Calvary Evangelical Free Church

John shows how to deal with false teachers by broadening our common conception of the antichrist, reassuring believers of the supernatural reality of their faith, and building a framework for discernment of false teachers.   So I’m going to read from 1 John chapter two, verses 18 to 25, which is what we’ll be discussing today together. I say discussion. It’s a sermon. Don’t answer unless it’s rhetorical, especially goes out to my children, who out of force of habit, will no doubt talk over me at some point. And security, if you could just keep an eye out for them, actually. Carry them away at the slightest misdemeanor. Children, it is the last hour and you have heard that the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they are all not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the Antichrist, he who denies the father and the son. No one who denies the son has the father. Whoever confesses the son has the father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard in the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. And this is the promise he made to us eternal life. Children, it is the last hour. The Apostle John writes these words with the heart of a father. He is both tender and fiercely protective. Like any loving parent. He speaks with both love and with discipline. He addresses his readers as children, not because they’re immature, but because he cares for them the way a parent cares for sons and daughters who are growing up in a dangerous world. He lovingly cautions them against anything that would pull them off the godly path that they’re on. He reminds them of the truths they learned when they were young, in the faith. Truths that were simple enough for a child to grasp, yet deep enough to sustain them for a lifetime. And he does all of this with a ferocious protectiveness that will not let them be led astray by smooth-talking deceivers. Now John writes in a densely poetic manner. It’s as if he cannot merely convey the information. He must also express the awe he feels towards God. And that leads him into rich and mysterious and weighty and sometimes actually quite difficult passages. His language is evocative, even lyrical at times, because the reality he is describing is bigger than words can easily contain. Yet even in this mystery, John is not trying to confuse us. He wants to clarify, to equip. And in this particular passage, I want to suggest that we can break it down into three clear and applicable points. First, he broadens the typical conception of the Antichrist from a singular entity who has or who will directly oppose the church. And instead John takes that idea, that spirit of deception, and he pluralizes it. He tells us that many antichrists have already come. These are not necessarily the headline-grabbing monsters that we might expect. They’re individuals who subtly corrupt the faith from within. They use false teaching. They look like insiders. They sound familiar. They once sat in the same gatherings we sit in. This broadening of the concept of Antichrist is quite disturbing, but also very helpful. Secondly, he reassures the believers that their faith is a supernatural reality. These antichrists haven’t discovered some brilliant new revelation. And in fact, they’re woefully adrift. They’re not enlightened. They’ve not seen something that the rest of us missed. The true believers have been anointed by the Holy One, the Holy Spirit, and their faith therefore rests on something solid and something eternal. Thirdly, through all the passage, John builds a practical framework for discernment. He shows us how the Holy Spirit attests to the reality of the gospel message rather than generating new revelation. So with those three things in mind, let’s draw out the themes from the text, and let’s let John’s words sink in deeply. This isn’t just ancient history. This is as useful today as it has been in every age. Perhaps even more so. Children. It is the last hour, and as you have heard, the Antichrist is coming. So now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist. He who denies the father and the son. These people, it’s clear, were once part of their community. They shared the same meals, the same buildings, perhaps even the same public confession of faith. And then they left. But when they left, they didn’t simply disappear into private disbelief or heresy because some leave the church quietly, but some leave the church evangelistically. John’s letter is focusing on this second group, those who exit from the church but continue to try to teach or corrupt or evangelize to it. Right after the passage we’re studying, John makes his purpose crystal clear. In verse 26, he says, I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. These antichrists weren’t content to go their own way. They wanted to pull sheep after them. And that raises the stakes dramatically. So that’s the first thing to note. John is not talking about every single person who ever leaves the church. He’s speaking of a specific group known to him and his first readers. Some people leave quietly and we grieve for them, and I want to stress that point. We grieve for them. We pray for them. We long and rejoice with the Heavenly Father at the return of prodigal sons and daughters. But John is focusing on this other group. They represent not merely personal tragedy, but an active danger to the body of Christ. This is couched as a warning, not a lament. These people parallel the false prophets that Jesus warned about in Matthew seven passage that we read at the start. Jesus said, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. John is describing something similar, right? This false prophet leadership. In his commentary on that Matthew passage, John MacArthur points out something interesting. The sheep’s clothing that Jesus is speaking of is not necessarily a disguise of an ordinary sheep trying to blend in with the flock. It can be the woolen robe of a shepherd pretending to be the one who leads the sheep. He stands up front. He teaches, he influences. He exerts ongoing authority. He’s not merely leaving to go out alone. He’s trying to draw other believers into his way of thinking. So this raises a crucial Christian skill, which is implied throughout the passage, even if it’s not mentioned outright. We see it in the language of people going out from us. We see it in John’s careful discernment, in distinctions between the true believers and these antichrists. The skill is discernment, and it’s distinct from church discipline. There are times, of course, when discipline is necessary. Jesus teaches himself in Matthew 18 that removing unrepentant members from the church is something that should happen. But there’s a distinction. There’s a difference here. You can’t excommunicate an idea. You can’t vote out a false teaching. John knows these dangerous ideas are already floating around inside the community. His concern is that they do not ruin the whole body. He’s describing chemotherapy for bad ideas. He wants to keep the patient, the church, alive. But to remove the thing which is poisoning it. That’s why this passage, and indeed the whole letter of John, is so relentlessly focused on these discernments and these distinctions. But John does not leave us fearful and anxious of these imposters. In fact, far from it. After warning of them, he immediately turns to two kinds of reassurance. Do not be troubled by those who have left. And remember the iron core of your faith. But they went out that it might become plain that they are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. So we shouldn’t be overly troubled by these false teachers who have departed. Truth is not decided by majority vote, or by who stays or who leaves. We don’t believe by consensus. Our confidence rests on something far more solid. The Holy Spirit himself affirming the gospel message that we have heard. Our trust in Jesus is this pincer movement. Hearing the historical message of Jesus, his life and death and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit confirming that within our hearts. Together they keep us steady in the truth. John is therefore emphasizing how firmly our faith has been established, because ultimately it’s been established by God. We’re not somehow clinging to driftwood amidst a storm, hoping that we’ll survive. We’re rooted. Our foundation is solid. God has built a castle which we inhabit. The walls are not made of our own cleverness or briefly coherent feelings. They are built by the Holy One himself. So John is doing more than just calming our nerves. He’s actually inviting us to draw a kind of relief from their departures. When he says that it might become plain they’re not of us, He’s pointing to something clarifying and even purifying in the church. The fly has climbed out of the ointment. The counterfeits teachers have been exposed. Their leaving does not weaken the true church. Actually, it strengthens it by making the difference between true teachers and false teachers, a true gospel and a false gospel. That’s why John draws out the key distinction in verse 20. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you have all knowledge. By implication, these false teachers never knew the Holy Spirit in the first place. Their departure reveals what was already true. Therefore, it’s not a change of status, but a revealing of it. So John is then developing two things in his audience. First, reassurance. The apparent loss of faith by others should not diminish the confidence of believers. And secondly, discernment. He’s training them and us to recognize the difference between truth and error. I want us to leave here with both of those things today. This reassurance and improved skill of discernment. I want us to know what it really means when someone leaves the church, because they have embraced a fundamentally different message from the gospel. And I want us to grow in the skill that John is building, the ability to test everything against the unchanging truth of Christ. Now, I’d like us to consider the way John builds a framework for discernment. But first I want to make a case for why discernment is vital. I want to begin with the why of discernment before we get to the how. And would you indulge me a youth pastor moment? Just a minute. I’m not leaving. Was this on anyone’s bingo card? I used to be an arborist a long, long time ago. Sort of my first proper job when I finished high school. If you look at a chainsaw, there’s a little line here. It’s quite small, but it’s very important. This is your felling line, and this line points where your tree is going to fall. Assuming it’s straight. But that’s too complicated to get into. Now when you make your cut at the base of the tree, this line is what you can sight across, which is where your tree is going to land. And it’s really important to get that pretty precisely lined up. And the reason for that is that, okay, you might be an inch or so off-center down here, but when you exaggerate that error with 50, 80, maybe 100 foot of tree, that could be the difference between a destroyed house or a dead colleague. Right. Everyone laughed at that one. The last sermon as well. There wasn’t meant to be a joke. It’s really serious. The discernment that John is advocating for is predicting this kind of problem. Right? These kind of mistakes. Okay, it’s 100 foot of trunk an inch or so down here can make a huge difference, right? And so it is with the lack of discernment in our life can mean that our mistakes are exaggerated across a lifetime or across a lifetime of a church, right? The heresies that we think John is dealing with in this letter persist to this day, right? The false teaching affects believers for hundreds of years thereafter, and even up to our present day, the stakes are significant. So that’s the why of discernment, right? It’s not a mistake today. We can’t just gloss over those subtle perversions of the gospel or of Jesus’s identity, because they last for a very long time. So John uses a simple test, a simple tool to invite us into an infinite reality. He gives what looks like a very simplistic method for distinguishing true believers from antichrists. Confess that Jesus is the Christ. That’s it. Admit that Jesus is the promised Messiah the defined son, the Savior. The reason this is extraordinary is because it’s simple enough for a child to understand and yet complex enough to spend a lifetime unpacking as we mature in the faith. Would you indulge me a very English metaphor? In the United Kingdom, we have a beloved television show called Doctor Who. The doctor travels through space and time in something called the Tardis. I see a few excited nods in the audience there. Thank you. Anglophiles. So this Tardis from the outside looks like a very normal English telephone box, right? It’s about eight feet tall. It’s about this wide. You could fit two people in it if they were close friends, perhaps. But once you step inside, it’s this vast, mysterious spaceship. It’s almost infinite, with endless rooms and corridors and wonders. And so in Britain, we have this phrase, ‘it’s a bit of a Tardis’, to describe things that look much smaller on the outside than they are on the inside. You know, a little cottage that you go in and suddenly it’s airy and spacious. We’d say it’s a bit of a Tardis. This is what confessing Jesus is the Christ is like. On the outside it’s a neat small package, which is simple enough for a child to proclaim. But once you step into that truth, you discover a cavernous reality. There are endless rooms of wonder. You can explore the depths of his deity, his humanity, his atoning death, his victorious resurrection, his kingly rule, or his coming return. The truth abides in us, as John says early in the letter, and we grow more and more familiar with its riches. And Jesus is always a sticking point. That’s why John’s identification of the Antichrist, those who rejected Jesus, is such an enduring litmus test for false teaching. In our own day, for example, it’s culturally repulsive to many people to see Jesus as king and judge. Jesus himself was unswerving in his commitment to sorting true believers from those merely jumping on a bandwagon. Much of our theology of hell comes straight from Jesus own words. Yet in our culture, we often discard him as the authoritative King and Savior we need by ignoring his role in judgment as well as salvation. The identity of Jesus becomes corrupted and we invent a Jesus who is our spiritual buddy. Always affirming and never convicting. In John’s day, the distaste for Jesus was his physicality and his full humanity. In our day, the distaste is often for his authority or his holiness, his exclusive claims. In drawing his reader’s attention to Jesus as the Christ, John evokes not just the person to which we are loyal, but the person whose life we emulate, whose commands we obey, and whose promises we believe. So we’ve considered how John identifies these antichrists with this simple test, and he contrasts them with true believers. Let’s look at what we can learn from this passage about some of the detail of discernment. Well, firstly, John gives us quite a dramatic context for this discernment. If we look at the passage as a whole, children, it’s the last hour. And he repeats it’s the last hour. And then at the end of the passage, and this is the promise that he made to us eternal life. In doing this, John brackets this passage with two themes. It’s bracketed by urgency and by eternity. Discernment then sits between these two. There’s the urgency of making your decision quickly. You can’t waste time. There are people being led astray. And yet he stretches out our vision to eternity, the eternal consequences for good or for ill. We have to keep these two things in mind, knowing that what we decide has consequences, but that we do not have an eternity to make that decision. Even if the consequences may well become eternal. So urgency inspires speed, and eternity inspires caution. That’s what makes discernment an art. It’s balancing between these two. It has to thread a needle. When I was an EMT in the UK on blue light driving courses, we’d have this phrase right drive to arrive. You’d think it might be get there as quickly as possible. But the trainers knew from experience that actually rushing meant that you may never get there at all. But equally, we couldn’t just drive as safely as possible 20 miles an hour, observing all the speed limits, their stop lights, stop signs. Actually, there was still an emergency to get to. So if we just have urgency or we just have eternity, we often don’t discern. So John keeps these things at the forefront of our mind. What we often do instead is we hurry without thinking of the consequences, or we procrastinate hoping a decision doesn’t yet have to be made. So we find ourselves gripping these two realities, neither of which John allows us to release. Even if they pull us in opposite directions. But as we cling to these opposing forces, our discernment develops strength and vigor. But how does this look in everyday life? How do we make decisions, especially about teaching and truth, when the stakes may be lifelong or even eternal? How do we avoid getting lost in overthinking? Interestingly, when I look back at my own life, some of my biggest decisions and the most far-reaching ones were made relatively quickly. But they were on a foundation that had lasted years. Take my wife, Imogen, for example. I don’t know if she knows I was going to use this example. Sorry, darling. It’s nothing embarrassing, maybe of me, but. I’d known her for some time. We had some mutual friends. We had a, you know, I knew her reputation well enough, and she knew mine well enough. But the actual decision was pretty quick, right? I sat in my parents house thinking, I like her, I think I think this is good, I think God is in this. And then deciding. I didn’t spend a long, long time thinking about it. It seemed foolhardy, right? I was 18 years old, but what they didn’t see was the years of preparation that had come before it. Believe it or not, when I was 13 years old, I decided I wanted to find a wife. I don’t know what got into me. I think the Holy Spirit was redeeming a desire to date girls into something more honorable and enduring. And I was about as successful as you’d expect for a 13 year old boy, especially when you consider my main criteria was pretty and my second criteria was Christian. But by the time I was 18, I knew what I was looking for. A woman of commitment, a willingness to let Christ into every part of her life. So when I met Imogen, I had already front-loaded this long-term perspective. It meant that when urgency came, and it was urgent, because she’s a real catch and I couldn’t just leave her on the market. I could respond with clarity and with speed. I had looked far enough down the road to know where I was going. We can bring the same attitude to testing, teaching, and recognizing false teachers. John keeps bringing his back, bringing us back to the message they heard from the beginning. Why is he doing that? Well, that message must be our daily focus. We should talk about it, remind one another of it, read books about it, encourage one another, challenge one another. And then when a novel viewpoint arises, we’re prepared, right? We can make those decisions with the urgency that they require. So after emphasizing the importance of weighing these false teachers and the eternal consequences of doing so, John gives us a focus for our efforts. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. What you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father. Therefore, these efforts at resisting false teaching are not mainly negative. They are a positive effort to abide in the simplicity of the good news about Jesus. Summarized as luck would have it most succinctly by John in his gospel. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life. Now this part of the letter that we’re studying today, the letter of one John, sits at the point where John labels those who have been corrupting the congregation, calling them antichrists. Right. Fierce criticism. The letter may have been written in response to an early form of Gnosticism. This was a derivative of a culturally dominant philosophy in Greece. It held that the physical world is somehow bad and perishable. But a mere representation of a somehow truer, purer spiritual world. And many in the history of the early church attempted to reconfigure Christianity along these lines. This especially impacted the view of the incarnation. The scandal and the surprise of God taking on flesh took on a new significance to people who were used to denigrating the body and conveniently justifying sin as action in what was an insignificant vessel, the body. One John is full of clues that John is refuting this way of thinking by reiterating that Jesus was indeed physically present. John describes himself as seeing and touching Christ, and he also affirms that true believers see sin as serious and love of others as paramount, practical love of others as paramount. Additionally, his refrain here in the passage and elsewhere in the letter that his audience should hold to what they heard from the beginning, indicates a novel philosophy was threatening the gospel. Therefore, a key part of John’s framework for discernment is maintaining an awareness of prevailing cultural trends, which are prone to pulling us off course. I want to outline one of those now, but I want to explain with a metaphor first why it’s important to be aware of cultural trends when we are discerning false teaching in the church. About why we don’t just look at the gospel, but we’re aware of some of the invisible forces that might be impacting that. Who here has navigated by a compass before? And you must be the good ones, because I guess the ones who weren’t very good at it are still out there somewhere. So you think it’s simple, right? A compass points north, and then you can work out if you’re going east or west or north west or north east. Actually, compasses don’t always point north, right? So your map has a north on it, but that north changes over time. The Earth’s magnetic field isn’t completely aligned with where we’ve drawn our maps or even how the earth spins. And so you take account of something called magnetic declination, which is the difference between your magnetic north and what you might call true north. And it can be as much as 180 degrees. If you’re up in the poles in somewhere like Alaska, it can be 50 degrees. Here it’s only about five, right? But you need to take account of where locally your magnetic north isn’t quite accurate. Cultural trends do something similar. They give us a false reading of True North. C.J. Mahaney puts it this way. Today, the greatest challenge facing the American evangelical is not persecution from the world, but seduction by it. Not persecution by the world, but seduction by it. So, like John, we need to be fiercely perceptive of what is going on in the wider culture and be able to articulate the Christian life and message and how it’s different. To that end, let’s look at a couple of authors briefly who I think are quite good at articulating the magnetic declination in our present age, the way our culture is subtly adjusting our navigation. In his book The Big Ego Trip, British psychiatrist Glenn Harrison covers the shift towards a high self-esteem, towards high self-esteem as the proposed foundation for all human flourishing. It’s a critique, really, from a Christian standpoint and a chronology of how we got this way. In the book, he captures the mid-century tipping point 50 or 60 years ago quite well. It took George Lucas’s Star Wars, sorry to disparage Star Wars, I’m just quoting. But it took George Lucas’s Star Wars movie to capture the final ascendancy of the self. Arriving at the finale, our two heroes are seen walking proudly through this vast cheering crowd of admirers. Now, having learnt to trust their feelings, they’re about to be awarded with the highest prize of all, the claim of the people, the approval of their peers and the worship of the masses. The self has triumphed. It’s no longer simply part of a greater story. The self is the story. And here, receiving the acclaim of its peers, it may be found at the very pinnacle of where it wants to be. However, our self, our emotional core, our feelings, our deep desires brought to the surface by introspection and carefully built through a process which Karl Truman calls expressive individualism, is not the final piece or the ultimate piece of your life, and that can be painful to hear. Right? Star Wars has a message which sits gently within the culture, doesn’t it? Discover yourself. Trust your feelings. There’s greatness inside of you. There’s bad people out there that corrupt you. But once you can get rid of them, the true you will rise up and be a blessing to the world. So it can lead us to wonder, where’s this thinking going to lead? And I think we have a very strong magnetic declination, a very strong cultural pull to elevate self as the as the focus of human flourishing. The idea that who we are inside is inherently good, that loving and expressing our authentic self is how we will bless the world, not just flourish personally, but then we open to Philippians two, verses 6 to 8, and we see a very different picture of human flourishing. Jesus, who though he was in the very form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. The contrast. Right. The expressive individualism as the way that I will flourish personally and the way I’ll really bless the world versus Jesus, creator of all things. The one who really only ever, and certainly most ever, deserved honor. Being humble, becoming a servant. Therefore, we must be ready for people to depart from us. We do hold as biblical the idea of the perseverance of the saints that God will sustain true believers to the end. But what is not biblical is the idea that everyone who ever calls themselves Christian truly is one. In the Matthew seven passage that we began with, Jesus words are sobering. Many will say to him on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And he will say, I never knew you. In a close friends church in the United States, a sizeable group left because they believe the gospel was mainly a tool for political change and felt that that was not being emphasized enough. We must be prepared, even in this congregation, to see people step away when the real Jesus becomes too costly, or a mere instrument to achieve a different goal and begin to change the gospel to align with that. Now, John implies that it’s often difficult to tell who those people really are until the moment of departure. So we don’t live with a paranoid suspicion of is it me? Is it them over there? Instead, we take the same difficult but sober piece that John advocates for. When people step away from the gospel, they haven’t changed their status, they’ve simply revealed their status. I want a light briefly on something else as well as we think about discernment in the present age. We also face brand new arenas where discernment is suddenly required. Consider generative artificial intelligence that can produce large amounts of text on any topic. This is not the AI that simply sorts ripe plums from unripe plums. This is AI that can generate theological discourse, Bible studies, or pastoral advice. I got caught out by this a few weeks back. I was looking for kind of good theology for young people on Amazon. Or perhaps it was the first mistake. And I read some reviews on this great systematic theology for teens. Author seems respectable chap, got the book, was going through a lot of hyphens in here. He’s weirdly repetitive and found out partly through kind of an expose that we’d done on this kind of theology book that had become popular, that this book was AI generated, and the author wasn’t even a real author. Right? He also had an AI generated photograph. He did look unusually handsome and even an AI generated bio. Right? It’s not a real person. It’s not the kind of weighty wrestling that happens when you try to come up with theology. And I’ve found even using it in my master’s studies, you know, perhaps you’re trying to understand a dense medieval theologian, densely written, not it’s not a comment on their intelligence, or you’re trying to locate a good source, right. It can be quicker than Google sometimes, but I found repeatedly that it subtly shifts away from the gospel. Most commonly and most glaringly, it drifts towards a workspace gospel. It might describe prayer as something that contributes to your salvation. Most insidiously, it often carries at its core, the same common cultural message that reality should shape itself around you yourself, your expressive individualism, because really it treats you as its master and it treats your feelings as your master. So we’re living in a strange moment in human history where lies can be generated not only by humans, but by the machines the humans have created. We must now test the tools and voices that shape our thoughts in ways previous generations had only ever imagined until very recently. So how do we balance all of this? Well, I want to suggest that we walk a tightrope, and that seems to be the kind of idea that John is getting at. The gospel is a reality which is stretched taut between Jesus’s birth, life and resurrection. And at the other end, his second coming. In the grand story of God, it’s simply the most visible expression of a straight line that stretches from before time began and into eternity. The story of God’s unfolding plan of salvation. That straight line doesn’t deviate with a culture. It doesn’t change course with a new revelation. But it’s not simply a case of us walking that tightrope. We need to balance as well. John reminds us in this passage that the Holy Spirit illuminates the good news. It’s like the balance bar a tightrope walker holds to keep them centered. As verse 20 puts it, we are anointed by the Holy One and you have all knowledge. But the tightrope is tiring. We grow weary. We want to step off and rest in the comfort of majority opinion. We want to deny the parts of Jesus our culture dislikes to shape him into a culturally congruous gospel. But John points us to a greater rest, a greater rest in that final sentence. And this is the promise that he made to us – eternal life. There’s a story of a missionary, and the source is unclear, but it goes like this. After decades of difficult but faithful service in Africa, the missionary returns home to New York. By coincidence, he arrives on the same boat as Theodore Roosevelt, who’s coming back from a safari. Thousands have gathered at the airport. Ticker tape parades, paparazzi, a band. The president stepped off the boat. The weary missionary felt a pang of discouragement. He whispers to God, why don’t I get a welcome like that when I come home? In the quiet of his heart, he sensed the Lord’s reply. Because you haven’t come home yet. One day the true king will return. Every false Christ, every seductive lie, every wolf dressed in shepherd’s clothing, will be exposed for what he is. The sheep who know his voice will hear the words that we all long for. Well done, good and faithful servant. And we will finally be home. Let’s pray.

