Heidelberg Catechism Introduction The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) is one of the most beloved and widely used confessions of faith in the Reformed tradition. Commissioned by Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate, it was written in Heidelberg, Germany, to provide a clear, biblical, and pastoral guide for teaching the Christian faith. Traditionally attributed to Zacharias Ursinus as the primary writer, with Caspar Olevianus playing a smaller role, the catechism was designed for young people, church preaching, and confessional unity among Protestants. Organized into 52 Lord’s Days for weekly study, it follows three key themes: guilt (our sin and need for salvation), grace (God’s redemption through Christ), and gratitude (our response to His grace). This simple yet profound structure makes it a valuable tool for both new and mature believers. The Synod of Dort (1619) formally approved the catechism, and it has since been translated worldwide, shaping the faith of countless Christians. With its warm, pastoral tone, the Heidelberg Catechism remains a trusted resource for understanding the comfort and assurance found in Jesus Christ. Lord’s Day 1 Q & A 1 Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death? A. That I am not my own,1 but belong— body and soul, in life and in death—2 to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.3 He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,4 and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.5 He also watches over me in such a way6 that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven;7 in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.8 Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life9 and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.10 1 1 Cor. 6:19-20 2 Rom. 14:7-9 3 1 Cor. 3:23; Titus 2:14 4 1 Pet. 1:18-19; 1 John 1:7-9; 2:2 5 John 8:34-36; Heb. 2:14-15; 1 John 3:1-11 6 John 6:39-40; 10:27-30; 2 Thess. 3:3; 1 Pet. 1:5 7 Matt. 10:29-31; Luke 21:16-18 8 Rom. 8:28 9 Rom. 8:15-16; 2 Cor. 1:21-22; 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14 10 Rom. 8:1-17 Q & A 2 Q. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort? A. Three things: first, how great my sin and misery are;1 second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;2 third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.3 1 Rom. 3:9-10; 1 John 1:10 2 John 17:3; Acts 4:12; 10:43 3 Matt. 5:16; Rom. 6:13; Eph. 5:8-10; 2 Tim. 2:15; 1 Pet. 2:9-10

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

Christ Alone Sermon Series Description Christ Alone is a journey through the book of Galatians, where the apostle Paul confronts one of the most persistent threats to the Christian life: the temptation to add something to Christ. Written to believers drifting back toward law-based righteousness, Galatians announces with clarity and urgency that life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Throughout this series, we will see that the gospel is not only how we begin the Christian life, but how we live it. Paul exposes the emptiness of religious performance, the danger of subtle legalism, and the false security of self-justification. In contrast, he proclaims the freedom of grace, the gift of adoption, and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit—all grounded in the finished work of Jesus Christ. From justification to new creation, from slavery to sonship, and from flesh-driven effort to Spirit-empowered love, Galatians calls the church to boast in nothing except the cross. This series invites us to abandon every competing source of confidence and rediscover the joy, freedom, and assurance that come from trusting Christ alone. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Boast Only in the Cross Galatians 6 Watch Freedom That Bears Fruit Galatians 5, Galatians 6 Watch Heirs of the Promise Galatians 3 Watch Faith or Works? Galatians 3 Watch Crucified with Christ Galatians 3 Watch A Gospel Worth Defending Galatians 1, Galatians 2 Watch No Other Gospel Galatians 1 Watch

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

Heading 3 Freedom in Faith Freedom in Faith

Crowned Sermon Series Description Crowned follows Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and through the events of Holy Week, showing that his kingship is unlike every worldly vision of power. He does not seize a throne by force, flatter the crowds, or preserve himself from suffering. He reigns by obedience. He is praised by the people, rejected by sinners, humbled unto death, and then vindicated by the Father in resurrection glory. This series helps the church see that Easter is not merely the happy ending to a tragic story. It is the public revelation that Jesus truly is King. From his resolute march toward Jerusalem to the empty tomb, every scene reveals a King who rules with purpose, receives praise, embraces humility, bears shame, and triumphs in glory. As we walk through these passages, we are confronted with a searching question: what kind of King do we want? A King who serves our expectations, or the King who saves through sacrifice? Crowned calls us to bow before Jesus as he truly is—the crucified and risen Lord—and to follow him on the path of obedient discipleship. Behold the crucified and risen King, and follow him in humble, joyful allegiance. Crowned With Thorns Matthew 27 Watch Crowned with Humility Matthew 26 Watch Crowned with Praise Matthew 21 Watch Crowned with Purpose Luke 9 Watch

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

