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

Infant Baptism At Prosper CRC, we baptize infants because we believe baptism is a sign of God’s covenant, just as circumcision was in the Old Testament. Throughout Scripture, God’s promises extend not just to individuals but to households (Genesis 17:7, Acts 2:39). Just as Israelite children were marked as belonging to God, we believe the children of believers should receive the sign of baptism, recognizing them as part of the covenant community. Baptism doesn’t save—only faith in Christ does—but it is a visible declaration that God claims us as His own. It reminds us that salvation is by grace, not by our own efforts, and that God’s promises extend to the next generation. Jesus welcomed children and declared that the Kingdom of God belongs to them (Luke 18:16), and the early church baptized entire households, suggesting that children were included (Acts 16:15, 33). In baptizing infants, we affirm that God’s grace comes before our response, just as He loved us before we loved Him (1 John 4:19). This practice is not about what we do for God, but about what He has done for us. It’s an invitation for parents and the church to raise these children in the faith, pointing them to Jesus as the only source of salvation. Baptism is not the finish line—it’s the starting point of a life lived in response to God’s grace. Infant Baptism Process To schedule an infant baptism at Prosper CRC, please fill out the form, and a staff member will be in touch with you. Infant Baptism Form

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

Jonah - Overview Prosper Christian Reformed Church Jonah - Overview Jonah Mitchell Leach Sunday, October 26, 2025 Audio Jonah - Overview Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 41:28 Sermon Transcript Good morning, Prosper. Good morning. Most of you probably know us, but for those of you that don't, I am Colin DeKam, and this is my wife, Sarah, and we will be doing our scripture reading this morning. Our scripture this morning comes from Jonah 1: 1-3, and then Jonah 4: 5-11. Please turn there in your few Bibles with us this morning as we read. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Ametai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for the evil has come up before me. But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Jopah and found the ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down to it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. He's skipping forward to Chapter 4: 5. Jonah went out of the city and sat there on the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade until he should see what would become the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant that made it come up over Jonah, that he might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when the dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live. ' But God said to Jonah, 'Do you do well to be angry for the plant? ' And he said, 'Yes, I do well to be angry. ' angry enough to die. ' And the Lord said, 'You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right-hand from their left, and also much cattle? ' This is the word of the Lord. Thank you, guys. After the devastation of World War One, France was determined never to be invaded by Germany again. So they poured resources and time and energy into building the Majinot Line. It was a massive line of fortifications between France and Germany right on the border. It included fortifications and underground bunkers. This was to deter another invasion. And military experts, politicians, and the people at large felt certain that this would deter another invasion. It would keep them safe. But in 1940, during World War II, Germany, knowing that these fortifications were there, simply went around this line. They went through Belgium and attacked France, and France fell in six weeks. The French weren't just unprepared. They prepared based on what they were certain would happen. They were defending against the last war, not the one that they were actually facing. The Majinot Line isn't just a military structure. It was a symbol of false certainty, and that led to disaster. Mark Twain once said, It ain't what you know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. The unknown isn't the danger. It's the false assumptions that we all have. It makes sense that we would get in trouble when what we believe, when what we're certain about isn't true. This is dangerous for us in life at large, but it's even more so dangerous for us, our spiritual life. And that's what the Book of Jonas shows us. And before we get into that, I want to ask you this question, what can we be certain about? What happens when we're certain about the wrong things? What if we're wrong about who we believe God is or how he acts or who he should love? What if our false assumptions about God threaten our relationship with him? What if What if the God we worship isn't the God of the Bible? What if the God we worship is the one we've invented to avoid facing the true God? This is the story we see in the Book of Jonah. Jonah, God's prophet, believes that he knows who God should love and how God should operate. Jonah thought he knew God. Jonah thought he knew grace. Jonah thought he knew justice. But God showed him something better. In this series, Will we become too prideful to allow God to change us, or will we pursue God's heart? Keep your Bibles open with me as we continue to read and we look at these two points in this sermon. How should we read Jonah and Why should we read Jonah? We're going to be starting a five-week series on the Book of Jonah, partially because the Book of Jonah is four weeks long, and an introduction to that is It's important for us to see the beauty of it. And the other part of that is we have five weeks until advent, and so we needed one more sermon to cover that time. But this is important. I think this is something that we're going to continue to do. Being able to step back from the book that we're about to study, look at it from a 10,000-foot view so that way we don't miss the forest for the trees. In the next four weeks, we're going to be going chapter by chapter through this book. And I would hate for us to see what each chapter says, but miss the overarching story. What happens in the Book of Jonah is that Jonah runs from God's heart by disobeying God's word. It begs us to ask this question, do we pursue God's heart? So let's look at how we should read the Book of Jonah. Whenever you get to a new passage or whenever you open your Bible, you should ask yourself, you should ask questions of the text that lead to the heart of the text. It's important to distinguish those questions. There are good questions and bad questions to ask of any text, questions