How Did Jesus Understand Scripture? The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture. Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 8, 2025 Bible, Theology This may be a question you’ve never asked before but it’s extremely important to understanding Jesus, the Old Testament, and God’s covenantal nature. Some people will argue that Jesus didn’t see the Old Testament scripture as fully inspired by God. In fact, they will try to argue that our evangelical belief that Jesus saw scripture as God’s word is imposing too much into the gospel accounts of Jesus. To be fair, Jesus doesn’t come out as clearly as Paul or Peter does in his view of scripture. But a careful study of the gospels will show us that Jesus does believe all of the Old Testament scripture is God’s very word. What are the dangers of seeing scripture as mostly man-made? The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture Did Jesus believe the Old Testament prophecies were about himself? Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. When Isaiah said: 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [1] Surely he had no idea of the crucifixion that would come. So, how can we understand scripture differently than the original author? We can’t understand it differently, but we can understand it more fully. This is the idea — some theologians call — sensus plenior. In his book Canon, Covenant, and Christology, Matthew Barrett — the associate professor of Christian Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — defines sensus plenior like this, “when a [sensus plenior] is first revealed in scripture, it is at this point — its conception — that the human author’s purview is the most limited, not knowing all the intentions the divine author has in mind.” When Isaiah wrote this prophecy he could see dimly what we see clearly. He knew the Messiah would suffer, but how exactly he didn't know? Yet he was still very correct about the nature of his suffering. What this idea shows us about God’s nature and his revelation is that he must be understood in light of all of scripture, rather than a brief moment of the historical author’s understanding. In other words, God prophesied using humans in one time, so that humans in another time could recognize the prophecy in its fullest sense. It comes down to the question of how can we interpret the Bible. Is the only justifiable rating of scripture one that only sees the human author’s intent, or are we able to see Scripture as written by one divine author who knew the full scope of redemptive history? Did Jesus believe all scripture was about him? Jesus saw what the prophets couldn’t, by living into the promises they made centuries before he came to earth. By his recognition and living into these prophecies, Jesus is affirming the Old Testament scripture as the very word of God and not only of mere men. This is what we call the scripture’s plural authorship. This means that all scripture is written by both human and divine authors. Jesus affirms Israel’s view of Old Testament scripture Jesus was Jewish, while it may seem obvious. But he came into a world where — even his enemies within Judaism — saw scripture as God-breathed. This is most clearly seen by looking at the covenants of the Old Testament. Matthew Barrett, says “God spoke a saving word in and through the cutting of covenants with his people, covenants that not only explained Israel’s Genesis but maintained their relationship with Yahweh as his chosen people.” God's relationship with Israel was in the form of written words. Not merely words that he agreed with but works that came from his mouth. The fact that Jesus fulfills the covenant shows us that he sees, recognizes, and affirms the reality that the covenants in the Old Testament are not just a man’s words, but the precious words of the God of the universe. It is maybe clearest that the truthfulness and beauty of the Old Testament scriptures are upheld in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. The clearest passages You are probably familiar with the passage in Luke 24:13-27. This is the story of Jesus revealing himself to two disciples after his resurrection. As he makes known to the two disciples who he is Luke goes on to write this memorable verse, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”[2] Jesus shows the disciples that all of the Old Testament scriptures were pointing toward Himself. 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.[3] Here in Matthew 5:17-19, Jesus gives one of the clearest pictures of how he views scripture. Jesus loves the scriptures, not as wisdom from men, but as the word of God. In fact, the reality of Christmas — or God becoming flesh — is an inditement against worldly wisdom. Jesus couldn’t have seen scripture as merely from men, the incarnation is a testament against it. Jesus’ actions show that he loves the Old Testament scripture. In his commentary on Matthew, theologian, and professor, D.A. Carson says, “that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets in that they point to him, and he is their fulfillment. The antithesis is not between ‘abolish’ and 'keep’ but between ‘abolish’ and ‘fulfill.’ ‘For Matthew, then, it is not the question of Jesus’ relation to the law that is in doubt but rather its relation to him!’”[4] Jesus’ obedience to the law confirms that he believes the law was God’s word. If Jesus didn’t believe that — and is still God himself — he would have had no need to keep them. If they weren’t authoritative, Jesus would have had no desire to be obedient, but we see the exact opposite. Jesus was obedient, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”[5] Jesus was the word of God. His closest friends on earth attested to this. Jesus loved the scripture because he embodied it. Have confidence that Jesus not only believed that the Old Testament scriptures were breathed out by God, but he loved, cherished, and was obedient to them. Therefore we — as Christians — ought to love, trust, and obey God’s holy word too. [1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 53:4–6. [2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Lk 24:27. [3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Mt 5:17–19. [4] D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), 143–144. [5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Php 2:8. [6] John Chrysostom, “Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople on the Gospel according to St. Matthew,” in Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. George Prevost and M. B. Riddle, vol. 10, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1888), 104–105. You’ve probably heard the term legalism, or legalist used — not just in the church — but in culture abroad. Legalism carries a clearly negative connotation (and for good reason). Yet legalism isn’t a word found in the English Bible, but that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Paul uses the phrase “works of the law” eight times in his writings (Romans 2:15, 3:20, 3:28, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10). Drawing the Line of Legalism Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

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

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

