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

Crowned with Purpose Prosper Christian Reformed Church Crowned with Purpose Crowned Mitchell Leach Sunday, March 22, 2026 Audio Crowned with Purpose Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 39:47 Sermon Transcript In 1519, Hernán Cortés set sail to the coast of Mexico with 500 soldiers and 11 ships in an almost impossible mission. And before the first battle, he ordered that every ship be burned. We tend, as historians tend to romanticize this story as this act of confidence, this act of complete and total, like a visionary leader eliminating retreat, looking at his men and seeing this supernatural confidence in these men. But Cortés didn't burn these ships because he knew that these men were going to stand beside him no matter what. It's actually the opposite. He could look at his men and see in his men everything that's in all of us. We have a tendency to have a hard time to commit fully to something. Cortés burned the ship so there was no way for retreat. There's no way out. The men had to commit fully. There wasn't another option. He didn't inspire commitment, he engineered it because he understood something about human nature that we don't often like to admit. We, left to ourselves, always hold for another option, another way out. We say yes but keep an exit door open. We make promises with our fingers half crossed. We follow until following gets expensive. Big Question What does it cost to be fully committed to anything? We live in a culture that repackages half-commitment as wisdom. Keeping your options open, not putting all your eggs in one basket, never losing yourself in someone else. We have engineered entire industries so you never have to choose fully. There are dating apps now that always show you someone new. Career culture that says never stop looking. We call it freedom. But the person who keeps every option open in front of them usually ends up with nothing real. A life with no anchor, with no roots, no ships burned. And the folly of this, the foolishness of this, is that we know it's not working. Half-committed marriages are miserable for everyone involved. Half-committed friendships feel hollow. Half-committed careers leave us empty. We were not made for partial allegiances and yet, here we are, knowing the full cost of commitment and keeping the exit door open. What does it cost to be fully committed to anything? Fortunately, the Bible has an answer for us. So keep your Bibles open to Luke 9 as we'll see an answer here for us. But before we get into that, we're starting a new Easter series. Just in a couple weeks, Easter is going to be upon us. And Easter is, by and large, the most significant holiday in the Christian calendar. Far and above even Christmas. Historically, Easter was the church event, the church holiday of the year. Without the resurrection, Christianity would become like every other world religion. It would leave us with a teacher. You look at any of the other world religions — Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius — they were surrounded by their followers when they got old and they died. They were buried. And yet, Christianity is different. Jesus is a teacher, but he's not just a teacher. He's a man, but not just a man. Jesus is alive. The last week of his life shows us who Jesus is. And that's what we're going to be looking at starting today, going into Easter Sunday. If you look at the gospels, half of the gospels — or more than half — cover the last week of Jesus' life. Where Jesus did ministry for 3 years, and yet half is consumed with the last week. What happens here from now until Easter Sunday is going to show us who Jesus is — that Jesus was not just merely a good example, but Jesus of Nazareth is God made flesh. These passages will implore us to behold the crucified and risen King and follow in humble and joyful allegiance. Outline A Face Set Forward (Luke 9:51) No Fire from Heaven (Luke 9:52-56) No Looking Back (Luke 9:57-62) A Face Set Forward (Luke 9:51) Luke 9:51 is a landmark verse in the book of Luke. This really divides the book of Luke into two different sections: the section about Jesus' ministry and then the section about Jesus' life in the last week of what he does here on earth. Jesus, up until this point, came to show the Jewish people first and then the whole world that he was the Messiah and that he had a way for eternal life. He had done this through a variety of different things in his ministry, through teaching and preaching, through miracles, and through loving and having compassion on the poor, the lost, and the sick. But now in this verse, his ministry is going to change. Luke 9:51 says this: 'When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.' One of the major themes in Jesus' ministry is this almost mystery, this secret timing. If you've read the Gospel of Mark, over and over, once Jesus does something, he commands his disciples or whoever he helped not to tell anybody. In John, the theme is time. John 2:4, the famous passage where Jesus is being asked to make water into wine, Jesus answered and said, 'Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.' When Jesus says 'My hour' in the book of John, he is talking about his death and resurrection. He is saying it is not time for me to be crucified yet. And then Jesus' focus changes. You can see that even later in John: 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.' Jesus said this after our passage, after Luke 9:51. Jesus is setting his face towards Jerusalem. What that means literally is that he firmed his face. Setting his face means it was an idiom for unflinching determination. That phrase 'being taken up' is not just talking about Jesus being put on the cross. It is talking about him being raised from the dead and his ascension into heaven. Think about your wedding. There is a ton of planning that goes along — finding a venue, a reception, figuring out dinner, the right invitations, who you are and aren't going to invite. You do the cake tasting, you do the premarital counseling, all of that. As a pastor, I get to do a lot of these weddings and I get to see this kind of journey that couples go through. And there's something that changes at the rehearsal. The night before, there's all this planning that happens. It's almost as if it's not real yet, and then you go through the