that lead us to understand the intent or why this book was written. Those are the questions that we need to ask, but there are bad questions that we can ask. A question that often comes up in the Book of Jonah is, what fish or was it a whale that swallowed Jonah? And the reality is answering that question might be It's an interesting thought. But whether the fish was a grouper or a goldfish, it actually doesn't lead us to understanding the passage or understand why this book was written. A question that we should be asking is, when does this happen? When does this book take place on the arc of the biblical narrative or throughout the Bible? Where does this happen? You might be thinking, why does that matter? Well, it matters a ton. If this happens after Jesus's resurrection, this book is completely different. If this happens during the Exodus or during the time of Abraham, this book is completely different. But we know that this book is during the time of the judges. During the time of the Kings, sorry. This is when Israel has its own nation. It has a king. It's actually after the time of King David and King Solomon. But Israel is a nation, and Israel is in a spiritually dark time in its history. There is rampant idolatry, and this matters because Israel faces threats from outside forces to come in and conquer and take them away. God told them that this would happen to them. In Deuteronomy, he said, If you forget who I am, I will allow enemies to come and take you away. This is an important underlying tension throughout this entire book, something that we need to remember. Another Another question that we have to ask is, what book is this? There are different types of scriptures. There are different types of genres within scripture. All of it is scripture, and yet there are different types. There's law, there are prophecy, there is poetry, there are letters, Gospels, apocalyptic literature. This is a historical narrative or a story that is telling an event in history. It's going to, like a story, have a a setting, a rising action, climax, except in this case, it won't have a resolution. This is a cliffhanger. This ends abruptly. And as we ask what book this is, oftentimes people talk out the Book of Jonah as if it's a parable, or they'll flat out say that it's a parable. And so let's look at that and look into that because it matters whether this is a true historical event or if this is a story told as a parable. Looking at parables in the Bible, almost every single parable doesn't mention the person's name or a person's name. So right off the bat, the Book of Jonah, since we know it's about Jonah, is a little bit different. It doesn't seem to be a parable. If you look at your Bibles at verse one, you'll see this. Now, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, and it goes on, When the Bible starts talking about someone, when they mention their name, it's usually It's likely that it's not a parable. And even more so, they mention this guy's dad. How many stories do you hear about someone who's made up, where they go into great length to tell you about their lineage? It doesn't seem like this is a parable. Not only that the Old Testament talks about Jonah as a real character because he was a real prophet. It says, According to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet who is from Gathhepfer. Again, Jonah is referenced as a real person with a real dad. But not only that, Jesus talks about Jonah as if he's real. Jesus says, The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold something greater than Jonah is here. Jesus talks about Jonah as if he's real. The real reason why this makes a difference, why it matters that Jonah wasn't simply a parable. Have you ever had a child tell you a story that you know for certain isn't true, but they're telling it in a way that is true? That's what would happen here. If this was a parable, this story was told in a way to make it sound true, if this is a parable, there is some deception, and we need to think about whether or not the Bible is fully true. But this story is true because Jesus says it's true because it's recorded as true. And I think even more than that, the reason why this is important, if it's a parable, it's theoretical. It teaches something theoretical about God. But if this is true history, this teaches not only something theoretical, but it teaches what God is doing, what God has done. Understanding how this should be read is important. And another important question that we need to ask is what do we need to know contextually about this passage, about Jonah? Jonah was a prophet during King Jeroboam. We see that in second Kings. This period was a period of economic expansion and prosperity, and yet spiritual decline. Also, we need to know about Nineveh. Nineveh is a city within the nation of Assyria. Later, it would become its capital. Assyria was a threat. It was a rising nation at this time in history. It was a conquering nation. Within a few decades of Jonas time, Assyria would devastate the Northern Kingdom of Israel, culminating in the fall of Samaria in 722 BC. Assyria, not only that, Assyria had a reputation of brutal warfare, cruelty in warfare. Their inscriptions and reliefs and accounts of their battles celebrated gruesome acts, flaying captives alive, impaling bodies, deporting entire populations in piling heads at city gates. These guys weren't just a threat. They were bad people. Israel and Nineveh were logical enemies. Jonas saw Nineveh not just as a sinful city, but as a threat to his people's survival. Preaching repentance to Nineveh, to the enemy, felt like helping the oppressor. During this time in Israel's history, again, there was idolatry, oppression of the poor, and general disobedience to Yah. Look at verse 2. This is what Jonas hears from God. Verse 2 in chapter 1 says, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. Jonah hears this, knowing everything that is going on with Nineveh, knowing everything that's going on with Assyria. And he hears this word from God. And he thinks, Why, God? Why wouldn't you bring this to your own people? Why can't this prophecy, why can't this call go to Israel? They need to repent. This call for repentance needs to come to your people, the people that you've chosen. Jonah thinks he knows how God should operate and who he should prioritize. And because of that, he won't pursue God's heart. When God said, go to Nineveh, Jonah didn't just hear, Go and preach. He heard, Go to your nation's enemies, the people who celebrate skinning people alive. That's who God told him to love. Jonah thought he knew God. Jonah thought he knew grace. Jonah thought he knew justice, but God showed him something better. Another important aspect of understanding any book that we read in