The Promise in the Ruins Prosper Christian Reformed Church The Promise in the Ruins Come Thou Long Expected Mitchell Leach Sunday, November 30, 2025 Audio The Promise in the Ruins Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 47:56 Sermon Transcript Good morning. My name is Dean Van Ostrin. My wife Debbie and I have been members of Prosper Christian Reformed Church, coming up on 30 years. Most recently I had the privilege of serving on the search committee with an extremely dedicated group of people. Our scripture reading today comes from Genesis 3, verses 1 through through 15. Please turn with me in your Bibles as we hear God's word. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loin cloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden and in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and he said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman, who you gave to me to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed you are above all livestock and above all beasts of the fields. And on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat. All the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. And he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Thank you, Dean. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 in the morning, five men changed the world. They would make a mistake that quite nearly would almost ended the world in the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. It started out with all things as a safety test. These five men made a series of mistakes, of reckless decisions. They ignored warning signs, they shut off safety systems and they pushed a nuclear reactor core past its limit, past what it was designed for. Within seconds, the reactor core exploded and it became one of the worst man made disasters in human history. After the Soviet Union had realized what had happened, that the reactor core exploded, they dumped boron sand on it. They built a concrete sarcophagus, they evacuated cities. They tried to seal the ground, the air, the water. But no matter what they did, they could not undo their original mistake. Genesis 3 is the Chernobyl of human history. One act, one choice, and the fallout is still with us. Like Chernobyl, Adam and Eve tried to cover themselves. They tried to shift the blame. But they could not outdo or undo what they had broken. No matter how much concrete, no matter how many helicopters they sent, no matter how many lives were risked, they could not undo what they had already unleashed. That's Genesis 3. The fallout of one act, one choice still reaches into every corner of the human heart. And advent begins with this truth. We need a savior. Because we cannot fix ourselves, Humanity still can't. Sins fall out is far deeper than the human repair. We can patch symptoms, but we cannot reach the core. That leads us to our main question. Do we have the ability to make up for what we've done? Do we have the ability to make up for what we've done? We want to believe that we can fix the things that we've broken. If we get a speeding ticket, we'll be more careful and feels like that speeding ticket should be, shouldn't count anymore. Or if we blow up at somebody, then, you know, if we're, if we apologize, then that kind of minimizes the damage or it erases the damage. If someone steals, they can convince themselves that giving to charity balances the scales. If they lie, if someone lies well then if I'm honest more often, then we can pretend that the lie evaporates. This is how our human hearts work. We believe that good behavior should outdo the bad behavior in our life. But does it? A season of good driving, does it erase a reckless driving ticket? A month of kindness doesn't erase a cruel word that cuts someone deeply. A generous donation does not return what was stolen. An apology does not put back the trust that once was was. We instinctively try to outweigh our wrongs with something that was done, something that we do right. It's built into us the sense that with enough effort, we can repair our own mess. But here's the uncomfortable truth. We may be able to fix a dented car. We may be able to repair a broken window, but we cannot repair a broken soul. We cannot unsay words. We cannot undo the choices we make. You can't unbreak what sin has already broken in your life or in the world when we feel it. Or we feel it when we lie awake at night replaying something that we said, something that we've done. We feel it in the shame from years ago that's still stings today. We feel it when we look at a relationship that was shattered and think, if only I could go back. If only I could unsay the thing I said. That's Genesis 3. One act, one choice. And the fallout is still with us today. We can try to cover ourselves with fig leaves. We can try to shift blame. We can try to justify or perform or try harder. But we cannot undo the core meltdown of sin. And that leads us to our big question of Advent. Do we have the ability to make up for what we've done? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Genesis chapter three as we see these three movements in this section. Actually, before we get there, this series, what we're going to be looking at is this. 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. So let's look at these first three movements in this passage, Genesis 3, we'll see the first sin, the first consequence, and the first judgment. This may not feel like a typical Advent series or an Advent text to read during this season. We're not talking about the angels coming to Mary yet. We haven't gotten there. We're starting off with the fall in the next couple weeks. We're going to stay in the book of Genesis as we look for this long expected Savior. But what is Advent? Advent is waiting, is longing for Christ. And that's what we see in the story of Genesis, the longing for the one who would make everything right again. Advent begins in the shadows of Genesis 3 because you cannot long for salvation unless you understand the fall first. This chapter will teach us. As humanity falls into sin, God promises to defeat the serpent and sin itself. And that let's look at that first section in verses 1 through 7. The first sin. Up until this point in the Bible, everything's good, everything's right. Adam and Eve have a perfect relationship with God. Everything had just been created. In fact, creation had just been getting settled into what it meant to be created. Everything was good. There was no sin, no death, no evil. And then we get to verse one. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. We see that word now stick out like a sore thumb. Now there's a change in the shift of tone of this book. So far, everything's good up until this point, but now, now we get introduced to the protagonist, to the enemy, to the one who's going to cause problems. We are introduced to Satan in snake form. And I think we need to pause ourselves just for a second and ask, who is Satan? We talk about Satan a lot, but we don't really maybe understand him. Or we don't take the time to talk about Satan enough. Who is Satan? Satan is a real and personal and malevolent spiritual being who opposes God, opposes his purposes and seeks to deceive, accuse and destroy humanity. Satan, here in the garden and here today, is here to destroy us. Jesus speaks about this in John chapter 8. He says, when he lies, speaking about Satan, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. And that's what we see him do in this section. Notice how he tempts Adam and Eve. He doesn't talk about offering gold or a better house or, you know, some kind of benefit. He tempts them by questioning them, by questioning God's words, by taking God's words and turning it against Adam and Eve. He says, did God really say, I wonder how often we say that in our own heart when we choose sin. Well, I know you know, this probably is wrong, but did God really say, I can't break it? Here he lies to them by saying that they won't die, that God is holding back something from them. God gave them one rule, and he gave them this rule because God knew that if they ate it, Adam and Eve would think that they didn't need God. They would think that they could find happiness or that they could try to be happy apart from God. They knew that, or God knew that this would lead them into misery. Then the snake tempts Eve by saying this in verse 5. For God knows that when you eat of it, eat of the knowledge of the tree of good and the Fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil. Your eyes will be opened and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil, essentially asking Adam and Eve, does God really love you? He's keeping something from you. He knows that if you eat this, you'll be like him, knowing good and evil, being able to define it. This is the temptation that Satan uses against the first people, Adam and Eve. Satan hasn't switched up his tactic at all. This is the same trick that he plays on each and every one of us. This is the same trick that he uses day in and