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Read what Pastor Mitchell has to say on a variety of different topics Prosper Blog Grace Makes You a Charity Case Mitchell Leach Grace Makes You a Charity Case Mitchell Leach We want to work for what we receive. We want to pay our own way and earn our place. This is true in nearly every part of life, and it often becomes true of the way we relate to God. We begin to think that if we work hard enough, obey consistently enough, or become useful enough, God will be pleased with us. This is the question that will wear out your soul: Am I working hard enough for God? Paul addresses this directly in Galatians 3: Bible, Theology A Plain Guide to What We Believe About Dispensationalism Mitchell Leach Is God a God who tests humanity, watches it fail, and starts over with a new arrangement? Or is he a God whose purpose never wavers — whose covenant never changes, whose plan was never derailed, never improvised, never interrupted by human failure? That is the question this paper is about. And it is not abstract at all. The answer determines how you read every page of your Bible, how you understand the church you belong to, and what you believe about the God you worship. Position Paper, Theology What We Believe About Dispensationalism Mitchell Leach Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism and its theological interpretations. While we wouldn’t call this faulty belief system heretical, we would strongly declare that it is erroneous and an improper way to handle God’s word. The failure in this theology is that it divorces God from his steadfast love, or covenant love. God’s covenantal love for his people becomes dependent on the time in which he speaks. Bible, Position Paper The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word which marks true Christian faith. Position Paper, Theology Rebaptism and the Promise That Does Not Repeat Mitchell Leach The question of rebaptism is not new. The church has wrestled with it for nearly two millennia, and the consistent testimony of the historic, catholic, and Reformed church is that baptism is once-for-all. The modern practice of rebaptism does not arise from Scripture or from historic Christianity; Theology, Church History First Prev 1 Page 1 Next Last

Grace Makes You a Charity Case We want to work for what we receive. We want to pay our own way and earn our place. This is true in nearly every part of life, and it often becomes true of the way we relate to God. We begin to think that if we work hard enough, obey consistently enough, or become useful enough, God will be pleased with us. This is the question that will wear out your soul: Am I working hard enough for God? Paul addresses this directly in Galatians 3: Heading 5 Grace Makes You a Charity Case Mitchell Leach July 27, 2026 Theology, Bible Most of us don’t want to be charity cases. We want to work for what we receive. We want to pay our own way and earn our place. This is true in nearly every part of life, and it often becomes true of the way we relate to God. We begin to think that if we work hard enough, obey consistently enough, or become useful enough, God will be pleased with us. This is the question that will wear out your soul: Am I working hard enough for God? Paul addresses this directly in Galatians 3: “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”—Galatians 3:1–3 The Galatians had received the gospel. Jesus Christ had been publicly portrayed before them as crucified. They understood that they were saved through faith in Christ. Yet now they were living as though Christ had begun their salvation, but they would need to finish it through their own effort. Paul’s question is simple: Did God come to you as a boss paying wages, or as a Father giving gifts? Grace Is Offensive to Hard Workers Grace is difficult for hardworking people because grace makes you a charity case before it makes you useful. Legalism affirms that we can save ourselves. It says that if you somehow work hard enough, God will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. This is what you deserve. You’ve been good, so I’m happy with you.” But the reality is that Christians can hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” only because the Father treated Jesus like us in order to treat us like Jesus. For us to insist on getting what we are owed is to insist on our destruction. Paul writes: “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.’”—Galatians 3:10 The problem is not God’s law. God’s law is good. The problem is our attempt to use the law to make ourselves righteous. If we want to stand before God based on our obedience, we must obey everything. We do not get to present our best moments and ignore the rest. We cannot offer God sincere effort and demand that he call it righteousness. The law requires perfect obedience. We have not given it. God Loves Obedience Before you write an angry email or comment, hear this: God is delighted when we are transformed by Jesus trading places with us on the cross by taking our sin, then by coming to new life with him through his resurrection, and then responding by obeying his laws and commandments. This is precious to God. First Samuel 15:22 says: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice.” This isn’t only confined to the Old Testament. In John 14:15, Jesus says: “If you love me, keep my commands.” God loves when we obey what he has told us to do because his law reveals part of who he is. When God commands us not to worship other gods, it’s because he is saying, “There’s only one God, and I’m him.” When he tells us not to worship carved images—not just of false gods, but also of the one true God—he is saying, “I’m infinite and eternal. I cannot be contained in something material. Not even your mind.” God wants us to obey because he knows what is right and true. Every time we don’t follow him, we break away from our Creator. God loves our obedience when it is done with the right intention. But when we try to leverage our obedience toward God as an act to earn God’s favor, it is disgusting to him. My Kids Are Bad Artists My kids are bad artists. It is a hard thing to say, but as I step back from my emotional connection to my kids and their art and critically look at what they’ve made, it’s not something an art gallery would hang. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing better or more precious than when my children make art out of their pure, childish imagination and give it to me out of pure love. I still have a misspelled card that my son made me in my office from two years ago, simply because when he gave it to me, it was him saying, “I made this for you because I love you, and this is the best that I can do.” But later, this same son of mine—in an attempt to get out of cleaning the playroom—made me a crayon drawing and said, “Here is a picture. Now I don’t have to clean the playroom.” At that moment, that artwork wasn’t something I wanted to cherish or even keep. It was a worthless piece of paper because of the heart behind it. Our children’s art doesn’t have any monetary value, nor would it win any awards. When it’s given out of a heart that is trying to earn something from us, it actually disgusts us—or at least it did for me. But when it is given as an act of love in response to the love we’ve given them, it is priceless. This is similar to the way God feels about us trying to earn his favor or love through our good works. Our works aren’t impressive enough to place God in our debt. Yet when they come from a heart of love in response to the love he has given us, they are precious to him. The difference is not the quality of the artwork. It is the heart behind it. Our Obedience Can Become Rebellion Isaiah 64:6 says: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” This passage uses clearly strong language against our righteous deeds. The original Hebrew is even stronger than many English translations communicate. The polluted garment Isaiah describes was a ceremonially unclean rag. Why does Isaiah describe our righteous deeds this way? Because we have perverted what God designed for our good and turned it into evil. We take obedience, which should be a loving response to God, and turn it into a way to twist God’s arm into loving us more or blessing us more. Just like a child who tries to trick his parent out of cleaning the playroom, God is greatly displeased when we use his law as a weapon against him. Our obedience becomes an act of rebellion when we use it to replace grace. Religion says, “I obey; therefore, God accepts me.” The gospel says, “God has accepted me in Christ; therefore, I obey.” The order matters. Abraham Believed God Paul continues his argument by pointing back to Abraham: “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’ Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.”