Pastor Brad Jones Arise Presbyterian Prosper CRC Pastor Brad Jones Arise Presbyterian Vista, California Brad was born in a small town in the Canadian Rockies. Kristin was born in West Michigan. By God's grace they were both brought up in Christian homes. Brad and Kristin have been married for over 15 years and together they have 4 children: December, Isaac, Reuben and Violet. They share a common commitment to Jesus, His Church, and His mission. Brad has degrees from Kuyper College and Westminster Seminary California. Brad is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and has over 10 years of full-time pastoral experience. The Jones family moved to Southern California in the summer of 2019 to help Grace Covenant Church replant into a new, vibrant church plant. In March 2020, GCC was replanted as Arise Presbyterian Church but the mission of reaching the community with the Gospel is just getting started! Support Pastor Brad

Christ Prosper Christian Reformed Church Christ Gospel In Three Words Mitchell Leach Sunday, January 18, 2026 Audio Christ Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 44:33 Sermon Transcript Most people have heard the name Martin Luther before. We learn about him usually in world history at some point. He was a German monk and a Bible professor about 500 years ago who became a key figure during the Protestant Reformation. As a young man, Martin Luther really struggled with this idea, and he was terrified of God's judgment and how to deal with it. He didn't take it lightly. Growing up, this was something that he thought about day and night, especially as a monk, he took this on himself. He prayed for hours. He fasted, lived with discipline. He confessed every day to the point where those he was confessing his sins to told him, You need to stop. You're confessing too much. But the strange thing was, the more serious that he took this, the more guilt, the more he couldn't let this go, the more he felt crushed by it. Later, Martin Luther would talk about this in saying, If anyone could save themselves, by doing the right thing as a monk, it would have been him. And yet he had no peace because he was enveloped with this idea, answering this question, What does a Holy God require? As Martin Luther began to translate the Bible from Latin into English, he started to find passage after passage that convicted him and transformed him. He realized that the righteousness that God requires is the same righteousness that he gives as a gift through grace, through faith. Luther later said that it felt like the gates of paradise opened up before him when he realized this. This is not just Martin Luther's story, though. This is our story. Our story that almost every philosophy, every religion, every worldview looks at, trying to answer this question, our big question, how can we be saved? How can we be saved? Our culture will give us a couple of different answers to this question, and yet they all come back to one commonality. They put the weight on you. An atheistic worldview would say, there is no God, there is no final judge, there's no final judgment. And so you don't need to worry about being saved. Just try being a decent human being. And yet the question doesn't go away. We still have a standard. We still feel this guilt inside of us, and we know that there are things that we can't undo. Even in a world where we try to convince ourselves that a judge doesn't exist, it doesn't erase the feeling in our soul. Other religions will say, Yes, there is a God, there is a standard. And so here are the rules. Here's how you should live. Practice them. Live by them. Do them. Prove yourself. And if you try hard enough, maybe you'll be accepted by this God or this spirit or whatever. The problem is you never know where you stand. You never know what What is good enough. And deep down, I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know we don't meet that standard. And then there's a third approach, which is very common in the American church. We wouldn't ever say, we never confess that we are saved by works. And yet we often live by it. We view Jesus as this ticket, this entry ticket into heaven. And once we've we've punched that ticket. Once we've said that sinner's prayer, believe that it's our job to maintain that standard. We really don't believe that we need to go any higher, but we need to maintain it. We need to be good. We need to serve hard. We need to know the right answers, vote the right way, parent the right way, anything to feel secure. So whichever path we take, whether it's know God, works-based religion, or trying to play the church performance game, The question comes back to, how can we be saved? But fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Colossians 1, as we will see three movements in this passage. Christ's supremacy in creation Christ's supremacy in redemption Christ's supremacy applied to believers. We are in week three of our series, Gospel in Three Words, where we're just focusing on Christ. So far, two weeks ago, we looked at the righteousness of God, how God's standard is so high that even our own righteousness could never meet it. Last week, we looked at our sin. Not only is God perfectly righteous, but we are desperately sinful. That leads us to this week, a need for salvation. In this passage, what we'll see is Jesus Christ is the Supreme and sufficient Lord of creation and redemption who reconciles all things to God through the cross. John Calvin has this quote to say, he says, "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God, the knowledge of ourselves." That's what we've been trying to do in this series so far, understand who God is, understand ourselves, because that drives us into the wisdom of knowing we need a savior. In other words, if you want to know whether or not you can be saved, Paul says, you have to look at the supremacy of Christ because only someone who is truly God can reconcile you to God. So let's look at that first section, Christ's