day out since this moment in Genesis 3. This is the universal problem for us. This is the scar left on every human heart since the fall. We want to choose what's right and wrong. We want to be the judge. We want to be able to define what is good and what is evil. This is the essence of sin. This happens from here on out in the book of Genesis. This happens from here on out in the Bible. Cain kills his brother because he defines what's right and wrong. He gets to decide who lives and dies. Noah, after completing the voyage, gets drunk and naked after the flood. Abraham decides that he's going to lie. He gets to decide what's true and what isn't. About his wife being his sister. And the truth is we do the same thing. Probably not about our wife being our sister, but you know, you get the idea. When we choose to lie, when we choose to gossip, when we choose to hate or to lust or to be greedy, we are choosing. We are deciding what is right and what is wrong. All sin is choosing to sit in God's place and decide. I'm the one who gets to decide what's right and wrong here. Every temptation from Satan carries the same lie. Is God withholding something from you? And sin begins. All sin begins with believing that lie at it's at the heart of our sin nature that we want to serve ourselves. And we will be the people who decide when we get to break the law, when it serves us best. When we decide that breaking God's rules gets us what we want. We hear this today in phrases like be in charge of your own destiny, right? Essentially, be the one who decides your own path. Be the one who decides how you're going to live. Be the one who decides whether you're going to obey God or not. From Cain to Noah to Abraham, and even down to us, every sin is an attempt at God's throne. Sin is not just breaking one of God's rules. It is replacing God's rule in our life. That's the lie behind every sin. The belief that life will be better on our own terms than God's. And at the moment Adam and Eve believed this lie, everything changed. Not just for them, not just for humanity, but for all of creation. As soon as they sinned, they felt the weight of it. And they knew they needed to cover themselves and run. And so that's what they do. That's what we see in this next section, verses 8 through 13. The first consequences. God came to them. God comes down into the garden and their first response, their first impulse is to hide. They didn't just hide, but verse eight says, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. Does that sound familiar? Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord when he knew that he didn't want to follow or obey what God did. He knew that he was sinning. He fled not from God, but from his presence. This is an ancient thing in our hearts that we want. We want to run away from God's presence because we know God sees all and is all, and we hate. We hate that he can see our hearts. They realized that the fig leaves that they tried to cover themselves with would not work, would not be enough, weren't sufficient. It's an interesting note here that as sin enters the world, the first thing that people try to do is to cover themselves. The same word used in this section for cover is used later on in the Old Testament. It's translated a different way. In our English Bibles, we'll read the word atonement. This word to cover is trying to atone for their sins, trying to make right what they had made wrong. We need someone to cover us. We feel that when we sin, we feel the need to justify ourselves or to do something to make it okay, what just happened. But instead of turning to God, we turn inward. We're the ones who try to make it right. And that's what Adam and Eve do. They run. They cover themselves. The question for us isn't are we trying to run? Are we trying to cover it? Is what are you covering yourself from? What are you running from? What are you running from this season? From something you said that caused a rift relationship. Is it a lie you told? Maybe gossip that you helped spread or an addiction that you don't want to bring into the light? Is it greed in your heart? It's easy to believe that we can cover ourselves, that we can run away, but it usually comes to light. The truth is we're not that clever. Our sin usually has a way of coming out in our life, but even if it doesn't, God sees it. Even if it doesn't come out, even if you clever enough to hide your sin from everyone else that's in your life, God knows. God sees, isn't hidden. So God calls Adam. And in verse 10, we hear Adam's response. It says, and he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. Adam replies, God, I was naked. God's reply to that is, who told you this? Essentially, have you done the one thing I told you not to do? And Adam's response to that is clever. He says, the woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it first. He goes, it was my wife's fault. I don't know if men you've ever tried that, but that doesn't go very far, does it? I almost think that he was seeing out of the corner of his eye when he started that sentence. And he goes, it was. It was the woman. And then he sees her and goes, it was the one you gave me, you know, he goes, from her to God really quick. Adam is showing signs of the fall on the human heart. Already within minutes of this happening, the fall has pervaded his heart, invaded his heart. He's defining what's right and wrong. He tries to blame shift. He blame shifts from his wife to God himself. And Eve, following her leader, following her head, does the same thing, shifts the blame to someone else too. What results is the first judgment. And that's what we see in this next section, verses 14 and 15. Then God hands out curses on all three. And it's interesting the order in which God does this. He doesn't begin with Adam and Eve, but he begins his first word of judgment. The first word of judgment in human history falls on the serpent, not on humanity. Before God addresses the sinners, he addresses his enemies, his enemy who deceived him. God's judgment begins as an act of protection. I think that's a neat thing that we often miss in Genesis chapter three, but primarily today, we're going to look at the curse that's handed out on the serpent. Specifically verse 15. Verse 15, it says this. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. And he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. These words are not just a curse, they are a declaration of war. God himself initiates the ongoing conflict that will play out for the rest of humanity. I will put enmity. In other words, I will not allow the serpent to stay in alliance with humanity any longer. God is taking back the territory that the serpent invaded. As humanity falls into sin, God promises to defeat the serpent. God's curse on the serpent, or when God cursed the serpent, it wasn't only a message of doom, but it was a message of hope. There would be a rescue, There would be a rescuer. Someone would come to save humanity and all of creation. The Heidelberg Catechism gives us a great question and answer here. What kind of mediator and deliverer should we look for? One who is true and a righteous man. One who is a true and righteous man, yet more powerful than all the creatures. That is one who is also true God. What we see here handed out in this first, this first condemnation, this first curse, the first consequence is the first gospel. The Belgian Confession Article 17 says this, I think, hits this right on the head. I One of the things that you're going to learn about me is I love the creeds and confessions. And sometimes I try, sometimes they're long and lengthy and I try to cut them out. But these two, I just couldn't. They're so, so good. Here says we believe that our good God, by his marvelous wisdom and goodness, seeing that man had plunged himself into physical and spiritual death, set out to to seek him and comfort him. When he was trembling and fled from him, he promised him that he would give his son, born of a woman, to crush the head of the serpent and restore what was ruined. Notice how specific God is in this verse. In verse 15, a child will come, the