The difference between remaining firm in Christ or being swept away by sin is determined by what you love, so you cannot love the world. Well, we’re getting to the point in our series in First John, when you will start to see some of the preaching team up here on Sunday mornings. And I am excited for you to hear the sermons that these guys have been preparing. We got together yesterday for our second workshop to share outlines with each other. And it was just a great time of learning together. A couple of months ago, we used the passage that I am preaching this morning as a group exercise. So we all broke down the argument together. And then they helped me develop the outline that I’m using today. So if this sermon is any good, you can thank them. And if it’s bad, feel free to blame them, actually. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. No, I’m very excited. Next week, Pastor James will be preaching his first Sunday sermon here at Calvary. And as part of that service, we are going to have a prayer of installation for him at all three of our services. So, please come and support him. I got to hear his sermon yesterday in full and you are not going to want to miss it. As I mentioned last week, the Apostle John is now directly addressing the people in the church who love Jesus. He’s writing this letter to them to remind them of who they are in Christ. He’s telling us about our own identity. He’s saying, don’t forget this. You’ve been forgiven by Jesus. You know the eternal God. Sin has no actual power over you anymore. You’re in the father’s family. And he’s doing this because he’s concerned. False theology is on its way. If it hasn’t arrived already. Lies are going to try to work their way into the hearts and minds of these people that he loves so much. And so this letter is an attempt to anchor the people in the gospel that they already know, so that they can stand up against the waves that are coming, that will try to drive them away from Jesus. And John has one very simple, straightforward command for the church. This is the first command in the letter. John is going to use an imperative or a command seven times in this letter, but this one is the first. Do not love the world. Do not love the world. Now that requires definition and qualification. We have to know what we’re talking about here. But I want you to hear right up front this morning, church, the difference between remaining firm in Christ or being swept away by sin is determined by what you love. So you cannot love the world. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 15 to 17. Today we’re looking at three verses. John first gives us the command, and then he gives us three reasons why we need to follow it, which all have to do with how the world relates to God our Father. It’s a simple structure, but there’s so much packed into these short verses. Let’s start with the command. Do not love the world or the things in the world. This is one of those seemingly simple phrases that becomes more complex the more you think about it. It’s like when Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself. That seems simple, right? Love your neighbor as yourself. But then at the time Jesus said this, a lawyer piped up and said, okay, hey, not so fast, who exactly is my neighbor? And I might add, and how do I have to love him? And of course, Jesus defined his terms beautifully with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which effectively closed any loopholes that someone might use to hold on to their bias or their hate. In our passage this morning, we also need to define the terms. First of all, what is this world that we are not to be loving? Every college and NFL end zone I have ever seen has a guy holding a sign that says John 3:16 that he’s hoping that I will then turn to it in my Bible where I will read, for God so loved the world. That’s in John’s gospel. Same author here. So John says, God loves the world, but then he says that we are not to love the world. What is going on here? Well, the word world in the Bible has a variety of different meanings, so you always have to look carefully at how it’s being used. John himself, earlier in this chapter, in chapter two, said that Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and that not only of ours, but of the whole world. So there in verse two, he’s clearly referring to the fact that Jesus is the one Savior for all people, no matter where they live in the world. That is very close to what John means in John 3:16. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. The people clearly are in view when he says the word world there. And just as clearly John is not telling us here in chapter two, verse 15 not to love people. If you look at the next verse, you’ll see that sinful desires and pride are listed as things in the world. So when John says, do not love the world, he’s referring to those things in the world that dishonor God, that pull us away from God. Now, I love the fact that he expands on this by saying, don’t love the world or the things in the world. See, what he’s doing is he’s making us look at the whole. But then he’s also making us look at the parts. And the reason I love that is so that we don’t we don’t do the thing that all of us are inclined to do, which is to reject certain worldly things that we don’t like while secretly embracing and coveting certain sins that we find enjoyable or convenient. For example, someone might say that they hate the injustice of our world. I hate the injustice of our world. They want to see the end of the mistreatment of people. But at the same time, they also kind of want to bend the definition of God’s love to include the acceptance of ungodly sinful relationships or lifestyles. Or maybe someone wants to champion the rights of the unborn, but not the immigrant or the poor, or some other group that the Bible calls us to champion. Or maybe someone can rightly claim victory over sins in a particular area of life where they don’t struggle too much, but are very comfortable and happy with other areas of their sin, so long as they can keep them hidden and nobody brings them up. By saying the things in the world, John is drawing our attention to all the various individual sins that can become objects of our love. We can’t give ourselves a passing grade for not loving the world if there are certain sinful values and activities that we continue to love. It would be far better for us, church, far better this morning for us to listen to what John is saying and search our hearts and identify those areas where we need to end our love relationship with worldly things. And I’ll tell you this church, we can be sure of one thing. The world wants us to love it. The world wants us to love it. John is telling us not to love the world precisely because the world presents itself as something desirable, as something to love. If the sin of the world around us didn’t feel desirable to us, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. If yelling and arguing and winning didn’t give you a sense of satisfaction, you wouldn’t do it. If gossiping about other people didn’t give you a sense of superiority over those people, you’d avoid it. Listen to how lust and sexual sin is described in Proverbs chapter seven. This is verses 21 through 23. Listen. Listen to how it’s described. With much seductive speech, she persuades him. With her smooth talk she compels him. All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a stag is caught fast till an arrow pierces its liver. As a bird rushes into a snare. He does not know that it will cost him his life. You see, seductive speech persuades. Smooth talk compels. Earlier in Proverbs, this same sort of talk is described as dripping with honey. It’s sweet. It tastes good. The sin of the world does not present itself as undesirable, because if it did, we wouldn’t all struggle with it. We wouldn’t have a problem with it. The real problem is that worldly sin is compelling. We can make an argument for it. It can seem right to us. Last week I went to my daughter’s soccer tournament. And if you if you’ve never been to a soccer game before, here’s how it works. All the parents sit on the same side of the field. The teams are on the other side. We’re all on one side of the field, And then the parents of one team sit on one side of midfield, and the parents of the other team sit on the other side. And when I arrived to this game, there was already this huge crowd of people there and just filling the sidelines. And so I was looking for a familiar parent and I saw Jeremy Moreland already seated there on the sideline. And Jeremy and I had, the day before, we had sat next to each other and Jeremy and I thought, okay, Jeremy’s part of cavalry. He’s actually right there. So you can all look at him. And, and so here we are. We’re sitting on the sideline. And by the way, I’ve already informed Jeremy that the cost of hanging out with me is that you might appear in a sermon illustration. So I go over, I go over, and I sit my chair next to Jeremy on the sideline. And we start watching the game. And I began to notice that every time our team did well, Jeremy and I would cheer, but nobody around us would cheer. And every time the other team scored, people started cheering wildly. And I realized Jeremy had misled me to the dark side. We were surrounded by the enemy, and we started laughing because our natural inclination when everybody around you is cheering is to start cheering. You’re like, yeah, oh, oh, no, no, actually that’s bad for us. That’s no good. And then the very opposite thing happens when you know our team does well. We start cheering and nobody around us is clapping. We’re like, ah, we should probably stop, right? Cheering in that moment meant something bad had happened. And as we sat there experiencing this very backward moment, Jeremy says, this is just like the world I want to cheer when I shouldn’t. And I leaned into him close and I said, you just made the sermon. See, when the world cheers, we want to join, don’t we? We want to join when things or people are excited about stuff and they’re embracing stuff and they value things. We want to cheer with them. Why can’t we love Jesus and love the world too? Why must we reject the impulse to participate and celebrate and value what the world finds commendable? Well, the first reason is that this love is incompatible with God’s love. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This is one of those helpful, self-discerning sentences that John loves. We’ve seen this plenty of times so far in this letter. If your passion is to affirm and accept and embrace those things in the world that the Lord calls sin, that is evidence that you don’t have love for the Father. He’s not saying that you won’t profess love for the Father. He’s saying that you don’t actually love the Father, and you can profess all sorts of love for God. You can give yourself any label that you like. You can hang out with Christians. You can be around the church, you can participate in ministry. But if at the same time, you also love the sins of the world, that God tells us to reject and avoid, and you unrepentantly walk in that darkness, you don’t actually love God at all. Because those two loves are incompatible. They can’t co-exist in the same heart. There’s an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, and it’s recorded in John chapter eight. He’s debating them over whether they’re Jewish background makes God their Father, and it’s a long and detailed argument. You should read it carefully sometime. It really is quite rewarding. But I’ll just point out one point of it. One part of this, this debate. At one point, Jesus explains why the Pharisees are rejecting him and he says this: If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God, and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s will. So Jesus says, you are either in one family with one father, or you are in another family with a different father. And the way to know which family you’re in is by looking at your own will and determining which father’s desire you want to do. In other words, who do you love? Who do you love? You can’t have two fathers. You can’t be in two households. You can’t be obedient to two different leaders. It’s not just that it’s hard to do that, he’s saying you can’t do that. You cannot have a passionate desire to love God the Father and also love your sin. If you love your sin, any talk of loving your heavenly Father is just that. It’s just talk. Which means and this is the sobering part of this. Just like the Pharisees who thought they had God as their father but actually served their father the devil, there are a whole lot of people in the church today who don’t have the father that they think they do. There are people who sit in church every week who are actively looking forward to the sinful things that they’ll do with the rest of their week. There are people who feel confident that God is on their side, who also take that religious mask off the moment that they’re ready to do the sin that they actually love. And if that’s you, if that’s who you are this morning, hear what John is saying to you. You don’t love God at all. You don’t love him. The true God is not your father the way you think he is. You’re in a different family. Let’s look at the second reason not to love the world. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. So this short list of categories is how John sums up the things in the world. John says that these things are not from the Father, they are from the world. This means these things do not come to us as heavenly gifts from our good Heavenly Father. They are not sourced in him. They’re not given by him. In the sermon on the Mount in Matthew seven, Jesus says that God the Father gives good things to those who ask him. In James chapter one, verse 17, James writes, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. So when the Bible describes what God the Father gives to his children, it’s always for their blessing and good, and it always leads to to growth and flourishing in Christ. In other words, the things that God gives lead us to godliness. And that’s true even of corrective discipline. In Hebrews 12, it says the Lord disciplines the one he loves. He chastises every son whom he receives. So correction is even part of the good gifts that God will give you. And we know this is true. Good parents give good gifts and good guidance to their kids to see them flourish, right? Our Heavenly Father does the same thing. In fact, he does so perfectly. He gives us exactly what we need. Good parents give good gifts. And so we will know a good gift from God when we see it, because it will lead us to become more like Christ and will be enjoyed for his glory. That’s how you know something is sourced from the Father. This list here in verse 16 is the opposite of that. He gives us three categories of sin that are all sourced in the world. When something fits into one or more of these categories, you can be sure that it is not given to you by God. Okay, this is not a gift. If it fits in these categories, it’s not a good gift. And any attempt that we make to rationalize something from these categories is a is just a lie that we’re telling ourselves. We call it good. You’re just using a lie to rationalize something that you want. The first category is the desire of the flesh. What we’re talking about here is the sinful, God rejecting, God dishonoring bodily cravings. That’s what it’s talking about. What your body craves. Now, God designed our bodies, right? God designed us. He knows what we crave. He knows that we crave things like food and affection and friendship and happiness. The problem is that sin has broken our willingness to find all that we crave within the good creation that God has designed. Those things the way God has designed it. We’re designed by God to find all of our happiness, all of our fulfillment for life in him, in a relationship with him. But we’ve rejected God. And so the happiness that we’re meant to have in him, we now search for in other things. Having rejected God the Father as our source, we need a new source, right? We need something else to give us the things that we’re looking for. And the world is happy to provide us with those things. The world provides us with all sorts of substitutes. But maybe the most diabolical thing of all is that Satan doesn’t own any stuff. Satan doesn’t have his own things. Our enemy can’t create anything. He’s not a creator. All he can do is get us to use the stuff God created in a God-rejecting way. So for example, sex is designed by God to be enjoyed in a God-glorifying marriage. He made that Satan has no ability to give a good gift or create a good gift, like sexual intimacy or the institution of marriage. He can’t make those things. And so his only tactic is to tell us the lie that sex would be better if you separated it from marriage. That’s right. That’s why he’s called the father of lies. It’s all he’s got. All he’s got is words. And so he uses the words to break apart the things that God has made. And so we take that lie. We take that lie from him, and we make it part of worldly wisdom. We say, yeah, you know, we don’t have to keep these two things together. We can break them apart. God is trying to limit our happiness by keeping these things together. So that’s what we do with all of Satan’s lies, and then we shape a world around our own design that says sex and marriage have nothing to do with each other. And we break God’s mold thinking that our reformation of God’s stuff, our reconfiguration of all the things that God has supplied us, we think our packing it together in our own way is a better formation of God’s stuff. And the result of that? The cheapening of sex, hookup culture, the slaughter of millions through abortion on demand, no fault divorce destroying the home, single moms and absent dads, the degradation of women, pornographic addiction, body image, depression, human trafficking, sex tourism, the rise of pedophilia, rape, the MeToo movement. I could go on and on and on and on. One lie. One lie. One lie that leads to thousands of splinters of sin, resulting in endless heartache. And by the way, the world knows this. The world knows this. Even if they won’t admit it. Even those who don’t know the Lord would look at this list that I have just rattled off here, and they’d say there’s so much in there that is evil and must be changed. I mean, how many worldly people look at human trafficking of girls and cry out against it? How many applaud when pedophiles are caught and arrested and put away? So many people, right? So many people. And yet many of the same people balk at the idea that these awful things are sourced in the same lie that says sex outside of marriage is permissible and good. And what they want to do is they want to arbitrarily draw a line between what they consider to be good and evil desires of the flesh, not even seeing the irony that the fact that the believing that they have the authority to draw that line is itself a desire of the flesh. And then there’s the desire of the eyes and the pride of life. And I’ll do these together briefly, because there really is a lot of overlap between these different categories. The desire of the eyes is just like it sounds. I see something I want, I covet it, I don’t care if it’s mine, I don’t care if whether God wants me to have it. I just I just want it. And the pride of life is the stuff I already have. It’s the things that I have accumulated for myself and I privately hold on to them. I say I display these things, I enjoy these things. And for both categories, it’s not just tangible things, right? It includes things like cars and houses and money that we might sinfully gain for ourselves. But it also can include honor and status and power and authority. And if you combine all three of these categories. What you get is a is a kind of sinful progression. My cravings cause me to look for the things that I want to accumulate for myself, stuff that will give me happiness apart from God. And here’s where that progression is going. It’s the third reason not to love the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever. Why can’t we love the world? Well, you can, but it’s a sinking ship. People who follow their own sinful impulses to build a life of happiness apart from the good design of God, will eventually find out that they have charted a course for their own destruction. The sinful world is passing away. John here is talking about the final judgment at the return of Christ. When Christ returns, sin will be vanquished for good. Satan will no longer have any power to lie or to mislead us, and the sinful impulses and desires themselves will be exposed for what they are. Truly paths that lead to destruction. The words won’t drip honey anymore. They won’t sound good to us anymore. They will no longer persuade us or compel us. But there will be a whole bunch of people who will have built their life on, made entirely out of cravings and impulses, and they will receive the same final judgment, along with the rest of the creation that has rejected the creator. Those who will come through this judgment and into eternal life, John says, are those who do the will of God. Now John is not saying, do enough of God’s will and you’ll make it through the judgment. There’s a reason he phrases it this way. The key word here is will. This is the only time in this this letter that this word is used. Making it stand out. Making it be pretty important. God’s will is what God desires. It’s set against all the other desires in the passage here. So John is saying all the desires in this world and all the people who have those desires and used them to make a life apart from God, they are heading for death. But those who have desires that align with God’s desire, God’s will, will remain. Or in this case, abide, forever. They’re going to be saved through that judgment. So what is God’s will? What does he want? What does he command of us? Well, this word will summarizes everything up to this point in the letter. It is God’s will that we would know him who was from the beginning, Jesus Christ. It’s God’s will that we would see our sin and our need for a Savior. It is his will that we would confess our sin and trust in Jesus as our substitute sacrifice, our propitiation. It’s his will that we. That we would then abide in Christ by walking in the same way that he walked. It’s God’s will that we would walk in the light as he is in the light. It’s God’s will that the love of Christ would bind us together and that we would love each other. So what that means is our will must be God’s will. Our passion must be God’s passion. We should love what God loves. So what do we do with our impulse to love the world? What do we do with that? Because we’re going to leave church here this morning. You can’t stay here, by the way. Lights are going out eventually, right? You can’t stay here indefinitely. I mean, isn’t it great to have a church community where we can come together on Sunday mornings and connect with one another and commune around the gospel and connect with those who love Jesus and have the same spirit. And we’re filled up and we grow. That’s a wonderful thing to have. But it cannot happen always. Joel has to go home eventually, right? But even if we could gather all the time, even if it was possible for us to do that, we shouldn’t. We have been sent on a gospel proclaiming mission to a world full of people who we are called to love, and they live in a world of sin that we are not to love. So, in a sense, what we do on Sunday mornings, what we do in our shepherding communities and in our Bible studies, is we fill our tanks with God’s love so that we can take it to a world that needs it. And so that means very soon we will all be once again on the wrong sideline. We’re going to be surrounded by people who are loving and cheering for things that we are called to reject. How do we keep our love for the Lord strong when the things of the world crowd in and try to capture our love? Well, I’d suggest that the answer is as simple as this. If Christ is your greatest treasure, if he is your greatest treasure, the most prized possession that you have, then you’re going to do everything you can to be near him, and you’re going to reject anything that would take you away from him. The more your love grows for the Lord, the more your joy and delight in this world comes with walking in his light. The more that is the source of your joy, the more you will hate the darkness. If Jesus is your greatest treasure, if you prize him above everything else, then you would protect his central role in your life at all costs, and you would want everything good in your life to come from him. That’s where you would receive your joy, your goodness. You’d be looking for God’s gifts in your life, and you would use those gifts to honor him and everything that comes at you that draws you away from him. You would fight against that. You would take up arms against that. If anything tried to abduct you away from your greatest love, you’d do everything in your power to destroy that enemy and be with the one you love. Friends, that means that we don’t need a list of rules for what we need to do this week. You don’t need a list of commands to make sure that you can live your life you’re supposed to, according to the rules of Christianity. What you need is for Christ to be your greatest love. You need him to be the greatest love of your life. If you’re struggling with sin, you might need some barriers and disciplines in your life. That would be a very wise thing to do. You need some people to come around you and help you to make some better choices in your life. No question about that. But what you ultimately need is for greater love in your heart for Christ. How do you grow in love? How do you do that? How do you do that with anyone? Well, you have to spend time with them, right? You need to cultivate the relationship with that person. If you want to know Christ in communion with the Father, so that he’s your greatest love, so that God is your greatest treasure, it’s going to take a lot more than a than an hour-long service 2 or 3 times a month. I’ll tell you that, right? You don’t love anybody and then just see them sometimes. Right? You don’t grow in your love and then just check in every once in a while. You commune with, you walk with through life. Spiritual disciplines that develop our hearts delight in the Lord is a different topic for a different sermon. We can’t go into it all this morning, but I want to leave you with this. If you want to walk daily in the light of Christ, you will need to develop your relationship with him daily. It’s going to have to be a daily thing. Yes, come to church. Glad you’re here. Glad you came this morning. Yes, go to Bible study. But you cannot rely entirely on others to help you develop your love for Jesus. You’re going to need to be in relationship with him daily on your own. And that means you’re going to need to know his word. And that means you’re going to have to be in prayer. And you’re going to have to cultivate, commune with the Lord on your own every day. Seek him as your greatest treasure. Love him as your greatest companion. Would you pray with me?