Supremacy in Creation Paul is answering a question, why can Jesus save you? He does this by showing us that Jesus is God. He's not a mere resemblance of God, but that he is the image God. He is God revealed. He is God. That's why he says in Colossians 1:15, the first half, he says, He is the image of the invisible God. The point is that Jesus is not a copy. Jesus is not some form of God. The point is, if you want to know what God is like, look to Jesus. He doesn't resemble God. He is God manifested. He's not a manifestation of God. He is God made flesh. In Greek thought, the idea of an image is that they would share in the reality of what they reveal. That's what Paul is trying to communicate. Jesus is the image. He is the reality, not just a mere resemblance of it. Not only is God, not only is Jesus God in the flesh, but that he has all authority. That's what we see in the second half of that verse, that he is the first born of all creation. This doesn't mean that Jesus is created. That's why we did the Nicene Creed a little bit before this. I want us to understand that this passage, a warning, that this passage is clear that Jesus is not created. The first born means not a literal son. It means someone who has the inheritance, who has the right The first born in the Bible means the supreme heir, the one with the right and rule, not the first one made. Psalm 89 says this about Jesus, prophesying about him, and I will make him, the first born, the highest of the Kings of the Earth. The first born is the one who inherited. He was the one who would be next in line for the throne. If it wasn't royal It would be the next in line to inherit the business or the farm. It wasn't just an inheritance of money or an inheritance of land. It was an inheritance to continue on what your father had done, to make the same decisions. Jesus has the authority over all of creation. He is not the first created thing. He is God. And in fact, if Jesus were part of creation, Paul would not say what he says next in Colossians 1:16-17. He says this, For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Paul makes it perfectly clear and impossible for us to think that Jesus is created because Jesus is saying, Jesus created everything. You can't create everything if you were created yourself. Jesus cannot be inside the category of created things. He is the creator. He created all things. That word all, right? Sometimes we break down the Greek. This isn't a simple one for us. It's the Greek word 'pos', the meaning of it is all. You can't take it another way. It just It means all. That's it. Which is why John says this, All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. What Paul, what John are trying to show us the proof that Jesus is God. They're saying, Look, look at what Jesus does. He owns everything. He is the creator. He is the one who does it. All things were made through him and for him. ' He does the very things that God does. Not only was everything made by him, And through him, everything was made for him. I think that's important for us to understand. Jesus is able to receive glory. That's what we see in Jesus being or everything being made for him. Any other place in scripture, when someone tries to worship an angel or someone else, the angel will say, No, you cannot worship me. But Jesus is able to receive glory because everything was made for him. That means that the universe is ultimately not about us. It is about him. Everything exists in creation to glorify God, and that includes our life. There's a great quote by Ironías who says this, The glory Of God is a human being fully alive, and the life of a human consists in beholding God. What he's trying to say is, Our lives belong to God, fully alive, glorifying God. Paul is creating an argument here about how Jesus can save us, and it's crucial that we see and understand that Jesus is God. Verse 17 says this, And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. That he has authority over all of creation. Paul is saying that Jesus isn't just the starter of the universe. That he is the sustainer of it. He is the one who holds all things together. He holds every atom of the universe together. Every breath that we have, every heartbeat is borrowed from God. So Paul starts by taking us all the way up. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the creator of all things, the one who holds everything together. But Paul isn't giving us theology, fun facts. He's showing us something. He's building an argument. Only the creator has the authority to redeem creation. And that brings us into our second movement here. Christ's Supremacy in Creation, Colossians 1:18-20. Verse 18 says this, And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead. That in everything he might be pre-eminent. He is not only the authority over creation, but he is the head of the church. He has authority over the church. And that The word head doesn't just mean authority. It means authority, but it also means the source of life. If Christ is the head of the church, then the church can only stay alive by staying connected to him, which means the church is not a book club. It's not a time where we can come together and passively observe God. This The church is the body. It is a living, breathing organism that gets its life from Christ himself. He also is the first born from the dead. It doesn't mean that he's the first resurrected person. In the Old Testament, there are people that were resurrected. In fact, Jesus resurrected Lazarus. It means that he is the first a new resurrection. He is the beginning of a new creation. The resurrection is this resurrection, his resurrection, is a guarantee that death will not have the final word for his people. It finishes by