offspring of a woman. Of the woman he will be wounded. You will bruise his heel, but he will deal the final blow. He will crush your head. The serpent will strike, but the Savior will destroy. This isn't vague hope. This is a roadmap. Roadmap directly to Christmas. Even in judgment, God is already moving towards mercy. Humanity is in hiding, blaming and covering themselves. But God refuses to leave them there in this very moment, justice. As justice falls, grace breaks in. Before God speaks a word of judgment to Adam and Eve, he speaks a word of salvation over them. That from the woman a savior would come. God vows to make right what man made wrong so right. At the center of humanity's darkest moment, God lights the first hope candle. He promises that sin will not win, that the serpent will not win, that death will not win. That leads us to our main idea. God promises to make right what man made wrong. God promises to make right what man made wrong. And he does this by sending himself. Oftentimes when we think about Christmas, it's the positive holiday, right? Easter is another one of those positive holidays. Good Friday, that's a sad one. But Easter comes and then it's a happy one. But Christmas, if we're honest with ourselves and if we read the story of Christmas, it's not necessarily a happy holiday. We think about the cute nativity, we think about the snow and think about Santa Claus and all these different things. But Christmas is an indictment on humanity. Essentially, God's in heaven saying, don't make me come down there. But we force his hand. If you've ever been in a car with little kids and you've said that, you understand that sometimes your hand is forced. He didn't come down to destroy us, though. He came down to save us. He came down both as a judge and a rescuer, confronting our sin while providing the way for escape. And that's what makes Christmas so staggering. The very God we rejected is the one who came to redeem us. The manger only makes sense in the shadow of the garden. The crib only makes sense because of the curse. The birth only makes sense because of the fall. Christmas is a holiday full of hope, but it's born out of hopelessness. Hope that had to come from outside of us because there was nothing left inside that could fix what we've broken. Genesis 3 tells us that we can't cover ourselves, that we can't save ourselves, that we can't climb our way back to God. So God came down to us. He stepped into our darkness. He entered the very world that rejected him. He became the offspring that would crush the head of the serpent. And that's what we remember at Advent. Not just the sweetness of Jesus birth, but the desperation that made his birth necessary. And once you understand that, you'll see that. You'll see why Advent always leads somewhere. It can't just stay in our homes. It can't just stay in this building. It invades every inch of our life. It changes hearts, changes lives, changes relationships. And that's why it leads us into our application. Our first point of application is this. Stop blaming. Take responsibility for one relational conflict. Christmas this season can be a tough time on relationships. Maybe. Maybe your Thanksgiving was rough. Maybe you had a liberal uncle who said, you know, crazy things at your dinner table. I don't know, but I'm just kidding. Adam and Eve, when they were caught in sin, pointed to someone else. And we often do the same thing by Doing this, we get to try to define what's right and wrong. We try to justify our own bad actions. We say what I said wasn't really that wrong because X, Y and Z, whatever we want to use to justify our poor behavior. But today I want you to think about one relationship that is strained. Maybe it's you and your spouse or an adult child or a co worker or maybe it's somebody here at church. I want you to ask, I want you to ask God, is part of this genuinely my fault? Most of the time it is if we're honest with ourselves. And I want you to go to that person, I want you to confess to that person what you've done, your part in this, but I want you to do it without adding, but you also did this. Every time we try to blame shift, we reenact the fall grace begins where our excuses end. So take responsibility for one relational conflict. The next thing is to invite someone into the story of the snake crushing savior. In the seats in front of you or on your seats when you walked in, there were these cards, these invite cards. They're business cards. They can fit in your wallet. That's why I wanted to make them that size. So that you take them with you. Take all of those with you. I don't want to see any left in here. Otherwise I'm going to remember where you guys stood. Do I need to take a picture? No, I'm just kidding. Where you guys sat. Take them with you. And I want you to invite one person who needs a church home in our community that you know, invite them to Christmas Eve. Fewer than half of us adults, only 47% say that they will attend a church service this Christmas. Yet more than half of those people who don't attend. So 56% of people say that they would come if they were invited by someone. That's crazy, right? I thought that would be like 2%, right? Half of the people that we interact with who don't go to church would come if only we would invite them. So this is the time, this is the season to be bold, to take initiative and to invite someone who doesn't have a church home. There are people in our community right now who will suffer eternal punishment, eternal suffering if they don't hear the gospel. I truly believe that if we all did this, if each and every one of us did this, that there wouldn't just be individuals whose lives are changed, but there would be families and generations of lives that are changed. Hearts that are turned to God. But I promise you this will not happen. If we think right now in our head, well, someone else will do that. You know, so and so. They're really good at evangelism. If that's the way that we think. This won't work. That. I was a lifeguard for a while, and what they teach you when there's an emergency is that you can't say, somebody call 91 1. If you say that, no one will call. No one will call. Everyone will think somebody else will do this. You have to point to someone and say, you call 91 1. So this is my moment right here, pointing at you, each and every one of you, saying, you invite someone this Christmas. All right, I think I laid it down thick enough. Next one. Our last application point is this. Bring one hidden thing into the light this week. Genesis 3 exposes our instinct to hide. We need to do the opposite. Identify the lies that we hear the most in our heart. Identify something that you've hidden or tried to cover yourself with that you've tried to cover all by yourself. Maybe we speak lies to ourselves that say we deserve this sin or God's holding out on you, or you'll be happier doing it your own way, or nobody will know the first sin. The first thing that sin does to us is that it makes us try to hide. That's what the first sin shows us. But the first thing that the gospel does is, is it brings us out of hiding. Bring one thing hidden into the light this week. So how is it that we can be people who avoid blame shifting that bring our sin out of hiding? Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we try to hide our sin? Right? Isn't it better for us? Isn't it easier to not have to admit something that you've done wrong? Why would we intentionally make ourselves weak? Why would we actively take the blame when we might be able to pass it on to somebody else? The truth is because someone has taken our blame. Because someone became weak for us. When we try to cover ourselves, we can do this by all types of methods. By justifying ourselves, by dismissing, by hiding, by blame shifting. This is humanity's natural response to sin. And it seems like that's the only way. But the gospel shows us another way. As Christians, we have another way. We can try to conceal ourselves and we can try to cover ourselves. But the gospel tells us that we've realized that our sin was covered because Jesus wore our sin on the cross. We don't have to worry about trying to cover our tracks anymore. We don't have to try to worry about saving face. We don't have to try to be the people publicly who seem blameless. Because our religion is built on the fact that each and every one of us are sinners. We have to admit that that's the first thing that we have to do. We don't have to be people that have it all together. In fact, it makes Christ stronger. It makes Christianity stronger when we admit that that we don't have everything together. We don't have to be the ones who make the world right. We don't have to be the ones who make ourselves right. We don't have to justify ourselves. We don't have to save ourselves. We can't. The good news is that God promises to make right what man made wrong. Remember that this Advent season. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are. That you are a God who saves us. That you are the God who promised to make right what we couldn't. God, we thank you that it is not on us. God, you are so good. You are so good to us. Help us respond as we worship as people transformed by your word. It's in your name we pray. Amen Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