As followers of Jesus, we have a new identity in Christ. If you trust Jesus, this is who you are. There will not be a sing-along this week. I was asked if we could do the whole album this week. That would be something, wouldn’t it? I think the elders would want a word with me if we did the whole album. No, we will not be singing this morning in the sermon. But strangely, we will be looking this morning at the portion of First John that is most like a song. For the last four weeks, we have been carefully exploring John’s magnificent instructions for determining the state of your own soul. His statements on light and darkness have challenged us to think deeply about our true standing in the presence of God. He has helped us to expose our own hypocrisy, not to judge us, but because he loves us. It’s unloving not to tell somebody the truth, to let them just go on walking in spiritual darkness that ends in judgment. John wants us to know Christ and to know that we know Christ. He’s rattling our confidence so that we can establish our confidence. Friends, I don’t want you to just think that you know Jesus. I want you to know that you know Jesus. I want you to walk confidently in the knowledge that your sins are covered by Jesus sacrifice, and that you are in Christ and that Christ is in you. And then from that confident standing before God, you get to live for him. You get to live that out. You get to find true joy in him. You get to love people the way he loves people. You get to share the gospel with him and help save their lives. Up to this point in the letter, we’ve been challenged to examine ourselves closely. That’s what he wants us to do. Today, John, is shifting perspective. This time, instead of calling us to question whether we walk in the light of Christ, he’s just going to speak to those of us who do. He’s going to talk to us directly. The churches that he was writing to were filled with people who love Jesus. He probably knew these people personally. It’s possible the original readers were in churches that John had either visited or perhaps even planted. He might have been the one who started these churches. We don’t know a lot about John’s ministry following the early chapters of the Book of Acts, but his letters show us that he was a major leader in the early church. So I think that he knew these people personally, the way Paul considered himself a sort of spiritual father to the churches that he had planted. So John knows these people. He has watched them confess Christ. He likely led many of these people to the Lord, which is why he knows the content of the gospel that they heard from the beginning. Remember that which you’ve heard from the beginning, right? You’ve known these things from the beginning of your walk. He was probably there. So he knows the gospel that they heard. Beginning at this point in the letter, John starts talking to the true church community who walks in the light. And this is the perspective that he’ll carry through to the end of the letter. And he starts this part of the letter with six sentences that form a kind of poem, or song, or saying, or framework, or colloquialism, or something. Okay? Let me just bring you right into my study this week. Church. I’m not sure what our passage is today. I don’t know what it is. I know what it says. I know what it says. And that’s the most important thing. It’s a very encouraging passage filled with statements that build our confidence. I know what it says. I’m not sure exactly what it is. There’s some different ideas out there about the form of what we’re going to read. But I got to tell you, church, I’m not sure which one is correct or if any of them are correct. Here’s what I do know. John wants us to know who we are. As followers of Jesus we have a new identity in Christ. If you trust Jesus, this is who you are. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 12 to 14 today. I do encourage you to open your Bibles and follow along, because I’m going to read the passage all the way through here to begin with. And then after a word about the form of this, we’re going to go back and look at each of these six lines that describe our identity in Christ. Here’s the full passage. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, children, because you know the father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. You can hear how different that sounds from the rest of the letter. Can’t you? Is it a Limerick? It’s probably not a Limerick. It has poetic elements, though. There’s poetic elements in here. Things like parallelism, repetition, key words. So it’s likely a kind of poetic style that John happens to like so that he can help with memorization. Something along those lines. There are a few features that I want to point out briefly, because they’re obvious in this, and they may or may not be helpful. The first thing to note here is that it seems like John is speaking to three groups, but I actually think that he is speaking to one group with two subgroups within that group. So children or little children is John’s name for the whole church, as we’ve seen already. And we’re going to continue to see this throughout the letter. If you if you go back to the very first words in this chapter, you’ll see what I mean there. He loves to call the church his little children. It would be odd if he meant something different here in this passage. He then breaks that down into younger people and older people. So he’s not here talking about the spiritually mature and the spiritually weak or new or anything like that. He’s talking, when he says this, he is talking about age. And as is my policy here at Calvary, I leave it to you to self-select into your category. Okay. I am not about to make that mistake this morning on Mother’s Day. Right. So he says, he says everybody, then he says fathers and young men. Okay, so fathers and young men here are used to address the whole church. So this would also include mothers and young women. It’s just he’s using the male words to talk about the whole group. That’s the first thing to note. The second thing that stands out to me as I, as I look at this, is that change right in the middle from I am writing to I write it’s a verb tense adjustment. It moves from the present tense things that are happening right now to a completed action. And John keeps that tense, that completed action tense throughout the rest of the letter. I think this is just a stylistic change. I think that’s all that is. There’s nothing really to glean from it because it doesn’t change the meaning of anything here. But I’m pointing it out to you because the repetition makes this so prominent. You might think, well, does that matter? Does that mean something? I don’t think so. I think it’s just stylistic. But that repetition is the third feature. Why does John keep repeating himself sometimes word-for-word in here? One person I read about this, thinks that John had two drafts of this part and couldn’t decide between them, so he just included them both. That doesn’t sound like a thing human beings do, though. Really? It’s not how we write. I think the simplest answer is the correct one. He’s doing it for emphasis. We do this all the time. We repeat things all the time so that we can emphasize. So we say something in a slightly different way than we said it before. And I believe John is telling us that what he’s saying in these verses is vitally important, especially for everything that he wants to say after these verses. So that’s the framework here. John is saying everyone, older people, younger people. And then for emphasis, he repeats it. Everyone. Older people, younger people. So let’s look at what he wants us to know about who we are in Christ. I’m writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake. So first and foremost, John is writing so that we remember that our sins are forgiven because of what Jesus has accomplished. For his name’s sake means on account of Jesus. And so this is a reference back to the earlier in the chapter in verses one and two, when he described Jesus sacrifice, and that that is what makes us right with God. The whole list of sins that you have ever committed or ever will commit have been erased by Jesus, if you trust in him, if you follow him, there is no judgment waiting for you because Jesus has already taken your sins full punishment on the cross. When Jesus said it is finished from the cross, this is what he’s talking about. And we know that Jesus sacrifice fully exhausts God’s wrath and transforms our standing before God. Because as John put it in verse two, Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. And by not qualifying that in any way, John must be referring to all of our sins. He doesn’t just say he’s the propitiation for your past sins, implying that your future sins are not covered by it. He doesn’t say some sins, as if other sins are too awful to be covered by Jesus sacrifice. Our sins have been forgiven, all of them, because Jesus paid for all of them. And we trust in Jesus. That’s what’s happening. Now the reason this is the first statement in this line of statements is because everything else that follows it is only true because the first statement is true. In other words, you can’t be an older or younger person in the next two subgroups until you are included in this large group. You must have your sins removed and that can only be done through Jesus. You’re about to hear me say some very encouraging things. I find this to be a very, very encouraging passage. And it’s so encouraging about our relationship with God and what that looks like. But if you have not trusted and given your life to Jesus, none of the affirmations I’m about to make are true of you. Okay. You’re outside the house right now. You haven’t trusted in Jesus. This first statement doesn’t apply to you. You’re outside of the house right now. You’re peering in. You’re looking at this group, but you’re not yet inside. But the door is unlocked. God is quite ready and happy to receive you into this group. If you will lay your burden of sin on Jesus through confession and repentance. And then you receive the good news of God’s gracious forgiveness to you in Christ. And all of these next things become true of you at that moment. All of this can be true if you trust in Jesus and He forgives you of your sins. But there’s another reason. There’s another reason that this is the first line. I want you to notice something. It might be a little bit subtle, but notice this. He’s telling believers that their sins are forgiven. He’s telling people he knows are believers that their sins are forgiven. They already know this. They know this. They are little children precisely because their sins are forgiven by Jesus. So why does John start by telling believers the most fundamental thing about themselves? Well, it’s because we all need to be reminded of this all the time. We need this to be put in our eyes and in our hearts and in front of us all the time. Even as a man who has followed Jesus for 28 years, I need to be reminded of the gospel. I need to be reminded of what Jesus has done for me and who I am in Christ. Some of you have been following Jesus for 50 years of your life. Do you know what you need? You need the gospel. You need the gospel preached to you over and over again. You need to be reminded over and over that you are who you are because of what Jesus has done for you. Because the human mind is frail. It is very weak. I am prone to forget God’s grace and to fall into temptation and become worldly in my thinking. And in those gaps of forgetfulness, worldly wisdom and false teaching and the work of Satan, they’re quick to fill in with doubt. Right? That’s what he’s coming with. Doubt about my true standing with the Lord because of Jesus. I don’t just need the gospel at the start of my spiritual journey. I need the gospel driven deep into my heart. I need the truth of Christ’s accomplishment on the cross to be brought to my mind daily. You know, there’s a reason that Jesus told us that every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we should remember his death until he comes back, because remembering the cross is vital to the spiritual growth of a Christian at every age and every stage of life. Okay. So with that established, he now turns to the older crowd. I’m writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay older folks, and again, you know who you are. No eye contact from me, right? Okay. You know who you are. John is writing this letter to you because you know Jesus. That’s why he’s writing to you. Him who was from the beginning is a reference to earlier in this letter, chapter one, verse one, which is a reference to the beginning of John’s gospel, which is a reference to the beginning of the Bible. So, Jesus is the eternal God who was with God and who was God at the beginning of time. That God, the Word of God, took on flesh and came to live with us. He took on a human body. That’s Jesus. So when John says, you know him who was from the beginning. He’s saying, you know, Jesus, who is God. So what does it mean to know Jesus? What does that mean? Does it mean simply knowing who he is and what he’s done? Well, certainly not because Satan knows Jesus in that way, right? Satan knows about Jesus. Satan knows what Jesus has done. That’s clear. They met before when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. It cannot be just having factual knowledge about Jesus because plenty of people have that outside the church. People met Jesus face to face and still rejected him. People today have theological degrees. They are loaded to bear with Bible knowledge, but they don’t know Jesus the way John is talking about here. So what does it mean to know him who was from the beginning? Well, it’s pretty important because John says it twice. This is word for word the same thing he says about older people in the church in the second round of children, fathers, young men. Word for word, the same. So it’s very, very important. The word know here is sort of a loaded term. John introduced it earlier in the chapter in verse three. All the way up to that verse he had been delineating between those in fellowship with Jesus and thus in fellowship with the Father. And those who didn’t have that fellowship, didn’t have that connection. And all of that, all of that connection is summed up in the word know. So if you know Jesus, you have all of that connection, all of that fellowship with God’s church and with Jesus and with God the Father. You have all of that. If you know Jesus, your life will emanate the light of Jesus. The love of Christ will come pouring out of you onto others. In other words, to know Christ is to have Christ at work in you. That’s how you know him. He’s residing in you by the Holy Spirit. Now, why does John direct this to older people? I mean, this is true of all believers, right? Of course it is. But the longer you walk with Jesus, the more you have seen this spiritual connection alive in you. That’s what it is. That’s why he says it. You’ve seen more stuff the longer you walk with Jesus. You’ve seen more. Your relationship with Jesus is more sweet. It’s more sure in your mind and in your heart, because you’ve walked with him much longer than the new believer. The younger believer simply doesn’t have the experience of a lifelong relationship with Jesus. They haven’t put in the time because there hasn’t been time yet to put in. Now, this is not to say that all older believers are mature. Some come to faith as older people, so they’re actually immature in Christ, even as a mature person. But John is speaking generally here. Okay. Generally speaking, generally, older Christians will have walked with the Lord longer and thus have a more mature faith. And the point is, older believers need to remember this. If you’re an older believer, you need to remember this, especially in the face of changing times and false teachers and false messages that are that are proliferating our world. Remember the unchanging Christ that you have had from the beginning, from the time that you came to know, and that you came to walk with him. You have known this God who is from the beginning, from your beginning in him. The gospel hasn’t changed since mom read you those Bible stories at your bedside 60 years ago. We don’t have a different gospel now. It is the same gospel we know and serve the same Jesus that your grandpa read about in that dog eared paper Bible back when it wasn’t on our phones. Okay, it’s the same book. It’s the same Jesus. Nothing has changed. And you know Jesus. And you know, you know Jesus. That is who you are. Turning to younger people, I’m writing to you young men because you have overcome the evil one. So to the younger believers in the church, John says, I’m writing you this letter because you have overcome the evil one. The evil one here is undoubtedly a reference to Satan and all that Satan is attempting to do in the world. First Peter chapter five tells us a little bit about Satan’s tactics and desires toward believers. It says that he prowls around like a lion looking for someone to destroy, somebody to devour. And Peter says that our response to that should be to resist him firm in our faith. And we should. We should do that. But John says something just a little bit different here. He says to the younger believer, you have overcome the evil one, right? It’s a completed action. So Peter seems to suggest that the battle with Satan is still being waged. And John is saying that the battle is over. How can both of those be true? Well, this is not a contradiction. Here’s how it works. Peter is telling us what to do. John is telling us why we can do it. Peter is saying, here’s the battle you need to fight. And John is saying, here is why you will win that battle. Why will we be successful in our resistance of Satan and his temptations? Why will he fail in destroying any true believer of Jesus who is firm in his faith? It’s because Satan has already been defeated and sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus. Let me say it again sin has no power over the person who trusts in Jesus. Now you may be sitting there as a young believer and saying right now, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true. You look at your struggles with sin as proof of sin’s power over you, or as evidence that it’s still alive and at work in you. And you say, well, I can’t help it. I feel defeated. Listen to me. You are not defeated. You are not defeated in your sin. On the contrary, sin has been defeated. Romans six 9 to 11 says this. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all. But the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So sin has been defeated by Jesus death. It has no power because Christ has conquered it with his resurrection. And if you are in Christ, Paul says that you now must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. And you’ll say to me, well, I can try to consider myself that way. But is it true? Is it true? Am I just considering myself that way? Or is it true that that’s the case? Does sin truly have no power over me? And I say to you, absolutely. Absolutely it doesn’t. Skip down to verse 14 in chapter six of Romans, Paul writes this. It’s just a little further down. Same argument. He says, sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law, but under grace. Dominion is reign. Okay? It’s like a kingly reign. You are no longer under Satan’s reign and compelled to do his bidding. You are under new management. Okay. Have you ever been to a restaurant that is under new management? You walk in there, right? Old building. Totally different experience. They don’t serve up the same old slop out of the kitchen that they served before, right? It’s completely new inside. Old management has no authority to do anything under the new management. Why do the young people in the church need to be reminded that Satan is defeated and has no real authority over their lives if they know Jesus? It’s because newer Christians are just starting out in the process of being sanctified and they need to remember that sin has no real power in their life anymore. Of course there’s temptations. Of course there are. Before Christ you couldn’t help but sin. You could only sin. Now that you are in Christ, you can truly walk in righteousness. That is available to you. But younger people don’t have the mileage with Jesus. And so they’re prone to think that the sins that they’re struggling with can’t be defeated. That maybe their confession of faith in Jesus didn’t take root or something. Or maybe it didn’t take or it’s not true of me somehow. And I see this a lot. I see a lot of this struggle with young people in areas, things like pornography or sinful relationships or ways of joking or and ways of treating people. And a younger believer claims Christ but sees defeat in these various areas and starts to question whether their sin is truly defeated and whether they are truly forgiven by God’s grace. Listen to me, young people. Listen to me. Satan would love nothing more than for you to walk around discouraged, thinking that you’re not good enough for God. He would want nothing more than for you to walk around down on yourself, feeling discouraged all the time because you think you’re not good enough for God. Let me be clear for you. You are not good enough for God. You’re not good enough. Good enough isn’t the gospel. Good enough isn’t the standard by which God accepts you. Good enough isn’t your status before God. I welcome the thought that I am not good enough, because I can immediately flip that thought judo style into remembering the one who is truly good, right? I can remember the one who was good enough for me, whose righteousness covers me. Not my own righteousness. Not my own way of building myself up to try to be good enough for God. Jesus was good enough. When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward, I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin, right? Young people, newer believers, John is reminding you that you are not captive to the power of your sins because your enemy is defeated. You’re set free. You’re set free from the power of sin and death. You serve a new master who saves you by his grace. And the more you remember this, the more victory you will see as you punch Satan in the face and walk in righteousness. This is who you are. Okay, second time through, a little faster. This time we’re in the emphasis round. I write to you, children because you know the Father. Everyone. Everybody. We know the father. If you have Jesus, you know him. Remember what John said in First John 2:1, beginning of this chapter, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So because we know Jesus, we know God the Father as well, and Christ is our connection to him. We have fellowship with the Triune God because we trust in Jesus. Someday we will stand before him, but not as our judge. He won’t be our judge in that moment because our sins have already been set aside. They’ve already been paid for. We will come home to God, like a father, because he’s our Heavenly Father, and you know him, and you know that he loves you in that moment. Do you remember coming home to see your dad? I know this is a difficult thought for some of you because of your relationship with your parents, and it’s strained or terrible or in some cases, non-existent. But in the same way that marriage is an imperfect picture of the relationship between Christ and His church. Our dads are imperfect pictures of the relationship that we have with God our Father. God is perfect in his love toward his children. He sacrificed himself. He prepares a place for us. We get to spend eternity in God’s family if we have Christ. And John is saying to all of us, all of his children. He’s saying, don’t forget that. Don’t forget that. I’m writing you this letter because you are all in the family of God. This is who you are. And then he goes back to the two subgroups. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. Okay, we’re back to the older folks here. If you are younger, turn to an older person right now, give them a high five and say, this is who you are. Go ahead, do it. Come on. High fives all around. Chaos. Mother’s day chaos. Same exact wording here. Okay. Same exact wording. Why double down without elaborating? I don’t know. Back to the young people. I write to you, young men because you are strong and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. Older people turn to a young person right now, pinch their cheek and tell them this is who you are. Go ahead, go ahead. You can even use your spit to fix their hair right now. I give you permission to do that. I know you moms are wanting to do that so bad and it seems fair in this moment. So here John does elaborate. Okay, here he does elaborate. But we’ve already talked about it. He’s writing them this letter for three reasons. But it’s all really one reason. First of all, they’re strong. They might not feel strong, but they are strong. Why? Because the Word of God is strong and they abide in the Word of God. Here, the Word of God is not referring to the Bible. It’s a stand in for Jesus who is the Word of God made flesh. So Christ abides or is spiritually connected to them in their heart and their mind. And that’s what makes them strong in their faith. And because of the strength of their tie to the abiding Christ, John says that they can be confident that they have overcome the evil one. They don’t need to be overcome by their own. You know, they don’t need to be overcome by Satan anymore. They have overcome. Their status is with Christ. He’s connected to them. In other words, because they have Jesus, all these other things are true of them as well. This is who you are. Church, when I bring all these statements together, when I consider all six of them together as one, one concept jumps to mind, that I think is very important for us today, especially for us today. And that’s the concept of identity. Who am I? Who am I on my own? And now who am I in Christ? The social landscape we live in has left people with something of an identity crisis today. People long to know who they are. Because if they can figure it out, if they can figure out who they are, well, then they can make some sense of this world. Because if you have an identity, you can rest in it. You can rest in your identity. You can say, I found my people and my place and my values and my way of thinking. The problem with that search, and by the way, that’s a search everybody does. Everybody’s trying to figure out the world they’re in. The problem with that search, though, is that it depends on some truth. And that truth has to be external to that person that’s out there for them to discover. It’s inadequate to ask, who am I? And then go about constructing something out of your own ideas and passions. I mean, what is that? That’s just wandering around in the dark. And deep down, every person knows that a self-made identity doesn’t answer the big questions. What is this world, really? And who am I really in it? What we need is for the God who made us to tell us who we are. And here in this passage, this is what he has said to us. You are sinners, but I have forgiven you if you have Jesus. You don’t know me, but you can know me if you have Jesus. There’s evil in this world, but you will overcome it, not in your own strength, but through the resurrecting power of Christ at work in you. Church. That’s who we are. That’s what we are. As Gerald Bray describes it in his excellent biblical theological work, God is Love. He says this: we know God because we are the sheep who have responded to our shepherd’s voice and have experienced his love at work in us. That’s who we are, church. And if that’s not who you are yet, if you’re listening to this saying, I don’t think that’s me, I’m not part of that group. The invitation for you is there. All of these things can be true of you as well. The door is unlocked. Just put your trust in Christ and come inside. Would you pray with me?

