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

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

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

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

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More Concerned for the Plant Prosper Christian Reformed Church More Concerned for the Plant Jonah Mitchell Leach Sunday, November 23, 2025 Audio More Concerned for the Plant Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 43:26 Sermon Transcript Today's reading will come from Jonah 4:1 11. So please join me as we read the word of the Lord. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, oh, Lord, is it not that I. Isn't it not what I. Is it not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. For I know that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to live than to die. And then the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? When Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there he sat under the shade till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant, made it come over Jonah that it might be shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so it withered. When the sun arose. God appointed a scorching east wind. And the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do well to be angry. Angry enough to die. And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in the night. And should not I pity Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle. This is the word of the Lord. Introduction In 1914, a crew led by Ernest Shackleton set out to explore Antarctica. They were going to be the first group of people to cross the continent. His crew of 27 people and him boarded the ship called the Enterprise. This was a vessel specifically built for Antarctic navigation, trying to cut through the ice. And yet, because it was 1914 and the ship was made of wood before they hit the mainland, the ship stopped in the ice. It was seized completely. They tried for months trying to get this ship to budge free from the ice. And they lived on the ice for months as this huge ice drift, this huge sheet of ice drifted in the Antarctic Bay. This was an incredibly dangerous situation for them. This sheet of ice, because it was freezing and unfreezing, trying to budge them free, ended up. The pressure from the ice ended up smashing the hull of the boat, rendering it completely useless for them to get back home. They had no way back home. They had no radio, and no one was coming to save them. Imagine the feeling that would come over you, being in a place like that. They camped on ice floats and survived on penguin and seal meat, and they barely made it out alive. They made a daring escape on a makeshift life raft, and they made it to South America. At many points, if you read the account of them escaping and trying to survive, there were many points in this emergency that they should have all died. But incredibly, every single person made it out alive. And yet, by all accounts, this mission was a failure. They never made it on the continent. And yet, when anyone looks at this experience, no one thinks about it as a failure. Everyone survived. There's a tension in Jonah. Chapter 4. He had a plan. He had expectations. He wanted Nineveh to be judged, not forgiven. And then God relented. Jonah was furious. His expectations had been crushed like that of Shackleton's. He stood at the wreckage of his own plans. But unlike Shackleton, Jonah did not adapt. He got angry. He went outside the city. He sulked. He even said, it would be better for me to die than to live. Shackleton lost the mission that he dreamed of, but saved the lives that were entrusted to him. Jonah, on the other hand, got the mission that he dreamed of, but hated the heart of God, the outcome that God desired. Shackleton adjusted his plan to save life, and Jonah refused to adjust his heart to God's mercy. That's the tension in Jonah. Chapter 4. What happens when God's. When God ruins our plans. When God's grace ruins our plans. Big Question And that leads us to our big question. What happens when you don't get the outcome you planned for? What happens when you don't get the outcome you planned for? What happens when you get passed up for the promotion that you rightfully deserved? What happens when you lose your best employee, the one that had brought in so much business to you or had just been so loyal? What happens when you don't get the same class with your best friend? What happens when you miss that monster buck that you've been chasing all summer long? What happens when you don't get into the right college, or you lose a loved one? Or the person you thought you were going to marry ends up saying no to you. What happens when the tests come, come back with results that you were sure God was going to prevent? What happens when your spouse confesses the big secret to you? A secret that they had been hiding, or confesses that they had been having an affair? What happens when we hear heartbreaking, soul crushing news like that? When the earth seems to shatter, when the earth seems to stop spinning? And as Christians, there's even more tension, there's even more unrest in our soul because we know God is in control, that he is sovereign over everything, that he holds the world in his hand. And as Christians, we can sit there and think, God, why would you allow this to happen? We can feel the conflict in our own hearts. Here's what Jonah 4 shows us. That God's mercy is greater than our preferences. But when that mercy offends us, how will we respond? What will happen when you don't? Or what happens when we don't get the outcome we planned for? Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Jonah, Chapter four. As we see this outline or these movements in this chapter, we'll see when God's. Outline When God is too gracious for us When God's mercy corrects our misery. For the context of this passage, we've been looking at Jonah and this is our last, our last, our last chapter, our last sermon on this, on this, in this series. So if this is your first time here, you picked the very right time to come because you're going to get the entire series right here. In one nutshell, you guys were the smart people while everyone else had to spend five weeks listening to me. You guys got, you guys got one. So no, the context of this. In Jonah chapter one, Jonah runs and flees from the presence of God, hearing the word that he wants Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach repentance to them, Jonah flees to the end of the world. God appoints a fish. As Jonah is thrown overboard towards his near certain death, God saves him by the fish inside the fish. God, or God hears Jonah's pleas, his prayer, and he rescues him. He saves him. And last week in Jonah chapter three, we see Jonah finally goes to Nineveh and preaches repentance, does what God wanted him to do. Nineveh repented and God relented from the disaster that was for them. And in this chapter, God will reveal his heart to Jonah as Jonah revolts against it. So let's look at this first point, this first movement in this passage, When God is too gracious for us Verses 1 through 5, God gave Jonah a mission, a mission to preach repentance to Nineveh. He goes and does it, and guess what? It happens. They repent. God had used Jonah to preach repentance to bring an evil nation back from their sin. And that's what's so jarring about verse one. Look at verse one with me in chapter four. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, right? Chapter three, verse ten. God relents from disaster. It seems like everything's going good, but Jonah is unhappy. Jonah is exceedingly angry with God. This is written in a way to make the reader, to make us when we read this, go, how could this be? How could a prophet of God be upset with God saving people? This is a prophet's dream. Isaiah, when he gets the prophecy from God, when he gets a mission, his calling is to go and preach to. To Israel, who will never hear, who will never change. And Isaiah hears this and goes, how long are. How long am I supposed to do this? He says, until one stone is not stacked on another, until the end of time. Jonah gets a prophecy, he gets a word to preach repentance, and it happens. And Jonah is angry. And that leads Jonah to pray to God. He says in verse two and three, he says, or it says, and he prayed to the Lord. And he said, oh, Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Jonah prays to God. He says, this is exactly why I wanted to run to the end of the world. This is exactly why I wanted nothing to do with your plan, nor your heart. Jonah is saying, I knew that this is what was going to happen from the start, and that's why I ran. What about for us? Have you ever felt frustrated with God because things didn't go the way you wanted, even if you knew it was right? Have you ever felt frustrated? Have you ever said to yourself, God, I knew that you would do that. That fits with your character. But I just can't get behind it. Jonah isn't shocked by God's grace. He isn't shocked by God's mercy. He's offended by it. So much so that he goes to quote Scripture against God. He quotes Exodus, chapter 34. He says this. This is a passage where Moses is hiding in the cleft of a rock. God is passing before him. And God says, this the Lord passed passed before him, Moses and proclaimed the Lord. The Lord, a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. The irony that Jonah would quote this passage in this moment is unbelievable, except for it has to be from God. And I think it has to be that Jonah is also extremely frustrated with God. Jonah quotes this passage. This the context of this passage. The reason that Moses is hiding in the cleft of the rock and this is happening why? Why is it that God is proclaiming this message to Moses is that the Israelites had just built a golden calf. They had just broken the covenant that God had made with them. God, wanting to destroy them, relents from disaster of his own people and proclaims that this is who God is. He is a God who is gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. In the same moment where Jonah is furious with God that he would not save his own people, that he doesn't save his own people, that he doesn't care for Israel, he quotes a passage where God does exactly that. Jonah is furious. So Jonah tells God that it would be better off for him to die than to live. Verses 3 and 4, it says, Therefore, now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? Jonah responds to God, I would rather die. I would rather die than be in a world where this is true. Have you ever felt so crushed by the unmet expectations that you didn't want to keep following God's will anymore, God's ways anymore? Not that you didn't believe in him, but that you didn't like what he wanted for you. Jonah is making a mistake here that too many of us make, too many people make about God. I have heard people say time and time again things like, well, if God could send people to hell, then I don't really want to worship him. If he would say that homosexuality is wrong, then I don't want to follow him. If he could make people, knowing that they would go to hell. I can't follow a God like that. Essentially, what people are saying is my version of morality, my version of what I think is right and wrong, is ultimate, is ultimately correct. If God doesn't fit my definition of good, then I'm out. I get to have the godlike standard of morality that everyone else has to submit to. Essentially, that's what we're saying. I've had Multiple people come up to me and debate about God. Usually atheists talking about whether God is real and passages like whether homosexuality is true or not, or, you know, whether, you know, creation was in six days or whether evolution is true. You know, these are the things that we get hung up on. And then I finally have to get to a spot where I say we can talk about those things after. But we have to answer this question first. Is Jesus actually God? Did he actually die for our sins? Is he actually risen? Because if that's true, if that's the point that we believe, we believe that he is God. He is seated on the throne right now. If that's what we believe, those things ultimately we can address later. Those things we can get to. But everything that we believe, everything that God then says we must submit to. Is there anything that we wouldn't do for God? These secondary things, I mean, if God. If God were to ask us to only wear the color green from here on out, or that we couldn't eat soup, or that we had to speak in Spanish from now on, or we had to hop on one leg, would we do these things for God? Or would we say, no, God, what you've asked of us is way too much. No, if he is truly God, if he's seated on the throne, there isn't anything that we shouldn't do for him. This feeling of self righteous morality, believing that he knows what's right, drives Jonah's anger into a deeper and darker place, into a place of utter distress, saying, God, it would be better for me to die than to live. And God responds with a question. He says, son, are you sure? Do you think that this is the right response? Where are these actions taking you? Are you on the right path right now? Verse 5 helps us to see furthermore what Jonah is feeling. So Jonah leaves the city in verse five and makes a hut outside the city or a booth outside the city. He does this because he's trying to get comfortable. He's trying to avoid the sun. The heat in the Middle east is not, it's not like the heat that we get in Michigan. It's not, you know, the sun isn't like, you know, in the Middle East. It's not like the first day of spring when we get sunburned. At least that's what I get because I'm the shade of sour cream. I'm pretty white and so I get burnt like crazy. But it's even more dangerous than that. It could take people's life. And so he's making this hut for himself. And he sits down. He's waiting to see God destroy the city. It's as if Jonah's outside or he's at a sports game and he's making a little booth for himself to watch, to become a spectator of what would become of Nineveh. Jonah makes himself comfortable in the hopes that he would see thousands of people suffer. God sees that Jonah is not getting the point, and that leads us into our second point, When God's mercy corrects our misery God is going to correct Jonah here in verse 6, God then appoints a plant to come up over Jonah to grow rapidly, and this results in Jonah going from exceedingly sad to exceedingly glad. And then in verse seven, God, it said, but God, or But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm to attack the plant so that it withered. Notice a familiar word that keeps coming up here that we saw in chapter one, the word appointed. Just like God had appointed a fish to rescue Jonah, the plant was more than rescue from the heat. It was there to correct Jonah. God wanted to show him something. And yet this frustrated Jonah. In verse nine, it says, but God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do well to be angry. Angry enough to die, God. Jonah's