rehearsal and I can see it on the look on the bride and groom's eyes. Something has changed. It's real for them. They can see it. They set their face towards the ceremony, the thing that they've been planning for. The ceremony is what makes a wedding a wedding. That's what is happening here. Jesus is saying the time for planning is over. The wedding is here and all I can focus on is that. At this point, Jesus could have walked away. Jesus could have said, 'Father, this is too much. I'm not able to do this and I'm walking away.' But he doesn't. He knows what's going to happen and he doesn't walk away. Sometimes people talk about Jesus being murdered and it's theologically not correct. Jesus says, 'No one takes my life from me.' When Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem, he knows what's going to happen. No one's forcing him to do something that he doesn't want to do. Hebrews actually tells us that he goes with a joy set before him. He went to the cross in joy. The cross was not a surprise. He set his face towards his own death for people who would keep an exit plan open for them. The fully committed had to die for those who were half committed. That is what Jesus is going to tease out in this next section. No Fire from Heaven (Luke 9:52-56) This next passage is kind of strange — Luke 9:52-56. But it would have made sense for any first century Jew or first century reader in this area. Jesus sends his disciples ahead into a town to make sure that there is a place for them to stay. An inn in the first century, even when you think of the birth story of Jesus where there was no room in the inn, would have been somebody who had in their home an extra bed or room or two. It would have been like a bad Airbnb where the host stays right with you. They didn't have hotels. So Jesus gets there and Luke 9:53 says this: 'But the people did not receive him because his face was set towards Jerusalem.' These are Samaritans that are rejecting him. In 1 and 2 Kings, there was a divided kingdom and there was a rift. The Samaritans were separated from Jews and were looked at after that separation as kind of a lower species of people. They worshipped on a different mountain. And that's why Jesus was rejected — because Jesus was going to Jerusalem where the Jewish people believed God's presence dwelled and the Samaritans didn't. Luke 9:54 says this: 'When the disciples, James and John, saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"' What happened was probably blatant disrespect to Jesus or at least to the Jewish faith. James and John could not handle it. They were furious. They believed they knew what needed to happen. They knew that they were right and they knew exactly what they needed to do. And so they asked Jesus if he could call down fire. Jesus rebukes them. He tells them that they're wrong in their approach partially because Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem. At this point in Jesus' ministry, judgment will only fall on him from this point forward. He doesn't call down fire from heaven because judgment falls on him and not on anyone else. Also, the Bible is clear that God is the God of vengeance. Deuteronomy says, 'Vengeance is mine and recompense for all time when their foot shall slip, for the day of their calamity is at hand and their doom comes swiftly.' It is not for James and John to be the judge. It's easy for us to look at those two brothers, James and John, as just knuckleheads who didn't understand what they were talking about — as long as we don't look at ourselves too deeply. I think it's kind of funny when I hear people say, 'I have such a strong sense of justice.' I've never heard anyone say the opposite — 'Well, you know, I morally, I'm kind of all over the map. I actually really don't know what's right and wrong.' The truth is innately, whether we are actually right or wrong, we have a deep feeling of what is right or wrong. We're kind of born with that. If you've ever been around any young kids, there is a clear sense of right and wrong. It's skewed, to be sure, but you can see it when a toy is taken away, when punishment is handed down by a parent. There is this sense of, 'I'm being wronged.' We have that built into us whether it is right or wrong. James and John thought they did too. But notice, Jesus does not rebuke them that the Samaritans were wrong. The Samaritans are wrong about this and the disrespect was not okay. Jesus is saying he has to be the one to bring it. The problem with our sense of justice is it always seems to point outward towards others, never inward. The Samaritans deserved fire from heaven — that's what James and John thought. Never us. That's how we feel. But Jesus is walking towards Jerusalem because we do. We deserve the fire from heaven. That's what we'll see Jesus tease out in the next section. No Looking Back (Luke 9:57-62) Jesus wants his true followers to value what he does. This is because God is a jealous God. God wants them to love him. God loves himself. He's the only being on earth that can do that without it being prideful or egomaniacal. He can be all about himself, all about his own glory, because there's no one other to give glory to. God is saying that we cannot have competing things in our heart. Luke 9:57-58 say this: 'As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."' If you've ever gone to a pro sporting event, as you get closer to the stadium you start to see more stickers, more team colors, and there's something kind of fun about that — you're with your people, almost caravaning down together. This is what's happening with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem. The crucifixion actually happens over Passover weekend. Passover weekend is the most significant holiday — that's their Easter, their Christmas, their greatest holiday. If you had enough money, if you were able to do it, you made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. So all of these people are coming to the biggest city in Israel, coming from wherever they were, meeting up on similar roads and traveling together, talking, camping out together. Somebody along the way says, 'I will follow you.' Pledges their unfettering, unwavering loyalty to Jesus. And Jesus' response is something that would confound anyone who's ever written a book on evangelism. All of our worldly wisdom tries to convince people, to market to people, to