Deep, dedicated, Christ-like love for brothers and sisters in Christ is the most visible characteristic of saving faith. You cannot carry around hate and anger and have any confidence you actually know Christ. All right. How many of my fellow 90s kids have been on YouTube in the last couple of weeks to listen to In the Light, huh? I know you’re out there, I know. By the way, for those of you who do not fit that very narrow demographic that I’m talking about, there was a band called DC Talk that released one of the best-selling Christian albums of all time back in 1995 called Jesus Freak. And one of the most popular songs from that album is a song called In the Light, and it’s written like a prayer using the imagery of First John, chapters one and two. And as part of my gift to you this morning, I will not be singing this, okay? You don’t want that. Because I love you, I will not sing this song for you. Instead, I brought along another 90s kid to sing it for you. Pastor Jamie has agreed to give us the chorus. Sort of. I’m like 58% ready for this. Show of hands, who knows this? Who can sing with me? Oh, great. Okay. I wanna be in the light as you are in the light. I want to shine like the stars in the heavens. Oh Lord, be my light and be my salvation. Cause all I want is to be in the light. All I want is to be in the light. It’s pretty good. I think we can be louder. Here we go. I want to be in the light. As you are in the light. I want to shine like stars in the heavens. O Lord, be my light. And be my salvation. Cause all I want is to be in the light. All I want is to be in the light. All I want is to be in the light. Yeah! That was way more fun than me reading it, wasn’t it? That was way more fun than that. I have been preaching for 25 years. This is the first sermon that’s ever featured a sing-along. So that was fun. One of the most important words in that prayer is the word want or wanna, I suppose in this case, I want to be in the light as you are in the light. You know, a lot of times when we talk about obedience to Christ. We put that into terms of right and wrong behaviors, right? And choices. And we should. We should absolutely do that. Light and darkness are categories, right? They’re designations for righteous behavior that pleases the Lord. And evil that displeases the Lord. Definitely is that. But simply identifying right and wrong does not make the difference for you personally. Desire makes the difference, okay? Desire is what makes a difference. Knowing what is right is not the same thing as desiring righteousness. Identifying sin is not the same thing as rejecting it, hating it. We trust in Jesus. God begins a process of changing our desires. He doesn’t just give us a list of behaviors and tell us what we should do and shouldn’t do on our own power. In fact, we couldn’t keep that even if we wanted to, right? We couldn’t keep it in our own power. But he gives us a new spirit. And with that new spirit, new desires within us that long for Christ and His righteousness. And one of the best ways to know that you have Jesus is simply to ask yourself, what do I want? What do I want? Do you want to be in God’s presence? Do you want to walk in step with the spirit? Do you long to apply God’s Word? And does your greatest joy come from knowing that God is glorified in what you’re doing? And on the flip side of that, is your sin becoming more disturbing to you? Do you see it as robbing you of joy instead of giving you joy? Do you see your confession of sin as a welcome relief and correction, because it gets you back to where you want to be? Where your heart longs to be. These are evidences of a heart that’s transformed by Christ. This is evidence of the Holy Spirit at work in you. Now, up to this point in the letter, John has not addressed specific examples of sin and righteousness. He’s only talked about the categories, right? But today that’s going to change. He’s going to take us into a topic I think is one of the most pervasive problems in the church today. It’s an area where I think that we have let our guard down. It’s the topic of hatred and anger toward others, particularly between people in the church. And this includes the whole package of sins that come along with hatred like bitterness, unforgiveness, slander, rudeness, things like that. This is an area where cultural sin has made its way into the church community. We’ve been pretty successful at some things, like standing for the value of life. We’re pretty good at identifying and addressing certain sins like sexual sins. But somehow, the hateful speech and angry attitudes of public discourse have made its way into the church. I’m not talking about Calvary specifically here this morning. I actually think we’re a pretty loving community. But I am saying generally, with Calvary included, this is darkness from the world that has had its effect on how the church relates together. Church, I want you to hear me on this this morning. Deep, dedicated, Christlike love for brothers and sisters in Christ is the most visible characteristic of saving faith. Jesus himself tells us this. I’m going to show it to you this morning. You cannot carry around hate and anger and have any confidence that you actually know Christ. So let’s get into it. We’re in First John chapter two today, verses 7 to 11. John starts with a description of the commandment to love our brother, that’s a little bit confusing, so I’ll start by untangling that. And then we’ll look at how love for our brothers and sisters in Christ is evidence of our connection to Christ. So here’s the confusing bit. Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. Well, that’s as clear as mud, huh? Right? Here’s an old commandment that is at the same time a new commandment. What’s going on here? Well, there are two interpretive keys that you need to have to understand this, to untangle it. And once you have them, this clears up quite a bit. And you can see why John starts with this. The first is to remember, the first key is to remember that John is writing to some people who are in the church, who have the potential to be misled by a false gospel that says that you can continue to walk in sin and still claim to know God. Okay? That’s the first thing that we must remember. And the second key is to realize that John is quoting Jesus when he calls this, what follows here, a new commandment. So this, this passage here, this is the setup for the instruction that starts in verse nine. John first wants to root this commandment in the original Christ-given message of the gospel. Here’s how he does that. He starts by saying that this commandment is old because they’ve had it from the beginning. From the beginning here is referring to the time when these people that he’s writing to began their walk in Christ. When they heard the gospel and responded to Jesus. That beginning. Their beginning of their life in Christ. So John is saying he’s not giving the church some new updated gospel. It hasn’t changed since these dear brothers and sisters in Christ started following him. Hasn’t changed for us either. The call of Christ and the life of following Christ remains the same. Any proposed new way of relating to God is simply a false gospel that will lead you away from God, not toward him. That’s what these false teachers were teaching. They were offering a different gospel. He says that will take you away from Jesus. It will take you out of the light and into darkness. So what he’s about to say is the same old commandment they’ve already heard right from the very start with Jesus, and it has not changed. At the same time it is also a new commandment, not new in the sense that this has new content to it, new in the sense that Jesus meant when he called this a new commandment. In John chapter 13, Jesus is having Passover with his disciples. Judas has left. He’s gone off to betray Jesus. And so the 11 are sitting there, and Jesus takes this opportunity to give them what he calls a new commandment. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Now even for Jesus, this is not new content. He’s quoting the Mosaic Law from Leviticus 19, which includes a long list of the ways that God’s people are supposed to treat each other with love and respect. And at the end of that list, the passage ends, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord. So if John says this is a new commandment, and he’s quoting Jesus, and if Jesus says, this is a new commandment, but he’s quoting Moses, in what way is this new? Well, it’s new because Jesus takes the instruction in the law and he says to his disciples, when you do this, all people will know that you are my disciples. So keeping this commandment will now be the mark of Christian discipleship under the New Covenant and the standard for measuring whether we’re keeping this new commandment will not be a list of do’s and don’ts like we have in Leviticus, and we have to interpret what it’s talking about. The example, the standard is now going to be Christ Himself. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. You got to look to Jesus to find out what the love is supposed to look like. Last week I reminded us all to set our course on Jesus, right? Just to focus in on him, to make our lives look like his life. Well, here it is again. Jesus Christ’s righteousness is our aim to. To walk with him is our path. To emulate him is our goal. Now we’re going to do this imperfectly. But imperfection is not where we’re headed. To quote the apostle Paul from Philippians chapter three, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do. Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So what John is saying here, in this sort of a twisty but memorable way, is that the commandment he’s about to give them is a reminder. This is a reminder. It’s old. You’ve had this from the start. From the very beginning, nothing has changed. But it’s new. The standard is set by Jesus and fulfilling it shows the world that we know Jesus. Okay? This is an old and new commandment. And they could very easily, very easily lose it if they’re swayed by false teaching. So they must remember this. We must remember this church. I echo this statement. It breaks my heart when church loses focus on this indispensable truth that sits right at the very heart of the gospel. Here it is. Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Just let those words rest on your heart for a moment. Let me read this again. Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Here we have that very familiar phrase indicating the lie that we tell ourselves. Right? John’s been saying this over and over again. If we say, whoever says. Would you agree with me that we can say a lot of things that are not true? We can. We can absolutely say a whole lot of things that aren’t true. I think you’ll agree that just because something is said out loud doesn’t make it reality. And John has been pleading with us, pleading with us through these two chapters. What you say about your spiritual state and the actual state of your spirit may not correspond. You may be incorrect about yourself. And here’s the indication that you’re wrong. You say you’re in the light of Christ, but you’re carrying around hatred in your heart. Don’t get too hung up on that word hate. You know, we use the word hate. We do. We use the word hate. When to describe the most extreme form of despising another person. So we think anything less than pure, unadulterated hatred is not covered by this statement. We give ourselves a pass because we’ll say, well, I don’t hate anybody, but I strongly dislike this other person. Right? This word covers any sort of ongoing unrepented anger or bitterness towards someone else. That’s what it means to hate. It’s carrying around division that you refuse to confess and repent and bring peace to, because you don’t feel any inner compulsion to do so. There is no gospel-sourced conviction in your heart that compels and requires you to make this right. That’s not pushing you. You’re content to despise and avoid. You’re content to judge and treat this other person with contempt. You have made peace with the brokenness. You’ve made peace with the brokenness of the relationship. That’s what it means to hate someone. And John says that if we do this with a brother or sister in Christ, someone in the church, then spiritually we aren’t who we think we are, no matter what we say. A little later, I’m going to talk about whether this applies to all people, even people outside of the church. But John’s focus here is on church relationships. He’s talking about the person who claims to know Jesus, but won’t do everything in his spirit, empowered life to make sure that there is no division between himself and another believer. He’s saying that person only thinks he’s in the light. He’s not. He’s in darkness. He’s not a new creation in Christ at all. He has fooled himself. Now you might be thinking, well, why is this such a serious offense? You know, not everybody gets along with everyone. Sometimes personalities clash, right? Especially in a church our size. Right? There’s bound to be some differences of opinion in here. I can vouch for that, by the way, there are differences of opinion in here, right? Do we all have to be best friends? Is that what he’s saying? While it’s true that there’s always going to be people that you’re closer to, but it’s just this sort of thinking then that’s excuse making that opens the door for worldly ways of relating. They all start to sneak in when we start to make these excuses. John’s not saying we won’t be different from each other, right? He’s not saying that we must be close to everyone. What he’s saying is, is that ongoing anger and bitterness can’t find rest in a person who truly knows Jesus. It cannot settle into your heart. It won’t settle into your heart. When we start using cultural arguments to excuse sin in our hearts, we end up with something that might look like a church on the outside, but it’s actually just a group of spiritually dead individuals fooling themselves. In Christ, God binds people together. Okay, that’s what he’s doing. He binds us together in a shared spiritual relationship. And that relationship is marked by deep love for each other. If anger and bitterness toward another person has rooted itself in your heart, and there’s no great conviction inside of you to reconcile that relationship, that’s evidence that you don’t have a relationship with Jesus that you think you do. The whole gospel. Think about it. The whole gospel message is reconciliation between God and us. It is the reality of divine forgiveness based on grace. It’s undeserved mercy. To receive that forgiveness is to be transformed by it. To claim that you have God’s gracious love but not display that gracious love to brothers and sisters in Christ is evidence that you don’t have the gospel at all. Listen to the next part of John’s argument. It brings clarity to this. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. Again, when showing contrast, John does not say whoever says no, he says whoever loves. You see that? Do you see the change? Words aren’t the first evidence of where you’re at spiritually. Actions are. I’m reminded of James letter when he says, show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. John says, the true reality of your spiritual state is not going to be revealed by the things you say, but by what you do. Now, that doesn’t mean that words are useless. Far from it, actually. Confession. Our confession of Christ is vital, right? It needs to be coming from our mouths. It needs to be declared. But our words can mislead us if they aren’t matched by the passions, desires, and actions of a transformed heart and mind. Those will always go together. Whoever loves his brother, that person can have confidence that he is indeed walking in the light of Christ. That love shows the connection that we have to Christ and the unity that we have with each other in Christ. I was reminded of a picture that I saw several years ago of something called the Get Along shirt. Have you seen this before? They look like they’re getting along nicely, actually. It looks like it’s working really well. The idea, of course, is that no matter how upset they are, there’s still brother and sister. That doesn’t change. So they’re bound together. They’re tight together. They have to stop fighting. You don’t get to go to your room and forget about it, okay? You make peace. You’re tied together. So you have to get along. Church. The Holy Spirit is our Get Along shirt. We are united by the Spirit of Christ who bonds us together in our walk with Jesus. No amount of bitterness or anger is acceptable within the body of Christ. Notice I didn’t say that it won’t be there sometimes. I’m saying it’s not acceptable. It can’t remain. Because a gospel that reconciles us to God cannot reside in the heart of a person who won’t reconcile with other people. Any ongoing, determined unwillingness to lay aside anger or hatred is evidence that you might not be wearing the get along shirt of the Holy Spirit. But those who do love their brothers and their sisters in Christ with merciful, gracious, peacemaking love, we have nothing to fear. That’s evidence that you know Jesus. That’s the evidence. Praise God for that. If anger and bitterness brings deep conviction inside of you to go and to be reconciled, that is gospel work in you. Praise God. That’s what’s happening. That is otherworldly. And I mean that literally. It is otherworldly. Our culture believes that hatred is a virtue. That’s what we’re being taught. That hatred is a virtue. We’re encouraged to hate and berate, belittle, cut down and dismiss our enemies. We’re encouraged to put people into categories and call them names and declare them unworthy of love and respect. And here’s where I get in trouble this morning, but I’m going to risk it. The whole public discourse of our country is becoming a disgusting thing to me. It is a disgusting thing. My soul is burdened by it. We have politicians who are supposed to be our leaders. They are supposed to stand for us. They are degrading people made in the image of God. They stir fear and anger to give license for people to hate other people. We have celebrities creating demeaning so-called art to destroy people. We have gossip mills running 24-7, tearing people’s lives apart. We have news media whose sole purpose is to stir anger for money. That’s what they’re doing. They’re stirring your anger for money, for clicks and likes. And while I can’t stand seeing the moral decay of public speech into this chaos of angry darkness, what makes me even more upset is to see the influence of that evil on the church that is supposed to be different from that! We’re supposed to be different church. Our community is supposed to be a bright light shining against that darkness. Our love for each other and for everyone in general is supposed to be stark against that backdrop. But instead, I hear Christians, even sometimes here at Calvary sound just like the angry rhetoric. I hear Christians parrot the slander of other people. I watch Christians refuse to reconcile. I watch Christians carry around bitterness and say worldly things like, well, you know, sometimes it’s just better to avoid people. Some people aren’t worth your time. They carry their bitterness like a badge of honor instead of the evidence of something very spiritually wrong inside their hearts. Love for all of our brothers and sisters in the church community indicates vital Spiritual abiding in the light of Christ. With it, we don’t need to worry about the possibility that we might be in darkness. I read that phrase ‘no cause for stumbling’ as saying that there is no concern that you’re on unsure ground. I get that from what he says next about being in blindness. If your heart’s desire is to be in the light of Christ, you can be sure that you are if gospel love compels you to make sure that you have peace between you and everyone else in the church. Because here’s what it looks like if you don’t have it. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and does not know where he’s going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Do you see the progression of that? If we carry hatred in our hearts, then we’re in darkness. So what do we do? We walk in darkness and we don’t know how to get out of it because the darkness blinds us. There is nothing in the darkness of sin that will help you get out of sin. There’s nothing there. You just wander further and further into it. You become more and more angry. The grudge sets in. The cement becomes solid. The excuses begin to mount. The bitterness drills down deep into your heart. And nothing in the world will solve this problem because you can’t solve darkness with more darkness. That’s not how it works. This is one of the more compelling descriptions we have in Scripture of the problem of sin. If you’re only willing to walk in darkness that blinds you, you’re not going to be able to see your way out of the darkness. For those without Jesus, sin is both the problem they’re in and the power that keeps them there. I’m regularly reminded of this when I’m talking to someone who’s suffering under the weight of some really difficult thing in their life, but at the same time, they’re absolutely convinced that the solution must be something other than Christ. They want a solution that’s made up of the very same darkness that constitutes their problem. Okay. They want it to be made out of the same cloth. To switch the metaphor here, they want a shovel to dig their way out of the hole they’re in. They want to cling to a bucket of water that will keep them from drowning. Solutions to sin that are comprised of sin just drive you further into that sin, into the darkness. If you refuse to put down your anger and repent of your sin and be reconciled to people in the church, you’re walking in darkness. You’re not who you think you are. If you refuse to do that, you’re in darkness. And hear this church, John, is saying that that refusal, okay, that refusal is a sign of your own blindness. That refusal, that excuse-making refusal is the darkness. It is the sin at work in you. Sin masks itself with a kind of false righteousness that makes you feel like you’re seeing correctly, but you’re actually blind. Don’t miss this. john says this guy is walking, but he doesn’t know where he’s going because he’s blind. Making this one of the scariest passages in all of the Bible. He’s walking. Do you see that? He’s moving around. He’s confident that he’s in the right place. He’s sure that he’s going to be where he needs to be. But he doesn’t know where he’s going because he’s blind. Jesus said, the whole world will be able to see that we are his disciples. Why? Because we love one another, and the love we have for each other is so gracious, that we will stand apart from the world around us. But if those who call themselves the church refuse to show each other this love, who are we really? Without a doubt, there should be no grudges, no avoidance, no corrupting, entangling sins between us. Bitterness will destroy a church. Perhaps you’ve been in situations like that before. This is why every membership class, right at the very end, we charge every person who wants to join us to do everything they can, not only to avoid gossip and slander, but to confront it when they do hear it happening. Division between believers in a church doesn’t just hurt the church, it hurts our witness to an unbelieving world. If someone has come to your mind this morning as I’ve been talking, I’ve been talking about this reconciliation stuff. If someone has come to your mind this morning, listen to it. That’s the Holy Spirit at work. That’s how God works. He transforms our minds. He guides our paths by changing our thoughts. That moves us toward gospel reconciliation. If you’ve got somebody in mind, go to them. Don’t excuse yourself. Go, confess, repent, forgive and be reconciled so that we can be the community of Christ that we are all designed to be. Go confirm that you walk in the light. Let me just close this morning with a word about people outside the church. Does this old new commandment give us any responsibilities there? Strictly speaking, John is talking about our love for people in the church as the mark of our unity in Christ. But someone, I suppose, could take this to mean that while we can’t hate fellow believers, hatred for people outside of the church doesn’t count. I imagine someone who thinks this might reason, well, John is so specific about loving other Christians that he must see a difference for non-Christians. But that’s what’s called an argument from silence. Okay, it’s a logical fallacy. Just because John is choosing to focus on unifying Christian love doesn’t make hatred outside the church acceptable, you see. Jesus said we are to love our enemies. Same Jesus that told us that the mark of Christian discipleship will be Christian love told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Paul said, our love for non-Christians should compel us to do everything we can to make friends and become like the other people, so far as we can, without violating God’s law to go so far as we can so that we might share the gospel with them. We’re to help the poor and the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the sojourner. We’re to pray for our leaders. Paul says that our reputation with outsiders should be excellent. Above reproach. And when we are mistreated, we turn the other cheek. We willingly suffer for the sake of Christ, never returning hatred for hatred because we don’t represent this world. We are ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. We’re ambassadors for another world. So there’s no loophole here. Okay? On the contrary, the picture of Christian love for those outside the church is simply an extension of the love that we have for each other. It is different only in the fact that it might not be returned to us. See, the expectation is when you love a fellow believer that the love will be brought back to you. Our love for the world is no different. The people in the world is no different. It’s just that we can’t expect that they will love us back. We can’t expect those who are walking blindly in the darkness of their sin to love us back, but that doesn’t lessen our love for them. After all, that’s what Jesus did for us while we were still sinners. Right, church? Let’s pray.