From This Day Prosper Christian Reformed Church From This Day Consider Your Ways Mitchell Leach Sunday, May 31, 2026 Audio From This Day Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 41:07 Sermon Transcript God's Blessing Comes Not From Our Hands but From His King Haggai 2:10–23 Introduction: Why Is It Easier to Ruin Than Restore? Why is it so much easier to ruin something than to restore it? A sandcastle may take hours to build but only seconds to destroy. A marriage can require years of trust, faithfulness, and commitment, yet one betrayal can undo so much of that work. Even creation itself seems to testify to this reality. Left alone, things tend toward disorder. Relationships drift. Bodies age. Homes become messy. Restoration requires intention. Haggai's final message addresses the same truth—not through physics, but through the human heart. In this passage, we discover: The Problem Beneath Our Work The Grace Beneath God's Blessing The King Beneath Our Hope The Problem Beneath Our Work Haggai 2:10–14 God begins by asking the priests two questions about ceremonial purity. The first question concerns holy meat. If a holy object touches something else indirectly, does holiness transfer? The answer is no. The second question concerns uncleanness. If someone who is ceremonially unclean touches something, does that uncleanness spread? The answer is yes. Sin Spreads More Easily Than Holiness The lesson is striking: Holiness is difficult to transmit, but impurity spreads easily. No one drifts into godliness. No one accidentally becomes holy. Yet every one of us naturally drifts toward self-rule and sin. Destruction is easier than construction. Corruption is easier than restoration. As Cornelius Plantinga writes: "Sin corrupts and then replicates, working its way through the whole system." The Real Problem Wasn't Their Work God then applies the lesson directly to Israel: "So it is with this people and with this nation before me." The problem was not their crops, sacrifices, or labor. The problem was the worshiper. Their hearts were unclean. This is what makes sin so dangerous. It is never isolated. It contaminates every area of life. The Danger of Ordinary Idolatry Haggai never identifies one spectacular sin. Instead, the people's problem was a thousand small priorities out of place. That is how idolatry usually works. Idols rarely appear obviously evil. More often they are good gifts—money, family, success, comfort—that become ultimate things. Israel's issue was not outright rebellion. It was gradual drift. The same danger confronts us today. Cheap Grace and Empty Religion The people's sacrifices continued, but their hearts remained distant from God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously warned against "cheap grace": Grace without discipleship. Grace without the cross. Grace without Jesus Christ. Religious activity cannot substitute for genuine repentance. This leaves us with a critical question: If everything they touched was unclean, how could they ever be restored? The Grace Beneath God's Blessing Haggai 2:15–19 God reminds His people of the years of frustration they experienced. Harvests failed. Crops underperformed. Blight, mildew, and hail struck their work. These were not random events. God Himself says: "I struck you." God's Discipline Is an Expression of Love God's discipline was not cruelty. It was mercy. Like a loving father willing to allow temporary pain to save his child from a greater danger, God was pursuing His people through hardship. The tragedy was not the discipline itself. The tragedy was that: "You did not return to me." Don't Mistake Comfort for God's Favor The absence of pain is not always evidence of God's blessing. Sometimes God's deepest love is expressed through His refusal to leave us alone. C.S. Lewis described believers as God's masterpiece. God refuses to abandon His work halfway finished. He loves us too much to leave us as rough drafts. Blessing Before Results Then comes one of the most surprising promises in the book: "From this day on I will bless you." Nothing had changed outwardly. The crops had not yet grown. The temple remained unfinished. The people had no visible evidence of blessing. Yet God promised blessing anyway. The foundation had been laid, and that was enough. God's promise precedes visible results. The King Beneath Our Hope Haggai 2:20–23 The final section turns to Zerubbabel. At first glance, Zerubbabel seems like an unlikely candidate for God's great promises. He was not a king. He was merely a governor serving under Persian rule. Yet God speaks astonishing words to him. The Signet Ring Promise God says: "I will make you like a signet ring." A signet ring symbolized royal authority. This language echoes God's covenant promises to David. Everything about the passage sounds like a royal coronation. Yet Zerubbabel never became king. So what is God doing? A Promise Bigger Than Zerubbabel Zerubbabel was never the destination. He was a signpost. God was preserving the Davidic line despite appearances. The throne looked empty. The kingdom looked dead. The promises looked forgotten. But God had not forgotten a single word. The Greater King When Matthew opens his Gospel, Zerubbabel appears in Jesus' genealogy. The promised King had come. Jesus is the true heir of David. Jesus is the faithful King. Jesus is the One who succeeds where Israel failed. Jesus bears the curse so His people can receive the blessing. The hope of Haggai is not a rebuilt temple. It is not a restored nation. It is not Zerubbabel. The hope of Haggai is Jesus Christ. Application 1. Obedience Often Comes Before Visible Results God promised blessing before the harvest appeared. We often want proof before obedience. God frequently works the opposite way. He calls us to trust Him before we see the outcome. Sometimes all God gives us is a foundation and a promise. The question is whether that is enough. 2. Don't Waste God's Discipline When hardship enters our lives, our first question is often: "How can I make this stop?" A better question is: "What is God teaching me through this?" Not every trial is direct punishment for sin. But Scripture teaches that God often uses suffering to refine us, awaken us, and draw us closer to Himself. When God exposes an idol, repent. When God reveals a misplaced priority, listen. When God loosens your grip on the world, don't cling tighter. The greatest tragedy is not suffering. The greatest tragedy is experiencing God's loving discipline and never turning back to Him. Conclusion Zerubbabel pointed forward to a greater King. Jesus arrived without worldly power, military strength, or political influence. He came as a carpenter from Nazareth. He died on a cross that looked like defeat. Yet that apparent defeat became the greatest victory in history. The cross brought salvation. The grave became the beginning. And today Christ reigns at the right hand of the Father. The people of Haggai's day were waiting for a king. Our King has already come. And because He has come, we know this truth: God's blessing comes not from our hands, but from His King. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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