the Bible is who wrote it. So now we ask, who is the author of this. The author is Jonah, and that's important. If it weren't Jonah, this would be a sad story. If it was any other author, this would be a sad story about a prophet revolting against God with no resolution. But knowing that Jonah is the one telling the story shows us his intent or what we should take away from this book. And that leads us to our second point, why we should read the Book of Jonah. Jonah shows us a lot of mistakes that he makes in this book. In fact, the way he writes it is a parody, a confession of his heart. This book shows us that whatever Jonah does, we should do the opposite. Jonah throughout this whole book shows us what not to do. Jonah is the disobedient prophet. Jonah writes this book in reflection to show how hard our hearts can become towards God. Jonah he knew God, that he knew grace, that he knew justice, but God was going to show him something better. This book is going to challenge us. It's going to ask us questions that we might not want to answer. It's going to say things that maybe we wish it wouldn't. See, I think we're familiar with the Sunday school version of the Book of Jonah. Chapter one, right? Iona is disobedient, gets tossed overboard. Chapter two, he's in the belly of the fish. He says, sorry. In chapter three, he goes and does what he's supposed to do. What a beautiful story of someone who was disobedient, repented, and did the right thing. Except that's not the Book of Jonah. The Book of Jonah shows us something different. Chapter four shows us something different. Look at how the book ends. Jonah, defiantly in opposition to God, angry with God, angry enough to die, he says. Not only thematically, but look at how this book ends. Look Look at the punctuation of how this ends. Look at the last verse, the last punctuation in this whole book. It ends with a question mark. No chapter 5, no resolution, except We know how this ends because we know who the author is. We know that Jonah wrote this. Jonah wants us to see that he understood this, that he figured this out, that he realized his actions weren't what God wanted, that they didn't pursue God's heart. Jonah wanted to show us that we have to challenge our own assumptions of God. Because God, and what we'll see in this book is that God is infinitely greater and infinitely more beautiful than we might want to dream about. The story shows us something about God. God has every right. At the end of the book, in chapter 2, when Jonah is tossed overboard, he has every right not to save Jonah. He has every right to destroy Jonah right there and then. When you read this book, you'll probably feel anger towards Jonah because he acts in such a foolish way. And yet, in chapter 4, look at how God approaches Jonah. He doesn't yell at him. He doesn't scold him. God is gentle with Jonah. He asks Jonah questions like a loving father. We see God loves Jonah. If Jonah made this story up, then it's fiction. But if Jonah lived it, and Jesus believed he did, then it's confession. The book is more than history. It's a personal journal of repentance. God wants Jonah to see his heart. God wants us to see his heart, not to look within, not to look within our own hearts, but to see his and to pursue it And that's what leads to our main idea. Do you pursue God's heart? Usually a main idea is a statement. It's not a question. But this book is asking us a question. God ends the book by asking a question of Jonah. That's the main thrust of this whole book. Do you pursue God's heart? Or do you pursue or do you believe that you know how God should operate? I think in culture, We see this. It's easy to see this with people who get it blatantly wrong. It's easy to look at them out there and see how they get it wrong, how they misunderstand God, their false assumptions of God. When people say, God wouldn't send anybody to hell. Why does God care who I sleep with? Why would God care if it's a little white lie? Why would God care if it doesn't hurt anyone else? But we need to understand that we have our own false assumptions of God. We need to understand that this is true about us as well. Usually comes out in the way that we respond or the way in which we act. What sins are we overlooking? What people do we look past? What people do we believe God assumes are his enemy? This book will challenge us to look deeper at our own assumptions, look deeper at our own hearts. And that leads us into our application points. First point of application is to read this book this week. I want you to read this book as a pastor. I want you to read the passage that we're preaching on before I come. The passages that we're going to be studying aren't a secret. If you want to see them for the next year, I've got them laid out. You guys can see them. Church cannot be a time where we come as a people just to hear one man's experience with God's word. We all need to encounter it and to come together and to relish in the beauty that it points to. The other part of this is that I am a man. I am I'm sinful, and I need your accountability. One of the definitions of a cult is that the leader will tell you that only I can understand this word. Only I can interpret this and give you the accurate understanding of what this says. And that can't be farther from the truth with me. I want you to be in God's word yourself. I want you to read what we're I want to read. If ever, if ever I deviate from this word, Prosper Church, I need you to hold me accountable to it and to bring me back to it. The other part of this that I'm calling you to is maybe you've... It's October. Maybe you've lost track of your Bible reading plan that you started in January. Maybe in February that happened, but it's okay. It's October. I can't read your mind. It's okay. This is a call back to get into God's word. I'm not asking you to read a chapter a day. I'm just asking you to read four chapters throughout this week. See what God's word has to say. See how God stirs in you. The next point of application is, invite God to challenge your assumptions. Again, our assumptions, like the Magina Line, can be and can lead us to danger. Oftentimes this comes out in how we see the world and how that plays with how we read God's word. This is a philosophy that I call text and framework. Our framework often superimposes itself on top of God's word. We do things like read God's word and we say, Oh, that challenge is how I see the world. And so this can't be right. I have to interpret it differently. This comes out in a variety of ways. One of the ways that I've seen the most is in a passage in the New Testament where Jesus says that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man through into heaven. As people in the top 1% of the global economy, you've