—Galatians 3:6–7 Abraham was not made righteous because he had done enough. He believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Abraham brought no credentials. He came with faith in the promise of God. Paul’s argument is that this has always been the way God saves his people. God does not save people because they have earned his blessing. He gives the blessing through faith. The gospel was announced beforehand to Abraham when God said, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” This blessing would not remain within one family or one nation. It would come to all those who share Abraham’s faith. We are not brought into God’s family through our ancestry, our religious background, or our performance. We are brought in through faith in Christ. Christ Became a Curse for Us The law does not save us. It exposes our guilt. Paul writes: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”—Galatians 3:13 The cross is where your earnings go to die. Christ did not come to help us pay the rest of our debt. He came because we could not pay it. We stood under the curse of the law. Jesus took that curse upon himself. He traded places with us on the cross. He received what we should have received, and in return, we are treated as he deserves to be treated. Paul says this happened: “So that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”—Galatians 3:14 Christ took the curse so that we could receive the blessing. We do not receive the Holy Spirit as a wage. We receive the Spirit as a gift. We do not become God’s children because we have proven ourselves useful. We become useful because God has first made us his children. Bleeding Charity One of my favorite dialogues from all the books I’ve read is a passage from The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. In this dialogue, the Ghost—representing a soul from hell—clings to a sense of self-righteousness and entitlement based on his own deeds and perceived moral standing. He believes he deserves certain rights because of his actions and life choices. He explains that he has gone straight all his life. He admits that he was not religious and had faults, but insists that he did his best. He paid for what he took. If he received wages, it was because he did the work. He wants nothing more than his rights. The other man tells him that getting his rights would not be good news. He says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better.” Still, the Ghost insists that he does not want anyone’s “bleeding charity.” The response is: “Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” Christianity isn’t a marketplace. It’s a mercy seat. As Christians, our hope eternally is based on the reality that we are charity cases. We need the bleeding charity of Christ. This is the understanding that we are poor in spirit. Insisting on earning our favor or our righteousness is—as Tim Keller said—“being middle class in spirit.” The poor in spirit know they cannot pay. They know they do not have enough righteousness to bargain with God. They do not ask for their rights. They ask for mercy. Everything Is Here for the Asking The question is not whether you have worked hard enough. You haven’t. The question is not whether you have obeyed enough, prayed enough, served enough, or made yourself useful enough. You haven’t. The question is whether Christ has done enough. He has. The Christian life begins when we stop bargaining with God. We come before him without leverage, without credentials, and without any claim that he owes us something. We ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking, and nothing can be bought. Whether or not prayer is effective (and it is effective), we are called to be followers of Christ. The question shouldn’t be “Does prayer change things?” But rather “Is Jesus God?” Because if he is in fact God, then what he says goes. Questioning God on whether his commandments make sense to us is a grievously offensive practice. In doing so we (as finite creatures) are inferring that we — somehow — have a better perspective... If God Is Sovereign, Why Pray? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Pray With Us “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” — Philippians 4:6 (ESV) Paniba PANIBA is a Christian ministry committed to feeding the hungry, sharing the love of Jesus, and strengthening vulnerable communities in the Dominican Republic. Their heart is especially for children and families living in economically disadvantaged areas, where access to nutritious food is limited and basic needs often go unmet. Through weekly feeding programs, PANIBA provides nutritious meals to children to help them grow, learn, and thrive physically, mentally, and spiritually. These gatherings aren’t just about food — they include worship, Bible teaching, games, and intentional time to share the hope of Christ with young lives. In addition to nourishing children, PANIBA extends care to elderly and disadvantaged adults, offering monthly grocery support for those who otherwise have no safety net. The ministry partners with local churches and volunteers to meet both practical needs and spiritual hunger, demonstrating God’s love with compassion, dignity, and respect. Please be in prayer for Keith & Phylla DeRuiter and the DeRuiter family as Keith will begin immuno-therapy treatments next week. They would appreciate prayers for comfort as they navigate treatments long term. Please be in prayer for Claire Sullivan who has begun 10-weeks of advanced training for the Military Police of the U.S. Army. Her birthday is August 15 and she is greatly encouraged by notes from her church family: PFC Sullivan, Claire A Co. 795th MP BN Bldg. 901 Plt. 2 7676 Loyalty Loop Ft. Leonard Wood, MO 65473 Please pray for the lost in our area, asking that God would open hearts to the good news of the gospel. Pray that Prosper CRC would be a faithful and significant part of God’s plan to reach those who do not yet know Christ. Thankful prayer fromm the DeRuiter family: The family of Ken DeRuiter sincerely wishes to thank our wonderful church family here at Prosper following Ken's cancer diagnosis and his passing on to his eternal heavenly home. We were blessed with meals, baked goodies, cards and MOST importantly, the prayers that we know are still being lifted. Thank you, Pastor Mitchell for giving the true gospel message, Pastor Jim DeZeeuw for the beautiful eulogy, the wonderful lunch that was prepared and served, and everyone who was involved behind the scenes. To God Be The Glory. Al Koster is dealing with the effects of cancer. Al and Carol would greatly appreciate the prayers of their church family during this time. Be mindful of our members who find it difficult to get out during this time of year, especially: Gary VanBuskirk, Sandy Pastula, Jeanette Dick, Ruth Brinks, and Judy Heethuis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowned with Praise Prosper Christian Reformed Church Crowned with Praise Crowned Mitchell Leach Sunday, March 29, 2026 Audio Crowned with Praise Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 42:16 Sermon Transcript This morning's scripture reading comes from Matthew 21:1-11. This will be our second part of our 5-sermon series, our 3-week series that we're going to be going through. We are going to have 2 midweek services this week, one on Maundy Thursday at 6:30 and another on Good Friday at 5:30. So if you have the ability to come out to that, it will be something that you don't want to miss. And then obviously on Easter Sunday we'll have that. Scripture Reading Matthew 21:1-11 Hear this, the word of the Lord. Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples saying to them, go into the village in front of you and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, the Lord needs them and he will send them at once. This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, say to the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden. The disciples went and did as Jesus directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, 'Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!' And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, 'Who is this?' The crowd said, 'This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.' This is the word of the Lord. Big Question Who is Jesus? As we enter into this Palm Sunday, the question that comes from the text, the question that we need to answer, and the question that everyone must answer is this: Who is Jesus? Every person on earth has to answer this question, whether Christian or not. If you've ever talked with anyone who doesn't believe in Christianity about Jesus, you'll notice that they have an answer for Jesus. They have to. Jesus is too important. He is too controversial. He is too persistent for people to simply ignore. To simply not have an answer for who is Jesus is something that we can't do. Every major world religion has a way to explain him. Islam says that he's a prophet, a great prophet, but simply a prophet. Buddhism says that he's a teacher, that he's moral, that he's wise, he's worth listening to. Secular historians say that he's a revolutionary, a man who changed history. And even inside the church, you ask 10 people, 'Who is Jesus?' you'll get 10 different answers. Maybe he's a personal therapist who helps you feel better about yourself. He's a fire insurance policy there to ease your conscience. A moral example that you can admire, or a social activist who was ahead of his time. We have been asking this question, 'Who is Jesus?' for 2,000 years. Kings, scholars, philosophers, historians, skeptics, all answering this question and we still cannot agree. Who is Jesus? Which either means one of two things. Either it means that we can't answer this question, that the answer is not knowable, or that we've been getting it wrong. Who is Jesus? The Bible has an answer for us, and Matthew writes this chapter, writes this section, because he's saying we have been getting this wrong. We are prone as human beings to get this wrong. So keep your Bibles open with me as we look at Matthew 21:1-11. Outline He Presents Himself (Matthew 21:1-5) They Shout His Praise (Matthew 21:6-9) They Still Don't See (Matthew 21:10-11) He Presents Himself (Matthew 21:1-5) This passage will show us this: Jesus enters Jerusalem as the promised king, receiving public praise while revealing that his kingdom comes in humility and peace and not in worldly power. Where we're at in this series — last week we saw that Jesus had this defining moment in his ministry. In the Gospels, there's really two halves of each Gospel. The first half is his ministry on earth, the first 2 years and some change, and then the rest of it is the last week of his life. A predominant amount of the gospels are focused on the last week of his life. That turning towards Jerusalem that we saw last week starts this last week where he's walking towards Jerusalem, walking towards his crucifixion. Matthew 21 is one of the most public moments in Jesus's ministry. It's designed to force us to ask and answer the question, 'Who is this?' The way that Jesus presents himself matters here. In the next series of events that unfold in this passage, we see imagery that proclaims the greatness of Jesus, not just as a king, but as something more. In this section, Jesus shows us and the world that he is God, and yet he has come in humility. Matthew 21:1-3 says this: 'Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, "Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. And if anyone says anything to you, you shall say, "The Lord needs them," and he will send them at once."' Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, on this march towards his final destination of his ministry on earth. He stops at the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives is significant for a couple of reasons. One, just in terms of where he is topographically, the Mount of Olives is the only peak in all of Israel that is higher than Jerusalem. Jerusalem is on a mountain itself and the Mount of Olives is slightly higher. So Jesus is on this march towards Jerusalem and he's stopping here, able to see all of the city — the city where he will be persecuted, where he will be arrested, tried, and just outside the city walls where he will be crucified. The Mount of Olives is also where the Garden of Gethsemane is. On Good Friday, we'll talk a lot more about that, but this is the place where Jesus sweat blood. The Mount of Olives has a ton more historical significance tying back to King David and different things like that. But Jesus essentially, by stopping here, is one subtle way of saying that he is king. But this is where they stop to make a plan for what will happen. I think this is an interesting point to just stop and think about. Jesus doesn't just do things willy-nilly. Jesus has a plan. I think oftentimes when we think about Jesus, or spirituality, we think it needs to be authentic, it needs to be in the moment, we can't really have anything planned out. But Jesus is deliberate here. He stops and makes a plan. The sovereign God of the universe is orchestrating what will happen. I think oftentimes when we think of our own spiritual life, we think, well, if I pray, it has to be something that just comes to me in the moment, but prayer can be something that we even write or rehearse. It can be deliberate. It can be planned out. There are a lot of things in our Christian life that should be planned out. Jesus teaches us that we don't need to only live in the moment. So Jesus, in this planning, he goes and asks the disciples to go get a donkey and a colt. An interesting thing about this — why this would have been strange to any first-century Jewish person reading this — Passover was a celebration, a festival that you were required to walk to. Jesus, up until this point, had walked 100 miles to get to the Mount of Olives. The choice to ride a donkey in on the last 2 or 3 miles in a pilgrimage full of pedestrians is not convenience, it's not coincidence. He's doing something incredibly theological. He is setting himself up as the Messiah. He wants everyone to see him as the Messiah. The time for hiding behind the miracles and saying, 'Don't tell anyone,' is over. As he rides a donkey into Jerusalem, he's proclaiming himself as the Messiah. When we hear that word Messiah, there's a lot of connotation that comes