saying this verse, it finishes by saying, He is all of these things so that in everything he might be pre-eminent. That he's not one opinion among many. He's not a spiritual teacher that we can add on and hope that it improves our life. He's not a moral example that we can sit and view like we're at the movies. Paul says that Jesus is pre-eminent. He is first place. He is ultimate. He is supreme. He is unmatched. That's what pre-eminent means. He is first place in every category. If Christ is merely important to you, but not ultimate, you might not be seeing the Christ that Paul is proclaiming here, the Christ that we see in Scripture. Paul is trying to show us that Jesus is not just another person, that he's not like everyone else in the Old Testament that tried their best but ultimately failed. Paul wants us to see that he is God. He always will be God. He always has been God. It leads us into Colossians 1:19, For in him all the four God was pleased to dwell. This is Paul's way of cutting down every argument, every statement that would say Jesus was a good idea, or he was almost God, or he was a neat thing, he was a good teacher, he seemed moral. No. Jesus is not part of God. He can't be a fraction of God. He cannot be a slice or a manifestation or some other mode of God. Jesus is God. He's not a junior deity. All the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in him. The whole divine nature dwells in him. God has ensured that in Jesus is found all that makes God God. Colossians 1:20 says this, And through him to reconcile himself to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. When Paul says, To to reconcile all things. He does not mean that every person will be saved. This is not universalism, that everybody goes to heaven. What he means is that Christ's cross is the decisive act that will put the whole universe back together under the rightful rule, either through redemption or through final judgment. Through the cross, Jesus will make everything sad come untrue. Either way, Jesus will have the last word. This passage that we're going through is actually it's called the Christ hym. It might have been sung in early churches. But this Him reaches its apex, not in creation, but in reconciliation. That's why Paul has been piling up language, piling up this argument to say, what sin has destroyed, God restored through Christ. Sin isn't something that God could ignore either. Sin is not something that he could have just turned a blind eye to, turn the other way and let happen, let go unpunished. Sin had to be dealt with. And it was dealt with by God himself coming and bleeding for us. Our sin was paid for. It was paid for by the blood of Jesus. Because if Jesus is truly God and all the fullness is pleased to dwell within him, then his death, his blood is not just tragic. It is sufficient for us. The cross has the weight to truly deal with sin and shame. Paul won't let this idea stay out there, cosmic far off in the distant. He turns and says in this next section, And you, because reconciliation isn't just a theory, it's personal. Christ's supremacy is what we'll see applied to believers iColossians 1:21-23 God's heart is to save, but he saves through real justice, not by ignoring it. You were made by God and for God. We were created to be in relationship with God. And yet humanity's problem, like we saw last week, is that we choose everything but God. Colossians 1:21 says, And you who were once alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, our problem isn't just that we were alienated. Our problem is that we are hostile, actively running away from God. Not neutral, not having some blemishes or mostly good, but we got a few issues that we just need to iron out. No, Paul says that we were opposed to God in our minds, our instincts, every flinch of our body ran directly towards hell, directly away from God. To get us back, he could not simply ignore the evil we've committed. Because if God could just turn a blind eye, could just allow it to go, it would mean that God is unjust, that he is not good, and that he's corrupt. There are some things that we've done, causing this rift in our relationship. That cannot go under the rug. They can't be swept under the rug. They have to be dealt with. And Jesus, we see in this passage, came to deal with evil by becoming sin for us. In fact, 2 Corinthians 5:21 says this, For our sake, he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Colossians 1:22 goes on to say, He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. Jesus reconciled us the Father through the cross. This is why it says the word body, flesh, and death, because reconciliation isn't a metaphor. It's not an analogy. It's not some neat teaching that we can draw something from. It is real. Reconciliation required a real substitute, a real death. It required a real death for us to have real life. If you want a one paragraph explanation of what reconciled his death means. Romans 3 might be the best passage for this. It says, For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. Because God is a Holy God. And what we saw in week one is that God cannot even look at evil. His Holiness is so complete, so good. And the bad news for us is that we are nowhere near his Holiness. All have sinned. All have fallen short of the glory of God. Something has to happen. God cannot turn a blind eye to it. It might seem weird that God can't, that he can't just let this go, that he can't just snap his fingers and make everything go away. That's not what forgiveness is. If I came over to your house and I broke a window, which isn't unlike me, but if that happens, there's two ways you can go about that. You can say, Dude, you broke my window. You need to pay for it. And you'd be