The goal is not to sin. But if we do sin, we can trust in Jesus and all he has accomplished for us on the cross, provided that we walk with him. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed our study of chapter one of First John. It’s a passage of scripture that I find myself returning to over and over again as a pastor, particularly in counseling situations. It’s one of the most helpful diagnostic and self-diagnostic tools that we have in the Bible. It’s like that intake form that you that you fill out before you go to a doctor’s appointment. It doesn’t contain all the procedures and all the medicine for dealing with our sin problems. We have that throughout all of Scripture. What it does is diagnose our spiritual starting point. Where are you right now? Sitting in front of me in a counseling situation. Right? Is a person who is either walking in the light of Christ and simply struggling to overcome some sin with the Lord’s help, or he’s walking in darkness trying to find an answer, but without the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit necessary to set him free. And even though those two people are worlds apart spiritually, they can often look remarkably the same on the outside. Same stress, same confusion, same impulse to hide. And First John one is like a checklist for uncovering the truth. If I’m talking to a man who is often angry with his wife and kids, it doesn’t take long to find out if he sees himself as entirely justified for doing this, or if he sees his anger itself as part of the problem. In other words, does he see himself as without sin? Or does he see that his sin is a big part of the problem in his home? The first guy doesn’t understand the gospel. The second guy probably does. The first guy isn’t going to repent. The second guy probably will. The first guy is probably walking in the darkness of sin without forgiveness and new life in Christ. The second guy is probably walking in the light of Christ and needs guidance to apply the gospel that he already knows. The first guy needs to become a new creation. The second guy needs to be the new creation he has already become. And it’s hard to know the difference. I’m sure you’ve had conversations with people where it is difficult to know the difference. It’s because not one of us can diagnose another person’s spiritual state with 100% accuracy. And that’s why I like to open up first, John. I like to open it up. I just like to read the statements and have the person tell me what they think. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. What do you think that means? If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us? How does that hit you? You see what I mean? You can just read these statements, have a great conversation about a person’s spiritual state. You can do a lot of good for somebody simply by helping them to see their own hearts in the light of God’s Word. John is going to continue to do that for us this morning. Only now in chapter two, he’s going to add something vital. He’s going to explain why confession of sin works. Have you ever wondered why God forgives sins as long as they are confessed? You ever wondered why confession is necessary there? Chapter one, verse nine says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So what is it that happens to our sins when we confess them that allows God to respond to them with forgiveness? And complicating this further, he forgives because he is faithful and just. Do you see that there? That he’s faithful and just when he forgives our sins, faithful means that God will fulfill all of his promises. He’s not going to break his promise. Just here in the sense that it is legally right to forgive. So God is not being unjust. He’s not violating the law. How is that possible? How is that possible? If you commit a crime and you stand before a judge and you’re guilty of that crime, justice requires that judge to punish you even if you say it out loud. He is not legally permitted to say, you know, thanks for letting me know that you’re guilty, I don’t think what you did was that big a deal. You’re free to go. You can’t do that. That judge would be unjust. The judge is bound by the constraints of the law to punish the guilty, even if he is lenient in that punishment he still needs to punish. He cannot simply wipe away the crime. And yet God, without violating his unchanging law, can forgive and wipe away sin. And John is going to explain why that is today. The goal is not to sin. But if we do sin, we can trust in Jesus and all that he has accomplished for us on the cross, provided that we walk with him. You can go ahead and open your Bibles to First John chapter two. We’re going to be in the first six verses today. We’re going to look at this in three parts. First, what do we have in Christ? And then the two ways that we can be confident that we know Christ. Let’s start with what we have in Christ. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. Okay, let’s stop briefly there. I know I’m one verse in and Kyle’s already hitting the brakes. I promise this will be a short point. Okay, short point here. John’s about to talk about Grace. Okay. The very next thing is he’s going to start talking about the grace of Jesus Christ. And grace for those who love Jesus, but they struggle with their sins, which is all of us, right? It’s all of us. But in describing God’s forgiveness, he wants to be sure that we do not mistake God’s grace as a license to continue in sin. He doesn’t want us to work backwards from God’s forgiveness, right? And come up with a faulty reasoning. We say things like, because God is gracious to forgive sinners, I can go on sinning and then just confess to God and receive his forgiveness, right? That’s the reason he wants to avoid. If that’s what’s happening in your mind when you think about God’s grace, you’re in darkness. If that’s what’s happening, when you think about God’s grace, you’re actually in darkness. That is a devious twisting of the gospel. To use God’s grace as a license to sin is reasoning that comes from an unregenerate heart. In fact, it might be more spiritually dangerous than other places you could be, because what that means is you understand the gospel. And you are using it for evil purposes. You get that? You actually have to understand the gospel to get to a place like that. And so he starts this, John starts this little children, I’m writing this so that you don’t sin. That’s my goal in this. He calls us little children because he’s he’s older, he’s wiser, he cares a lot about what happens to the church like a father does for his kids. I almost referred to him this week as Papa John, but I thought that would make us all hungry. It’s our older, wiser father in Christ. That’s who he is, right? He’s our father in the faith, and he’s writing this letter so that we can get the hooks of sin out of us, not so that we can put them back in. Okay? With that in mind, he continues, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. So here it is. Here’s why confession works. It works because when we confess our sins, that confession doesn’t go directly to the judge. Okay? That confession doesn’t go directly to him. It first goes to our advocate. Our confession of guilt does not go before the Lord unaltered. If it did, a just and faithful God would have no choice but to give us the penalty for our sin, which is eternal death. As Paul said, for the wages of sin is death. But our confession of sin doesn’t go by itself. It first goes to our advocate. It goes to Jesus. An advocate is a person who speaks for us like a lawyer. An advocate makes the appeal on our behalf. So our confession before God is not just our guilt, it is our guilt as communicated through our advocate. Now, what does that do? What does Jesus add to our confession? Well, if all he did was convey our guilt to the judge without adding anything, he’d be unnecessary. He would. We could directly say that to God. But that’s not what a good advocate does. A good advocate makes a case for you. A good advocate takes all of the facts and makes them into an argument of innocence or leniency, in this case of our sin before God. There’s no true argument for innocence. We aren’t wrongly accused. We are guilty of our sin. But Jesus, as our advocate, doesn’t simply argue for leniency or mercy either. He advocates for forgiveness and a kind of forgiveness that does not violate God’s justice. So how is that possible? How? How is it possible that our confession can pass from our lips through Jesus to God the Father, and result in a forgiveness that both sets us free and does not tarnish God’s faithfulness or violate his justice? I’ll never forget the first time I drank out of a mud puddle. And I know that you’re thinking that I’m about to tell you a story from childhood. This was in my 30s. I was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with some friends of mine, and we ran out of water. And there weren’t very many sources of water, so we had to refill our bottles with water from a stagnant, dirty creek in the woods. That was basically a mud puddle. Now that is a recipe for disaster. Except that my buddy Brian had a device that could filter the dirtiest water and make it into clean drinking water, which it did. I was blown away by this. It was some sort of military grade filter. He was very proud that he had it. And the claim of the filter was that you could use it on your own urine and make it into potable water. We did not try that. I would rather die. But what a device. I mean this. It worked. Think about this. Think about this device. If it fails, okay, if it fails. If we can’t turn bacteria-filled water, essentially poison, into drinkable water, we die. But if it can, we live. Jesus is able to hear our confession that will kill us. He can advocate before God the Father and deliver back to us forgiveness that saves us. He is the filter that stands between our sins and a just God. Now how can Jesus be this filter? Well, John explains. First, he is Jesus Christ the righteous. This is the only place in the Bible where we have Jesus identified this way with ‘the righteous’ added to his name. And by adding it to his name, John is saying that Jesus Christ is in a righteous state before the Father, meaning he is without sin. On our own no one else could be described like this. By our own merits, I cannot be called Kyle Bushre or the righteous. You couldn’t put your name in there either. So Jesus, our advocate, is without sin as he stands before God making his appeal on our behalf. But that doesn’t explain what happens when our sins are confessed to Jesus because he could simply hand our guilt onto the Father and remain righteous himself. What happens here is that Jesus does something with his righteousness. Notice John quickly follows that up in verse two with “He is the propitiation of our sins.” A propitiation is a sacrifice that is acceptable to God, and it’s pleasing to God. It both fulfills the requirement that God demands, and it turns away his anger. It appeases his just wrath, his anger over our sin. In the Old Testament, the sacrificed animals would be burned at the temple, and the aroma was said to rise to God and to please him, which is, of course, a metaphor for appeasing God’s anger over our sin. That is propitiation. John is saying that Jesus death on the cross is the pleasing sacrifice that causes God to set down his just and righteous anger over our sin, because it is an acceptable substitute. God accepts this substitute sacrifice for us. He is the propitiation of our sin. So being righteous on his own, he had no sin to die for, but he is the acceptable sacrifice for us. And so now we have the full mechanism of confession. I know I’m putting this into engineering terms, but often it is helpful to break something down into its parts to understand how it works. We confess our sin, right? That’s where it starts. We own it. We call ourselves out on what we’ve done. We don’t hide, we don’t excuse. We go before the Lord as open books with honesty about what we’ve done. Now without Christ that sin is condemned and we would take the punishment. Plenty of other religions all around the world have confession as part of what they do, but their confession is without Christ, and so it does nothing but condemn them. Confession on its own brings conviction. That’s justice. But the good news of Christ is our confession is not on its own. Christians confess sin, but at the same time, we trust Jesus. Right? We confess, but we trust at the same time. Jesus Christ receives our confession. He takes our sin on himself. He becomes a substitute sacrifice for us. He becomes a propitiation for us. And this sacrifice fulfills God’s law requirements so that when God declares us righteous He’s not violating his own law because justice has been served. It’s already been served. It’s been served in Jesus. God can forgive sinners without becoming unfaithful to his promises or unjust according to his own law. This is how Christ filters our deadly sin into gracious forgiveness. Writing in the fourth century, church father Augustine of Hippo called Jesus the true mediator. He wrote this: Christ Jesus appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal just one, that he might, by righteousness, cancel the death of justified sinners, which he willed to have in common with them. So the true mediator uses his righteousness to cancel the debt, creating a category that would be an oxymoron were it not for Jesus: justified sinners. You know another way of saying justified sinners? Innocent guilty people. That’s what it is, innocent guilty people. That does not make sense unless you understand Jesus advocacy work. Apart from Jesus, that does not make sense. It’s an oxymoron. But with Jesus, it makes all the sense in the world. If you know and trust Jesus right now, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, saying, she’s mine, he’s mine. I died to pay their debt. I am their righteousness. And this, this gracious forgiveness of sin advocated through Jesus. It’s for everyone. It’s for everyone. John says he’s not just the one who advocates for his sins or for the church’s sins that he’s writing to. He’s the advocate for the whole world. Now, there’s a way of reading that, that makes it sound like John is saying that Jesus has already paid for all the sins of everyone in the world. You could misread this little portion of it universally, but without a doubt, the context dictates that John is not saying everyone’s sins have already been paid for. The whole point of the letter is to help people ensure that they actually do know and have Christ. So he’s not saying that the whole world has Christ. He’s saying that Christ is for the whole world. Everyone in the world must be saved through the sacrificial work of Christ. Salvation isn’t accomplished for different people in different ways depending on where you live. It’s accomplished in one way by Jesus sacrifice and advocacy for every sinner who would be saved. So if you are to be saved, it will have to be through Jesus, the one who can take your sins. This is a statement about missions here at the end. Church, every person you know needs the sacrifice of Jesus on their behalf to be forgiven. That’s what they need. They need to know him, and they need to have confidence that they know him. Here’s how you can have confidence. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. Sounds kind of like last week, doesn’t it? John is returning to his same line of reasoning from chapter one. And by this we know that we have come to know him. This is how you know you know, is what he’s saying here. Again, it’s all in the grammar here. The Bible rewards very careful reading. How do you know that you have already come to know Jesus? In other words, how can you have confidence that you actually do know Jesus? Instead of just saying that you know Jesus and fooling even yourself? I can’t tell you the number of people that I have crossed paths with through my life that say they know Jesus but do not at all appear to. There’s no evidence of it. John is saying there’s a way of knowing. There’s a way of knowing. You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to wallow in doubt. You also cannot stand on a lie. Here’s how you know you know. You obey his commandments. If you truly know Jesus and his sacrifice covers your sins, there will be an eagerness inside of you to not only to know the commandments and the instructions of God’s Word. There will be an eagerness to obey them. Your life will be marked by evident obedience. I say evident obedience because it will be observable. It’ll be observable by you. It will be observable by the people around you. It will serve as a piece of evidence. You won’t live two ways. You won’t. You won’t have this, I lived this way for the Christians to see in my life, and then I also live a different way for myself. Remember, John wants his readers to really know themselves. So this is helpful to you to really know where you are spiritually. He’s saying that you’ll know because you’ll be able to see what your mind thinks. You’re going to be able to observe what your heart wants, what your hands do, what your mouth speaks, and all of these thoughts and all of these actions will be conformed more and more every day to the commandments that God has given us in His Word. Let me pause here just for a minute and speak to the guy or the girl sitting here this morning who knows deep down inside that there is not this eagerness for obedience to Jesus, and it’s just not there inside of you. Look, I get it. I completely understand. I came to faith in Christ when I was 20 years old. I remember being a person who thought he was fine, claiming to be a Christian and then just living for myself however I liked. I remember that. I know how easily this gospel can be assumed. You can just assume it. You can just say, yeah, it covers me. I think so, yeah. That’s how I, you know, you can just assume it. Just say you’re a Christian, be better than most people and then live however you want. That’s enough. Right? Please listen to me this morning, if that’s you. Listen to me, as one who used to be in your shoes, true gospel transformation in your heart comes with a longing and a striving to be obedient to Jesus. It’s not just different belief. It’s a different life that you live. Now. It’s important to understand and to remember that this obedience to Christ’s commandments includes repentance for our sins. Okay, that’s part of the obedience. The goal is perfection. The goal is to live perfectly. Perfect obedience to Christ. In Jesus sermon on the Mount, he sets the standard. He says, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. But his commandments include repentance. In Matthew chapter four, verse 17, Jesus went about preaching. Matthew says, repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe in the gospel. So the way he summarizes all of Jesus ministry is that it includes repentance and believing together. John started this whole passage here by saying, don’t sin, but when you do sin, confess your sin, right? He assumes the failure you’re striving for perfection. But you assume that there will be times when you fail in this. And obedience to Jesus is striving for that perfection while resting in forgiveness. Okay, we’re striving, but we’re also resting. Until we are made new, there will be always a gap between where we are and where we are heading. There will always be a gap there. You’ll be closing the gap with the Holy Spirit’s work in your life. There’ll be victories, right? But there will always be a gap until we’re with Jesus. I recently read a great quote by Trevin Wax. He wrote an article and he says this. I love this quote. Hypocrisy isn’t the gap between Christian ideals and the Christian life. Hypocrisy is the refusal to acknowledge that gap. He’s right. If you are in a state of forgiveness, or as John puts it in verse five, the love of God is perfected in you, then you will be eager to keep God’s commandments and ready to repent when you fail. That phrase, the love of God is perfected in you, it’s a little bit awkward to us, but it’s beautiful when you think about it. This is God’s love. Complete. Perfect. Finished. It is not being perfected. It is perfected. You’re not building God’s love up as you are obedient. The obedience is just the evidence of God’s perfected love for you. So God’s love for us in Christ is not a half-done project. Our growth in Christ is still incomplete, but his love for us is not incomplete. Are your children earning and building up their love that you have for them through the completion of chores? Is that how it works at your house? Is your spouse slowly gaining your love by accomplishing goals and completing tasks? I hope not. I hope that’s not how it works in your house. That’s going to be a pretty dysfunctional home if you see it that way. And if you do, it’s probably because you don’t yet know the unconditional love of God that we have through the finished work of Christ. Jesus commandments are not a path to earning God’s love. They are the good instructions of a God who is already loving us perfectly because of what Jesus has done for us. Not everyone has that love, but that love is offered to everyone. And you know you have it if you joyously obey Jesus. Here’s another way of saying that it’s our second way of having confidence. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. If you’re beginning to suspect that John likes to say very similar things in slightly different ways, with different shades of meaning, you are right. We are going to see this throughout this letter. He returns to the same topics over and over again, and I can see two reasons for doing that. First, the repetition brings emphasis and focus. And repetition is really important for learning things. We hear the same things over and over and we learn them. But the second with each restatement, John gives us a little bit different perspective on whatever it is he’s talking about. Notice the slight change in focus here. See, before he said, here’s how you know him. Now he’s saying, here’s how you know you are in him. So the first is a focus on our relationship with Christ to know him. The second is on whether we’re covered by Christ’s propitiation and are spiritually connected to him, that we are in him. And they go together. You can’t have one without the other, but they are slightly different perspectives of the same spiritual state. John calls this abiding. Okay. He gets this word from Jesus. He gets the idea from Jesus himself. Abide means to remain connected. Jesus uses the branches of a vine in John chapter 15 to describe this. He said, if we’re connected to him, it’ll be evident because we will remain connected to him. And that sounds a little bit redundant, but it’s not really. Said another way, if you’re really covered by Christ’s sacrifice, if you’re transformed in heart, if you’re saved by God’s forgiveness, then that will be evident throughout your life. You will remain. You will abide in that truth. If you’re tethered to Jesus, your life is going to look more and more like Jesus. Okay? If you have him, you will become more like him. And that means that you’ll sit at Jesus feet, in a sense, and you will be his disciple. You’ll want to learn from him. You’ll want your life to match his life. So what did he do? Well, he did a lot of things, didn’t he? But let’s name a few. He hated sin. Jesus had a hatred for sin. He refused to give in to temptation. He did so perfectly. We have not done that perfectly. But we strive to shun every temptation, to root out every clinging sin within us. He loved the Father. He really loved the Father. His every impulse was to listen to the Father and make choices accordingly. John 15:10, listen to this, I want you to listen to John 15:10, Jesus said to his disciples, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his. He showed us what really, truly loving God looks like in your life. If you’re in Christ, you’re going to follow him and you’re going to match your choices as closely as you can to the way he walked. Because Jesus isn’t just our Savior, he’s our role model for life. He’s the one we look to, to know how to live. Church, I can’t stress enough how important it is for those of us who claim Christ to set our course to follow him as closely as we possibly can. There’s an app on my phone. It’s called Find My. In theory, it’s supposed to help you find your phone and your lost items and lots of things. But let’s be honest. Let’s be honest, parents. We know what this app should be called. It’s the stalk my kid app. We all know it. That’s how we use it. That’s 100% of its use. Where are they? Haven’t they left yet? What are they doing over there? They said they were going to leave before 10:00, and they’re still there. And I don’t know why they’re still there. Does it say that they’re in a lake? Are they in a lake? I better call them. Are you in a lake? Right? You moms are the worst about this too. You are the worst. Dads, dads don’t really want this information unless there’s a problem. And then we need the information. But moms though, my goodness. My wife has two of these kinds of apps on her phone. She’s got that one, and she’s got another one that will give her an alert when one of our kids starts riding in a car. I can’t imagine why I would want that information. What? Why would you want that? Anyway, I will say there is one way that this app has completely improved my life, and that’s when traveling to sporting events. When Sammy would ride to the cities to play baseball with his team, play a game with his team, it used to be that I would have to look up the address and then hope with every fiber of my being, that they did not move that game from that place to another place at the last minute. And I have driven to so many fields where baseball is not happening. I have asked so many people I do not know, do you know where this game is being played? Can you point me in the right direction? Now, usually I will be in the vicinity, right? It’s not like they said it would be in Apple Valley and now it’s in Iowa or something like that. It’s usually about 15 minutes away or so. But not anymore. Not anymore. Because now, now thanks to the marvel of technological advancement, I don’t have to make a map to where I think I’m supposed to be. I can make a map to my kid. Straight to him. Now, last week the app messed up and I went to the wrong field anyway. My wife being a good wife. Rachel said that my illustration is now ruined. I’m using it anyway. Okay, let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good illustration here. It’s a flawed picture of an infallible reality. Friends, you don’t need to guess or wonder or approximate where God would have you go. You don’t have to wonder what your life should look like. You can just set a course for Jesus. You can just put your life on a trajectory toward Christ. A life lived well in light of Christ’s sacrifice is going to look like him. It’s going to look like Jesus. So you need to study Jesus. You need to listen to his word. You need to let it change you. And as you do this, it will confirm to you more and more strongly every day that you are indeed in him, that you have him, that you know him, that you are covered by his grace and you are secure in the forgiveness of your sins because your father says you are. Let’s pray.