try to bring people in. I've heard pastors say, 'Try Jesus out for one week and if not, you can return him.' Jesus says to someone who's seemingly trying to follow him: it is not going to be easy. Almost, 'Are you sure you have what it takes? This will not be fun. This will not be glamorous. In fact, it will be humiliating. Don't do this. If I can talk you out of this, you shouldn't do this.' He then moves on to another person. Luke 9:59-60: He says to another person, 'Follow me.' But the man said, 'Lord, let me first go bury my father.' And Jesus said to him, 'Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.' This seems like a strange thing for Jesus to say, right? Almost anti-family. Is Jesus anti-family? He's not. He's the one who invented family. But this seems really strange, almost offensive. The point that Jesus is trying to make is that those who have a new life in Christ, family has to be — your allegiance to family has to be a distant second to him. Asking someone to miss their father's funeral would be one of the most disrespectful things you could ask someone. Jesus intends for this to be offensive. Either you will see Jesus and the sweetness of freedom that comes from him, or you will hear what Jesus says here as foolishness. Jesus is saying, if you truly treasure me, if I ask you to miss your cousin's wedding, your sister's wedding, a funeral in your family — you say, 'Absolutely, Jesus. The freedom, the joy, the treasure that I have in you is infinitely more valuable than anything, than any experience I could have with a family member.' If you think I'm taking this verse out of context, let's look at some other ones. Matthew 10:37 says this: 'Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.' Luke 14 says, 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.' Mark 3:33-35, after being asked about his mom and brothers who are right in front of him, he says, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And Luke 12:51-53 says: 'Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.' Jesus is emphatically clear. We cannot have competing allegiances here on earth. Family is one of the most important things in our life. It truly is. Don't hear me as saying you get to leave your family, you get to walk away from them whenever you want as long as you say it's in the name of Jesus. That is absolutely not what I'm saying. It's also not permission or license to neglect your family. But if your family becomes something in your heart that you love even remotely close to Jesus, Jesus is saying you have your allegiances wholly and totally screwed up. What would it profit you to gain the love of your family and lose your soul? That's the question Jesus is asking here. Lastly, in Luke 9:61-62, he says this: 'Yet another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."' What Jesus is saying is that if you're going to plow a field and you look back at what's being plowed, it's going to get all screwed up. It's kind of hard for farmers today — usually we've got GPS and auto-steer. But it's the same with driving a car. If you look to the side, you're going to swerve a little bit. Jesus is saying if you look back, it's going to pull you away. He's saying we've set our face towards Jerusalem, towards the cross. We cannot turn around now. John Bunyan understood this. In The Pilgrim's Progress, he paints a picture of Christian, the man who finally makes it to heaven, the man who follows Christ faithfully. As he runs, this happens: 'Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children, perceiving that he was about to leave, began to cry after him to return. But the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on crying, "Life! Life! Eternal life!"' His family calling him back and he put his fingers in his ears. Life, life, eternal life. That's what undivided allegiance looks like. Not cold duty, not gritted teeth, but a man who sees something so glorious, something so worthwhile, that his family, his children pale in comparison to the joy that he sees. It's the same thing that the 3 people on the road to Jerusalem were missing. These 3 people on the road all had something that they loved more than Christ or that competed with their love for Christ. And Jesus did not argue with them. He simply kept walking towards Jerusalem, walking towards the cross, towards death — a death he would die for them. A king who marched towards his own death for half-committed people deserves more than our half-committed heart. Main Idea Forsake lesser loyalties and follow the King who marched toward Jerusalem for our salvation It comes down to our identity. There will be two teams at the end of all things, there will only be two things that matter. Are you in Christ or are you in Adam? You cannot be half in or half out. You can't play on both teams. If you've watched any of March Madness, you take one step out of bounds — you're not even fully out of bounds — and it's like your whole body is out of bounds. You can't be half out and half in and play the game. Jesus says, 'Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.' There are times when Jesus is gentle, and this is not one of them. When it comes to our identity, when it comes to our loyalty, Jesus is as firm as he can be. Because you cannot have Jesus as an option amidst other options. Jesus either changes everything about you or you're fully committed to being on Team Adam. Jesus is not a theory. He's not a philosophy that we can try on. He's not one way amidst a bunch of other ways. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Following him means burning the boats behind you. Don't leave an option. Don't leave an exit, an escape into your old life, into old sins, into another way of trying to save yourself. Burn the boats. Application Criticism is not judgment One of our favorite verses in America is when Jesus says, 'Do not judge lest you be judged.' We love talking about that because we do not like to be confronted on anything. We live in a culture that has no immunity to criticism. It is easier for us to cut people out of our life than it is to have people in our life who tell us things that we don't want to hear. But we need that. What Jesus is doing here is direct. It is confrontational. The biblical word for this would be admonishment. Jesus is admonishing both the people in this traveling party with him and also his disciples. And yet, this isn't rude. It's not judgment. You need to be able to hear people in your life tell you things that you don't want to hear. The Bible says, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend.' Sanctification starts from Christ being wounded and continues by ourselves being wounded daily. If we cannot hear the truth of God's word, if it hurts and we can't stick around and hear and change, what we're saying is really, I'm God. I get to decide who gets to offend me and nobody gets to offend me. Being drawn closer and closer to God means that we are wounded and we accept that. We die to ourself more and more each and every day. I've read a lot of old pastors about a lot of different things, but one of them being church discipline. They would confront sin head-on. Not because they were trying to be mean or judgmental or to humiliate people. Churches would do this because sin is bad. It is actually bad in our life. I remember reading at one church where there was a very minor sin issue — one instance of gossip — and they were put under formal church discipline for that because they saw their sin as actually dangerous for their soul and wanted to crucify it. And they needed help. If we did this today, people would just leave. We'd go to another church and say, 'Man, that church is like Pharisees. They're too judgmental.' We have no immunity for this kind of stuff in our culture. In fact, it is more likely that you have cut people out of your life who were trying to tell you something devastating they saw in your life. Confronting people is hard. When you do this, you know that what you are about to say is confrontational because it is best for them. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. When someone comes and tells you something hard, know that it sucks for them probably even more than it sucks for you to hear. Be people who can hear criticism not as judgment. Christ must be our greatest loyalty One of the greatest sin struggles in rural areas — not just at Prosper, in any rural area I have ever been a part of — is family loyalty. This becomes an allegiance that can almost trump anything, including our Christian calling. Three generations at the same church. I grew up in a church like that where your family name means something. And quietly, slowly, family loyalty becomes the highest priority, becomes your highest loyalty. We don't have to follow where Jesus leads. We follow him as long as it's close to home, as long as it's within what our family deems appropriate. We do not forsake lesser loyalties. What we do is we just baptize them. We repackage them and call them faithfulness. But Jesus was not subtle about this. Jesus was not gentle about this. He said, 'If anyone loves father or mother more than me, they are not worthy of following me.' He would rather offend you than you lose your life to something smaller than him. So how do we leave these lesser loyalties behind? We cannot shame ourselves into leaving them. We can't create enough willpower into following a new one. There is only one way to have this kind of allegiance. You have to see something more glorious. That's what Christian saw in The Pilgrim's Progress. He saw something more glorious. He ran toward eternal life. He didn't run from his family — he ran towards eternal life. The difference in that makes all the difference. When Christ becomes your treasure, lesser loyalties don't get ripped away, they just loosen their grip. Prosper Church, hear this: forsake lesser loyalties and follow the King who marched toward Jerusalem for your salvation. Closing Prayer Father God, we thank you for who you are. We praise you that you alone are worthy to be praised. God, I pray that we would crucify any idol that we have in our heart, anything that comes close to competing with you. God, help us to see, to taste and see that you are good, that you are greater than anything this world can offer. God, you are glorious. Let us glorify you in our worship here and now. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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

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

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Josh and Mandy Shaarda Freedom In Christ Prosper CRC Josh and Mandy Shaarda Freedom In Christ Uganda Josh and Mandy have dedicated their lives to making disciples and strengthening the church in East Africa, particularly in Uganda. They serve through Resonate Global Mission alongside Freedom in Christ Ministries, partnering with local pastors and church leaders to equip them with discipleship resources and training so that individuals, families, and entire communities can be transformed by the truth of the gospel. Their work goes beyond teaching — they walk alongside local churches, helping leaders multiply disciples who live out Jesus’ love in word and deed. A significant part of their ministry has focused on prisons, where they share the gospel and train believers who, in turn, lead worship, start Bible studies, and boldly proclaim Christ’s freedom to others inside and outside prison walls. Josh and Mandy’s vision is to see Jesus’ church in Uganda equipped to transform the nations — building up leaders who will continue to spread the good news throughout Africa. Support Josh & Mandy

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

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

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