with that. We think of Jesus, we think of the Lord. But when a Jewish person would have heard the term Messiah, they would have never connected that with this fully God, fully man person. When they hear Messiah, they think this is going to be a king, an anointed king like David, who's going to set up another 200 years of prosperity and blessing for the kingdom of Israel. He's going to come and conquer all of their enemies and he will defeat them. He will allow them to have their own nation back, their own kingdom. They were expecting Jesus to be a conquering king, a king who would destroy Rome. It makes sense to us now when we look back on the Old Testament and see all of this prophecy about the Messiah being God. But this was not their expectation. So Jesus, by doing this, is making a statement just by getting on the donkey that he is the Messiah. Every Jewish person watching this knows that this is what Jesus is intending to do. He says, 'If someone's giving you trouble, say that the Lord has sent you.' There are two ways to interpret this, and I think both are equally valid. Either Jesus was intending to say the Lord needs them in terms of Yahweh needs them, or the Lord needs them in terms of a medieval lord — a title of lordship. Either way, whether it's a boss or Yahweh himself, what Jesus is saying is, I'm sovereign over everything. All things belong to me. If it's Yahweh, this is God himself needs your donkey. Or if it's a lord, yes, you might be the rightful owner of that animal, but the true owner needs it back. And all this happened to fulfill what the Old Testament said. Matthew 21:5 says: 'Say to the daughter of Zion, "Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden."' Matthew wants us to see something here. He wants his readers to see that Jesus is the king but came in a new way. The passage quoted here from the Old Testament is actually two passages, one from Isaiah and one from Zechariah, both about the Messiah. The main reason Jesus uses them is to highlight something that would not have been popular in the ancient world of leaders and kings — Jesus's humility. Jesus's humility, the humility of a leader, of a king, would have been so foreign to anyone outside of Israel. To describe a king as humble would have been an insult to any king. It described someone who lacked the power or will to assert themselves — essentially a weakling. But the Old Testament said that the Messiah will be meek, will be humble, because he will be like Moses. Moses was described as being meek, but his meekness was because he laid down his own agenda in submission to God's. Jesus's meekness is not the absence of power, it is the presence of power held back. It is the sovereign choice not to conquer with force. Jesus could have rode in on a war horse. He owned all the war horses. But he didn't. He chose a donkey. And yet Jesus' meekness is not niceness. This is not wimpy Jesus. This is not passive Jesus. What he's doing is saying, yes, I absolutely could come in with force and yet I'm choosing to go and suffer instead. Dorothy Sayers has this amazing quote. She says this: 'We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him meek and mild, and recommended him as a fitting house pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.' Dorothy Sayers wrote this in 1949 and I think within the church, this notion of a weak and emascified Jesus has only grown stronger. We've sanded down all the sharp edges of Jesus, everything offensive from Jesus. We've made him palatable, agreeable, pliable, safe. But meekness was never meant to be the same thing as niceness. Niceness avoids conflict. Meekness walks straight into Jerusalem knowing exactly what needs to be done there. This is not a house pet that we see here in this passage. This is a sovereign God choosing suffering over power. This is a king who has already decided what his power is for. They Shout His Praise (Matthew 21:6-9) So Jesus has staged this moment purposefully, deliberately. He has given every signal and the crowd sees it. They respond to everything that he said with everything that they have. The problem is they believe they're certain of how they're supposed to respond and what they are responding to. So the disciples get the donkeys and Jesus rides the colt, an animal that's never been ridden before. They throw their cloaks down. This act of throwing cloaks down seems kind of like a footnote, but this was important. This is not just an improvised action. This was a coronation ritual. It goes back to Jehu in 1 and 2 Kings. Jehu was coronated as the king of Israel and they threw cloaks down in front of him. This was a way to say, this is the one who we want to save us. The problem is they wanted to domesticate him. Jesus is presenting himself as Messiah, but they wanted to define what Messiah meant for them. Matthew 21:9 says this: 'And the crowds that went before him and the crowds that followed him were shouting, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!"' Hosanna is a word that means save us. Essentially, this thing that they're saying to Jesus is, we need saving. Here is the authorized one by God who can save, and we need saving. This is the gospel framework, right? Crying out that we need saving, a recognition of our own sinfulness. Seeing who our Savior is and rejoicing that this is the one who can save us. The crowds shout, 'Hosanna to the Son of David!' They are simultaneously praising and pleading for him to save them. The distinction between prayer and praise has collapsed. It is both. The king himself is the answer to the prayer. And Jesus' response to this is worthwhile noting. It's incredibly important. All throughout Jesus' ministry, he tells people not to talk about what he has done. In Matthew 9:29-30, he heals two blind men and he says, 'See to it that no one knows about this.' And now, the whole crowds are shouting and what does Jesus do? He doesn't turn them away. Jesus understands the time for secrecy is over. This worship is appropriate because he knows that he is going to die. The truth is that what the crowds are doing is actually right, it's just in a wrong heart posture. They aren't hypocrites in a technical sense; they are actually saying all of the right things. They are praising Jesus and inviting him to be their king. Hosanna and 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord' both derive themselves from Psalm 118. These psalms would have been sung by the king with the people as they were marching through the streets in a festival in worship. They're crying out to him saying, 'You're our king.' They're even using the right liturgy, the right terms to worship God, and this is real worship. Yet they miss who Jesus truly is. They want a king that they've invented in their own minds. They want another David, another king who would destroy their enemies but not destroy their true enemy, liberate them from Rome but not liberate them from sin, restore the kingdom of Israel but not inaugurate the kingdom of heaven. It is entirely possible to praise Jesus loudly, liturgically, and sincerely and to be praising a Jesus of your own imagination. The danger in this text, in our own hearts, is not rejection, not rejecting Jesus. It is Scripture-quoting worship of a domesticated Savior. It is worshiping God truthfully from the pages of Scripture and yet worshiping one that we've invented, one that truly isn't there, one that fits in a box that's convenient for us. Not the true infinite God of the universe. That is a Jesus that's nice, that's kind, that's easy for us, that's palatable for us, that we can grasp our arms around, one that we can control, the actions of whom we can predict. A Jesus that has the same morals as I do, who's concerned with the