right to do that. I broke the window. That's justice. The second option is to say, Don't worry about it. I've got it. Maybe get out of my house so you don't break any other windows. And that's forgiveness. But regardless, forgiveness is not just letting it go. The window has to be fixed. The window cannot go unfixed. Someone has to pay the price. Forgiveness means that someone has to absorb the cost. Forgiveness means that the offended is the one that has to pay. This is what happens on the cross. The offended took the place of the offender. God himself provided the propitiation. It's a word we don't use. What it means is to satisfy the wrath of God. Jesus bore the wrath we deserve so that he could be both the just and the justifier. Jesus, who is fully God, satisfies his wrath so we wouldn't have to. Jesus loved us so much that instead of demanding justice, instead of demanding that we pay the price, that he would pay it. Why? He does this. This shows us in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. If you're someone who circles in your Bible or writes in your Bible, circle that in order to... Paul is showing us the reason why. The reason why Jesus must be pre-eminent so that we could be presented, holy and blameless. This is salvation in one sentence, not just forgiven, changed, not just spared, presented, holy before God. God does not reconcile us and then leave us in our filth. It's in order that we could be saved, in order that we can be his again, that he could wash us of our evil, our sin, and that we could be one with him. The goal of salvation isn't merely to escape hell. It is to be reconciled. It is to be unified with God. And that's what leads us to our main idea. The God who made you is the God who died to save you. The God who made you is the God who died to save you. Think about how staggering that is. The one who spoke creation into existence is not distant from our mess. The one who holds the universe together did not stand back here with his arms crossed, scolding you, hoping that you would pick yourself up by your boots, traps, clean yourself off. No. Colossians says that all things were created by him, through him, and for him. And then in the same breath says that he made peace by the blood of the cross. It means that the greatest power in the universe is not just the ability to create, it's the willingness to suffer. And that's why we talk about the cross so much. It's not because as Christians, we want to be morbid. It's not because we're stuck on guilt. It's because the cross is the place where God's Holiness and God's love meet perfectly together. At the cross, God doesn't pretend that sin is small. He proves that it is deadly, that it will kill us. Rather than allowing it to kill us, he chose to die in our place. At the cross, God does not tell you to fix yourself. He does not tell you to try harder, to be better. He comes and rescues you. The offended, the offended one pays the cost. The judge steps down and bears the judgment that he just pronounced. This is the most beautiful reality in all of the world. The God that you sinned against is the God who was moved in love, moved in compassion to come to you, not with denial, not with sentimental tolerance, not just blinking at your sin and writing it off, but with blood bought peace. Do you see what happens on the cross? Do you see it? Jesus goes and bears the wrath of God. He was punished for you. He was tormented for you. That is what hell is. It's God's wrath poured out against sin against evil. And Jesus willingly did that for you. Do you know what love that takes? I think most of us in here have people in our life that we would die for, people we love, people that we would take a bullet for. But who in here would be willing to trade places with someone, to bear the wrath of God for all of their sin? Jesus did. Jesus did before the foundation of the world. He said, I do, I will, I love you that much. And if this is true, if God made you, the God who made you is the one who came to save you, then Christianity is not, first and foremost, an invitation to improve yourself. It's not some moral betterment program. It is an invitation to be reconciled, to stop hiding, to stop negotiating, to stop performing, and to come home. This changes everything for us. If salvation is earned, or if salvation is not earned, it is received, if peace with God is not achieved by effort but purchased by Christ, then it has to reshape everything about us. That leads us into our points of application. First, believe the gospel. If you've come here today, and you don't, this is my earnest plea not to leave here without believing the gospel, not merely confessing something. Belief is not mere confession. We can't believe in the same way. We can't believe in Jesus the same way we believe it's going to snow. We live in Northern Michigan. It's going to snow, right? Those two things are categorically different. Belief in Christ demands our whole life. It means whole-hearted transformation. It means surrender to God. It means putting God, seeding God, where where he belongs, treating him as if he's God. I think too many of us are all too comfortable with treating God as if he's only our provider, only our protector, only our healer, only our savior, not wanting him to be Lord of our life. Belief in Jesus has to come with relinquishing that, putting him, seeding him as Lord of our life. We cannot not say to God, Jesus, I want you to save me for my sin, but I don't want you to tell me what to do. That cannot work. Jesus must have total authority of our life. Belief means we trust him for everything. Not just simply using him as a get-out-of-hell free card. It means trusting him totally because we can. It means trusting his work on the cross