probably heard this interpretation that Jesus isn't really talking about a physical eye of a needle. He's talking about a city gate in Jerusalem. And that makes it easier for us to hear that passage. And yet no biblical scholar, credible biblical scholar, really looks at that as an accurate interpretation. Another way that we see this play out is in churches who affirm homosexuality. They'll read passages that clearly say homosexuality is sinful, and they'll say, Well, I see homosexuality as a good thing, and therefore this really can't mean that. And so they jump through hoops in order to find a different interpretation. Our job is to allow God's word to transform the way that we see the world, to transform our heart. When we bump up against something that feels like it is in contrast to the way that we see the world, we need to let God's word change our heart, not the other way around. So in your time of prayer or devotion this week, pray that God would open your eyes to see God's word and to see what he's doing in your life. God, in his sovereignty, is doing about 10,000 things in your life right now, and you're probably only aware of five of them. Not just the blessings that God is orchestrating, but also the suffering, the trials that he has to sanctify you. What happens when God allows an illness in your family or life, when he allows a diagnosis diagnosis you weren't ready for, allows you to lose the job that you love with coworkers that you love. Now you're in a job with coworkers that you don't really care for. When God allows you to have a child who rebels against you or family that leaves you isolated, how will you respond? Will we run from God's presence or will we run to it? And that leads us into our last point of application. Run toward God, not from him. It's easy to feel like Jonah. It feels like God has forsaken us. When life is harsh, it's easy to hear or to think, Man, if this is what I get for following Jesus, is it really worth it? But the point of our faith isn't to get the benefits. It's not even to be saved. The point of our faith is that we get God. This may not feel like a practical point of application, and yet understanding this changes everything in our life. Until we get this, we won't understand Christianity. We run to God not because he has something to offer us. We don't run to God because he gets us a ticket out of hell. We run to him because God is the greatest thing in all of existence. When life is miserable, he is our rock in our fortress. When we feel weak, he is our strength. When we are confused, he is our wisdom. When we feel broken, he renews us. When we feel lost, he runs after us. All of those things aren't benefits. We find our rest in him. Being a Christian for what God can offer you would be like accepting a job because it's got great dental but forfeiting the salary. We cannot be Christians for the benefits. We are Christians because God is so glorious that nothing else in this life can compare to having him, can satisfy us. So run to him. Run to God. Don't flee from him. Run to him not for what he can offer, but for who he is. The reality is that we are sinful people, and we have no right to pursue God, to run after him. The only reason that we can run to him is because on the cross, Jesus traded places with us. See, while we were God's enemies, while we should have been cast out of his presence, God sent his son to be cast out of his presence in our place. In this story, Jonah goes down into the belly of the sea because of his sin, and Jesus on the cross went down into the belly of death for our sin. Jonah spent three days in the fish, and Jesus spent three days in the tomb and rose so we could run to the Father. Jesus spent his whole life on earth pursuing God's heart, running after those whom God loved, the broken and the lost. We are the broken and the lost that he came to save, not just to save, but we get to live in the power of his blood. We get to live in obedience because Christ took our place. He is our only hope. This is why we can sing, To this I hold, My hope is only Jesus, for my life is wholly bound to his. Oh, how strange and divine I can sing All is mine, yet not I, but through Christ in me. We can sing this not because we have it all together, but because Christ in us gives us what Jonah lacked, a heart that beats with God's own mercy. The question is now, will we live like this is true? Will we let his heart define ours? Prosper Church, do you pursue God's heart? Let's pray. Father God, we thank you. We thank you and we praise you that you sent your son, that we do not have to be like Jonah, we do not have to flee from your presence, but you give us your Holy spirit so we can reside in it, we can abide in it. God, help us to see your heart, to treasure it, and to run after it. God, we love you. We love to do your will, so help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Prosper Christian Reformed Church is Rooted in the Reformed faith since 1894, we seek to pass on the gospel, disciple families, and serve our neighbors with Christ’s love. Rooted in Scripture Centered on Christ Engaged in Our Community Rooted in the Reformed faith since 1894, we seek to pass on the gospel, disciple families, and serve our neighbors with Christ’s love. Latest Sermon Crowned With Purpose Watch Sermon Sunday Morning Service 9:30 AM Get Directions Go Join Us Online 9:30 AM Watch Live Go Events About What We Believe Go History Go Staff & Leadership Go Stay Connected Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest Prosper CRC updates. Newsletter Sign Up Contact Us

The staff of Prosper CRC. Including Pastor Mitchell Leach. See the more information on the staff. Staff & Leadership Elders Gary Gladu Elder Dries Dodde Elder Lyle Pratt Elder Henry Diemer Elder Gary Gandolfi Elder Keith Dick Elder Deacons Steve DeZeeuw Deacon Josh Dick Deacon Gary Gladu Deacon Craig DeRuiter Deacon Tyler Gernaat Deacon Alex Utecht Deacon Staff Learn More Mitchell Leach Lead Pastor Learn More Jolene Sullivan Office Administrator Learn More Gary Gandolfi IT Director Learn More John Baas Custodian Learn More Bonna Baas Custodian

Come Thou Long Expected Sermon Series Description When we think of Christmas, we usually think of shepherds, wise men, and angels — and we’ll get there. But Christmas didn’t begin in Bethlehem. It started in the garden when God made a promise that one day someone would come to crush the serpent, restore what was lost, and bring us back to Himself. This Advent, we’re going to walk through that promise, from the garden to the manger, and see how all of history has been pointing us to Jesus. From the ruins of the fall to the birth of the King, God weaves a story of judgment, mercy, and promise—fulfilled in Jesus, the long-expected Savior. The Child Who Fulfills Every Promise Luke 2 Watch Judgement and Mercy Genesis 6, Genesis 7, Genesis 8 Watch Blood on the Ground Genesis 4 Watch The Promise in the Ruins Genesis 3 Watch The Blessing of Abraham Genesis 12 Watch