Because God is entirely light, with no darkness of sin in his character, we must identify, repent, and rid ourselves of all sin.   In his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer wrote, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. So, if Tozer came over to your house this afternoon for lunch and he wanted to get to know you very early in that conversation, he would have you describe the thoughts that come into your mind when you think about God. Now, you might think that he’d get to know you better if he asked about your family or your career. What are your skills? What do you enjoy doing? Where were you born? What brought you to Rochester? Right. For Christians, we really prize asking someone their conversion testimony. When did you become a Christian? How did God get a hold of your heart? These are fine things to talk about, but I agree with Tozer. Your thoughts about God do more to shape you and who you are than anything else about you. And that’s because everything about you is profoundly impacted by what you think God is like. If you think that there is no God, no creator, then you will live autonomously. You’ll make your own rules. You’ll believe that there are no divine consequences. If you think God is amoral, meaning without morals, then you’ll live like God doesn’t care what you do. You really wouldn’t be any different than the atheist. If you think God is a angry dictator who must be appeased by you, then you will live in fear of him. If you think God is just a spiritual force of love without any real character, then you’ll define love however you like and you’ll live like that. If you think God is just a source of blessing and curses, then you’ll probably live mostly ignoring God, assuming that you’re on his good side, turning to him only in times of need. All of these views about God are profound philosophies that shape everything about you. The choices that you make, the way you address conflict, how you handle your money. How you handle your free time. What you read. What you watch, how you cultivate your marriage, your fears, your hopes, your plans for the future. Tell me what you think about God, and I will have a pretty good start toward how you approach all of that. When it comes to God, it’s what’s in our minds that counts most. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. So I think you’ll agree with me that it’s important to get that right, to make sure that what our thoughts are about God matches up with who God actually is, to make sure our thoughts match up with the actual nature and character of God. The apostle John wrote this letter so we would get that right. He’s not sharing his own thoughts. He’s sharing what God has revealed about himself through Jesus. You need to remember, constantly keep in mind John’s description from his prologue. The word of life was made manifest. And we have seen, and we have heard and we have touched it. John is not suggesting a new, more helpful way to think about God. He’s saying, God has shown us who he is. He wants our thoughts about God to be accurate, aligning with what God has revealed about himself. And that’s what I want for us too, church. That’s what I want for you as an individual. It’s what I want for us collectively. I don’t want us to walk blindly through life guessing as to what God is like, falling into all sorts of problems and hopelessness. Because we get it wrong. John will show us today that we don’t have to live like that because God has revealed himself. We learn today that because God is entirely light with no darkness in him at all, we must identify, repent, and rid ourselves of all sin. We’re in First John chapter one, verses 5 to 10 today. The passage starts by revealing to us an important truth about the character of God. And then John gives us three hypothetical errors that we could make in the way that we see ourselves and the way we see God. And he begins each one of these with “if we say”. So, let’s start with God’s character. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. The first thing to note is the way John introduces his message here. He wants us to know that he is not the source of his message. See, he could have said here, this is what I know about God, right? That’s a fine way to talk. It’s a totally normal way of speaking. And given his credentials as an apostle, we probably wouldn’t have questioned the accuracy of what he said if he just said, here’s what I know about God. But John has already made his case in the first four verses with an abundance of language, that what he knows about God comes from the fact that he was with God. He walked with Jesus. He heard, he saw, he touched God’s word of life. So here in verse five, the way he phrases this matters. Here is the message I heard from Jesus. I am now giving this message to you. In other words, this is what I got from Christ and here’s why this matters. Let me briefly tell you what we know about why John wrote this letter. Letters are occasional documents that there’s always an occasion that they were written. Something’s going on that prompts someone to write a letter. And that’s true of all letters. But it’s true of the New Testament letters, of course. Everything that Paul wrote, John’s three letters, James, Jude, they were all written because something was going on in the church. Usually we know the recipients of the letter because the author tells us who he’s writing to. So it could be a specific church like Ephesians written to the church in Ephesus. It could be a circular letter that’s intended to be taken to many churches through messengers like James, for instance. It’s likely that all of the letters eventually became circulated letters, which is one of the reasons why they’re identified by the church as Scripture. Determining the occasion of this letter is a little tricky, because you have to glean it from the evidence of the letter itself. I’ve heard it said many times that reading a New Testament letter is a little like listening to one half of a phone conversation. Perhaps you’ve heard that before, too. It’s a pretty accurate way of describing it. If my wife is in the other room and I hear her say, so does she have a doctor’s appointment? I know that somebody’s sick and that we’re pretty close to the front of that sickness. Right? There’s no doctor yet, right? So I get some information. I can glean some information about what the other side is saying. I know someone is sick, right? I know it’s early. I don’t have all the information, I know something. Same thing here with John. We don’t know the specific church or the churches that John wrote to, but we know something about the reason that he wrote. If you skip down to chapter two, verse 19, John mentions there were people who had been part of the church, but they had left, as John puts it, because they were not of us. So there’s been something of a church split that’s taken place, but the people who left have errant theology, and now they’re going to other churches trying to share this theology. All three letters that John wrote appear to be warnings not to be misled by these false teachers and to fall into those errors. What are those errors? The whole letter contains them. We know what the false teachers were teaching based on the corrections, instructions, and theological emphases that John has for his readers. That’s our half of the phone call. So his need to correct the theology of these false teachers is the reason that he starts his argument with. This is the message we heard from him and proclaim to you. He’s establishing the authority of his message. The false teachers were standing on their own authority. John is giving us what Jesus Himself taught. Why can he claim that authority? Because he was with Jesus. He was there. And here’s what he knows directly from Jesus. The nature of God is that he is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Light here represents truth, pure truth, and righteousness that’s found only in Jesus. Now I won’t go back over it, but if you read the opening of John’s Gospel again, you will see that light is John’s predominant metaphor for describing Jesus. John one verse nine says, the true light which gives light to everyone was coming into the world. So Jesus is the embodiment of pure truth and righteousness, which means God himself has no error. He has no impurity in him. Darkness, of course, is the opposite of that. It represents sin and corruption. And so John is saying that God, with his nature and displayed in his character, is completely pure in his truth, justice, and righteousness, and contains no corruption of sin of any kind. God is not some combination of good and evil, of goodness and sin. There is no moral ambiguity in God’s character. God does not have a bad thought or a moment of moral failure. Now you might think, well, that just impractical ivory tower doctrine that really doesn’t matter practically for our lives. But this is actually one of the most foundational truths of Scripture. It’s one of the most foundational doctrines we have to hold. Again, the most important thing about us is what we think of God because it affects everything else. If we think that God might be evil sometimes, then we have no reason to trust him. You can’t put any trust in him if you think that. If you believe deep down in your heart that God might treat you unjustly on some occasion because he himself is prone to sin or cruelty, you won’t trust him, and you won’t want him, and you won’t worship him. But because you were designed by God to do those things, the lies that you believe about him are now preventing you from living the way God designed you to live. And even more than that, if we believe that God is morally corrupt in certain ways, it gives us license in our minds to be morally corrupt too. This appears to be the main problem that John is addressing here with the churches. These false teachers are pushing a view of God that says that he’s not entirely holy and sinless and good, and it’s giving them license to engage in sin. And then they just argue that they are simply aligning themselves with God’s character. This is probably the result of the mixing of non-Christian religions with the gospel. In the first century, people would use sin to actually worship their gods, these false gods. There are a lot of ancient examples of this. I won’t go into detail this morning on the disgusting practices. But just let me tell you that temple prostitution and child sacrifice were still forms of worship in the first century. We don’t have those extremes in our Western society, but the practice of assigning corruption to God and then using it as a license to sin is very much still in practice. Every time that you have ever heard or thought or said, I can’t help it, this is the way God made me. You’ve just blame shifted your sin to God. We have a really big one of these coming up here later in this book. First John chapter four, verse eight, the most quoted quarter of a verse in the history of biblical misinterpretation. God is love. If there are three words of the Bible more abused than those I have yet to read them. People routinely tear those words, that word love, out from the page of the Bible. They pack it with all sorts of definitions, implications and applications, reinsert it back into its three word phrase and declare that their understanding of love is the very essence of God’s nature. Friends, we can’t do that with the Bible. If we want to know how to live for God truly and faithfully, we must first know God. We’ve got to know who he is. If we get his character wrong, if we believe him to be sometimes sinful because he’s not entirely holy, then we will act sinfully based on that lie. And to do that puts you in a very dangerous spiritual position before the true God, who you don’t actually know and understand. John elaborates on this with three lies that we could believe, and they’re lies that we could tell ourselves, along with the dire consequences of them. The first two he gives us a solution for, the proper way to think about God. For the last one, he simply offers the warning. Here’s the first one. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. I like the repetition through this passage. If we say, if we say, if we say. It challenges one of the most powerful lies in our culture today that if I say something about myself, it must be true. If I say I have a relationship with God and that he accepts all of my choices and behaviors as good and correct, then that has to be true. In a sense, our culture has completely destroyed the category of hypocrisy. Isn’t that interesting? You keep moving the goalposts around, you actually destroy, there is no such thing anymore as hypocrisy. It’s impossible to be a hypocrite in a society that says morality is personal and fluid and can change at any time. See, hypocrisy requires an external, unchanging standard. It requires a moral law. Interestingly, it’s often Christians who are accused of being hypocrites, but the standard used to measure it comes from Christianity. It’s very interesting, strange world we live in. Anyway, let me summarize this. You can be a hypocrite. Okay. You can. You can be a hypocrite. How do you do that? Well, you start by saying to yourself and probably to other people that you have fellowship with the one true God. You say, I know Jesus. He’s my Saviour. I follow him. He’s the light of my life. I believe what he says is true and that he is leading me into a righteous life. You say that, but then you live a life of darkness. The sinful patterns of your life demonstrate that you actually don’t have any spiritual connection to God at all. You walk in darkness. That word walk is a pretty important concept in this letter. See, a walk is a consistent, continued journey. So a walk in darkness is not a stumble or a temporary failure, from which you then get up and metaphorically dust yourself off and get back into the light. This is a chosen path of sin. The same, by the way, is true of a walk in the light. But we’ll get to that here in just a moment. If you say that you are in a Holy Spirit bound relationship with God, but you choose to live in sin contrary to his character, you don’t actually have a relationship with God at all. You are lying to yourself. You are telling yourself untruths. You have believed a lie about God. Now you might have made up that lie. Somebody might have told you that lie. However it happened, you’re basing your life on a lie. Your sin separates you from a holy God who is all light and no darkness. He will not unite himself in a relationship to people who choose willingly to persist in their sin. Thank God there is a solution for this. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. All the 90s kids just broke into a song in their hearts just now, right? You’ll have to dig out that Jesus Freak CD later, right? If you’ve got anything to play it on anymore? The solution? The solution is there is a different way to walk. That’s the solution. You can be on a different journey. A journey in light. Now, just like with a walk in darkness, this is a persistent journey that is just like an occasional failure is not a walk in darkness. An occasional good deed or religious activity is not a walk in the light. If we walk in the light as he, Jesus is in the light, meaning our life choices persistently match the truth and righteousness shown to us in God’s Word and demonstrated by Jesus. Then two things are true of us. First, we actually have the fellowship that we say we have. Here, John says it’s fellowship with one another, meaning we’re spiritually bonded together as a church. But you’ll remember from verse three before John said, fellowship with the church is also with the Father and the Son. So he’s basically saying the same thing here. The second thing that’s true, if you’re walking in the light, is that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. The gracious gift of God’s forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice has been applied to you. So a person who walks in the light, whose life demonstrates the righteousness and truth of God, is showing two things that are true of him. Right. So that’s the outward sign of two things that are true inside. He actually has a relationship with God because he actually has his sins washed away. The path that we are walking will tell us the truth of our relationship or lack of relationship with God. Now immediately, that presents us with a problem, doesn’t it? What about that sin that still clings to us? What about my sin failure? It happens every day. And it does, doesn’t it? Don’t you fail every day at some point. I mean, I’m fighting. I’m winning the war with God’s help, with the Holy Spirit actively at work in me because Christ has won the war for me on the cross. I am now winning the war. But I lose battles all the time. If I sin, what does that say about the path that I’m on? What does that say about my relationship with God? About my spiritual state? The second hypothetical error addresses this. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. See, the false teachers were apparently teaching a view of God that eliminated the category of sin. Or at least they took a lot of sins out of the category. You know, when you think up your own God, you know, when you when you think up your own God, you know what you get to do? You also get to think up his law, too. Which is incredibly convenient if you want to justify yourself, because then you get to claim that you have no sin according to the God that you made up that doesn’t exist, right? If you’ve ever wondered why I spend so much time up here on this stage preaching on self-deception, it’s because of verses like this. We find them all over the Bible. This is one of the clearest. When I read about Eve in the garden, there is no question that she was deceived by the serpent. She was told a lie. But that quickly became an entire conversation in her mind about the goodness of God, the goodness of the fruit, the benefits of eating it. And it caused her to question whether God, what he had said was true. In other words, deception quickly led to self-guided self-deception. Her errant thoughts about the truth of God led her into a self-chosen darkness. So yes, she heard the lies, but it was her heart that led her into sin. You know, a few years ago, I got my kids a bunch of stickers for their water bottles. That’s a thing, right? Just water bottle stickers everywhere, right? They love them. So I got them a bunch of stickers from this company called Missional Wear. Here’s one of the stickers that I got for them. Don’t follow your heart. Doesn’t he look like a happy little heart? Right. Just as he’s on the go, he’s on his walk. By the way, this is not a commercial for Missional Wear. Wouldn’t that be weird if I started doing product placement in the middle of my sermons? That’d be a weird thing to do. I just, I put it up there to tell you where to get it because they’re the ones that designed it, they should get the credit for it. Every cartoon I have ever watched tells me to follow my heart. Why does this cartoon tell me not to? Well, if you look closely, there’s a reference there to Jeremiah 17:9, which says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? So Jeremiah is describing a heart that hasn’t been changed. It’s not been made new by the Lord. The fallen state of our human ambition and desire means that our hearts aren’t going to lead us to truth on their own. Okay? That’s not where we’re headed on our own. Those hearts are going to lead us into darkness. They’re going to mislead us. Which is another way of saying that we will be self-deceived. What’s the solution? If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The solution is not to deny your sin, it’s to own it. It’s to stand up and say, that is my sin. Confession is the weapon that kills your sin and demonstrates that you are walking in the light of Christ. So back to our earlier question. If I sin, what does that say about the path I’m on? Nothing, by itself. It says nothing at all. By itself. You won’t know the path by whether you have sin in your life, you will know it by what you do next. What do you do with it? Are you going to confess it? Call it out? Turn from it? Seek forgiveness from God and people that you’ve wronged? Are you going to go before Christ in repentance? If so, you have nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. You’re in the light. Jesus is faithful when we fail, he forgives the one who repents. That’s the whole gospel. His death pays for our sin. When we go and repent, we’re saying Jesus took that on the cross. It’s no longer my penalty to pay. He paid it for me. Are you going to go in confession with it or are you going to justify it? Are you going to blame others? Essentially claim that you have no sin? If that’s the case, you’re walking in darkness. You’re walking in self-denial and darkness. Confession, repentance, and a confident trust in the forgiveness of Jesus is the evidence of your salvation. That’s what a walk in the light is. See, we are going to sin, and we’re going to fail until we have new bodies. That’s going to be true. But until then, God has given us restoring grace.  He’s cleansing us of unrighteousness. It’s consistently challenging, molding and conforming us more and more into Christ. Conviction over our sin is part of that process. Okay. It’s a normal part of the process if you feel deep conviction over your sin. Praise God. Okay. That’s a gift to you. That is evidence that God is working inside of you in your heart. The spiritual danger isn’t when you feel shame and guilt that turns you to Jesus. The spiritual danger is when you don’t feel anything at all. Well, there’s one more hypothetical error that we can make. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Have not sinned here is in the perfect tense, meaning that a person who thinks this, doesn’t believe that he has sinned at all. He’s in a state of sinlessness, and the only way to get there is to claim that sin doesn’t even exist. That it’s just a category that’s made up by religious people to give power to the church, or to keep their children in line. People think stuff like that. People think that that’s what sin is. It’s a very naive view when you consider the reality of the evil in our world. This is the sort of lie that mostly is believed by relatively wealthy, safe and comfortable people. But they’re out there. People will believe this. You might even be inclined toward a thought like that. That maybe sin isn’t really a thing at all. Nobody really believes it. God’s law is written on our hearts. We have to suppress a lot of obvious truth in the world to get to a sin doesn’t exist position. And no one is ever consistent on this. As soon as a person is truly wronged, moral relativity just goes out the window and a strong sense of objective justice comes thundering back. But if you claim that you are not in a state of sin using whatever argument you like, it’s the same as calling God a liar because he’s revealed himself. And you’re saying that’s not true. You’re calling him a liar. You’re saying that the gospel isn’t true. And that means that his word isn’t in you. Meaning his gospel hasn’t changed you. You have no relationship with God. If you refuse to acknowledge your sin. You can’t. It’s not possible to have a relationship with God unless you acknowledge your sin. Without sin, there is no gospel. Jesus died for nothing. Salvation only makes sense if you can identify what you’re saved from. You know, if I’m walking down the street and some guy comes up behind me and puts me in a headlock and drags me backwards and lays me down and starts pounding my chest, I’m going to sue him for assault. But if the same thing happens when I’m drowning, he just saved my life. The difference is the water. The difference is the position I’m in, which is imminent death. I’m drowning. Why don’t more people accept the saving work of Jesus? They don’t know they’re drowning. They don’t know they’re dying in sin. They think the gospel is an assault because they don’t know they’re drowning. They don’t yet see and believe the true nature of God and accept his revealed word. Their thoughts about him are not accurate. I’ll leave you with this today. The incomparable J.I. Packer, in his book Knowing God wrote this. Disregard the study of God and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life, blindfold as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul. Friends, if you are walking the path of darkness and you are stumbling and blundering, I want to invite you into the light of Christ this morning. Light is available to you. There is a way through this life that makes sense. Where you acknowledge the sin and evil in your own heart as you see it objectively in the world around you and realize you’re part of that, but you can claim Christ and be set free and see the light. It’s available to you. Light that will make sense of this world, light that will lead you into righteousness. If you will confess your sin and trust in Jesus and begin a journey in the light. Would you pray with me?