even more than trusting our own emotions. I think too often in the modern church, our salvation is tied to how we feel. We come to church because the music makes us feel good. We like the way that the sermon makes us feel. Even our own relationship with God is tied to how we feel towards him, that we feel saved when we feel saved. The danger in this is that our salvation is then It's tied to an emotion. It's still tied to a work, to how we feel, to making us feel a certain way. Historic Christianity has always said, You are saved, not by a philosophy, not by some step program, not by emotion. You are saved by a historical event. Jesus came and died for you and rose again three days later. We know that we're saved because God tells us that we're saved. He tells us in his word that we're saved. And if we ever get confused on that, he's actually given us two really great things. He's given us our baptism and the Lord's Supper. Two means of grace that can remind us what God did for us. We cannot shift back into self-salvation. That's what we see in our next point of application. Continue in the gospel. Don't shift back into self-salvation, trying to save our self. Paul goes on to say, Continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel. The translation? Once you've been reconciled, you are going to feel tempted to try to measure yourself up by what you've done, by what you feel. Some of us will be tempted into pride, into saying, Yeah, you know what? I have done a good job. I've been to church every single week this month, and I've done the right things, and I've really avoided doing X, Y, and Z. I'm much better than that person out there. Or we'll be tempted into despair in recognizing the sinfulness in ourselves. No, I have failed this week. I haven't been around church. I haven't done these things. I am without hope. But both of these forms of shifting away from the gospel. It does this because it makes you the center. It makes you the auditor of whether you're good or not. Martin Luther has this to say. The law says, 'Do this, and it never does, and it's never done. Grace says, believe this, and everything is already done. We are saved by what Christ has done, not by working for it, not by trying harder. And we'll see that next week in Galatians. So practice this one simple thing this week. When you sin, don't hide, run to Christ, confess quickly, and receive forgiveness. Preach the same gospel that you would preach, preach the same gospel to yourself that you'd preach to any sinner. But you are saved not by what you've done, good or bad. You're saved by grace through faith. Believing the gospel is not moving from bad people to good people. It is moving from people who are proud, moving from people who are in despair, to moving to people who can rest in the work, in the finished work of Christ. That leads us into our last point of application, which has three subpoints. Live reconciled. These aren't ways to earn peace with God, but this is a way that our peace from God bears fruit in our life. We need to forgive. If Christ has absorbed the cost of our sin, then we need to, in our life, slowly, painfully, and truly absorb the cost of others' sin against us. I want to I'll ask you two questions. Who do you keep punishing in your mind? What have you refused to release? It's a great place to start in forgiveness. The next is to be generous. If everything that's been created is created for God, then what we have, possessions or money, it belongs to him anyways. It's ultimately not for us. And if Jesus gave himself for us, then generosity is not a negative on our balance sheet. It is an opportunity for us to worship. The last thing is to reconcile. Reconciliation is maybe one of the most clear pictures that we can give the world of the gospel. If Christ moved towards us while we were hostile, while we were enemies to him, then you don't get to stay distant, forever, and safe from people. Is there a text that you need to send? A conversation you need to start? A confession you need to make? Not to win, but to make peace. We don't forgive, give, and reconcile to get God to love us. He already does that. We do it because in Christ, he's shown us that he has. The beauty of reconciliation between us and God is that it is not not just for this life. Salvation isn't merely God's way of helping us cope with the here and now. It is him bringing us home forever. Because the end of the story isn't escaping a bad place. The end of the story is God dwelling with his people. Revelation 21: 3 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 he will be and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. That is reconciliation complete. Not a temporary peace, not a fragile assurance, not a relationship on probation. That is God with us forever. How do sinners get there? Not by measuring up, not by earning it, only through the blood of the Lamb, because peace with God had to be purchased. So if you hear anything this morning, hear this. The God who made you is the God who saved you. The gospel isn't our way to climb to God. It is his way of showing us that he came to us and that he will be the one who brings us all the way home. Would you stand with me as we prepare our hearts to respond in worship? Father God, we thank you for who you are, that you are a God who came to us, not just for this life, but to bring us home that you loved us even while we were still sinners, and you came to purchase us back. God, we cannot live and leave here as the same people. God, let us be transformed by your word. Let us go out and live with the peace that you've bought for us. Live as reconciled people. 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

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