Boast Only in the Cross Prosper Christian Reformed Church Boast Only in the Cross Christ Alone Mitchell Leach Sunday, March 15, 2026 Audio Boast Only in the Cross Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 34:04 Sermon Transcript To all who are weary and need rest, to all who fail and desire strength, to all who mourn and long for comfort, to all who sin and need a Savior, this church opens wide her doors with a welcome from Christ Jesus, a friend to sinners. Welcome to an online gathering of Prosper Christian Reformed Church. And I can say this now preemptively, man, the roads are terrible out there. Can you believe this weather? We're pre-recording this on Saturday so that way when we needed it, because if you're seeing this, we did, because we canceled church because we— the weather was just so bad. We wanted to include this last sermon in our Galatians series, Christ Alone, that really encompasses the totality of what we've been looking at in this series. And so we wanted to make sure that this was available for you because it goes along with the devotional series that we've been going through, the devotional plan that you've been going through, and we felt like this was a really good way to end this series. There will be some announcements that we'll send out in the email that comes along with this and some songs that you can sing at home that will go along with the service. But this is going to be an abbreviated message, abbreviated video service that will include the scripture reading and then the sermon. So let's jump into that scripture reading now. Scripture Reading Galatians 6:11-18 Hear the word of the Lord. See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they might not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. In the past couple decades, baseball teams thought they knew exactly what made a good baseball team, what players made a good baseball team. They were certain of this. Things like batting average, pitching stats like ERA, RBIs, the look of a player, the sound that the bat made when it hit a ball. All of these things were key indicators that led a team to either choose or pass on a player, especially when replacing a player. And then came the Moneyball era. If you've seen the movie Moneyball, you'll know what I'm talking about. This, this idea of replacing players, not as a one-for-one, but replacing them with maybe a couple different players that, that kind of Frankenstein their way into making the replacement that a team lost. This happened with the Oakland Athletics. They were a team that could not afford to compete with the New York Yankees, the team that had tons of money. This team had hardly any. And so they figured out an algorithm, figured out an equation to make players, to make a team out of misfits, out of a team that really didn't seem to— that nobody wanted, players that nobody really wanted. And it worked. They were able to compete at a very high level and it changed the game of baseball. But it exposed something: old metrics were comforting but they were misleading. Things that teams were certain of were exposed. Even though they gave them a sense of control, even though those old metrics or a sense of control for these teams, they didn't actually produce results. They didn't actually produce wins. And once they saw that, they realized that you can be sure of something, but you can still be wrong. And that's not just true for baseball; that's true for us. You can be sure of things in your life and still be wrong. Because we all live based on a metric. We all have things that we try to trust in that tell us that we are okay. And that leads us into our big question for this morning: What are you sure of? What are you sure of? Big Question What are you sure of? We all live on something that we are sure of. Everyone has a righteousness. Everyone has a metric. Everyone has a boast. The question is whether or not you can hold onto those things, those things can hold you, while you suffer, when you suffer. If your certainty is built on performance, then your best day becomes your pride, will produce your pride, and your worst day will produce despair. Our culture offers dozens of different ways to produce these counterfeit certainties. Things like image: if I look put together, then I'm safe. Maybe it's morality. If I'm better than them, then I'm clean. It can be control. If I can plan it, then I can breathe. Maybe it's approval. If they like me, then I can feel secure. Maybe it's a religious marker. If I do the right things, if I obey the right laws, then God must accept me. But the reality is all of these things have the same flaw. They cannot carry suffering, they cannot carry guilt, and they cannot carry death. They never give peace; only more rules, only more things to check off our list, only more bars to jump over. And that's why Paul says false teachers want to show a good showing in the flesh. They want something visible, something measurable, a metric, a ruler, a proof that they can point to. That says, "Now I'm sure." So the question is unavoidable: What are you certain of? What are you sure of? The good news is that Christianity is not guesswork. God speaks to us. So keep your Bibles open to Galatians 6:11-18. We're going to see two major movements in this last sermon on Galatians. First, we're going to see false boasting exposed and then true boasting declared. This is the last all-encompassing kind of review of this sermon series that we've been going through in Galatians where we've been seeing Christ alone. That life in God starts in Christ Jesus, not in works. What we'll see in this passage is that the only legitimate boast for the Christian is the cross of Christ through which the world is crucified, a new creation has come, and peace belongs to those who walk by this gospel rule. Outline False Boasting Exposed: Confidence in the Flesh (Galatians 6:11-13) True Boasting Declared: Confidence in the Cross (Galatians 6:14-18) False Boasting Exposed: Confidence in the Flesh (Galatians 6:11-13) The Apostle Paul starts off by showing what false confidence looks like in real time—religious performance under social pressure. And that's what we see in this first section, this first section, Galatians 6:11-13. I'm titling this False Boasting Exposed. Confidence in the flesh. Let's look at Galatians 6:11. He says this: "See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand." Paul has been probably using a scribe to write most of this book and then he ends this last portion by writing it personally with his own hands. If you were to read the original letter from Paul, you would have seen larger letters. Scholars have speculated maybe it was the thorn in his flesh. Maybe it had something to do with his eyesight or maybe it had something to do with his hand-eye coordination. We don't know. But Paul is saying that he's writing this last portion himself. Paul wants the Galatians to feel, to see with their own hand, their own eyes, his handwriting and to know that this isn't a minor dispute. This isn't some secondary or tertiary church, you know, theology issue that we can brush under the rug. This is a gospel crisis and they must respond. It has to do with adding anything to the finished work of Jesus on the cross. And here's why people add