same social justice issues as me, who votes the same way that I do. And that, I think, is a real danger for us especially in our world today. The belief that the right leader, the right party, the right coalition, the right policy, the right revolution will finally fix what is broken — this is political idolatry. Political idolatry isn't the problem of caring so much about politics, but that we ask politics to do what only God can do for us. This is clear and evident in our text. They want a political king. They want someone who will come and make a nation for them, a kingdom for them. Jesus has something far superior for them. These visions of Jesus that we impose on him — we can find passages in Scripture that support our own version of Jesus. That's why we have churches on far ends of political and theological spectrums. We have churches that affirm homosexuality and they bring up passages to talk about Jesus as a social justice warrior. And we see also very legalistic churches who use passages of Scripture to justify their legalistic views. They're not hallucinations. We can find bits and pieces of them. The problem is with a curated Jesus, a Frankenstein's monster sort of Jesus where we take parts and pieces that we like from the gospels and mash them together. That is no longer Jesus. We can quote Scripture that supports our monstrosity but it isn't truly, fully the Lion of the tribe of Judah. One of the most dangerous things that we can say is, 'If Jesus were here today, he would...' whatever it is, fill in the blank. Unless we're saying Jesus would be truthful, or he wouldn't sin, we can say those things. But if we're trying to say, 'Here's a problem in our culture, if Jesus were here today he would do this, he would vote for my candidate, he would be Reformed, he would be Presbyterian, he would be Methodist' — it's one of the most dangerous things we can say. Nobody could predict what Jesus was about to do next. Not his disciples, not the people traveling with him, not the Pharisees. For us to believe that we can wrap our minds or our arms around Jesus, to contain him in a box that fits neatly in our worldview — it's to be as silly as Peter when he rebukes Jesus. C.S. Lewis says this: 'We want not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven, a senile benevolence who, as they say, likes to see young people enjoying themselves and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "A good time was had by all."' We want a God who will make our life better. We become like the people in the crowd. C.S. Lewis nailed it. We don't want a king, we want a benefactor. Someone who smiles at our choices and picks up the tab. A God who is endlessly supportive and never inconvenient. But that God does not exist. And deep down, we know it. Because a God small enough just to make you happy is not a big enough God to save you, and ultimately not a big enough God worthy of worship. They Still Don't See (Matthew 21:10-11) Matthew 21:10-11 says this: 'And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up saying, "Who is this?" And the crowd said, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee."' The whole town after hearing this parade of Jesus coming into Jerusalem asks the question, 'Who is this?' The town is stirred up. Actually, a better translation of that word 'stirred up' would be more closely tied to an earthquake — shaken would probably be a better word for this. Every time the true identity of Jesus presses in on those who do not recognize him, the whole world shakes. This word 'shaken' is consistent throughout Jesus's life. When Jesus was born, Bethlehem shook. When Jesus enters into Jerusalem, Jerusalem shook. When Jesus is crucified, the veil is torn and the earth shook. And on the third day, the tomb rolled away, the earth shook. History itself is being seismically reoriented around this man, the God-man, Jesus Christ. The only question is whether you will let him reorient your life. Who is this? This is the question they ask. Who is Jesus? The fragments of the truth have been laid throughout the gospel narratives leading up into this point. Some say king, some say the coming one, some say Jeremiah or Elisha. The people in Jerusalem say, 'A prophet.' To say, to call someone a prophet like they're calling Jesus is the highest thing that they can call someone. Spiritually, this is the greatest honor you could give someone in a title. This is the most glorious thing you could call someone. So are we overreacting that these people are just calling him a prophet? No, this is not an overreaction at all. To call Jesus merely a prophet is the greatest slight in human history. Categorically getting the person of Jesus wrong, putting him in an altogether different category. It would be like calling a man and a fish the same thing because they both have a heartbeat. Calling him a prophet is not just an error that's harmless. What you think about Jesus determines what you expect him to do. The crowd called him a prophet. But prophets don't rise to overthrow Rome. Prophets don't sit on thrones. So when he didn't do what a king would do, they turned on him. The Jesus that you expect determines the response that you give to the Jesus you get. The world has an answer for Jesus, each answer insufficient or wrong. There is only one answer. Main Idea Praise the humble King who comes to save What do we do when we see our king humble and riding on a donkey? We praise the humble King who comes to save. We have to praise Jesus for who he truly is, not the Jesus we want, but the Jesus who is truly there. The crowd goes from praising him to condemning him in a week. The Jesus they wanted was the one who would defeat Rome, but Jesus becomes the one who allows Roman guards to arrest him and crucify him. When this happens, they feel betrayed. The Jesus that you expect determines the response that you get from Jesus. A Jesus of your own imagination will disappoint you. I don't want you to miss that. When we imagine Jesus, when we create our own version of him, the Jesus that we can fit into a box, the Jesus that really has to be smaller than us if we're going to comprehend him, that Jesus will disappoint you. Oftentimes as a pastor, one of the most prominent questions I get asked is, 'Pastor, how do I get through a season of hardship? How do I get through a season of spiritual drought? I just don't feel a connection with God anymore.' Oftentimes, the answer to this is that we have brought Jesus so far down to our level, in fact, beneath us, that this is a Jesus that we don't even feel like we should worship. It's not a Jesus that we can connect to. An invented Jesus is not a Jesus worth worshiping. And so, honestly, we don't. We have to let go of the Jesus we like, the Jesus that we want to worship, and embrace the true and rightful King. The King who does things that we cannot predict, riding in on a donkey. The King who comes in sometimes with power, sometimes with anger, as we see if you just kept reading, as Jesus cleanses the temple. This Jesus we can't predict, this Jesus who is beyond our human capacity for reason. What do you do when you find a Jesus who scares you, who confronts you, who challenges you, who calls you out to something different, who calls you to something greater? Do you retreat to the Jesus that you knew, that you can hold in the box, that feels comfortable, or do you embrace a Jesus who might just scare you? If you become a Christian and none of your views shift, you've most certainly created a Jesus of your own imagination. True Christianity, the true Christ, challenges you. If you were very conservative before coming to know Christ and none of your views change, you've missed the very liberalness of Jesus that we see in the