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Where Else Would We Go? Prosper Christian Reformed Church Where Else Would We Go? Come And Eat Mitchell Leach Sunday, August 9, 2026 Audio Where Else Would We Go? Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 36:11 Sermon Transcript John 6:60-71 In our culture, we love loyalty. It's something we talk about in the relationships we have. We see it most beautifully in the wife who stayed, the friend who never left your side, the person who committed to something and actually came through. But most of us, if we're honest, have conditions built around our loyalty: I'll stay as long as it keeps making sense for me, as long as I feel like I'm getting some end of the bargain. We'd like our loyalty to be immune to circumstances, but in the real world, if the person were tested, it's easy to follow someone who always tells you what you want to hear or gives you what you want or need. But what happens when they contradict you? What happens when they say something that crosses a boundary you had put up? Most of our relationships carry conditions — even with the people we follow, the people we're under authority to. If we reserve the right to decide what the people in charge of us are allowed to say, what they're allowed to lead us into, what we're actually doing is no longer following that person — we're following ourselves. And that's the crisis Jesus creates in this passage, in John chapter 6. Miracles. People like Jesus. They just got fed. They've seen him do miracles. And now Jesus says something that goes against almost everything they've believed — something they would have never wanted him to say out loud. Big Question What do you do when someone you trust says something you cannot accept? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So let's look at John chapter 6, where we see three major movements in this story: first, the word Jesus will not soften; then, the followers who turn back; and lastly, the faith that has nowhere else to go. Over the last three weeks in this series, we've seen Jesus do some incredible things — he fed thousands of people, walked on water, showed that he was the true bread of life. He pointed people back to the Old Testament manna and showed how it was pointing to him. And then he says something pretty hard: that if you're going to have eternal life, you must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Today we reach the morning after the miracle wore off, after the spectacle was no longer in the forefront of their minds. A crowd had chased him for loaves — now only a handful of people remain. Outline The Word Jesus Will Not Soften (John 6:60-65) The Followers Who Turn Back (John 6:66-67) The Faith That Has Nowhere Else to Go (John 6:68-71) The Word Jesus Will Not Soften (John 6:60-65) Let's look at who's talking right now. Look at verse 60: 'When many of his disciples heard it, they said...' — and look who's talking. It's not the crowds, it's not the Pharisees, it's the disciples — the people who had been traveling with him for months, maybe years. What do they say? 'This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?' When they say this, they're not saying, 'Jesus, you've told us some kind of riddle we have to decipher, you're speaking a different language.' It's not that this was hard to comprehend in their minds. It was hard to accept in their hearts. What they meant when they said 'this is hard' is, 'This is intolerable. We can't accept this.' I think we can often move past how offensive what Jesus had just said to them was. When Jesus said, 'Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in you,' imagine being an alcoholic reaching out to your sponsor — the man or woman who had answered your calls in the middle of the night, who had saved your marriage, who had helped transform your life. Imagine you're meeting him for dinner, and suddenly he pours a glass of wine and says, 'Unless you drink this, you have no life in you.' You wouldn't say, 'This is a difficult thing to understand.' You'd say, 'This works against everything you've told me not to do.' That's something like what's happening here in this chapter. The disciples trusted Jesus — they had seen the miracles, they believed, they had faith that he came from God. But they were also Jewish, formed by the Scriptures — Scriptures that forbade drinking blood. The difficulty wasn't merely that Jesus sounded strange. For a moment, Jesus sounded unbiblical. The question they now faced is the question every disciple must face: what will you do when Jesus, the one you know and trust, says something you cannot reconcile with what you thought you knew? So how does Jesus respond? It would have seemed natural for Jesus to turn to the Old Testament and say, 'Let's look at that passage — I'll give you a new understanding, show you how this didn't mean what it meant before, how there's a new covenant happening.' But Jesus doesn't do that. Or he could have talked about what he was about to do — Jesus talks a lot about how he's going to die, how he foreshadows the cross. He could have talked about the upper room, said, 'In a year we're going to gather, and I'm going to institute this thing called the Lord's Supper — I'm not being literal about drinking my blood, this isn't something you need to be offended by.' But he doesn't do that either. Instead, look at verse 62. Jesus says, 'What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?' His response isn't a rational argument. It isn't clever words to try to help them understand more clearly. Jesus forces them behind what he was saying, into the identity of the speaker. The question is no longer simply, can I accept these words? It pushes them into: who is the man who has said this? Essentially what Jesus is saying is, either I'm God or I'm not. What he's saying is that belief in me cannot be a cost-benefit analysis. We can't weigh the things we like about what Jesus says against the things we don't — 'well, he says awesome things about not going to hell and some pretty cool things about heaven, but he also says some things about human sexuality that don't jive with the culture we live in.' We can't say, 'In Shalom he promises to give us rest and peace, but on the other hand he's asking me to give up my Sunday.' Either he's God or he isn't. Either he was crucified and raised from the dead or he wasn't. Either he's the second member of the Trinity or he isn't. Oftentimes we look at our faith and say, 'There's some parts I'm just not going to read, not going to follow — I'm not going to spend much time in that part of the Bible because it's convicting for me.' How moronic would it be for us to believe that Jesus truly is God, and then say, 'I might walk away because I don't like this one thing he says.' If Jesus is God, who are we to determine what he can and cannot say to us? If he were simply a good teacher, we could weigh his teachings over time and see what stuck — take the good things, disregard the rest, the way we do with other teachers, other pastors, other philosophers. But he wasn't simply a teacher. If he is the Son of God, then we do not stand over his word and judge what he has to say. His word stands over us. Jesus will not soften the truth to keep people who only want him for the benefits. He would rather have a group of twelve than a stadium full of people ready to leave once the bread runs out. Jesus has been and always will be a stumbling block for people who cannot see beyond their own desires. But Jesus refuses to change his words, and many of his followers respond by making a different choice. They change direction. That's what we see in the next section — the followers who turn back. The Followers Who Turn Back (John 6:66-67) Verse 66 might be the saddest chapter — the 'disciples turn back' chapter. 