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

The Day the Worst City Got the Best News Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Day the Worst City Got the Best News Jonah Mitchell Leach Sunday, November 16, 2025 Audio The Day the Worst City Got the Best News Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 37:45 Sermon Transcript My name is Dandy Kam. I'm one of the elders here. My wife and Mona and I pretty much all grew up in Prosper. We were gone for 20 years, but we've been back for the last five. We've been, thankfully, still here. This morning's scripture reading is Jonah 3. It's on page 921 in your few Bible. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now, Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breath. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, Yet 40 days in Nineveh shall be overthrown. ' And the people of Nineveh believe God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself in sackcloth, and sat in ashes. He issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, 'Let neither man nor beast, hard nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. When God saw what they had did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented from the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Thus is the word of the Lord. Introduction After the American Civil War, many expected harsh punishments to be handed down for Confederate soldiers and leaders. But Abraham Lincoln repeatedly chose mercy. One man sentenced to death for desertion, had a sentence overturned by Lincoln, who said, I'm unwilling for any boy to die who sincerely wants to live rightly. He showed leniency on thousands hoping to heal the country. But his critics hated this. The people in the north cried out that these people don't deserve this, that they were traitors. Lincoln's mercy to them seemed unjust, as mercy often does. But that That's the same question that Jonah will wrestle with in this passage. How can God forgive people like them? Can mercy be just? And that's our big question for today. Is mercy just? Is the act of giving mercy a justified thing? In Jonah, God is showing us what his heart is like. He's showing and exposing Jona's heart and ours. The question is, do we pursue God's or just his benefits? Is the act of mercy an okay thing to do, or is it somehow wrong? Does forgiving people lead to more societal harm? You might think, why in the world would that be a question we'd ask? But It's an important question in our world and our country right now. Justice and mercy seem to be opposed. Those two words are important for us to understand. Justice is getting the thing that we deserve, where mercy is getting something good that we don't. Critics of this will say that giving mercy avoids accountability for offenders. It allows people who have done wrong, leniency, or to walk free from wrongs that they've committed. In America, this is a big thing, whether you're a Democrat or Republican. And it seems to be that certain offenses matter more to which side of the political aisle you're on. We forgive in the way that we vote. There are certain things that each party holds that we can't forgive and certain things that we see that we should forgive. When it comes to legal ramifications, hundreds of articles have been written about this. The idea that mercy or forgiveness is not a good thing for our justice system. An article titled The Limits of Forgiveness. There's a quote that says, There has to be a limit. There has to be a balance between between mercy and justice. What happens when we separate the two of those things? In the Book of Jonah, we see and we understand that the Ninevites are bad people. There's no excusing what they've done. They are evil people. So how can mercy be just? How is it right that God would forgive these people, that he would let them off? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So if you would keep your Bibles open with me to Jonah Chapter 3. Let's see what this has to offer. We'll see these three points. Outline Jonah responds Nineveh repents God relents Context For context, chapters one and two, what we saw is that Jonah gets the word from God, and he revolts against it. He not only flees God, he flees from the presence of God. He gets into a boat and is thrown overboard and is saved by being swallowed by a fish. In chapter 2, Jonah, in the belly of the fish, praise to God, and rustles as he thanks him and still is prideful that he's being saved or that he's being forced to do this. Jonah seems to repent and thanks God for it. And that leads us to this chapter. In this chapter, we will see God, in his sovereign mercy, brings Nineveh to repentance through his word and withheld the judgment that they deserved. Jonah responds Let's look at this first section as Jonah responds, verses one through four. Notice this section starts with familiar language. The word of the Lord came to Jonah. This is how the book starts, how chapter one starts. Again, God sends his word to Jonah. And after realizing that God is the one who saved him, Jonah now does what he was supposed to do in chapter one. It's at this moment in the story that Jonah realizes that he's getting a second chance. He's getting something he doesn't deserve. He's getting God's mercy. Verses three through four, Jonah then goes into this great city. The Hebrew word for this great city is that it was an exceedingly great city. It was a city so big, it was preposterous to God. Some people have been critical of this passage saying that this is why the Bible isn't true, because a city that's three days in journey long, there's no records of finding one this big in the ancient near east. But the word that we understand as journey in this passage is important. Really, it doesn't mean if you started a stopwatch today and stopped it on Tuesday and you kept walking the entire time, that's how long the city was. What he's talking about is the city was three. It was so big, it took three days to properly get through it. Another way to say it would be, it was so big, it required Jonas to spend three days in it, proclaiming what God had told him to say. So what does Jonas say? Jonas says, Yet 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. I don't know about you guys, but the first time I read this, I thought, this has got to be the worst gospel presentation ever. I mean, essentially, he's saying, 40 days and you're all going to die. No hope, nothing, right? I mean, that's not what I want to hear from the Pope. I like some hope. It seems like this is at least