. We can resolve to be different people, yet slip back into the same sins. Tim Keller has this quote. It says, If our problem was only our environment, God would have sent a teacher. If our problem was only ignorance, God would have sent a philosopher. But our problem is sin, so God sent a savior. You can change your environment, but temptations still come with you. You can turn the page with the same heart writes the next chapter. Human history had second chance after Eden, and it didn't get better. It got worse. Which brings us to the tension that Genesis 6 confronts head-on. Do we just need a second chance, or do we need something greater? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us, so keep your Bibles open to Genesis. We're actually going to cover Genesis 6 through 9. We're not going to read the whole thing, but this is the whole story of Noah. And so we're going to see three movements in this story. Outline: We're going to a second chance a second Eden a second fall Let's remember where we're at in this story so far. In Genesis 3, sin entered the world. In Genesis 4, sin spread to a family. Cain murdered his brother Abel. By Genesis 5, sin had taken root in a genealogy in generations of people. And by Genesis 6, sin has infected the entire world. What began with a whisper now roars across the earth. Instead of the seed of the woman crushing the serpent, the seed of the serpent fills the earth with violence, corruption, and pride. This is no longer a broken couple or a broken family or a broken community. This is a broken world, and God sees it. What we will see in this story is as human wickedness multiplies and creation is corrupted, God grieves and brings judgment through flood, yet he preserves his redemptive promise through Noah, the righteous man who walks with God. A Second Chance And that's what we'll see in this first section, a second chance, Judgment and the Ark, chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 5 showed us a genealogy from Cain and a genealogy from Seth leading up into Noah. When we arrived to Noah, the trajectory set by Cain has become full-fold It has fully blossomed and corrupted the world. Look at Genesis 6:5 with me. Genesis 6:5 says this, The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. Humanity had become totally evil, totally wicked. They had become tyrants. That's what the word nephilum means. These people were tyrants, ruling over people in an There were men using women to satisfy their lust instead of seeing them as image bearers. The Earth was filled with wickedness, with selfishness, with pridefulness. That's what we see in Genesis 6:6-7, if you look at that with me. "And the Lord regreted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I've created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them." God's heart is pined by the evil the world has come to love. This is not the fury of an irritated deity. This is the grief of a father whose children chose to love violence than him. Cornelius Planteca has this quote that says, "Sin is not just the breaking of rules. It is vandalism of Shalom." This is why advent begins in the shadows, because the savior we wait for comes into the world that God himself judged for its violence. The peace that was once in the Garden of Eden is perverted. And because of this, God declares that he will cleanse the Earth. But notice this, that God is not abandoning his promise that he made in Genesis 3. He is purifying the stage on which that promise will unfold. God does not start over completely. He has every right to, he has every right to wipe everyone off the face of the Earth and start over again. But he doesn't. God had promised to bring salvation into mankind through the seed of the woman. And God is a faithful God. That's actually the first time we see this in scripture. God God's faithfulness coming out in a clear and direct way, at least. God's faithfulness to his promise here because he won't go back on his promise. Genesis 6:8-9, it says, "But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God, and Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japhoth." Grace appears before obedience. Favor precedes faithfulness. And that's the pattern that we see in scripture. That's why we see this pattern here. Anytime God commands obedience, he saves first. He shows grace first. You look at the Ten Commandments, that's the way that it happens. God saves He saved Israel from the Red Sea, from the Egyptians. He delivered them and then calls them into obedience. So he chooses a family. God chooses a family here. God looked at all the people of the Earth, and he chose Noah. The word in this passage that says found favor is really a word that means that God's heart was moved. Noah didn't earn this. This wasn't something that he did enough good in order to earn God's favor. This is actually the same word that we use throughout the Old Testament and New Testament for grace. This is the first mention of grace. And it's interesting because it's in the context of judgment. Before God saves through a manger, he saves through an ark. I think some of us still think that God loves us because we're better than most or that we're better than these other people. I think it's easy for us, and maybe we don't say that confessionally or we don't say that outwardly. But deep down, I think in everyone's heart, we believe that we're better than them. We're better than those people who don't follow God, or we're better than those people who do this thing. At least I don't do that. Noah reminds us that grace is never earned. It is only received. If you're tired this advent season of trying to clean yourself up for God, this passage invites us to rest in God's grace. This verse doesn't mean that Noah was without sin. When it says that he is righteous or blameless, what that means is that Noah's righteousness was given from God to him because he believed in the promise, that his blamelessness was based on his