essentially saying, God, I'd rather die than be in this discomfort, than be around you, who's not only not punishing Nineveh, but also forcing me to suffer in this way. Now, there's something before we move on, we have to examine here, because it's not in our English translations. It's this word raha. It's a Hebrew word that means disaster, displease, discomfort, evil, or even ugliness. This word pops up three times in this ending. It actually starts in Jonah 3, verse 10, and it pops up two more times in chapter 4. He says in Jonah 3 that the Ninevites were rescued from their disaster, or racha. In verse one of chapter four, it says, but it displeased, or Racha. It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and that he was angry that Jonah's heart was turning ugly, it was turning towards evilness, the disaster. In verse 10, it was the ugliness that would have been poured out on Nineveh. And in verse 6, Jonah is saved from his discomfort, from his raha, the ugliness that would have happened to him, the bad outcome that would have happened to him. Now, I'm not just bringing up Hebrew words because it's fun or it's Interesting. I oftentimes don't intentionally, because nobody knows Hebrew. Not even many pastors know Hebrew. It's a terrible language. Anyways. Greek I understand a little bit, but Hebrew, never mind. You guys don't need to know that. But the point in bringing this up, the point in any of this, is that Jonah writes this intentionally. The reason that this word comes up three times in this short section, the short amount of verses, is because Jonah wants us to see something here. He wants us to see something and not to miss it. The original reader wouldn't have been able to miss it. I don't want you to miss it. What Jonah is saying to the reader is what God did for Nineveh, he did for me. And I missed it. I missed it. I was wrong. I had this whole thing wrong about God. I only wanted what I wanted. I wanted what my heart desired. I didn't want God's heart. I thought that my ways were higher than his ways. I didn't see his mercy. I didn't see how beautiful he was. I didn't see how gentle he was being with me. And that's what we see in these last two verses. Verses 10 and 11. It says, and the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? God is saying to Jonah, I saved you. I was the one who did it. I saved you in the boat. I saved you when you jumped into the sea. I'm saving you now. God's saying, I was the one who did it. But you're mad at me for doing the same thing for Nineveh. You don't even care about the cattle. You care about the plant, and you don't even care about the cattle there, let alone the people who bear my image in that city. Jonah was mad that God didn't destroy them. God was showing Jonah that he loves Nineveh, that his heart breaks for them. Jonah would have preferred for the plant to live and for Nineveh to die. He loved comfort more than compassion. And that's where God presses this question into Jonah that Jonah doesn't want to hear, that we don't want to hear. Do you pursue God's heart or just your own preferences? And that leads us to our main idea for today. Main idea: God's mercy is greater than our preferences. God's mercy is greater than our preferences. But essentially, God is asking Jonah this do you pursue my heart? Do you want to continue to act the way you think, the way you think you should? Or do you want something infinitely better? Too many people sit in church week after week feeling this feeling of God. I really just want to be able to do what I want. But I know that you, your word says that I shouldn't do these certain things, but I just. I see these as rules. And there's this tension in a lot of people's hearts who sit in churches week after week. This heart wrestling of going, these laws feel like they're keeping me from really what I want to do. The truth is, as we get to know each other more and more, I want to help you get to understand a little bit more of me. But I'm not going to be the kind of pastor who leads a moral reformation. The truth is, I don't really want you guys to leave here simply being more moral. I don't want you to leave being less moral. But if you leave here today with 10 tips on how to follow God a little bit better, you've missed the point. If you leave today here going, well, I need to try harder and be better, and God will love me for that. You've missed the point. If you want to run after your own desires, I'm not going to be the kind of pastor who stops you, because God won't stop you either. Romans, chapter one lays this out for us, actually, in some nice clarity. It says, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man. Therefore, God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts, to the impurity, to dishonoring their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. You might think, okay, that sounds pretty harsh. That sounds. It doesn't really sound that good. And yet I want to lay it on thick here. This is what God calls his wrath. I specifically left out verse 