what he's saying. But the truth is that this is communicating what God wanted him to communicate. Biblical prophecy often works this way, warning people about judgment intending to usher them into repentance. If people repent, then God will relent. And that's laid out in Jeremiah 18. It says this, This is God speaking, If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it. And if that nation concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. Now, this isn't God's conditional grace. This isn't God making his grace conditional. But it's like a loving father coming to his child and saying, If you don't stop doing this, I will have to stop you myself. Nineveh understood this and repented. Jonah's sermon to them is short, but it works because the power isn't in the prophet, but in the word of God. Jonah obeys, but he doesn't yet share God's heart. You can do the right thing outwardly and still resist God inwardly. And that's what we see in this next section as Nineveh repents, verses 5 through 9. The people believe the word from God, from God's messenger, and they fast and repent. And then it gets to the king, and he repents. And then he issues a decree or a law that the entire city would have had to follow, that everything must repent, not just people, but the birds, the animals, everything, because the king knows what he's done. Look at verse 8 with me. The king says, Let everyone turn from his evil way, his evil way, and from the violence that is in his hand. Nineveh was an evil nation, an evil city. They knew what was wrong. And now they're being convicted of it. It's like if you have a friend tell you something that you already knew that was maybe going wrong in your life. Or if you go to the doctor, right, and you hear you got a bad diet or you don't exercise enough, and you're sitting there and you go, Yeah, I know that already, but it's nice to Now that a doctor tells me, I have to follow it or whatever lie we tell in our brains, right? Speaking of bad diet, why would they fast? Why would these people fast? Fasting in the Old Testament is often more than just a physical expression. It is a physical expression associated with mourning over sin. It's a desire for reconciliation with God. Joel, the Prophet Joel, writes this down writing down God's words. He says, Yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all your hearts, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relents over disaster. This act of fasting that Nineveh does is an act of mourning and submitting to God, mourning over sin. See, fasting isn't a piece of some magic formula that we have in Christianity. We are not some voodoo where if we do the right rituals and we say the right things, then God will have to act in a certain way. No, fasting isn't the thing that God loves. God doesn't love the fact that we're hungry. That's not where he gets his satisfaction from. What God loves is true repentance. We fast not to make God happy. We fast because we hate the sin we once loved, and we love the God we once hated. Nineveh's fasting isn't about earning mercy. It's about expressing real repentance. And that's exactly what God wanted Noah to see. This moment isn't about Nineveh's sin, it's about God's mercy. This chapter shows us something deeper. It's not a story of a people or a city repenting or being saved or being changed. It's a story of a prophet being confronted. That's why this chapter is in this book. This chapter almost seems like a diversion from the overall story. The overall story is God is redeeming. He's bringing his prophet back to himself, changing his heart so that way he can see the heart of God, that he would desire to pursue his heart. Why do we have this story? It seems like this weird story that almost takes away from that narrative, right? Why do we have a story where it seems like the moral of the story is to be more like Nineveh because they repented? No. This chapter is to contrast Jonah. How many times did Jonah have to hear a word from the Lord? How many times did Nineveh? It would be easy at this point to make this passage, this sermon, about be like the Ninevites. They were the good ones. They heard the word of the Lord and repented. That's not why this story was written down for us. The story isn't to put ourselves anywhere in scripture, to put ourselves in the seat of someone who was obedient. Now, we are the Jonah in this story. We're the righteous ones. We're the ones who sit in church, who think that we're good. This isn't a call to be better. This isn't a call to be like Nineveh. It's a call to be like Jonah, to realize that we have some stuff in our own heart. It's a call to be honest, to ask ourselves, do we pursue God's heart or just his benefits? How many times do we need to hear God's word? We must be people who pursue God's heart. What's striking about the response to this, what's striking about the response to this is the King's attitude towards this message as he repents. Look at verse nine with me. This is what the king says. Who knows God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. Nineveh decides to repent, not knowing for sure whether or not God's going to destroy them or not. God knew what he was going to do. Jonah knew what God was going to do, but Nineveh seemingly didn't know what was going to happen next. Nineveh wanted to do the right thing without knowing what God would do next. Too many of us need sure outcomes before we step out in faith. We say to God, God, I'll only go through this suffering if you get my tax situation better or you get us out of debt, or God, you help me with these relationships that seem to be broken, or you fix our family issues, or you fix my marriage. But if you can't do that, then I don't want to go through this. I'll only be faithful if you can promise something better for me. We take passages like this, like Jeremiah 29: 11. We take this and we apply it to ourselves. We read, For I know the plans I have for you, individual, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare, not for evil, to give you a future and hope. This is a lie that we believe from Satan that everything is going to turn out good for us. You might be sitting here thinking, whoa, this is God's word. How can you say that this is a lie from Satan? Well, I'd ask you this. Has Satan never distorted scripture before in tempting people? That's what we see in the garden. That's what we see with Jesus in the wilderness, Satan using God's word and just manipulating it. This passage is a beautiful passage, but intended for the people of Israel. I can't go too far on this, but this passage was intended for the whole nation of Israel, not an individual person. This passage today should be applied to us as the church, as the global church. God is going to give the