worship because he walked with God. God had every right to wipe the whole world clean. Sin had pervaded every inch of the world, the perfect world that he had created, and that included Noah. Noah's righteousness is imputed to him. Not a righteousness of his own, but a righteousness of faith, God's righteousness. And so God makes a covenant with Noah. Look at Genesis 6:18 with me. He says, "But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you." This is the first time the word covenant appears. And there is a huge sensation for me to stop and do 15 minutes of talking about a covenant right here because covenant is such a huge part of our faith. But we're going to talk about that in 2026 a lot more. So I'm going to limit myself to this brief explanation. A covenant is more than a legal contract. A covenant is even more It's not even just a promise. It is a promise against your own life. It is a promise marked by blood. It is like a promise, but you have to put a deposit down. And imagine that deposit being your own life. That is what is happening here. God is promising Noah and his family against his life that they will be saved while everyone else dies. What we see here in this story is that the Ark is a type of Christ. It's the only place of safety when judgment comes. We must be found in Christ just as Noah was found in the Ark. But even after the waters recede, we are left asking, Will Will this cleansed world cleanse the human heart? And that's what we see in this next section. The second Eden, a new world, a new covenant in Genesis 8, the whole chapter of 8, and then Genesis 9:1-17. God brings all the animals to Noah, and the flood begins. Everyone boards, and God shuts the door. When he closed the door to the Ark, he sealed the coffin on humanity. And this might offend our modern sensibilities, but we have to remember what's happening. This was justice. This wasn't God punitively punishing people. But this was justice. This was creation had gone so arrived, so wrong, that this was justified. In the Bible, judgment and salvation always travel together in the same waters that destroyed the wicked, the same waters lifted the boat, the Ark, to safety. The same act that shut the doors brought Noah and his family in. That's what we see in Genesis 8:21, Genesis 7:21-23, it says, "And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, bees, and all swarming creatures that sworn on the earth, and all mankind." Everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and the birds of the heaven. Sin had become so violent, so corrosive, so dehumanizing, that God would no longer allow his creation to rot unchecked. This is why in chapter 6, he says, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years. This word abide, that God's spirit would not abide in man forever, really means to strive or contend. Really, what God is saying is, I will not try to negotiate with mankind anymore to try to follow me. They are a lost cause. It is futile. They are flesh. They only want what they want, and what they want is not a relationship with me. And so the water subsides. Noah and all the animals get off the boat. And for a second time in humanity, there's a chance to obey God, to follow him, to follow what he says, and to live by how he defines right and wrong. Moses wants you to hear. Moses is the writer of Genesis. Moses wants you to hear the echoes of Genesis 1 in this. Look with me at this. A world covered by water, wind sent by God, dry land appearing, animals multiplying, man standing as the head of humanity. This is a second Eden, a fresh start, a new creation. Many of us, we love this time of year because It's a chance for us to think about something new. New Year's is right around the corner. There's a lot of new things happening. Kids, we're about to get a lot of new toys. It feels like a great way to start over. In fact, this is probably a time where we even think back about our year. If you have Spotify, you get a Spotify wrapped, you get a chance to look back at your year and think about what your year was. And many of us maybe feel like we have things to run from. The story of Noah shows us that a new start is not enough. We can try to run away, but sin and guilt and shame will always follow. What we need is a redeemer. And that's what this advent season is It's not about a fresh start, but salvation coming in the form of an infant. A washed world is not a new world. Water can cleanse creation, but it cannot cleanse the human hearts. C. S. Lewis says this, "No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever makes a good omelet." And I think that's true here. No matter how hard we try, no matter how many fresh starts we have, we cannot change who we are. So God makes a covenant with Noah as he steps off the boat. In chapter 9, verse 11, he says, I establish my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by waters of the flood, and never again shall I Why shall there be a flood to destroy the earth? So God gives Noah another covenant. And why a covenant here? Because the second Eden will fail for the same reason the first one did. Unless God binds himself to all humanity with grace, humanity will walk away. The truth is Noah is not holding on to God. This covenant shows us that God is holding on to Noah. God is holding on to all humanity. The rainbow that we see here is not a sign of human progress. It's a symbol of divine restraint. God's showing that he will no longer judge the world in this way. For a moment, it feels like Eden is restored. A righteous man, a renewed world, a fresh covenant, a new start. If anyone can crush the head of the serpent, if anyone can get it right, Noah surely has to be the one. But unfortunately, that's not what we see in this next section. A Second Fall The sin that returns. Genesis 9:18-29. Genesis 9:20 says this, Noah began to be a man 'Man' of the soil. He planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. 