'After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.' Yesterday there were thousands of people on a hillside ready to make Jesus their king. Now some of the disciples walk away — not the Twelve, but people who had followed Jesus for months, maybe even a year. They'd had one-on-one conversations with him, they were regulars, they followed him wherever he went. That's why Jesus, in other places, asks the Twelve to prove themselves as his true disciples after this happened. A crowd of followers is not the same as a company of a few faithful. The thing that separates the two is not intellect, not zeal, not enthusiasm — the difference between those who are true disciples and those who left is whether they stay when the words stop being flattering. It says they 'turned back.' This phrase is a direct allusion to Israel wandering in the wilderness, when they kept desiring to go back to Egypt. Over and over in the Old Testament, the desire to turn back is almost exclusively a bad thing — Lot's wife turned back and looked at Sodom and Gomorrah. It also says they 'no longer walked with him.' That phrase is pregnant with meaning. Throughout the Old Testament, walking with someone wasn't just an activity — it was the status of a relationship. It showed who you cared for. Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. Enoch walked with God. And now these disciples will not walk with him any longer. The interesting thing is that Jesus does not stop them. He doesn't plead with them, doesn't run after them to bring them back. It shows us something: our staying, our showing up, isn't a favor we do for Jesus. Look at verse 67: 'So Jesus said to the Twelve, "Do you want to go away as well?"' Essentially Jesus is saying, 'Look, there they go — there's the door, if you want to join them, go ahead.' Our staying was never a gift we gave Jesus. Our staying was a gift he gave us. Only Jesus can hold someone fast, because it's part of his nature, because he's God. As humans, there are relationships we're dependent on — if you're married, you need your spouse; if you're a child, you need your parents. But God does not need a relationship with us to be complete. It's one of the beautiful things about creation — he didn't make us to fill something he was lacking. He was complete when he made the world, in relationship within himself — that's what the Trinity is. Out of love he created us. Jesus does not need to chase after them. God does not need people he manipulates into worshiping him. He doesn't need hostages. God is glorified when we see his beauty and desire to walk with him. This shows God's trust in the Father's faithfulness — it shows how Jesus trusts the Father's calling for the elect. Jesus knows the Father will bring to him whom the Father has chosen. Jesus is bringing them to the moment every disciple must face: if everyone walks away, who do you believe Jesus is? The question isn't to reassure Jesus — it's not asked to make Jesus feel better about himself. Jesus is giving the disciples an opportunity to stand their ground, asking if they're leaving too. And that's what we see in the next section — the faith that has nowhere else to go. The Faith That Has Nowhere Else to Go (John 6:68-71) Verses 68 and 69 say this: 'Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God."' Others had said this was too far, too much, and they left. Peter looked at Jesus and realized he had nowhere else to go with his questions — nowhere else had the words of life. The difference is not that Peter had fewer questions. The difference is that Peter knew who has the answers. He doesn't say, 'Jesus, I figured out your riddle, I get it, I've comprehended it, I understand what you have to say.' He also doesn't say, 'What else would we turn to, or where else will we go?' Peter says something very specific: 'To whom shall we go?' He's saying, 'We've looked around — there's no one else who has the words of life, no one else can give us life and life eternal.' He gets it. And if you read the rest of John's Gospel, Peter is certainly still confused about what Jesus had said. He makes some pretty boneheaded moves throughout the rest of the book. He's still confused. But he stays, because he knows there isn't another way. He stays because there is no better alternative. Christianity is not a system of ideas for us to adopt. It's not a moral code. Christianity is not a philosophy we apply to our lives to make us into better people. Christianity is, and always has been, a person. It's Christ. It forever will be. Peter is not saying, 'We have found the best worldview.' He is saying, 'We have found him' — the one that Scripture, that all of time, has been looking forward to. Where else can we go? To whom can we run? This is the faith of a cornered heart that has found the only open door. Peter does not have to understand every hard word to know that they are the words of life and that Jesus is the only one who has them. Then he says this beautiful thing — 'we have believed and have come to know.' That order is important. We are not people who understand in order to believe. We believe because it makes us understand. St. Augustine, a 4th-century pastor and prolific writer, said this: 'Seek not to understand so that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand.' True faith is not the absence of confusion. Peter is still confused about much of what he has just heard. This is not about knowing it all, not about having all the answers — it's about running to the one who has the words of eternal life. There is nowhere else to go, so run to him. We often think faith means having no doubts, having absolute certainty, no questions, no hesitancy, no fear. But that's not what we see in Peter. He doesn't say, 'Jesus, I understand everything now, I've logically put it all in order and it makes sense.' No — he says, 'Lord, to whom shall we go?' Faith is not having every question answered. Faith is knowing where the answers are. Saving faith does not depend on the strength of your certainty — it depends on the strength of the one you're trusting in. Imagine you're falling off a cliff and you see a branch, and you're 100% certain it will save you if you grab onto it. You can study the branch, know exactly what type of wood it is, know it won't snap under pressure. You can tell everyone, 'This branch can save you.' But if you never grab it, you're doomed. But if, in the same situation, you're uncertain the branch will save you, and yet you cling onto it — you cling on with trembling hands — you will be saved. What saves you is not the confidence of your grip, not the perfect strength of what you are gripping. That's what Peter understands. He does not have a perfect grip on Jesus. No one ever has. It's not the amount of faith that saves you — it's the object of your faith that saves you. It's not the strength of your trust that saves you — it's the strength of Christ. Christ is strong enough to hold weak faith, even if we're unsure, even if we have just a mustard seed of questions. Maybe you grew up with questions. In this reformed world we live in, we love to be right, we love to know the right thing — we don't say that out loud, but we pride ourselves on it. Maybe you brought some questions with you this morning. Maybe there are things in Scripture you don't understand. Maybe you're going through a season of suffering and you don't understand what God is doing. Maybe you feel weaker than you used to. The answer is not to manufacture a pseudo sense of certainty — it's not to fake it. The answer, again, is to run to Christ. Weak faith in a strong Savior is still strong faith in a strong Savior. Peter is right: where else do we go? To whom shall we run? Who else has the words of eternal life? There's nowhere else to go, so run to him. There are two points of application. The first is this: stop. Verse 66 says many of his disciples turned back — and that's not something people just do with their feet. Turning back is something we do with our hearts. What they did was essentially repent from Jesus — turn 360 degrees and walk away. Some of us spend our lives trying to return to a season that's gone. We want to go back to when our children were small, when our marriage felt easier, when our bodies were