18, which is the intro to that section. It says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness. We think about God's wrath in a couple different ways. We think of it as hellfire and brimstone coming against judgment, against those who are doing wrong. But the New Testament lays it out for us like this. God is going to allow us to run after the sinful and evil desires of our heart, that is enough punishment. That's the same kind of punishment of hellfire and brimstone. And we think, wow, that seems pretty, pretty easy. Sounds like I can still do the things that I want. If you are thinking that you don't understand your sin. Our sin divorces us from our soul. It separates us from who we are. Our sin allowing us to run after our sin is torture in God's eyes. It will destroy us. This is what Jonah's doing. He's running after what he wants. God comes to Jonah and asks him, where does this path lead you? Where does living you do you lifestyle lead? How is it, how is it beneficial to you, Jonah, that you could do this? That you could run from me? Can't. The truth is you can chase what you want only for so long before you find yourself outside the loving arms God. I'm not saying that there's a place that you can run to that you can be so disobedient that you can be beyond forgiveness. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a reality that you can run so far from God that you find yourself permanently separated from him again. This isn't a try harder be better message. This isn't a if I do the things that God asks me to do, then I won't be outside God's loving arms. And that'll be good for me. No, the only way for you to follow God's law in joy, in a joyful attitude, is by pursuing his heart, is by loving Him. We can't do it any other way. A white knuckled trying to be obedient to God's law will not grant us anything except for resentment. We have to love the God who gives us his word, who gives us his law. When we love him, we'll fall in love with what he commands us to do. It's not always easy, it's not always comfortable. But it's always centered on what's true and eternal. There's a hymn by John Newton. He was the same person who wrote Amazing Grace. He wrote a hymn. It was never put to music, but it's one of my favorite pieces of literature written in all of Christianity. It says this. Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before, since we have seen his beauty are joined to part no more. To see the law by Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice transforms a slave into a child and duty into choice. What this hymn represents is what it is talking about is at some point in our Life following our duty to God, being obedient to God was separate from our pleasure, was separate. It was a burden on us. But when we see Christ, when we become a child, when we are transformed from a slave into a child, that duty, that obedience, becomes something that's light. It becomes a choice, becomes something that we live into. That leads us to our points of application. First, we must remember God's goodness before suffering comes. One of the worst times to be given a book on suffering is when you're in the midst of it. If you've ever been there and a well intentioned Christian has given you that, it can feel, it can feel harsh. We need to prepare ourselves before suffering comes. Trials and suffering will come. This is a promise to all of us as humans, especially those of us as Christians. Are we ready? Are you ready to see God in the midst of suffering? Or will you be like Jonah and run? Jonah forgot that the same God who could be trusted, who rescued him from the sea, could be trusted with the city. If we remember God's goodness before the storm, we will forget him in the midst of it. Suffering can be hard for us individually, but some of the hardest things for us spiritually is not just our own suffering, but seeing those around us suffering, seeing our spouse, seeing our parents, seeing our children or our brothers and sisters, our friends suffer can be detrimental, can be so hard on us spiritually. My challenge for you this week is to take inventory of the things and the people in your life. Pray to God this week about how he can prepare you for suffering. That's what you got in your bulletin this week. It's a prayer, a prayer guide. I challenge you. Take 15 minutes this week, go through that, prepare your heart, because suffering will come. And if we're not ready for it now, it'll be incredibly hard for us later. Trials will happen. God will bring us through suffering. Will we pursue him or our own sense of what's right and wrong? And that leads us into our last point of application. Recognize the danger of loveless orthodoxy. The reality is that Jonah had good, good theology. He even quoted scripture. The problem isn't that Jonah didn't believe the right things. It's that Jonah didn't love God's heart. The thing about us as reformed people is that we don't just love being right, we love knowing that we're right. Probably more than any other