'And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. ' This, admittedly, is a confusing passage, and it is not clear what happens. But it is clear that both Noah and Ham sinned. Moses wants us to see the big point, not the details here. The man who walked with God stumbles. The righteous one falls into shame. The new Adam lies naked in a garden-like setting, just as the first Adam did. Noah goes from the righteous one to the drunk and shameful one, allowing something clearly evil to happen. Just like Adam and Eve, Noah brings sin back into the picture. Do you hear the echoes of the fall? Adam eats the forbidden fruit, Noah abuses the fruit of the vine, Adam's nakedness is exposed. Noah's nakedness is exposed. Adam's son rebels. Noah's son rebels. Martin Luther says this, The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent, that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ. This message is unmistakable. You can restart the world, but you cannot restart the human heart. Noah Noah looks like he would be the one to crush the head of the snake, but he isn't the one to do it. A clean world with the same old heart is still a broken world. And that's where advent becomes necessary. If all it was was an environment, God could fix the environment. If all it was was our circumstances, God could fix the circumstances. But the problem is us. It's our hearts. It's what we love deep down. So salvation cannot come from inside the ark. Salvation cannot come from inside of us. It has to come from inside of heaven. And that leads us to our Main Idea Judgment can cleanse the Earth, but it cannot change the human heart Only the one who bears judgment for us can bring lasting salvation. We need more. We need something more than a fresh start, more than a do-over, more than a try better next time. And subconsciously, unfortunately, we believe this, that we just need a do-over, even in our relationship with God, even in our salvation. As a former youth pastor, I can say this without a shadow of a doubt. There is an epidemic of people rededicating their lives to Christ. And I don't want to throw shade on people whose hearts are convicted by sin and that there's a desire to get right with God. I think that there is a lot of good in that. The danger in rededicating our hearts to Christ is it puts people in this spiritual limbo of, are they saved? Aren't they saved? I've seen countless times where people feel the conviction at a conference or during a sermon or at a retreat. People understand that their sin is evil, but they maybe grew up in the church, and they don't want to confess that maybe they weren't a Christian or that they had been walking in this way and feeling like They have to admit that maybe they really had something wrong when it came to their salvation. Unfortunately, this is a way... The rededication can be a way to ease our conscience about how we've been living, that we can do this and continue to live the life that we've been living and still keep a Bible verse in our Instagram bio. This might last for a couple of years, but nothing changes. We use rededication or dedicating our lives to Christ as a way to have a fresh start, a do-over. This Christmas story, the Christmas story, isn't one to make you feel better about your sin. The reality is that it's here to judge. It's here to judge you. It's here to judge me. We should feel judged by it. We cannot fix ourselves, even with unlimited do-overs, even if we had a Groundhog Day experience, if we relive the same day over and over. If we don't feel the weight of this in this passage, we've missed the point. Jesus came to fix the Earth, to fix what we couldn't fix, to fix our hearts. I think there are churches, there are pastors, there are Christians who would revolt against what we just talked about. They love to say things like people in the Gospels never felt judged around Jesus. Jesus was so accepting. Jesus was so open to people that he never made people feel judged. And unfortunately, that's just a lack of biblical literacy. That's a lack of seeing what happens in the Gospels. I mean, goodness me, if you were one of the Pharisees, I hope you felt judged by Jesus. If you've read the Gospels, you would have seen that. A few other places in the Gospels where Jesus makes people feel judged around him is: in Peter's confession after the miraculous catch the rich young ruler the disciples after the storm John in Revelation Dietrich Bonhoffer says this, "The coming Becoming of God is not only glad tidings, but first of all, frightening news for everyone who has a conscience." We feel judged by God because of his righteousness, because of who he is. He's perfect. Just being around him would make us feel judged. But the good news is for us that we don't have to stand in that judgment. We do not have to be the people who live in that judgment. The one who was born in the manger came to be condemned in our place. All of God's The wrath fell on the head that Mary held. And because the wrath fell on his head, he could crush the head of the serpent. That leads us into our application. Application Identify one place where you keep giving yourself second chances and replace it with accountability The first point of application is this. Identify one place where you keep giving yourself second chances and replace it with accountability. Instead of saying to yourself, I'll do better next time, pick one area in your life and tell someone, I need help with this. Some practical steps would be telling a spouse, Telling a friend where you're failing. Ask them to check in on you this week and choose a specific time when to talk about it. We can't go through life continuing to walk in the same sin over and over. We have to be willing to say we need more than a second chance. Our second point of application is this. Practice one act of generosity that stretches you this week The world before the flood was filled with people who wanted to exploit it, exploit other people for their own