church plans for welfare, not for evil, a hope in a future. Future. But for us to read this passage as an individual and to say that God's going to make my life better as long as I'm faithful. That's not always true. We can see that in the Bible. Look at Stephen, the apostle Stephen. What happens to him? Did God have plans for welfare, not for evil, to give him a hope in a future? Stephen was stoned to death. I think his plans were for good for him, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be what we see as good. Our suffering might have good outcomes for us, but it might not. We might end up like Stephen. But regardless of that, it glorifies God. We can't be Christians who only pursue God when it's convenient for us or when the benefits align for us, when the outcomes are sure and it looks good for us. Our faith isn't It's not about what we get out of it. It's not about what I want. It's not about my hearts and desires. It's about pursuing God's heart. Nineveh doesn't know how God will respond, but they turn anyway. That's faith or that's repentance, driven by faith, not driven by outcomes. We don't repent to get heaven. We don't repent to get anything from God. We repent Because we know that our savior, our God, the one who has redeemed us, sin is the opposite of him. The thing that he hates, the one we love most, hates, and we must repent of it. That's why we repent, not because we're promised anything. That's what we see in this last section in verse 10, the pinnacle of this chapter. This is the climax. This is the most important part of this chapter. It's not about the people repenting, but God relenting. We see what God sees. God sees true repentance from the Ninevites and relents. And it might seem for a second on the surface that God told a fib or wasn't telling you the truth. But the truth is that this prophecy was given as a prompt to repent. This was never This was never a sure thing that they were going to be destroyed. This was, again, a loving Father saying, I'm going to put an end to this evil one way or another. See, God eliminates evil in one of two ways. The traditional way that we think about it is Sodom and Gomorrah, God putting an end to destroying his enemies. The other way that God eliminates his enemies is by turning them into friends. Romans 5 says this, But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. Here's the important part. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, how much more shall we be reconciled by his life? When scripture says that God relented, it doesn't mean that he changed his character. It means that he acted in accordance with his mercy. See, mercy and justice are never in conflict for God. They perfectly meet in his heart. And because of this, God relents. When God relents, Jonah will be furious because Jonah wants a God who will only destroy his enemies and not one who delights in mercy. That's the tension of the book. Will Jonah align with the heart of God, or will he align with his own sense of justice? This is who God is. God is a God who relents. Exodus says that God is a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. This is who God is, not fickle, but faithful to his steadfast love. God doesn't want his people to die. He wants them to live. Jonah himself had already experienced the mercy from God when he was evil towards his own behavior. But the question is, will he be delighted when he sees the Ninevites and what they've experienced, that they've experienced the same thing? That question we'll answer next week, so make sure to come back for that. Shameless plug there. Here we go. That leads us into our main idea. Our main idea is this: trust God who sends his word to awake in repentance. Trust God who sends his word to awake in repentance. We trust God's word, not because this book has some magic pages. It's because what's written on them. This is God's word, the very voice of God. We get to see God's heart in and it. We can trust God's word because we can trust God. God's word never lies because God is God who speaks truth. God's word shows us who God is. God failed to see that the first time. He failed to see that when he received the word of the Lord, that when he was receiving that, he was receiving the very essence of God's heart. But we can trust God and his word. That leads us into our points of application. Our first point is this, Seek God for God and not just the benefits. We cannot be people who worship God, who seek God out of our own selfish gain. We can't be people who build our own kingdom, who seek God in order to add something onto our life. This is why we pray in the Lord's prayer, Lord, your Kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Building towards anything else, building towards anything else on this Earth is not only biblically foolish, but it won't last. The reality is we are not immortal. We will die. And maybe this is an uncomfortable thing for us to think about. And maybe this feels cold, but I want to drive this home. I want you guys to understand this. Our children, our grandchildren, and if we're lucky, our great grandchildren may remember us. But after that, most of the time we'll be forgotten. Say you're one of the outliers, right? You're one of the Napoleon's or Julius Caesar's who is remembered throughout history, right? You go down as one of the George Washington. We're going to be saying that name for the rest of history. In a billion years, the sun will expand and destroy the Earth. If all we're building here is our own Kingdom, if all we're doing is using God to make our lives better, the end result is that nothing's going to be remembered anyway. It's all going to be in vain. We absolutely need to do and obey God's word here and obey God. But it's not about getting something back out of it. It's following God because we love the God we know. We must seek God because it's the only thing that will outlast time itself. We don't add God into our life as some another version of a self-help book. It's not like, God, I've got this problem in my life, and if I try sprinkling a little bit of Jesus on it, then that's going to make everything better. God isn't an add-on to our life. He's either everything or nothing. And that's what we see in this next point of application. It leads us into our next point of application, loving mercy. God is either everything or nothing. If we love him, we have to love everything that he loves. We have to love mercy. Our default for this is that we love mercy for ourselves, and we love justice for everyone else, right? If you talk to a kid, there have been studies that prove this, that children enjoy seeing other children punished, and that might seem like a dark thing. The reality is we don't grow out of this as adults, either. We just get