gospels, who cares about social justice, who cares about oppression, who cares about the poor. And if you're liberal and you become a Christian and nothing changes, you don't see the moral fortitude that Jesus has — the morality that is far more conservative than maybe you're comfortable with. The moral nature that says not only can you not commit adultery, but that you can't even lust. Far more conservative than maybe you'd care to admit. If Jesus doesn't challenge your paradigm, challenge your worldview, I guarantee that you're seeing a Jesus that you're inventing. True Christianity challenged the true Christ. He pushes us beyond our beliefs and changes everything that we do. The crowd thought that the donkey was the beginning, a humble entrance before the real display of power. Surely, riding in on a donkey was his entrance to take Jerusalem's throne back. The donkey was just the opening act before the war horse came out. But they had it exactly backwards. The donkey wasn't the prelude to his kingship; the donkey was his kingship. Don't you see? The donkey is the gospel. He comes in not to conquer but to be humiliated. It is the clearest possible announcement of the kind of king Jesus came to be. Not the king who rides out against his enemies, not the king who conquers by force, but the King who came to take the blows himself. Not the King who makes others suffer so he can reign, but the King who suffers so we can live. The road from the donkey leads straight to the cross. This was always his destination. He rode into Jerusalem not to take a throne, but to take a wound. The humility of his entry and the humility of the cross are the same thing. The voluntary surrender of a king who had all the power in the world and chose instead to spend it on you. That's what the prophet saw. Behold your king riding on a donkey, humble. Not humble until the real power shows up, humble as the very shape of our salvation. And that changes everything we know about God and every way we go before him. We want a king whose power looks like the world's power — force, dominance, victory over enemies. But Jesus said, I have given you something better. I have given you a king whose power looks like a donkey, looks like a cross, and looks like a tomb that could not hold him. This is not weakness dressed up as theology. This is the only power in the universe strong enough to defeat sin, to defeat evil, and to rise victorious over the grave. He is coming back. And this time he will not ride in on a donkey. Jesus will ride in on a war horse, on a blood-soaked robe, one that was bought with the humiliation of riding in on a donkey and being crucified on a cross. Through the humility that the world would call defeat, heaven has called victory. Application Bring someone to Easter You were handed a card on your way in and if you weren't, you need to grab one on your way out. All of Jerusalem asked, 'Who is Jesus?' And church, we know the answer to this. Let this week be a reminder to you as you have this card. This isn't a card to invite you to church, this is a card for you to give someone else. Hand this card to someone else. In fact, before you leave this morning, before you leave the doors to go out to your car, I want you to put a name to it. Know who you're going to give that to. Because I know how it works — you get home, you get in your car, and you start thinking about everything else you have to do. Have a name before you walk out. Easter is one week away. Invite someone to come and see, to come and ask the question, 'Who is Jesus?' And for us to be able to say, 'Jesus is the most glorious, risen God-man in all of human history, and he's our Savior who's alive and seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.' Audit your expectations of Jesus What are you asking Jesus now to do? Not a theological question, but a personal one. Are you asking him to fix your finances, your marriage, asking him to get you a better job? None of those are wrong prayers, absolutely not. But beneath them, what kind of king are you expecting to show up? A war horse king who comes in to overpower every obstacle in your path? Or worse, a king who is there only to serve you, to make your life more comfortable? Because I think oftentimes we turn Jesus into a concierge. He's there when we need something and he's invisible when we don't. We pull him out when life gets hard and we put him back when things are manageable. That is not a king, that is a spiritual vending machine. Jesus came on a donkey, not because he couldn't ride in on a war horse. He owned everything. Not because he couldn't afford a war horse, but because he held back power in order to serve others, and that's the whole point. Yes, Jesus came to serve, but he came to serve your deepest need. Not your most comfortable request. He didn't come to make your current life easier. He came to give you new life. He came to make you new. His meekness is not weakness. It is strength, strength that chose the cross over a crown. The King you have is better, I promise you, is better than the king that you wanted. Church, as we leave today, praise the humble King who comes to save. Closing Prayer Father God, we thank you and praise you for who you are, that you came in humble, riding in on a donkey, and that your humility, your humiliation did not end with that. But you humbled yourself in the form of a servant, humbled enough and obedient enough to die on a cross on our behalf. Father, we have no hope without you. We have no hope to save ourselves. Thank you for coming to save us, being wounded for our transgressions, stricken for our iniquity. God, you are good. Let us sing in response to how good you are. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

Crowned With Thorns Prosper Christian Reformed Church Crowned With Thorns Crowned Mitchell Leach Friday, April 3, 2026 Audio Crowned With Thorns Mitchell Leach 00:00 / 01:04 Sermon Transcript Scripture Reading Matthew 27:33-50 When they came to a place called Golgotha, which means the place of a skull, they offered him wine to drink mixed with gall. But when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, 'This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.' The two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on the left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, 'You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!' And also the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him, saying, 'He saves others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now if he desires him, for he said, "I am the Son of God."' And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' That is, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' And some of the bystanders hearing it said, 'This man is calling Elijah.' And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But others said, 'Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come.' And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. This is the word of the Lord. Some things feel like a footnote until you realize that they change everything. There's a story that came out of World War II, out of Auschwitz, where a prisoner had escaped and the guards found him and brought him back. As a punishment, they found 10 men at random to punish by starvation. One of the innocent men chosen at random, as he was being taken away toward a part of the camp where he would be starved to death, saw his wife and his children and broke down crying out, 'My wife! My children!' In the camp, there was a pastor who stepped forward. His name was Maximilian Kolbe. He didn't protest the injustice. He didn't negotiate a sentence. He simply offered himself. He said, 'Take me instead.' And that's exactly what