gain. Advent shows us the infinite nature of God's gratitude, of God's generosity, that God himself gave us himself something we needed desperately, but we could have never earned, never deserved. So this week, do this. Give someone something or give to someone who can't repay you back. Buy groceries for a struggling family, leave a gift card anonymously, Tip generously. Fill a need in the church without being asked. Generosity loosens the grip that sin strengthens in our heart. Of sin, and it strengthens our heart towards worship. One thing that we didn't talk about in this story so far is the rainbow. It was a sign that was given to Adam and Eve, is the sign that was given to all of humanity. It points directly towards the manger. When we see a rainbow, we associate it with positive feelings that it's happy, it's a good thing. And yet we forget that the rainbow is a sign of a weapon. That God chose to hang up his bow, to hang up his weapon. The next time that God would judge the world, the judgment wouldn't come down. It wouldn't be facing down. Look at the shape of a rainbow. This time, the next time that God would judge the world, the bow would take aim directly at the heart of heaven. And that's what we see on the cross. God's wrath, God's judgment coming down directly towards his son. Judgment can cleanse the earth, but it cannot change the human heart. Only the one who bears judgment for us can bring lasting salvation. Would you stand with me as we pray and prepare our hearts to respond in worship? Let's stand and pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are. God, you are so good and good to us. God, I pray that as we prepare our hearts for communion, for worship, God, that you would ready us for more than a way just to remember you, but to commune with you to enter into your presence, to identify you so deeply inside of us that we want to consume you. God, because we know that we can only be saved by entering into you, by entering into the Ark like Christ. It's the only place safe from wrath. God, thank you for sparing us. Thank you for saving us. Help us to respond in worship. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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Come And Drink Sermon Series Description Come and Drink is a series about a God who shows up to his own party uninvited. The Feast of Booths was supposed to celebrate God's wilderness provision — water from the rock, shelter in the desert, the presence that sustained Israel when nothing else could. But when the one to whom all that provision pointed walks into the feast, he has to sneak in because the hosts want to kill him. Over three weeks, we will watch everyone form an opinion about Jesus — his brothers, the crowds, the leaders, the officers sent to arrest him — and every one of them will get something wrong. They judge by appearances. They assume they know where he comes from. They argue about his credentials while ignoring his claims. And then, on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stands up and shouts: if anyone is thirsty, come to me and drink. The whole chapter forces a single question — will you stand with the crowd debating Jesus from a distance, or will you come to him thirsty? At the Feast of Booths, Jesus exposes every shallow judgment about his identity and offers the Spirit to anyone who will stop arguing about him and come to him thirsty. Rivers John 7 Watch His Own Party John 7 Watch

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The God Who Saves in Spite of Us Prosper Christian Reformed Church The God Who Saves in Spite of Us Jonah Mitchell Leach Sunday, November 9, 2025 Audio The God Who Saves in Spite of Us Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 38:48 Sermon Transcript My name is John Boss. I grew up in Prosper Church, and I've been a member here for 51 years. My wife and I are custodians here. My wife, Bonna and I, are custodians here. I volunteer with our food ministry every other Thursday. Our passage today is from Jonah 2: 1-10, and you will find it on page 920. Starting with verse 1, Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as God from the belly of the fish, saying, 'I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you heard my voice, 'For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and all your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven from your sight. Yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed over to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bar is closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idol, forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I, with a voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. ' And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon dry ground. This is the word of the Lord. I want to tell you a story that you're probably familiar with. It's the story of Israel in the wilderness. The people of Israel had been enslaved for generations in Egypt. This was under brutal oppression from the Egyptians. Hard labor day in and day out. The people cried out to God for someone who would deliver them. And God heard their cry and brought them Moses, who would deliver them out of Egypt into the promised land. As they were making their escape, they became trapped by the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's army was descending descending in on them. Imagine yourself in this situation. Imagine the scene just for a minute. You and all your family, your neighbors, your friends, with all of your possessions, watching Pharaoh's army descend in on you with no hope of being able to defend yourself trapped against a sea that you could not cross on your own. But at that last minute, God split the sea and allowed them to cross so they wouldn't be slaughtered by Pharaoh's army. God had literally saved them from near certain death. As they were on their way, just a few months later, wandering in the desert, on the way to the promised