to Jesus. Not because they're wicked always. But it's oftentimes because they're scared. And that's what Galatians 6:12 says, "It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised and only in order that they might not be persecuted for the cross of Christ." The circumcision party wanted men who weren't Jewish, who weren't born Jewish by birth, to be marked by the old covenant sign. This sign, circumcision, was to hold Israel, to hold God's covenant people until the Savior came. Why would they want this? Maybe it was because they believed that God would not accept them, accept these new Christians, unless they held to everything in the Old Testament. Maybe it was a love for traditions; they loved the Jewish culture. They loved some of these things that were emblematic of the Jewish faith and they felt like they were losing them as new Gentiles came into the faith. But one reason, certainly, and what Paul says is that they were afraid of persecution, specifically Jewish persecution. These Christian Jews who came to saving faith in Christ, were probably influenced by friends and family. These relationships that had been ongoing that these friends, these people in their family, maybe neighbors, having conversations with these new Jewish Christians. I bet you they were called unclean; being associated with Gentiles, outsiders, people that they weren't supposed to eat with, Jewish people weren't supposed to eat with. And I bet that these conversations weren't some thoughtful theological conversation. It wasn't some debate between Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis. I'm certain that this was everyday conversations between everyday type of people. People, Jewish people, not Jewish Christians, but Jewish people who weren't certain. They were already kind of afraid of this new Jesus thing. But now that they hear about these Jewish Christians mixing with these Gentiles who weren't forced to follow all of the Jewish laws, I bet you these people were kicked out of their families or kicked out of these social circles that they were once in. I'll bet you Jewish people would say, "You know, I can't believe that you would do this." Maybe, maybe if you ask them to become Jewish and, you know, celebrate all of the purity laws and become fully Jewish, maybe then you, who are a Jewish Christian, could come back in and be accepted; that it would be okay. Paul isn't trying to slander anyone. But this decision on what to believe should not be based on social pressures. It should not be based on these external things, these relationships that even we have in our life. The flesh does not just want to be good. It wants to prove. It wants to be seen as good. Legalism isn't just trying hard. It is trying to get a verdict without the cross. It is trying to get external validation to see people say, "Yes, you are good." People-pleasing isn't just wearing religious clothing. It is when you make faith a badge. You turn sinners into trophies. And that's what Paul continues on in Galatians 6:13. "For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh." Boasting in the flesh here means this: it's the equivalent of what happens when Christians celebrate over conversion. When we see a sinner come to saving faith, we rejoice. But these people, these Judaizers, these Jewish Christians, would not celebrate over someone becoming a Christian. They would celebrate when someone would become a Jew. They do this not because they actually want more obedience to the law. The sad part about this is that they fear the persecution. They just want to avoid persecution. And Paul says this because we cannot have confidence in what we bring to the table. We can't— Paul's telling them that they can't say, "God, I know that you've saved me but I'm more faithful than those other guys who don't get circumcised." And maybe we don't struggle with this today; we don't struggle with circumcision today. We've kind of handled that issue. We know what we believe on this today because Paul has given us something. And yet, we struggle with other things like the idea of baptism or being rebaptized. So many people today believe, well, I need to be rebaptized again as an adult because I didn't make the decision as a kid. I've heard this over and over as a pastor. My question to them is, do you think that you had a choice? If you feel like you don't have a choice in baptism, in being baptized, do you feel like you had a choice in being saved? Did God choose you or did you choose God? No, God chose you even in your infancy. Our baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant, just like circumcision was for the Old Testament. And the beautiful part of our covenantal theology, our covenantal baptism as people who baptize infants, is that it doesn't have to be us saying we made this decision. We get to live into this reality that God chose us even while we were sinners. Our confidence cannot be in ourselves, cannot be even in our own decisions, but they must be in Christ Jesus. And Paul doesn't just criticize their boast, he shows you what his is. He puts it on the table as the only safe metric for the thing we can boast in. That's what we see in the second section, true boasting declared, confidence in the cross, Galatians 6:14. True Boasting Declared: Confidence in the Cross (Galatians 6:14-18) As people, we so desperately want credit. We want to feel like we did something, especially when it comes to our faith. We want to feel like we didn't leave Jesus alone on the cross. We want to believe that if we would have been in the crowd, we wouldn't have shouted, "Persecute him," or, "Crucify him." We wouldn't have been, if we were a disciple, we wouldn't have scattered when Jesus was crucified. If we would have been Peter, we would have never denied him. And this comes from pride. But the reality is we are sinful. We don't have hope. We would have exactly done the same things as everyone else. This pride that we have that makes us believe that we would have been different is a faulty one. It leads us to want to add to our salvation. To try to prove to Jesus that we really mean it; that we are truly his. But we owe a debt. The Bible says that we owe a debt. And if you've ever been in debt, you know what that feels like, especially if it's been significant. If you've ever found out that all of a sudden you're in some serious financial hardship, some