happened. The man who was saved later recalled: 'I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on, the immensity of it. I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offering his life for me, a stranger. Is this some dream? I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian. I was saved and I owe him the fact that I could tell you all of this today.' The guilty went free, the innocent took his place. That is substitution. And everyone understands why a story like that would stay with you, because substitution is the only kind of love that saves. Big Question Why did Jesus have to die? We like the idea of forgiveness when it is cheap. We love the idea of love without justice. In some sense, we want a God who says, 'It's fine,' while still being a God who's holy. But if God just forgives, if he ignores sin, he stops being good. He stops being just. And if God punishes sin without mercy, then we have no hope. How can God be truly just and truly merciful all at the same time? That's the question — why did Jesus have to die? It's because sin cannot be waved away. Someone must bear it. Outline A Crown of Shame (Matthew 27:33-37) The Mockery of the Truth (Matthew 27:39-44) The Cry in the Dark (Matthew 27:45-49) The Final Surrender (Matthew 27:50) A Crown of Shame (Matthew 27:33-37) Matthew doesn't just point out the pain of what happens on the cross; he shows us shame. A king being treated like a joke. Let's look at Matthew 27:33-34: 'And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means "Place of a Skull," they offered him wine to drink mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it.' They are going to the address of death. This was outside the city and it is important to understand that during Passover it was against Jewish custom to kill someone inside the city. The Jewish leaders thought they were just expelling a blasphemer from their holy city, except they're doing something infinitely more important. Just like in Leviticus, a sin offering had to be given outside the camp. Jesus, in this moment, becomes the sin offering the world needed, sacrificed outside the city. They were enacting Leviticus without understanding it, sending a sacrifice outside so sinners could stay inside. John Calvin on this section has this written in his commentary: 'In no other way could our guilt be removed than by the Son of God becoming a curse for us. If God declares that our salvation was so dear to him that he did not spare his only begotten Son, what abundant grace do we here behold?' We see in this section Jesus taking the blows as he's being cast out. And this is the cup that he must drink in order to satisfy the wrath of God, which is exactly why he passes up the cup mixed with wine and gall. This cup was most likely a mild narcotic. When Jesus was in the garden praying to God, the imagery of this cup kept coming up. The cup he must drink is the cup of God's wrath, which is why he cannot drink this numbing cup. He must be fully present in order to bear the full weight of our sin. In Gethsemane, he resolved to drink the cup of God's wrath to the full. Matthew 27:35-37: 'And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him which read, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews."' Matthew sprints past the crucifixion, gives it just a couple words because he wants us to see that the mockers are the dialog here. He's writing in irony, not a gruesome description. This echoes Psalm 22 where they strip him and cast lots. The mockers are performing Psalm 22 in front of the one who wrote it. As Pilate nails the charge sheet above the cross intending to mock Jesus, the charge becomes a coronation proclamation. Despite every intention to strip Jesus of his kingship, every event here solidifies it. Look at who Jesus is crucified with — he's crucified with the accomplices to Barabbas, the one who was set free as Jesus took his place. The Romans wanted people to see that Jesus ends up on the wrong side of history. He is crucified with criminals. But the scene secures his kingship. The cross is his throne, the thorns his crown, the mockers his court, his witnesses. Everything is being set for Jesus to become the king that the world has longed for. The Mockery of the Truth (Matthew 27:39-44) Matthew in his gospel loves this theme of the upside-down kingdom. And here is the deepest irony in all of his gospel. Every taunt in this section accidentally becomes true. Matthew 27:39: 'And those who passed by him derided him, wagging their heads.' Any reader steeped in the Psalms would have been slapped in the face by Psalm 22:7, which says: 'All who seek me mock me, and they make their mouths at me, and they wag their heads.' These mockers are not improvising; they are performing a script that they have never read. Matthew wants us to see that we are inside Psalm 22, the psalm about the righteous sufferer, and here is a better David suffering beyond what any human ever had or will suffer. Matthew 27:40-44: 'You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in 3 days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!' Notice that phrase — 'If you are the Son of God.' That line has a history. It points directly back to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Luke records Satan saying, 'If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.' And when the temptation ended, Luke records: 'when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.' This is that opportune time. Satan has come back to tempt Jesus one more time through the mouth of the mockers — saying, 'Prove who you are by saving yourself.' But Jesus' mission was not to save himself. The crowd's logic is: if you are the Son of God, your divine identity gives you the power to escape. So do it. Prove it and we will believe. But the gospel logic is this: it's precisely because Jesus is the Son of God that he cannot come down. More evidence will not produce faith in people who have already hardened their hearts. Coming down from the cross will not make them believe. But even more — it will not save them. Jesus must be our substitute. He must stand in our place. He must be treated like us to treat us like him. He cannot save himself because we could not save ourselves. This is substitutionary atonement spoken out by mockers. John Stott in The Cross of Christ says this: 'The concept of substitution may be said to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be. God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserved to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone, and God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.' This is what Good Friday is all about. The Cry in the Dark (Matthew 27:45-49) For 12 verses, Matthew's been focused outward — on the soldiers, the passersby, the Sanhedrin, the criminals. The noise has been relentless, taunt after taunt, wave after wave of mockery. And then everything changes. Everything up until this point was about the horizontal suffering, the physical suffering from others. Now we will see not only the physical punishment but God's wrath and the spiritual punishment as well. Matthew 27:45: 'Now from the sixth hour there was darkness all over the land until the ninth hour.' Anyone who had read the Old Testament — this darkness equals judgment. Judgment has fallen on the Son for all the sin that God hates. A crucifixion was a spectacle, a show. People walked by just to see. It may be in this moment that the Father is hiding the Son's agony from public view. The holiest moment in the history of the world happens under a veil. 3 hours where heaven is saying, 'This is no longer entertainment; this must be atonement.' 