land, they began to run out of food. Rather than trusting God, knowing that just a couple of months earlier, he had saved them, performed a miracle in front of their eyes. They complained. They complained to Moses saying, Would that we have died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full? For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. God's people, literally just seeing a miracle before their eyes, now believe that God will not provide for them, will not take care of them. After being saved, they don't trust God. This is what we see in the Book of Jonah. Israel forgot God's salvation within weeks of the Red Sea. Jonah does the same within moments, and we do the same every single day. Like Israel, Jonah doesn't just forget God's deliverance. He resists God's heart. This is the question that hovers over this whole book. Do you pursue God's heart, or do we just want his help? That leads us to our big question for today. How quickly do we forget when someone comes through for us, or how quickly do we forget God's faithfulness? How quickly do we forget God's faithfulness. If you're a parent, you know this. You see this probably every day, how quickly people forget when you came through for them. Your kids don't remember the time that you got them a present or how you pay their cell phone bill or the time that you helped them in a time of need. I mean, as a kid, I know for certain I didn't think about those things. All I thought about when I was a kid was the thing that my parents were actively doing wrong or the thing that frustrated me or annoyed me. This is true about all of us, whether we're a kid or not. We forget. There are studies that back this up. It's called the recency bias. When When you're in crisis, your brain's priority is not to recall past blessings, but to solve the immediate threat. Unless gratitude and faith are continually rehearsed, they will be cognitively displaced. What this means is that unless we actively remember, unless we actively make it part of our life to be thankful, when we get into crisis, we forget the faithfulness of God. We forget his pattern of faithfulness. This isn't a scientific excuse, but it's a study that shows us our hearts' sinful nature. We are naturally not a grateful people We often forget that God has saved us in order to grumble about bills, about hard times in life, or that it's going to snow later today. I want to ask this question of us. Can we look back at a time in our life and see a moment where God was not faithful to us? For some of us, it's easy when trials come, blinders come on, and we can't see what God has done. These trials in life hit us from all sides, and sometimes they're not even big ones. Sometimes it's the Walmart substitution forgot the wrong thing for our grocery pickup, and we're halfway to atheism. It can be the smallest things. But God provides. But when the next bill comes, we panic. He can answer a prayer one week, and the next week, we're acting like he's never answered a single prayer in our life. This is why we study this book. This is why we look at the Book of Jonah, because in this chapter, we'll see that Jonah recognizes that God saved him and then forget two chapters later. So let's look at our outline for this morning. We'll see three major movements or sections in this passage. Judgment descends, mercy intervenes, and salvation triumphs. Last week, to give context for this passage, we saw Jonah deliberately flee or run away from God's presence. A huge storm comes that threatens the life of everyone on board, and he's cast overboard. And then God appoints a fish to save him. The point of last week's passage and the message last week was to fear God and run to him. And this week in Jonah 2, God hears Jonah's prayer of distress and graciously delivers him. So let's look at this first passage or this first section, Judgment Descends. Jonah realizes he's not dead, and he knows that this can only be from God. Yet, Jonah is in anguish. And maybe we don't see this right away in this passage. Because this passage is different from Jonah 1, and Jonah 3, and 4. It looks different. If you look at this printed in your Bible, it looks different. It takes a different format. It's no longer telling a story. This isn't historical narrative. We talked about genres the first week. This isn't a historical narrative anymore. It switches to poetry. The nature of poetry is hyperbolic or it uses imaginative language. Poetry doesn't just tell us what happens. It's not telling us a story. It shows us how the author felt. Jonah isn't giving us a report anymore. He's giving us his heart. Jonah could have written in here, I'm struggling with God. I am thankful that he saved me, but I was in the belly of the fish, and I prayed to God, and it was a weird time for me. This prayer, this poem shows us Jonah's heart. This is why he says in verse 2, he says, Out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you heard my voice. This is imaginative language. Jonah is not telling us that he is in Sheol or that he's in Hell. What he's saying is that he feels in utter anguish. Jonah will use a lot of emotion in this prayer. Jonah's emotion isn't random, though. It's revealing. The very God who Jonah is crying out to is the same God he knows has put him in this place. This poetry moves from feeling abandoned to realizing that he's being confronted. And that's why Jonah says, For you cast me into the deep. Jonah is clear he knows who has put him here. This prayer resembles a lot of prayers in the a lot of distress prayers in the Psalms. A really good example of that is Psalm 18. I've put Jonas 2 in Psalm 18 next to each other here. If you can't read it, that's okay. I want you to see that there are a lot of the same themes This is the same language being used in both of these. These two prayers look nearly synonymous. The words, Jonah's words, echo in this Psalm. The cords of death encompass me. The torrent of destruction assail