denomination, that's true of us. I feel that I've. I had a professor say that to me once and I was like, oh, that cuts right to the Heart. It's easy for us to say that God is powerful and yet we don't fear God. It's easy for us to sing songs about God's mercy and yet demand justice of all the people around us. It's easy for us to say that God is infinite and yet try to force him into a box small enough, small enough that we believe we can control Him. Having good theology is often like obedience. If we do it out of a heart that is not in love with God, it is meaningless. You will not be able to be joyfully obedient or have good theology without loving God. And if you try, you will miss the point entirely. The truth is, Satan can pick up God's word and say that this whole book is inerrant, that there's not one word in here that isn't true. Satan can say that. He just hates that. It is true. He hates it. Jonah's theology was flawless, but his heart was frozen. He could quote Exodus, but he couldn't rejoice in it. Orthodoxy without love is idolatry. Don't pass up delighting in God, delighting in the heart of God for something so shallow as having good orthodoxy, good theology. It's an idol that leads us actually away from God. How is it that we can run in joyful righteousness? How is it that we can love theology and not be a shell? It's not idolatry. Why is it that we can pursue God's heart? It's because on the cross Jesus heart was was crushed. Jesus heart was pierced and water flowed out of it. God wanted, or Jonah wanted Nineveh to perish and Jesus died to save the Ninevites on the cross. God crushed the heart of His Son so that ours could be made new. This is why we can pursue God's heart. It's because his grace, his mercy, already pursued us. Jonah ran from God's heart. Jesus revealed God's heart for sinners. Jonah sat outside the city waiting and hoping for judgment. Jesus went outside the city ready to bear our judgment, the judgment for us. We can love good works, we can love righteousness, good theology, obedience, and not have it be idolatry. Because we can love the heart of the infinite, God of the universe, a heart that bursts forth with mercy for the undeserving Ninevites and for us as undeserving sinners, prosper as we leave here. But let's be reminded that God's mercy is greater than our preferences. Do you pursue God's heart? Would you stand with me as we pray? And prepare to respond in worship. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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

Never Alone Marriage Conference Christmas Eve Times Come celebrate the birth of Christ with us at Prosper CRC’s Christmas Eve Candlelight Services! Services will be held on December 24th at 5 PM, & 7 PM . Nursery will be available for children birth-5 years old. We invite you and your family to join us for this special evening of worship and reflection. Breakout Speakers Name Name Name Name Name Name Frequently Asked Questions What is the theme of the 2025 Marriage Conference? “Never Alone” is the theme for the Peace Church 2025 Marriage Conference. We are never alone; we walk through life with our spouse, with our church, and with our Savior. How do I register? You can register for the 2025 Marriage Conference here . What is the conference schedule? Friday 5:30 PM | Doors open 6:00 PM | Session One & Worship Night 7:30 PM | Resource Shop Opens Saturday 8:00 AM | Check In, Breakfast, and Resource Shop 9:00 AM | Welcome and Worship 9:45 AM | Session Two 10:45 AM | Breakout #1 11:30 AM | Lunch + Resource Shop Open 12:30 PM | Breakout #2 1:30 PM | Session Three 2:30 PM | Q/A Session 3:00 PM | Concluding Worship 4:00 PM | Resource Shop Closes Can I bring my children? Childcare is offered only during the Friday night session. Will meals be provided? Breakfast and lunch will be provided as well as snacks throughout the day. Who can I contact for more information? Contact Nicole Baumann for more information. What if I have a food allergy? You can select your lunch choice in your registration. We will have dairy and gluten free options available! Does this conference celebrate same-sex "marriage"? No. Click here if you'd like to learn more about our biblical views on sexuality. Will we be in the new worship center? Most likely! Will this be live-streamed? No, however we will have the Keynote recordings available for a limited time after the conference to attendees. Can I attend this if I am engaged? Yes! Vision To see the Gospel embraced and passed on for generations of Kingdom impact. Mission At Peace Church, we are Gospel-Centered, Family-Focused, and Kingdom-Minded. Sponsors Sponsors 2024 Conference Messages

Upcoming Events Stay Connected Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest ministry updates. Newsletter Sign Up Contact Us Go Interested in Serving? Go Stay Connected Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest ministry updates. Newsletter Sign Up Interested in Serving? Go Go Stay Connected Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest ministry updates.