better at masking it. Our default is that we love justice for others, and we love mercy only for ourselves. If we are people who have been set free from sin, we must desire that other people would be set free as well. To pursue God's heart means that we love who he loves, even when that mercy offends our sense of fairness, like it did for Jonah. We must desire that people would be set free from slavery to sin. The reality is that this all sounds so nice. It's easy to get behind confessionally or to say this out loud. It's easy to say this, right? Yeah, we ought to love mercy. This sounds great. But do it. It's much harder. It's easy to admire mercy. It's another thing to love it. In our Christian circles, in our Christian bubbles, we can talk about loving mercy. We can say it's a good virtue. It's a good thing that we ought to love and to do. But doing it means that we have to rub shoulders with people that aren't like us or that might not act like us. It means that we invite people into our church not saying, in order for you to... It's It's great if you come into our church and you start acting like us and you start doing the things that we do. No, it's hard to invite people into our church and say, It's going to be messy. It might not look the same. We might have to change. We might have to accommodate people. It looks like sharing the gospel with people when it's uncomfortable, when it's someone you know, a family member, someone you've worked with for a long time. The fear of, Man, will they think I'm weird for saying this? Will they think that what I'm saying is It's too churchy or too Christian-y or whatever we think, whatever lie that comes into our heart? There's a difference between admiring mercy and loving it, and the difference is action. As we close, the question I want for us to think about is, why could God relent from destroying Nineveh? Let's look at verse 10. When God saw what they did, how they turned from the evil ways, from their evil ways, God relented the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it. The reason that God could relent from destroying Nineveh wasn't because they repented. It was because on the cross, God saw what Jesus did and how he was innocent of all the evil ways, and yet God delivered him to disaster. He delivered him to destruction. This is why we can trust God. This is Why we can trust God? Because he sent himself to pay the price. In this chapter, he sentiona with his word. Later on, he would send the word made flesh. He proved that we can fully trust him, even when we feel like he's leading us astray. We all love Psalm 23. If you're here on Friday, you heard it in a beautiful sermon, in a beautiful ceremony, in a beautiful funeral. We love this passage that it says, Even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. But who's leading us? Go back to the beginning of that. That psalm, The Lord is my shepherd. It's God who leads us through this valley. Are we willing to follow him? Are we prepared for the reality that God may lead you somewhere that makes feel like a lamb being led to the slaughter? Even when the path is dark, even when obedience costs you everything, we can trust the good shepherd because he is the one who leads you through that valley because he's already went through it himself. So what do we do? We turn, we trust, we stop running from God's heart and we run to it as people who have been redeemed. The Lord who sent his word to Nineveh sends his Holy spirit to you today saying, 'Come to me, turn to me, trust me, for I am gracious and merciful. ' Prosper Church, trust God who sends his word to awaken repentance. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are, that you are God who is rich mercy. A God who we can trust because you walk before us. God, I pray right now that you would comfort us. Not all of us are in a good place. Not all of us are in an easy season. God, I pray that we can trust you even in the midst of confusion. God, I pray for the Dick family as they've lost a huge pillar in this family. God, I pray that you would be near and tender with each and every one of them. God, as a community, help us to surround them. Help us to relish in the beautiful moments and the stories that we knew of Caroline's life. God, help us to love them like you've loved us. God, as we respond in worship, God, I pray that we would be changed people, not by the words that I've spoken, but the words that you've spoken through your word in scripture. God, we love you. We love to do your will. So help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Would you stand and sing as we respond in worship? Before the Throne of God above, I have a I know that while in there, there's a strong and perfect plea, a great high priest who's made his love, whoever lives and please for me. My name is proven on his hands, my name is written on his heart. I know that while in every sense, no tongue can bid me then steep art. No tongue can bid me then steep hard. No tongue can bid me then steep hard. When Satan tells me to despair and tells me of the field within. Upward I look and see him there, who made an end of my sin. Because the sinless savior died, my simple soul is mounted free. For God, the justice satisfied, to look on him and pardon me, to look on him and pardon me. Behold him there, the risen land, my perfect Godless righteousness, the great unchangeable I am, the King of glory and of Grace. For with His self I cannot die. My soul is purchased by His blood. Our life is in with Christ's on high, with Christ my savior and my God. With Christ, my savior and my God. Hear this blessing. May the Lord, who is rich in mercy and abounding in steadfast love, send you out with hearts awakened by his word. Go in the strength of his spirit to the ones he loves, to show mercy and to walk in the freedom of grace. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Amen. With the peace of God, our heavenly Father, and the grace of Christ, the risen Son, and the fellowship of God, the spirit, keep our hearts and minds within his call. And to him we praise for his glorious way. From the depths of earth to the heights of hell, we declare the name of the land One slave, Christ eternal, the King of peace. With a peace which has his understanding, and his grace which makes us what we are, and this fellowship of his communion, make us one, spirit and be called. And this fellowship of this communion makes us one in spirit and in heart. And to him we praise for his glorious strength. From the depths of earth to the heights of hell. We declare the name of the land once slain, Christ eternal, the King of He. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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

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