me. In my distress, I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice. This is the same language, the same imagery of drowning, sinking, and crying out. Like Jonah, David cries out from the brink of death. And like David, he finds God. He finds that God hears him even from the depths. Here's another parallel between the two. What's strange about this prayer, about both of these prayers, is that they are both laments and prayers of thanksgiving. A lament is a prayer where You bring your discomfort, you bring your grief to God. You're honest about how you feel. It's a way to cry out to God. The Bible gives us language. Not every prayer has to be, God, thank you for everything that's good, or God, everything is good in my life, or the feeling that we have to be happy and smiling all the time as Christians. The Bible says that we can go through hard things and that we can run to God in those moments. This is a prayer of both lament and thanksgiving. Jonah is thanking God while still being in the belly of the fish. Imagine how disorienting this would be. Jonah is in one minute, he in the water, mentally preparing to die. And the next, he's in the belly of the fish, realizing that he can somehow still breathe. And these seconds of becoming aware that he's not dead yet. Turn into minutes, turn into hours, turning into days where he's feeling smothered, uncomfortable. Yet understanding that he's alive and thanking God, and at the same time frustrated in the midst of this suffering. Jonah is saved, but he's not free. That's how grace often feels. We're delivered, and yet we're still figuring out what deliverance means. Jonah is wrestling with God. This is a unique prayer. The tone of it is half genuine and half blame shifting. Jonah is saying, God, I cried out to you, and you answered, But you did this to me. Jonah cries out to God, not because he wants to be near to him, but because he wants out of trouble. He's chasing relief, not relationship. It's the same question for us. Are we pursuing God, or do we just want his help? This is the tension that we see in this prayer. Jonah's judgment was deserved, but mercy was already in motion. And that's what we see in this next section as mercy intervenes. Verses 4 through 8. Jonah feels like he's being driven away or banished. And that's what we see in verse 4. He knows what he did was wrong and feels like he's far from God. I think it's easy for us to feel the same way, too. We talk about sin as something that separates us from God. Sin would separate us from God. But the cross, but Jesus Christ, because of the cross, even in our sin, we can be drawn near to God. Oftentimes, I think we approach our sin as a pharisey would. We say, God, I've sinned, and now I'm far away from you. You're disappointed with me. You're mad at me. And so I'm far away from you. But if we're Christians, if we're people who know the gospel, we know that while sin should separate us from God, it actually brings us closer. You can say to God, God, I know that what I did was wrong, and I should be cast out from your presence. I should be banished. I should be the one driven away from your sight. Yet I know your son took my place, and that's the only way I can have a relationship with you. It seems that Jonah feels far from God, and yet we see him come around halfway through verse 6. Look at verse 6 with me. Jonah says, Yet you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God. We see this glimmer of hope for Jonah that he recognizes, he understands that God's the one in control, that God's the one who saves him. But then he goes back the next verse to try to take credit for what is happening. He says, When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you in your holy temple. Yes, God, you saved me, but I was the one who did the right thing. I was the one who prayed, and I was the one who followed through. I was the one who remembered you. This is a common way that I think we approach prayer as Christians. We say things like, God, I've been avoiding that sin, that sin that's really been tempting me or that's been a problem in my life. And I've been so good about that. God, why are you making my life this way? Or God, I'm struggling with these feelings things, this mental load. God, why are you giving this to me? I can't see any sin in my life, or I don't understand why you're doing this to me. God, I've been good. This is a common way we try to interact with God. In fact, this is a prevalent way that some churches tell people to interact with God. The Health, Wealth, Prosperity gospel says that this is one way that we should talk to God. Joel Olstein, which I would never quote, except to tell you this is a a bad guy and you got to stay away from him. I'm using him as a bad example. Don't go get any of his books. He says this in one of his books, When you're in difficult times, don't just pray, God, please help me, but remind him, God, I've been faithful. I've honored you. I've been giving, serving, helping others, and being a blessing. So God, I'm asking for your favor, your healing, your increase. Church, this is a fundamentally broken way to understand God. If this were true, it means that we, as people, could manipulate God, that we somehow would be able to control God. God would no longer be Almighty. He would have to be subservient to my good works, to the things that I've done, to the giving, serving, helping others, and being a blessing. We cannot use our good deeds to twist God's arm into doing what we want. How in the world do we think that we're powerful enough to twist the arm of the Almighty God? We cannot use our religiousness or our good works. We miss the point when our confidence comes from our religiosity and not from God himself. See, God isn't impressed with our good works. Christianity isn't some secret formula where if you do enough good works, God's happy, but if you're disobedient, then God's not happy. That's not what Christianity is. The heart of