If you put your trust in Christ, you will be united in fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, and with all of God’s people for eternity. Well, that was some Easter, wasn’t it? Wow. What a joyous and God glorifying time all together. Just as one big church family together. People keep coming up to me and thanking me for putting in so much extra work to make it happen. Full disclosure I did one third of the work that I normally do on a Sunday morning. The sun was already up when I got out of bed on Easter Sunday morning. That never happens for me on any Sunday. Okay, so I don’t have the ability to pull off a service like that. What I have and what we all have is a fantastic team of pastors, directors, support staff, and volunteers who can make all of that happen. So yeah, so thank them for making it. These people are administrators and artisans. They each use their strengths to make something special. So if you’re coming to me and you’re about to thank me, I want you to picture me lazily eating some eggs in my slippers and go instead to thank one of these outstanding servants who truly made last week happen. And also, I’ll tell you what really, really excites me about what happened last week. I believe that the overwhelming generosity of this church filling up J.M.’s Resource Center could be the start of an ongoing partnership of blessing and community impact. We’re looking into other ways that we can come alongside the students and the faculty, because that’s how we create opportunities to share the love and the message of Christ. You will hear about some gardening opportunities that are coming up soon. Apparently, this is a school that gardens. I did not go to one of those. This could be a great opportunity for those of you who love to garden. Or it could also be a fun, shepherding community activity. We will bring you more opportunities as they develop. I believe last Sunday was a great combination of the two parts of our mission statement here at Calvary. Calvary exists to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus, who live out passion for Christ and compassion for people. Our passion for Christ was on full display last week. The collective voice of this congregation singing death was arrested and my life began was unmistakably a declaration of our dependence on the grace of Jesus Christ. And to do that at John Marshall High School, while also partnering with the school to help students, is an example of our commitment not to keep Jesus to ourselves. See, passion for Christ drives us to compassion for people. It has to. The love of Christ compels us to look at our city with a deep desire to see them know and love Jesus like we do. We’re beginning a new series this morning in the letter of 1 John called Walk in the Light. It’s, in my opinion, one of the most transformational documents in the entire biblical library. And that’s because from beginning to end, the aim of this letter is to make sure that the faith in us that that we profess, this faith in Christ that we have, is demonstrated in the life we actually live, that there’s no disconnect between those two things. So, for example, we say we want to proclaim good news to our community, but are we actually doing that? Is that what we’re actually doing? We say we repent of our sin and that we trust in Jesus, but do we actually repent of our sin? Or are we just trying to avoid the appearance of sin. We say we love others, but is our scope of love limited in ways that skews the gospel of Jesus Christ and misrepresents Jesus love? Let me do something a little bit strange here. We don’t usually do this when we start a new series, but I’m going to go ahead and I’m just going to show you the last verse of this book. Seems a little premature, I know, but here it is. Here’s the last verse of this book. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. That’s how it ends. That’s it. That’s  the ending. There’s no greetings. There’s no sign off. Just one final command that sums up everything that we have just read in the letter. Everything in this letter is from an older, wiser Apostle John who is pleading with us. He is pleading with us in this letter not to live an inauthentic Christian life. Don’t live inauthentic Christianity where we profess faith in Christ, but we actually spend our lives chasing idols. With all his might, in this letter, he will steer us away from idols that cause Christians to walk in darkness when we desperately need to walk in the light of Christ. And my hope for us, church, is that as we study this letter, the Holy Spirit will radically reshape us. Radically to our root. That’s what radical means. To our root. That it would reshape us. Painfully if necessary. Rochester doesn’t need a big group of casual, nominal, cultural, relatively silent, good people who go to church. It just doesn’t need that. What it needs is an army of people who have been powerfully transformed by the gospel of Christ, and who are willing to compassionately take that message of salvation in Christ to every corner of our community. That’s what we need. Okay, so that’s how it ends. So, right. This is where we’re going. Here’s how it begins. It starts with John making sure that we can completely trust what he says about Jesus. And it starts with an invitation. And as we’ll see in a moment, John walked very closely with Jesus. He is now inviting us into that relationship. He’s inviting us into a relationship with Jesus that is just as close as what he had. And if you put your trust in Christ, you will be united in fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and with all of God’s people for eternity. That’s the invitation. Now you can keep your Bibles open to First John chapter one, verse one. I’m going to read the whole introduction to the letter, and then we’re going to go back and explain it a piece at a time. The whole thing, the whole prologue here is an appeal to us. Here’s what it says. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testified to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father, and was made manifest to us that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. So his appeal starts with a very familiar phrase, the beginning. More than any other New Testament writer, the Apostle John is motivated to share with us the pre-creation reality and identity of Jesus. So when John says the beginning, he’s talking about the beginning of creation. He’s not talking about the beginning of his time with Jesus or the beginning of Jesus ministry. Let me get just a little bit grammatical on you. Okay. This is going to feel a little like English class, but I want you to see something here. Okay. The object in this sentence is fronted, so the object, the thing he’s talking about is from the beginning. So, he’s not talking about the beginning of the object, but that the object was present at the beginning. This is even more clear in John’s Gospel, which you heard read earlier. In the beginning was the word. When was this beginning? Well, John is getting this phrase from the opening verse of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And just in case we are tempted to think that Jesus was created at the very beginning of creation, John says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. So if you read Genesis 1:1, you have God, and you have his creation of heavens and earth. And so is Jesus with God, or is he part of that creation of heavens and earth? Is he creator or is he creation? Well, John answers this emphatically. He is creator. In fact, he says, all things were made through him. The making of creation was done through Jesus. This is one of the more helpful phrases we have for understanding the Trinity. The word was with God and was God. With and was. And I know that’s mysterious, but a God who is one substance in three persons will be mysterious to us. I expect that my 3 pounds of brain which is created by this God, will not fully comprehend his entire nature. But for our purposes this morning, we don’t need to fully comprehend the Triune nature of the Godhead. What we need to do, what we need to see, is that at the beginning, Jesus was not part of the creation. He was with God because He is God. So, when John starts this letter, that which was from the beginning, he’s saying, I’m paraphrasing him now here, but he’s saying, I’m about to share with you about the God that made you. I’m about to tell you about your creator. And that’s quite a claim, isn’t it? That’s quite a claim. For some of you, that claim might put you on alert. How can this guy tell me about the God who made me? I mean, anybody can make up anything they want about God and say that’s who God is, or this is what God is like. And that’s true, actually. That’s true. Anybody can do that. Lots of people have done that. So we have to explore this. Why is John so convinced? And why does he want to convince us? Well, it’s because of his conviction about Jesus that it’s rooted in his firsthand experience. See, in John 114, the apostle says, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. He says, we saw it in his gospel. Here he triples down on that. God became a man and lived with us. And not only did we see him, but we heard him. We touched him. Everything about his experience of Jesus left him fully convinced that he had physically encountered the Son of God, who spoke God’s very word. Now this has to be, as I mentioned earlier, an older John reflecting on his total experience with Jesus, because much of his time with Jesus in the Gospels is spent learning the nature and the full identity of Jesus was revealed to John over time, just like it was with the other disciples. And John failed along the way, just like they did at one point, along with his brother James, he asked Jesus to rain down fire from heaven on his enemies. Does that sound like Jesus to you? But that’s what John wanted, right? He’s immature. They also asked to be honored in God’s kingdom. Put us at your right and left hand in your kingdom. Right? they were prideful. They wanted power. John did briefly appear at the foot of the cross to be given responsibility to take care of Jesus mother. He was also the first disciple to connect the dots between the empty tomb and the resurrection, as we saw in John 18 last week. So, he was growing during that time, but it wouldn’t be until the resurrected Christ appeared to the disciples and taught them for 40 days that John would have a full understanding that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh. And here in our passage, he’s bringing us into that revelation. He wants us to share in the thing that he has experienced. All of us, by the way, have done this. You experience something remarkable, and then you try to tell the story, right? And you want people to experience it sort of the way you experienced it. So, you bring in all these details to try to help them to come into the story so that they can experience it too. It’s why the weather people go outside and stand in the pouring rain when it’s raining, right? They were probably doing it today. Some poor guy just standing out there going, look everybody, it’s raining. We’re like, yeah, we can hear you probably didn’t need to do that, right? They could just say, it’s raining really hard out there. Don’t go out there. But what do they do? They go and they stand in it so they can say, trust me, I know, I’m wet. It’s raining out here. John is saying, trust me, I know. I was in it. I walked with Jesus. Think about what John took in with his senses as an eyewitness. What did he see with his eyes? He saw a sick people healed when Jesus touched them. He saw Lazarus, who he saw die, right? He was dead. He was in a tomb. He saw Lazarus walk out of a tomb when Jesus called to him. He saw Jesus get out of a boat and walk on the sea. What did he hear? He heard Jesus teach with the authority of God. He didn’t hear Jesus say, you know, God says this or God says that. He heard, I say to you, your sins are forgiven. He heard Jesus say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through me. It’s the only way. What did he touch? He embraced and touched Jesus during his ministry. But listen. He also touched the resurrected body of Christ. The one he saw die. He touched the resurrected body of Christ. He felt the breath of the resurrected body when. When Jesus breathed on the disciples. You’ve probably noticed how much John repeats the senses in these first four verses, he is effusive about what he experienced, how visceral it was to him to experience all of this with Jesus. We have seen with our eyes, we looked upon, we have seen it. That which we have seen. We have heard. That which we have heard. We touched with our hands. That’s four references to seeing, two to hearing, and one to touching in the span of four verses. You might struggle to be convinced of what John has experienced with Christ, but understand John is not struggling. John is not trying to sort this out. He knows what he experienced. He is fully convinced of what he knows about Jesus. And he’s not just excited about what he saw and heard and touched. It’s also what it means for us when God the Son became a man and entered this world, eternal life came with him. Verse two is an elaboration of the phrase word of life that we see at the end of verse one. John saw and heard and touched the life giving word of God. And so he gives us the details of this. He says, this life was made manifest. To manifest is to reveal something, something that was previously that you couldn’t see. It was invisible. It’s made visible. That’s what manifest is. And so God’s word of life, his plan of salvation that was unveiled in pieces throughout the Old Testament comes together and is now revealed in one man, Jesus Christ, Prior to Jesus coming. The full plan of salvation for God’s creation was shrouded in mystery. It was hidden in a series of promises and visions, signs, symbols, prophecies of the future. And John is saying here that God’s ordained path to eternal life has come to us in Jesus. That all of that was about Jesus. Now, if you and I were looking for what we would expect that God would, God’s pathway to eternal life would look like, right? If we were going to get together and brainstorm and determine what it should look like to have a path back to God, we would probably look for a series of steps. Steps that we have to take to make our way to him. And I feel fairly confident saying that that is what we collectively would come up with, because all man-made religions and worldviews have that in common. Actually, they are all some sort of a personal improvement project designed to impress God. Whenever people get involved in creating a path to God, it always becomes some form of effort to obtain enough goodness, to gather enough merit. We think that we build a ladder up to God. And if you think that, if that’s sort of the way you approach God, if you’re sort of building a ladder up to him. Let me let me ask you something. How do you know when the ladder is high enough? How do you know when you’ve done enough? At what point would you say, I have completed this project? I mean, let’s be honest. You know yourself, right? You know yourself. You know your sin. You know even the secret sin that nobody else knows. That stuff that you hide. You know that too. How do you know when your goodness opens God’s heart to you in the project of your creation? See, the gospel is very different from that. Very different from that. It’s gloriously different from that. The good news is that the word of life isn’t a project of personal improvement. It’s a man. It’s not personal improvement. It’s a man. Jesus came and performed all the good works that we can never do because he’s perfect and we’re not. He’s righteous and we’re not. So when he died, he was free to take our sin burden onto himself, having no sin penalty of his own. And then he rose and he secured our eternal life by rising from the dead. The path to eternal life is simply trusting that he did that for you. You just reach out and you take hold of that gift of what he’s done for you. It’s putting your full hope and confidence in his project on the cross, not in your personal merit project. God’s plan is a man. Your personal improvement will never achieve what Jesus achieved, what he secured once for all on the cross. Knowing this is where life is found, John says we have to share this with you. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you. You know, I’ve talked to a lot of people over the 26 years that I have been a Christian who cannot seem to figure out why Christians are so keen on pushing their religion on other people. They just can’t understand. Why? Why are they…why are people so…why are these Christians so pushy? Why do they keep talking about Jesus so much? That’s how they see it, by the way. That’s their words, pushing religion on other people. Why are Christians always trying to convert and proselytize or evangelize everyone else? Why? Why can’t we just keep our religion to ourselves? Let everybody else go about their business? Once back in my early church planting days right out of seminary, I was trying to book a rental on a couple of pavilions in a public park in the town where I was. Because we were going to have this big free, authentic Mexican taco cookout, we had some Hispanic friends that were going to come do this. I don’t have any authentic Mexican skills. Okay, I know that’s a surprise, but I don’t have any of those. So these friends were coming to town, they were going to do this, and we were going to make it like a just a great big party in the park. And I went to sign the paperwork, and the lady at the park office was very hostile to me. She said, it’s a public park, and we weren’t allowed to share our religion because of the separation of church and state. I suppose that she was hoping that I was some sort of idiot. I informed her that we were allowed to share our religion precisely because it was a public park. We can talk to anybody about anything we want. Check out the Constitution. You won’t have to read very far. It’s right near the top. Right? There’s this segment of the population that can’t understand why people who love Jesus feel compelled to talk about him. It doesn’t make sense to them. And not only that, they don’t get why we feel compelled to call others to follow him, too. Well, John is explaining why here. He’s explaining why. You cannot experience what John has seen and heard in Jesus and not be overwhelmingly moved to tell other people about him. If Jesus truly is the only way to have eternal life with God, then that is the most important truth for every single person in the world. That is the most important truth. If that is true, that is the most important truth for every single person, no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what time you lived in, no matter what country you’re in. That is the most important truth in the world. And if Jesus is not the manifestation of the eternal life from God to save us, then he is of no importance. We should stop immediately. But he is, But he is. And John knows this. That’s why he’s so convinced. He knows this because he was there and he experienced it. And so he is compelled to share it. I said last week when we looked at the resurrection, and I’ll say it again, you can’t have Jesus without giving him away. You really can’t have a new life in Christ without being compelled in your heart and your mind and your soul to give him away. The moment you experience salvation in Christ is the moment you join the mission to share him with others. It’s because we now see people as spiritual beings. We see people rightly, how they’re created, who they were made for, why they were made. And we see the problem of sin. We see the struggles. We know what sin has done to them, and we want them to experience the joy of being set free and having a a relationship as a gift from God. Have a relationship with their Lord. Evangelism is motivated by the deepest love for people. And if it’s not motivated by that in you, you probably shouldn’t do it. But if you love Jesus, then you love people and you want them to have what you have. Listen again to what John says happens when you experience eternal life in Christ, so that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. John says he wants his reader to have fellowship with us, meaning God’s people, meaning the church. But that fellowship isn’t just with other people, it’s also with God the Father and with God the Son, Jesus Christ. Now, fellowship is not just friendship, okay? At least not when it’s used to describe Christian theology. It’s not just a heightened form of friendship. I don’t know when quite in church history, the word fellowship picked up the meaning, drank coffee and talked to each other. Okay. Somewhere along the way, that’s what it became. And that’s nice. And we should do that. And you hopefully did that before service, and maybe you’ll do it after service. No problem there. We should do that. But that’s not the biblical description of fellowship. See, fellowship is spiritual unification. It’s what Paul calls the unity of the spirit. Faith in in Jesus unites us together because we are filled with the same Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity indwells all of God’s people. And this is what, this makes us one with each other. But it also connects us to the Father through Christ. This is why when we talk about our relationship with God, we. We don’t just say that we listen to Christ. We say we are in Christ. That’s Paul’s phrase, right? Fellowship is a spiritually bonded family. As a side note, this is one of the many places in Scripture where the church is described in such a way that it makes me concerned for people who don’t take church seriously. This is one of those places. Many American Christians have a very low view of the theological importance of the local church. They see it as kind of a like a religious club or a tool for growth, or a place you go to when you have the time or when you need something. The Bible says it’s a spiritually bonded community connected to the Father and the son. It is the body of Christ of which each of God’s people is an indispensable part. The Western conception of the local church has drifted a long way from what the Bible actually describes. Next time you’re reading the New Testament, and especially when you’re in the letters that are written to the churches. Okay, next time you’re in there and you’re reading, just note how much of the instruction is on maintaining a spiritually unified community. Okay, it’s nearly all of it. All of it is saying, this is how we are the church together. This is what we must maintain. This is what we have to strive for so that we can be this united church. And yet so many people in the West treat church like this thing that you might do if you’re not doing anything else, or a place to check in once in a while if you’re feeling especially religious or festive. And I know that’s a tough thing to say the week after Easter when so many people did just that. I know, and if that’s you this morning, thanks for coming back. I’m glad you were there. I’m glad you’re here this morning. You’ve been doing it wrong, but I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. The church is a living spiritual organism, not a special weekend event. Okay, I’ll end the rant there. All right. John is inviting you. He’s inviting. This is an invitation. He’s inviting you. And I am inviting you into something so much more Life giving. Eternal life giving. And he’s not just doing it for our joy. He’s doing it for his joy. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. That seems like an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? That his joy would be complete. He’s writing so that he’s happy. What I would expect here is that John would care about my joy being made complete, that I would accept Jesus and my joy would be complete. But here he’s talking about how his own joy is completed by writing this letter and sending it to people like us who need to hear it. This is actually quite a remarkable little verse because of what it says about a Christian’s experience of joy. Flip it around. Turn this thing around for just a moment. John’s joy is incomplete if he doesn’t share this testimony about Jesus. Something is missing from John’s own experience of the joy of fellowship with God if he stays silent. If he keeps Jesus to himself. Evangelism, which is the sharing of the good news of Jesus with other people, isn’t just important for others. It’s important for you as a Christian. Your own relationship with Jesus will be stunted if you don’t talk about Jesus with other people. It will be. And that’s because of the nature of the gospel itself, the very nature of the message of the gospel. The good news is a message that is designed to be shared. Do you like Kit Kat candy bars? Do you like Kit Kat? Somebody stole 400,000 Kit Kats back in March. You know, like one truck of Kit Kats is like, 20 tons of. That guy really likes Kit Kat. Okay, but you know, Kit Kat, I looked up the history of Kit Kat candy bars this week. Sometimes I can’t believe what my job includes. So I’m researching the history of Kit Kat. Kit Kat was developed in 1935. It was intended to be a snack you could easily carry in a lunchbox and could be eaten on a break, which explains their slogan have a break, have a Kit Kat. And as I expected, this is why I did my research, as I expected, the reason it comes in four bars that you can break apart is that it was originally designed to be shared. That was the reason for its design. It is designed to be shared. You can hear it in their later jingle, Break me off, a piece of that Kit Kat bar over there. Right? Break me off a piece of that. Right? It’s supposed to be obvious. It’s supposed to be obvious to us, right? It looks like one bar on the outside, but once you unwrap it, you can see it is clearly designed to be given away. Now, I know that’s not how you monsters eat them, right? It’s like, oh, that’s four bars for me. Look at that. I’m going to eat it at a diagonal so nobody will ask, right? That’s how we eat them. But it was designed for you and three of your friends. Church the gospel that we enjoy. Okay. This gospel that is for us, we enjoy this gospel. It was designed to be shared. So you see, when you unwrap the gospel, you can clearly see it was designed not only for you to have it, but for you to give it away. To be a disciple is to be a messenger of this gospel. If we don’t share it, we’re actually not functioning as disciples of Jesus. It makes all the sense in the world that if our discipleship is incomplete, then our joy in the Lord will also be incomplete. John wrote this letter so that we will see and hear and experience Jesus the way he did. He’s he’s sharing Jesus with us. He’s inviting us. He’s inviting us through this letter into that community. And this letter is going to be challenging, I’ll tell you that right now. This is a challenging letter, deeply spiritually challenging in the best sense of those words. But if we will receive these challenges and then give this gospel to each other and to the people in our lives, our joy will be complete too. Would you pray with me?