stronger, when our parents were alive, when the church felt fuller, when faith felt simpler — back before the diagnosis, the grief, the disappointment. There's nothing sinful about missing what is good, about remembering the blessings God has given us. Grief often means we cared about something that was good. But nostalgia becomes dangerous when you begin to believe that life itself is behind you. You cannot follow Jesus while constantly facing backwards. Christ has not promised to take you back to the life you had. He has promised to lead you to the life he has now given you — he's our shepherd through the valley of the shadow of death. So stop asking only, 'How do I get back what I've lost?' and begin asking, 'How do I follow Christ faithfully from here?' Maybe faithfulness from here means learning to live with limits you did not choose. It means loving the spouse you have today instead of resenting the marriage you used to have. Maybe it means serving the church that exists now instead of comparing it to the church you remember, or trusting God in a quieter season when you no longer feel as useful as you once did. The past absolutely contains gifts we should thank God for. But the past is a terrible place to live. Trying to resurrect what is dead will only make us miserable. God is not calling you to look backwards. He is calling you to walk with him. The second application is this: do not demand that Jesus explain himself before you obey. We often say, quietly in our hearts, 'I will do this, God, but only once you make this clear to me, once you explain it.' But that kind of obedience is conditional obedience. Peter does not understand everything Jesus said, but he knows who Jesus is. Faith does not mean we stop asking questions, but there is a difference between asking questions and putting Jesus on trial. Sometimes Christ calls us to obey before we understand what it means to forgive, what it means to tell the truth, what it means to remain sexually faithful, what it means to give generously, or what it means to trust him in suffering — and yet he still calls us to obey. Saying 'God, explain it to me first, show me it's all going to work out, I don't know if I can do this, I'm still thinking about it, still praying about it' can be a respectable way of saying no. Obey what Christ has made clear. Keep asking questions, keep seeking understanding — but do not make complete understanding the price Jesus has to pay for your obedience. But there is nowhere else to go. So we must run to him, because the one who says the hard things is also the one who did the hardest thing for us. Jesus did not stand at a distance and tell sinners, 'Go save yourself.' He went to the cross for us, and on that cross he did not merely suffer — he stood in the place of sinners. He bore the guilt we deserved. He took the judgment, took the wrath that should have fallen on us, so that everyone who trusts in him would never have to bear it. The Holy One of God was treated and condemned as guilty, so guilty people could be declared holy and righteous. The Son was forsaken so that all who belong to him would never be abandoned. That's why Peter is right: where else will we go? Who else has carried our sin? Who else has borne our judgment? Who else has taken God's wrath upon himself? Who else has defeated death for us? Who else can look at every sinner and say, 'Son or daughter, you are forgiven'? And who else has the words of eternal life? Eternal life is not merely living forever. Eternal life is not merely getting a mansion or streets of gold — those are a cherry on top. Eternal life is life with him. One day, faith will become sight. The questions that confuse us now will not have the final word. The suffering that makes obedience hard will be gone. Sin will be gone. Death will be no more. And we will see the face of the one we trusted when we could not see the way. And on that day, in the presence of Christ, we will not say, 'I wish I would have turned back, I wish I would have trusted less, I wish I would have chosen another way.' We will see the one who brought us home — the Lamb who was slain, the Savior who bore our sin, the King who was worth it. So when the word is hard, when obedience costs, when you don't understand what he is doing, when the world offers a hundred other places to go — hear Peter's question again: Lord, to whom shall we go? There is nowhere else to go. So run to him. There is no one else you need. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

In Life & In Death Sermon Series Description Lord's Day 12 1 Peter 2 Watch

Heading 3 Adam Nash Open Chair Counseling

Membership Interested in becoming a member of Prosper CRC? Interested in becoming a member of Prosper CRC? Join one of our Membership Classes to learn about our theology, philosophy, and how to get involved. After completing both classes, you'll meet with a elder to finalize your membership. Click here to register for a membership class. Baptism We believe that Jesus has commanded all those who are His to be baptized with pure water "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). This sacrament signifies our reception into the Church of God, which separates us from all other religions and dedicates us wholly to Him (Galatians 3:27). Yet, we deny that baptism is necessary for salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9; Luke 23:42-43, Romans 3:28, Romans 4:5, Galatians 2:16, Titus 3:5). We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, by His sacrificial death and the shedding of His blood, has fulfilled and abolished the old covenant practice of circumcision, instituting instead the sacrament of baptism (Colossians 2:11-12). Therefore, we believe in the baptism of infants, as it aligns with the biblical precedent of including children in the covenant community, much like the practice of circumcision under the old covenant (Genesis 17:10-12; Acts 2:38-39). Christ's redemptive work extends to the children of believers, and they, too, should receive the sign and sacrament of baptism, affirming that Jesus shed His blood for them as well (Luke 18:15-17; Acts 16:31-33). This practice underscores the continuity of God’s covenant promises, ensuring that our children are marked by the covenant from the earliest moments of their lives (Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 7:14). We hold firmly that this sacrament, once administered, is sufficient for the entirety of one's life, symbolizing both our initiation into the faith and God's enduring grace towards us (Ephesians 4:5; Romans 6:3-4). Profession of Faith We believe that profession of faith is an essential outward expression of an inward belief in Jesus Christ. Scripture teaches that faith should not remain private but should be confessed openly, as seen in Romans 10:9-10: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Jesus also warns against being ashamed to profess faith before others (Matthew 10:33; Luke 9:26). While the Bible does not prescribe a specific method for this profession, we recognize the longstanding tradition in church history of publicly affirming one’s faith, whether as a new believer or as a child raised in the church. Because of this, we ask those who have never publicly professed their faith in a church setting to do so when becoming members. We see this as an opportunity to glorify God, encourage fellow believers, and affirm one’s commitment to Christ and His Church. We believe that profession of faith is closely connected to both church membership and baptism. We practice covenantal infant baptism, and those baptized as children later profess their faith when they have a firm understanding of the gospel. For those who were not baptized as children, profession of faith and baptism occur together. We know that some lifelong believers may feel that a formal profession is unnecessary, but we encourage it as an act of testimony, unity, and accountability within the church. Through this process, we affirm that new members are not only declaring their faith but also committing to walk with the Lord, support fellow believers, and receive the loving guidance of the church community.