who we are is who God's after. The question that we see over and over, do we pursue God? Do we want him? Do we delight in him? And when we do, that leads to good works. That leads to us being obedient, trying to be good and trying to have good works out of self-righteousness is actually an act of rebellion. And that's what we see as Jonah continues in verse 8. Jonah continues in saying true things out of a place of self-righteousness in verse 8. He says, Those who pay regard to vain idol, forsake their hope of steadfast love. While this is true, people who don't worship the true God, who worship idles, won't have steadfast love. Jonah is using as a way to say, God, I'm good. I'm the one who remembered you. Remember those people out there? They're the ones who don't understand it. God, he probably could be talking about the mariners or the Ninevites who he was called to go and minister to. Jonah is still wrestling with God. He's saying, God, I remembered you. I prayed to you. But they don't understand you. And this is the danger of having and seeing the world through an us versus them mentality. Whenever we have an us versus them mentality, what we're doing is, well, number one, we never put ourselves in the group of people who aren't good. We always put ourselves in the people who are doing good things, who are good, the good guys, right? When we put ourselves in that category, we're the us. We will demonize other people. Rather than seeing people as one collective, one group of people who are equally sinful before God, which is something that we're studying tonight, just a subtle nod to the evening service if you want to come. This is something that we have to break. We can't see the world through an us versus them mentality. This is what Jonas does, and that's why he gets this wrong. He thinks he knows who the us should be, who the good people are, who God should save, and who God should punish. Jonas' words sound right, but his heart is still wrong. God saves him, but Jonah doesn't share his heart. Salvation belongs to the Lord, but sanctification means learning to love who God loves. And that's what we see in this next section as we see salvation triumphs in verses 9 through 10. In a contrast to those pagan people, Jonah is thankful that God saved him, and he promises to sacrifice to him. But I think it's important to see the location where Jonah is when he's saying these things. He's in the belly of the fish. Let me ask you this question. If someone were to confess to you something that they had done wrong, what means more when they come to you unprompted. Maybe you don't even know that they had done something wrong and they come to you on their own because they feel guilt and they want to rectify the relationship. They want to restore the relationship or when they've been caught, when they have to say sorry. What means more? Obviously, when people come of their own accord. It's easy to say sorry when you've been caught. It's easy to say, I'll do the right thing when you have no other way out. When we look at the whole context of the book, we see that while this is a beautiful prayer, Jonah didn't really mean it. We know this from Jonah 4. Jonah assaults God with his own words saying, I knew you were going to forgive these people, and I hate you for it. Maybe, maybe, Jonah really meant this prayer, and maybe he didn't. But either way, I'm reminded of this quote from George Whitfield, I must repent of my repentance. How many times, how many times have we in our lives confessed a sin to God, only to run right back to it? How many times have we told God God, this is the last time I do that. Why is it that sin still has a hold on us as Christians, as those who believe in the gospel, who know that we've been saved? Paul talks about this very idea in Romans 7. He says, For I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Paul's talking about this, this idea of understanding I know what's right, and yet I find myself in sin. The only reason, the only reason as Christians, that sin still has a hold on our life is because we love it. The only reason that sin still has a hold on our life as sanctified, as redeemed people, is because we love it. But the good news for us as people, as Christians, is that the way to defeat a love is with a greater love. And that's why Paul goes on to say, But thanks be to God that you who once were a slave to sin, you who once loved your own sin, have become obedient from the heart to the standard of the teaching which you were committed. And having been set free from sin, you've become a slave to righteousness, slaves to God, loving what God loves, pursuing his heart, But we don't often do this. We don't often see this. We're often like the Israelis who sit, wandering in the wilderness, going, Why don't we just go back to Egypt, be back in slavery? At least we had meat pots there. As Christians, we can go through trials. We can go through hard seasons of our life and feel like maybe God's way isn't the right way for us. Maybe what God has for us isn't good for us. And maybe running back to sin is okay. But this chapter tells us something different. This chapter tells us, and this is our main idea, that salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it. Salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it. It's clear that if Jonah was sincere about this prayer, he quickly forgot what he was saying. Like Israel, after crossing the Red Sea, Jonah forgets the salvation he just witnessed. Yet salvation is not in our hands. It's inherently not our own. It's God's. We don't have the ability to hang on to it. Our salvation isn't in the strength of our faith, but in the strength of the object of our faith. We aren't saved because we have a strong faith in God. We are saved because we have faith in Jesus Christ, the Almighty. He who was created, who are he who created us without our help, will save us without our consent. This doesn't erase response, but it reminds