serious hole financially. The dread that comes from that is overwhelming. It can cause you to lose sleep. It can cause you to become depressed. It can cause a litany of emotions. But there is no greater feeling than discovering that you've missed something; discovering that there is hope or finding out that there might be someone who can rescue you from this financial hard spot. And the same is true with our faith. It is never fun to admit that we are in such a spiritual or financial debt that we can't get out of it ourselves. It's humiliating, in fact. And yet, that feeling is dwarfed when we realize the freedom, the relief that comes from being rescued. Paul says this in Galatians 6:14, he says, "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." When the cross becomes your boast, the world's scoreboard dies. You stop needing old trophies. Why would Paul say this? That our only boast is in Christ? Why would he have to say this? Because boasting in the cross in the first century, in the first century world, would have been a crazy thing to do. It would have been so, so weird. The cross was a torture method. It was a way to crucify, to kill criminals. It was shameful and everyone saw it that way. Every other person who had been crucified had been guilty in some right. You look at the people who were on the cross, who would be crucified, they were criminals, thieves, murderers. They were bad guys. Yet, for Paul, this wasn't shameful. It was the only reason for his boast. We cannot boast in anything. As people who are Reformed, who believe that God is sovereign over everything, even our own salvation, we can't boast in anything other than the cross. I won't be able to get to heaven someday and look at fellow Christians and say, "Well, you know, I came to saving faith when I was 15 and you waited until you were 18. Therefore, I chose Jesus a little bit sooner than you did and therefore I get a chance to boast." No, no, no, no, no. That's how people fall. That's how people become corrupt, being overconfident and not watchful. Because God is sovereign over everything. He chose the time, the exact right time for me to follow him. He chose the exact right time for my wife who was 18 to follow him. There will be no boasting for either of us. What is my only boast? Or what is my only comfort? That I with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. My only boast is in Jesus. My only comfort is in Jesus. My only hope is in Jesus. Let this be our prayer, Prosper. Let this be your prayer. Far be it from us to have anything pull us into confidence apart from Jesus. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. And that's been our whole theme throughout this series in Galatians. Life with God comes by faith in Christ, not by the law. Far be it from anything to pull us into confidence other than the cross of Christ. Paul continues on in Galatians 6:14. He says, "By which the world has been crucified to me and I to it." Paul is saying, "I have a new allegiance." And that alludes back to Galatians 1:4. It says this, "He who gave himself," Jesus, "who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age." That present evil age is the same idea that Paul's talking about that the world has been put to death. There is this age, this era, that is no longer. We are now under the reign and rule of Christ. Paul continues on, "For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation." The cross is the only place that pride and shame die together. The world says, "Prove yourself." The cross says it has been proven for you. The cross does not just forgive you, it frees you from needing credit. New creation means this: you don't need old markers to feel clean. You don't need old metrics to feel sure. Scars, for Christ, are not evidence that God has abandoned you. They are evidence that you belong to Jesus in a world that doesn't. And that new creation does not just change what you believe, it changes what you are willing to bear. It changes what will mark you. The only marker that counts is being sealed by the promised Holy Spirit. In fact, Paul continues in Galatians 6:17, "From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus." Paul is saying if you want a physical mark, if you want to mark your body physically, I'll show you one. Look at my scars. I am branded with the sufferings of Jesus. All of Galatians has been leading up to this point, has been leading up to this final paragraph, this final all-encompassing paragraph. Paul has been pleading with the churches that they cannot add anything to the gospel. They cannot require circumcision. They cannot require anything that would replace Jesus. Jesus. All, any of these things are things that people can do. All of these things that people could have pride in and use to rank themselves against other Christians, against other believers. If the way that we are saved is by any work of our own, then we have some reason to boast. I could have done more. I could be enough. For God to save me. You could get into heaven and say, "Yeah, we're all here in heaven, but, you know, I was the one who never missed church in 30 years," or, "I was the one who gave more than anyone else," or, you know, "I really, you know, I accepted Christ before you. You had waited until you're in your 20s, 30s, or whenever you did." No, that is not what we get to boast in. And this is our main idea. Paul says, "Boast only in the cross." That's our main idea. Boast only in the cross. Main Idea Boast only in the cross The gospel is not just how we start as Christians. It is a daily necessity. We are all sinful people, even after accepting Christ, even after being marked by the promise of the Holy Spirit. We need the gospel daily. We never graduate from the gospel. If you get tired of hearing messages or songs about the gospel, about the saving grace that comes from the gospel, then you don't understand the gospel. We are not saved by what we've done. We're saved and held to Christ by the cross. If we are saved by what Christ did for us, on our behalf while we were sinners, then what right do we have to claim that we are better than it or better or worse than any other Christian? How can I make rules for entrance into the kingdom if someone else has paid the price for me to get in? I can't. I get in. I get into the kingdom. I get in because he said so. He's the one who took my