'And about the 9th hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"' — that is, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Matthew writes this down in Aramaic because he was there. He remembers these were the exact words Jesus spoke. Everything else in the gospel is written in Greek except for this. He remembers the exact phrasing, the dialect, the language in which Jesus spoke it. This would have been a memory you couldn't possibly forget. And in this moment, Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1. This is not Jesus quoting a verse to stay religious. This is Psalm 22 becoming flesh. He is the righteous sufferer, and he is alone. Notice what Jesus says. He says, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Every prayer that Jesus has spoken up until this point started off with 'my Father,' 'our Father,' 'Father.' And here on the cross, he can't say that anymore. Jesus was not just experiencing the physical brutality of the cross; he is now abandoned by his Father. Jesus is suffering true, actual hell on the cross. The full wrath of God is being poured out. Jesus is not just experiencing what hell would be like if any one of us were there — he is experiencing every single chosen person's hell compounded into one moment. An agony, a spiritual agony no one of us can imagine. Jesus is bearing the full weight of sin on his shoulders. Isaiah 53 explains what's happening on the cross: 'Like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.' This is the answer to our big question: why did Jesus have to die? Because the Lord laid our iniquity on him. The curse that belongs to every lawbreaker, every idolater, every rebel against God is here concentrated and falling on the head of Jesus. Sin cannot be simply waved away. God could not have just snapped his fingers and said, 'We're going to let this go.' Sin had to be paid for. When something is broken, it has to be fixed. If you are the one who broke it, someone can forgive you, but that means the cost is now passed on to the owner. And that's what happens here on the cross. The Final Surrender (Matthew 27:50) 'And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.' Matthew doesn't record what he says, but other gospels do. The Gospel of John says that Jesus said, 'It is finished' — meaning the debt is paid, the account is settled, the curse has been borne. All the wrath towards God's chosen has been paid in full. There's no more wrath for you. There's no more wrath for me. He gave up his final breath. The irony of the cross is that the one who spoke the world into existence breathes out his last word, his last and final breath. Everything now that has been broken begins to come right. The King, the true King, reigns by giving himself and completing the work the Father set before him. If you want the simplest summary of Good Friday: Jesus' death is not a tragedy. He died as your substitute. And when he said, 'It is finished,' he meant there is nothing left to add. Not only does he bear the curse and remain faithful — at the very moment when he feels the most forsaken, he is the most faithful. This is not Jesus losing his grip. This is Jesus holding on. Richard Sibbes says this: 'Jesus is never more obedient, never pleases the Father more than when he utters these words on the cross. The moment of maximum God-forsakenness is simultaneously the moment of maximum obedience for Jesus.' The Father turns away, but Jesus doesn't. He does not recant. He does not curse the Father. He could have come down, but he stays. Not because nails held him, but because love did. Main Idea Behold the King who bears the curse for sinners Jesus stays on the cross so he could have you. He could have your whole heart, everything you are, because he loved you already. When Jesus cries out, it's not in a moment of weakness. It is in a moment of ultimate faithfulness. This is the greatest display of love in human history. Jesus becomes the promise of life made to us all the way back in the Old Testament, and he purchases it through his death. Jesus is treated as guilty so we can be treated as righteous. He is shut out so we can be brought in. Jesus is treated like us so we can be treated like Jesus. Application You cannot help yourself Jesus, as he's hanging on the cross, is mocked to save himself and yet he does not come down because we could not save ourselves. Everything that happens on the cross is a trade — a radical reversal. Jesus gets what we deserve. We get credited his righteousness, because we could not save ourselves. No amount of goodness in us makes us better in God's eyes. The beauty of the cross is that Jesus declares, 'It is finished.' If we try to save ourselves, if we try to add anything onto the cross after that, we're trying to make Jesus a liar. We're saying, 'Well, Jesus, I know you said it was finished but you didn't really mean it.' There would have been no need for Jesus to die if you and I could have been even 1% good enough to save ourselves. Believe that it is finished Have you come here tonight with spiritual agony in your soul? Have you come here with guilt and grief that you don't know what to do with? The cross answers this. There is a story of a Puritan pastor who sat at the deathbed of a man who had lived in spiritual darkness for 30 years. The man said to the pastor, 'What can you say to a man who is dying and feels that God has forsaken him?' And the pastor replied, 'What became of the man who died, whom God did actually forsake? Where is he now?' The dying man caught it and said, 'He is in glory and I shall be with him.' Charles Spurgeon commenting on this says: 'So the light came to the dying man who had been so long in the dark. He saw that Christ had been just where he was and that he should be where Christ was, even at the right hand of God the Father.' Christ came to trade places with you. And today, if you believe that that's true — not as a cold fact, not as another add-on to your life, but as a total life-transforming reality — today is the day to believe that. Some of you have been in the dark for a long time. Tonight, the light is the same as it was for that dying man as it is for you. Not a feeling, not as a fix, but as a King who went where you were, where you are. As we come to a close, we all live under a verdict. Throughout our life, either by ourselves or by others, we feel guilty, not enough, ashamed. On the cross, that verdict came down on Jesus. Jesus takes this verdict for us. Not near you, not in some proximity to you — for you, in your place. The curse that should fall on us falls squarely on him. And the guilt that our conscience fears is spoken over Christ. And now there is nothing left to add, no debt left to pay. He said it was finished. So tonight we believe him before we see in 2 days what finished looks like. Church, behold the King who bears the curse for sinners. Closing Prayer Father, we praise you that our sin was paid in full. God, we cannot imagine what it looked like to see our sin on the cross. Father, your verdict has been spoken on the cross, and you've declared us innocent by treating your Son as guilty. Father, thank you that we can be received into you, that we can have you through this. Help us to go knowing the peace and knowing that this story is not over. In 3 days we will see a resurrected Christ. Father, we love you. We love to do your will. So help us worship you here now. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Church, your verdict has been spoken at the cross. Christ was treated as condemned so you could be received as beloved. So go in peace knowing the story is not over. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you, be with your spirit now and forever. Amen. Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link

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