us that God's saving grace is always the first mover. A. W. Tozer says this, Salvation is from our side a choice. From the divine side, it is a seizing upon and apprehending a conquest by the most high God. Our accepting and willing are just reactions rather than the action. The right of determination must always remain with God. What this means is that God is the one who acts first. Our responding to or our choosing to be Christian or choosing to follow God is always a reaction to him, opening our heart to love him. Which one of us, after receiving salvation, then is done sinning, sins no more. Even at our best moments, even at our most pure moments of worship, of repentance, our sin still taint who we are. J. A. Parker has this great quote, There's a tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me. This is the good news of the gospel. Jesus didn't just save us knowing the sins that we did before we were a Christian. He knew every single sin we would commit, all the sins we would commit, even after accepting him. God knew everything that you had already done and all the things you would do after being saved and still went to the cross for you. Jesus died knowing that even after you placed your faith in him, there would be tons of moments where you would act like you have no faith at all. Salvation salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it. So how then should we live? This leads us into our application. Our first point of application is this. Pray even when our hearts aren't in the right place. One of the most clear things we see in this passage, and that we can learn from this passage, is that we can pray to God in any season. Jonah pray to God with some selfish motives, absolutely. But the main thing is he runs to God. He prays to God. There's a tension here pastorially that I want to tease out just for a minute. I want you to run to God. I want to say that God is big enough to handle you when you're wrong and when you're confused. We still run to him. The other side of this is that we have a Holy God who we worship and that we shouldn't intentionally to have a sinful heart in prayer. It's okay to come to God humbly and say, God, I don't understand this, or God, I want to trust you, but I don't feel like I can, or to say, God, how long will you not respond to my prayer? It's great to pray those things, but it's not okay to assault God with our words, to sinfully and pridefully attack God. This is part of what it means to fear God and to run to him. This was our main idea from last week. Our prayers of confusion need to be in humility, praying God, Change my heart. I need you to change my heart not to pray to God in hoping to change his. That leads us into our last point of application, which is this: be intentionally grateful. It's easy to forget what God has done for us. It's easy to be focused on the on health issues, on tests, on broken relationships. Our natural state isn't being thankful to God. It's to be grumblers. And so my challenge to you this week is to make every part, every prayer this week that you pray to God, start it with thankfulness. We are so good as a people by requesting things from God. Prayers of supplication, that's our best prayer. We are great at it. Most of the time when we pray, it's, God, I need this. God, this is happening. Please give me this. I'm struggling with this. Help us figure this out. Before we start asking God to give us things, quiet our heart. Start off by thanking God for something that is going well in your life. Even when life is going horrible, we can still thank God The thing about lamenting, the thing about praying to God, prayers that bring grief, confusion, or distress to him. Biblically, what we see in Psalms is that all of them end with thanksgiving. All of them end while still expressing faith in who he is, in his character, and in his promises. As we come to a close, by what power are we able to still be united to Christ, even as Christians who wander away from him, who choose to do our own things? How are we not abandoned by him? It's by the power of the cross. We are held to God because on the cross, Jesus was expelled from God. He got God's wrath, the thing that we deserved, God's punishment against those who turn away and disobey. That's all of us. That's the story of Jonah. We're the Jonah in this story. We're the disobedient ones. But the good news is that there was another man who went under the waves, not for his sin, but for ours. Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days because he was disobedient. Jesus was in the belly of the earth for three days because he was obedient for us. Jonah was cast into the deep because God was drawing him back to himself. Jesus was cast into death because God was drawing you back to him. This is why we can sing in our next song, we can sing, Sin and despair like the sea waves cold, threaten the soul with infinite loss. Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold, points to the refuge, the mighty cross. So if you've run, if you've prayed half-hearted prayers, if your repentance feels weak, remember. Remember, prosper. Salvation belongs to the Lord, even when we don't fully mean it. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that we can run to you with our prayer, that you are big enough, you are great enough to take our prayers that are half-hearted, that are confused. God, thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for loving us, even when we When we are so confused that we don't seem to love you back. God, I pray that each and every one of us would be able to respond in worship, that this week we'd be able to respond knowing you and loving you Loving your heart. Help us not to be like Jonah. Help us to love you, the God we see. God, we love you. We love to do your will. So help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Just stand with me as we sing our next song. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link