place. The cross is the only hope for every and any sinner. Application Stop letting the fear of people edit the gospel — Galatians 6:12 So what does boasting in the cross look like for us tomorrow? It looks like refusing people pleasing and it looks like reinterpreting our suffering. So let's look at our first point of application; it's this: Stop letting the fear of people edit the gospel. Just like in Galatians 6:12, Paul's saying that these Judaizers, they don't want you to get circumcised because they want you to be more obedient. They don't follow the law themselves. They want it because they don't want Jewish people to persecute them. They want to be able to be in relationship with their friends and families and neighbors who look down at them. When you feel the pressure to fit in, with your friends, with your coworkers, with your friends or your families. Ask yourself, "Am I avoiding offense of the cross to keep my approval?" This is the most dangerous way heresy creeps into our life. It's not through false teaching, mostly. It's through those everyday conversations we have with people that we don't really want to offend them. And maybe we know that what they're saying might not be biblical but it's easy for us to go along with them. We like the people that we're talking to. We want to stay in those same kind of relationships and so we subtly change what we believe in order to fit in. This is a dangerous, dangerous thing for us. And so the challenge for you is this: When you feel yourself going against what Scripture says? Well, stand up for the word. Stand up for what Christ did. Let your boast only be in the cross, not in your relationships with others. Jesus says that he comes not to bring peace but with a sword. He will divide us against the people we love because the world will naturally want to fight against truth. And we need to be people who believe in the Word. I've been in many conversations like this where people will say, "Well, you know, Paul said this and Jesus said this and they seem like they contradict. They seem like, you know, they don't get along. So we got to go with what Jesus says. We got to be red-letter Christians." And there hasn't been a bigger or maybe more subtle undermining belief system in the church. We are not red-letter Christians. Every word in God's Word, in Scripture, is spoken, is breathed out by God. The words of Paul are just as authoritative as the words of Christ. We have to be people who come back to his word and believe even if it offends the people around us. Reinterpret your suffering — Galatians 6:17 The second point of application is this: reinterpret your suffering. If you carry hardship, if you're going through a hard season, don't assume this is God punishing you. Sometimes the marks of Jesus are what faithfulness costs in a world that resists the cross of Christ. There are going to be times in your life where you're going through a trial, where you're going through hardship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that God is disappointed in you or something's wrong. Sometimes when we fix our eyes on the cross and we see the narrow road, the narrow path that lies before us that's marked with suffering, we have to choose it. We have to choose to walk through hardship knowing that the joy that is set before us in the cross of Christ is more beautiful, is more satisfying, than anything else. If your treasure, if your boast is only in Jesus, then the trials and sufferings along the way will be nothing, will be light, will be an easy affliction. Oftentimes, those trials are there as a filter to weed out people who are lukewarm in their faith. So persevere. Do not run away. Paul calls these marks the marks of Christ. The things that can refine us into the Christians, into the people that God is calling us to be. Why is it that we can boast only in the cross? Why is it that we can boast even in our suffering? It's because Jesus became a curse. He wasn't a boast; he wasn't something that people bragged about when he was hanging on the tree. In Matthew and in Mark, it says that we aren't supposed to look past people; it says that we're not supposed to call out, "Raca," against people. It was this word that meant You nobody. And as Jesus was hanging on the tree, that was what he was called. He was not a boast. He was not something that people had confidence in. He was something that people said, you no one. He took our place. We were supposed to be called no ones. We were the people who God was supposed to look at and say, depart from me, I never knew you. You are no one. Yet that's what Jesus heard while he was crucified. Jesus took our place. Jesus was treated like us so we could be treated like him. Therefore, we can boast only in the cross. Closing Prayer As you're sitting there at home, let's pray together knowing that we are bound more than just by being gathered together, but we can gather together in the spirit this morning as the weather prevents us from meeting in person. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for who you are. We praise you for this series that, that taught us that life in you comes only through the cross of Christ, not in our works. God, thank you that we are able to have faith in you and that it is separated from works; that we do not need to earn our way to have a right relationship with you but you have made it possible by sending your Son. God, I pray that if there is anyone who does not believe this, that they would come to this saving faith. God, that they would believe this gospel because it transforms every single part of who we are. God, whether we've heard this for the first time today and are accepting Christ or we've believed our entire life, let us be transformed not by my words but by the words that you've given us in this letter. God, your gospel, your good news, is so satisfying. God, let our only boast be you. Be the cross of Christ. A thing that should be a shameful thing, but God, it is the most glorious reality in all of human history, all of the world, all of eternity. God, let us bear these marks. Let us boast in you alone. God, we love you and we love to do your will. So help us do that today. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Hear this blessing, this departing blessing that comes right from the end of this book. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link