Mary’s first encounter with Jesus is a beautiful picture of the restored relationship we have with God when we put our hope in the resurrected Christ. How could she have the honor to be the first to see the Lord? A woman like her. She was a Jewish woman from means, but not of stature. From a prosperous and quite religious fishing town of Magdala. You would have thought that she would be regarded highly among her people, but the demonic presence in her life made her an outsider, tormented, unclean, separated from the community. That was until the day that another Galilean came to town to preach at the synagogue. He was from a town of no reputation, Nazareth. But his reputation was growing. She had heard of the man who traveled village to village, casting out demons, healing the sick, restoring people to wholeness. He was coming to Magdala. But would he do this for her? A woman? She had heard this rabbi welcomed women to be his disciples, but a tormented woman, by demons, like her? She had also heard that he would sit with sinners and eat with tax collectors. He’d been known to touch a dead body and bring people back from the grave. He didn’t seem to avoid uncleanness like the other rabbis. Maybe he would be willing to give a moment of his time to come near a tormented woman like her. And sure enough, he came to town, and he was willing. He cast seven demons out of her body. He restored her, released her, gave her back her life. And she learned his name, Jesus, Yeshua, God saves. She followed him using her means to support his ministry alongside a group of other women who became her new friends. They learned from Jesus about God’s compassion for broken sinners. They listened to him declare the sins of those who trusted in him were forgiven. But how can any person do that? Not even the most respected teachers and religious leaders would dare do what only God can do. Was this Jesus something more than a great teacher? He had authority to cast out demons. He could heal with his touch. Can he really forgive sins? Doesn’t sin require a sacrifice like the law says? If he really did have the authority to forgive her sins, where was the sacrificial lamb? They were heading to Jerusalem for the Passover. And there were whispers among the disciples that something bad was waiting for them there. She thought he might be the Christ, but the rumor was that Jesus expected to be killed in Jerusalem. Jesus said, lifted up. Did he mean the cross? She was scared, but it didn’t matter. She was going to go with Jesus wherever he went. She and her friends had found new life and hope and peace in Jesus. They were with him no matter what. The week started off well. People were cheering Jesus when they entered the city. Hosanna! God saves! She and her friends were filled with joy. But by Thursday, things had changed. Jesus was arrested. Everyone scattered. Peter couldn’t be found. And to her horror, she watched from a distance as the crowds turned against her Lord. She watched as they humiliated him, beat him, marched him to the cross. She watched the nails driven through the hand that had healed her. And from a distance that no one would mistake her for a disciple to her shame, she watched her Lord and friend die. Carefully, she observed where they took his body. She was going to make sure that she knew where they buried him. She was powerless to stop the Romans and the religious elite from taking his life but she would do everything that she could do to honor him in death. She made note of the location of the tomb in the garden where Jesus was buried. She saw the stone rolled against the grave. She couldn’t honor him on Saturday because of the Sabbath, as a faithful woman who observes the Lord’s commandments. But first thing, first thing Sunday morning, that was her time. She and her friends gathered spices to preserve the body, and they set out for the tomb. And she knew it was dangerous. She knew the Jews weren’t just trying to stop Jesus. They were trying to stop anybody from following Jesus. But Jesus, he’s worth the risk. He had given her everything. How could she not do this one final thing for him? No, no. The only thing that could stop them was the stone. They discussed it with each other on the way. Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb? To her amazement and fear, Mary and her friends arrived and the stone was already rolled away. Leaving her friends behind, Mary quickly went to Peter and John. They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they’ve laid him! Peter and John ran for the tomb, Mary close behind them. The men went inside and they found burial clothes folded neatly. If they took the body, why wouldn’t they take the clothes? Mary stood outside the tomb. She watched Peter walk away, astonished, not sure what to make of it all. But in John, she saw something different. He seemed to know something. They left, but she just couldn’t. She just couldn’t leave. All she wanted to do was honor Jesus one last time. But somebody took the body and robbed her of that comfort. So she stood there, weeping. Maybe Peter and John had missed something. Maybe she should look inside. Was she seeing this right? Two angels in white sat where Jesus was laid. Woman, why are you weeping? Still overcome with the thought that someone had moved Jesus body she tells him they have taken away my Lord, I don’t know where they’ve laid him! He’s not in the tomb. So she turns to leave and encounters another man, probably the gardener, he repeats the same question. Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you seeking? Why do they keep asking these questions? Obviously, she’s upset because of the grave robbers who stole the body. But this guy knows that she’s looking for someone. He must be the one who moved the body. Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away. And that’s when she heard it. The word that cut through all of her confusion and eased all of her heartache. Mary. Everything inside of her changed. The last time she saw this face it was covered in blood. And now here was her Lord, standing in the garden, restored to life. Raboni, teacher. Everything inside her wanted to grab hold of him and never let him go but Jesus needed her now. He had a job for her as the very first witness of the resurrected Christ. Don’t cling to me. The mission isn’t over. Go tell them that I am ascending to be with our Father, God. What an honor to carry the message of Jesus word. She rushed into the huddle of confused disciples and declared, I have seen the Lord! Well, Calvary, this is something, huh? This is pretty different. This is a very special celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ here at John Marshall High School. Welcome to that. And a special welcome to those of you who are guests with us this morning. Hopefully, you did not go to our regular building first. I’m just waiting for those stories to start rolling in. Hopefully you didn’t go. If you did, I’m real sorry about that. But you made it here, so that’s great. This is something. You all sound great, by the way. Did you notice that? This is awesome to be able to hear these voices. What a joy to be able to lift our voices together as one church. I did some research this week to pinpoint exactly when it was the last time that the entirety of Calvary was able to worship together in one service on a Sunday morning. And the answer is 1990. 1990 was the last time all of Calvary on a Sunday morning was able to worship together under normal circumstances. That is 36 years ago. Now, for some of you who have been around for a little bit, you don’t feel like it was that long ago. So let me put that into perspective. I was 12. H.W. was the president. Germany was still two countries. Al Gore had just invented the internet. Okay? That’s how long ago that was. Let’s see, one for the kids, okay. There was no Barney. Okay. Turtles were dressing as ninjas. It was a better time. A better time. 36 years is a long time. What a privilege it is to gather as one church to praise and worship the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ together. We’re here because we are like the Apostle John in our passage, we see the historical evidence of the empty grave. And we believe. We believe Jesus is the God who went to the cross on our behalf to pay the price of our sins. We believe that his physical body died and was buried. And we believe that he raised physically from the dead, that the stone was rolled away, that he walked out of the tomb. We believe the eyewitness testimony of those who were there, those whose lives were transformed by seeing, touching and hearing the resurrected Christ. And these include the 11 remaining disciples. It includes 500 other witnesses, who spent 40 days with Jesus. But I want to concentrate this morning on just one of those witnesses, Mary Magdalene. The very first person to encounter Jesus in his resurrected body. Mary’s first encounter with Jesus is a beautiful picture of the restored relationship that we have with God when we put our hope in the resurrected Christ. So, here’s what we’re going to do this morning. I have four things that I want to share with you. The first is just a brief note about Mary being the first witness. And then I want to share three ways our lives are changed by the resurrected Christ. Now I’m going to use this phrase, resurrected Christ. And you might be thinking to yourself, well how is that different from Jesus? No, it’s not. Same guy. Okay. Same guy. Mostly when we talk about Jesus ministry, we’re either looking at his ministry before his death or we’re looking at the cross itself. As a point of emphasis this morning, I want us to consider how a resurrected Christ impacts and transforms our relationship with God. And we’re going to see that in the three things that Jesus says to Mary in the garden outside the tomb. But before we do that, let me first point out something that’s pretty remarkable about the fact that Mary was there at all. Now, I know that many of you that are here this morning are skeptical about the resurrection. Perhaps attending a service like this really isn’t your thing. You’re just here because that’s what your family does on Easter. And I’ll tell you, I’m glad you’re here. You’re not glad you’re here, but I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. And some of you are okay with talking about Jesus but when we get to the miracles, you’re more apt to think of them as embellishments or even lies or legend. Please understand, the early church that birthed the worldwide church planting movement did so because they fully believed that Jesus rose from the grave. They fully believed the testimony of their peers who said we were with the resurrected Christ. So let me challenge you. If you’re in that camp this morning, let me challenge you with something. You might think someone would make up a story like this, but I can assure you no Jewish person in the first century would make up a story like this and expect it to be believed. See, in the first century, a woman’s testimony was not admissible in a court under Jewish law. I’m not condoning that. I mean, we’ve come a long way, right? But understand, in their culture, you could have ten women witness a crime and the judge would still say, okay, yeah, but was there a man there that saw it? Okay. Remember, first-century Jewish society, not Kyle Bushre. Okay, so hold the emails. That was what was happening then. So, if you’re going to write an account validating the resurrection of a dead man, which is exactly how the early church understood the gospels, you’re not going to make the woman the first witness. You’re not going to do that. Unless, of course, that’s what happened. Unless that’s what happened. This story would have been dismissed immediately by that culture, except for the fact that this is what happened. I could spend all morning talking about the reasons we can have full confidence in the historicity of the Gospels, but I want to turn our attention to three ways that our faith in Christ transforms our lives. And the first is that the resurrected Christ eases our sorrows. They said to her, woman, why are you weeping? And she said to them, they have taken away the Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? Why are you weeping? Sounds like an odd question to ask someone who just watched your friend die the day before, and who is now standing at his grave, where it’s clear to her that someone has stolen the body, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that seem like an occasion to weep? Most of us would be weeping over far less trauma than what Mary has gone through in the last 24 hours. But here, the angels are asking why Mary is weeping. And then she turns and Jesus is standing there, and you’d think that he’d be a little bit more understanding but he asks the same question. Woman, why are you weeping? You know, if I spoke to you at a funeral of your loved one and I came up to you and I asked you this question, you would say, what is wrong with this guy? Get this guy out of here. Why is he asking these questions? And yet everyone around Mary in that moment seems to be under the impression that it’s her tears that are inappropriate and that there’s something wrong with how she’s acting. What has she missed? Well, obviously we can’t be too hard on her this morning. What she has missed is the same thing that everyone who walked with Jesus missed all along the way. Jesus mentioned is his future death and resurrection at various points throughout his ministry, but no one ever really understood what he meant. It wasn’t going to be until the disciples encountered the resurrected Christ, that they would connect the dots with Jesus and what he said before. And that’s why Jesus asks this follow up question, who are you looking for? It’s a rhetorical question, because Jesus knows full well that Mary is looking for his dead body, and she won’t find it because she doesn’t yet understand. She hasn’t fully grasped the incredible truth. The truth that makes all the difference for you and for me this morning, too. Death doesn’t win. Death doesn’t win. Mary, who are you looking for? You’re looking for a dead teacher when you should be looking for a resurrected savior because death doesn’t win. When I think of all the turmoil and the pain and the sorrow that comes standard with just living in this world. One of the most compelling aspects of the gospel is that it answers the question, is death the end? Is it just struggle, pain, wars, relational battles, disappointment, depression, and then death at the end? Is there a point to life? Is the goal of life just to carve out some little fleeting happiness while I try to convince myself that things matter and await the inevitable end that is death? You say, Kyle, it’s getting a little dark for Easter, don’t you think? But it is dark. The world is dark, isn’t it? Every sentence of recorded human history has only shown us that it is dark and destructive when humanity is in charge. When you set the good news of Jesus Christ against that dark background, the contrast is striking. The resurrected Christ is proof that while sin drags us to death, Jesus Christ has overcome death. If you trust in Jesus, death doesn’t win. If you trust in Jesus, death doesn’t win. When you confess your sins and you turn from them and you trust that Jesus paid your death and he died on the cross for your sins, you can have every confidence that eternal life with the resurrected Christ is what awaits you. Death doesn’t win. And when you have hope in the resurrected Christ, it eases the sorrows of this broken world because you know they’re temporary. You know that’s not the end. In fact, it’s more than that. You start to realize that these sorrows are building a longing inside of you to be with Christ for eternity. And even more than that, it’ll make you into a person who will bring this hope to others because now you want to ease the sorrows of others. Can you imagine if we lived in a world where everybody was trying to ease the sorrows of the people around them? That’s the Kingdom of God. And I’m going to talk more about easing sorrows here in just a minute. Here’s something else we learn from this moment with Mary at the tomb. We learn that the resurrected Christ calls us by name. Jesus said to her, Mary. And she turned and said to him in Aramaic, Rabboni, which means teacher. Now, it may not seem like a big deal that Jesus would call Mary by her name, or that by saying her name, Mary would suddenly realize that this was Jesus and not the gardener. After all, they had been friends for years now. Mary followed Jesus all over Israel as he preached the good news. She had a great relationship with him. He had cast seven demons out of her, and he taught her about the kingdom of God. But here’s the thing that all happened prior to his death. Mary and the disciples had a personal relationship with the man Jesus. Okay? But here he is now, the resurrected Christ. Here he is on the other side of death, about to ascend to his former glory, to sit at the right hand of God the Father as God the Son. And this Jesus, the resurrected Christ, the word that became flesh, the Word of God who was with God and who was God, as we are told at the beginning of John’s gospel, he calls Mary by name. You know what that means? You know what that means, church? It means the creator God of the universe relates to us personally. He’s not an aloof, transcendent, unconcerned God. The relationship with Mary didn’t end when Jesus was revealed to be both God and man. The creator God designed us to have a personal relationship with him. Do you know what deism is? You ever heard of deism? Deism is the belief that God created the world but has really not been involved with it ever since. We’re just sort of fending for ourselves in a world that a God somewhere created. We can trace this idea all the way back to ancient Greece. But it really became popular in the 1600s thanks to some philosophers in England. Sorry, Jamie and James, to you guys. You Keep doing this to us. These deists said that the only thing we can know about God is what we find in the natural world. So, no books, no revelation. God hasn’t spoken. However, they also said that God ought to be worshiped and that our morality matters to him, and that God gives out rewards and punishments now and in eternity based on our behavior. How they got all that from looking at plants and animals is beyond our scope this morning. But you don’t need a history lesson. So why do I bring it up? Well, 20 years ago, sociologist Christian Smith conducted a study of 3,000 teenagers to determine what they believed about God. And he concluded that this generation of young people, who would be in their 30’s today, believed in what he called moralistic therapeutic deism, MTD, moralistic therapeutic deism. They believed in a God who created the world but really wasn’t involved in it, except for when we need something from him. And then he gets involved. He wants us to be good. He wants us to be moral in how we treat other people. He’s there if we need him, so he’s therapeutic. But for all the other times, he can be safely ignored because he doesn’t really care who we are or what we do. He leaves us to strive for our own happiness, waiting in the wings just in case things don’t work out according to our plans. That’s MTD. That’s what people believed in, he found. And let me tell you, as a pastor, I have encountered a lot of people who believe God is exactly like this. Disconnected, uninterested, unconcerned, just a sort of ethereal power somewhere out there. And for most of these folks, they’re fine when the sun is shining on their lives and they’re working through things and things are going well, they’re just fine and things are going their way, and they don’t think about it too much, but it all falls apart when people around them don’t agree with their version of morality. And when their version of therapy isn’t working for them. It doesn’t bring the relief they want. And so you have a lot of people trying to feel their way through this life on their own terms, expecting God to show up when he’s summoned like a butler. And they’re very disappointed when he doesn’t. And the incredible irony is that they get mad at a God that didn’t exist in the first place. The truth is, we can’t know what God is like unless he reveals himself. Don’t you hate it? Don’t you hate it when someone who doesn’t really know you assumes things about you, and are wrong without listening to you and getting to know you. They just assume things that are obviously wrong about you. They clearly don’t know who you are. Don’t you get upset when people do that? Why would we think that that’s okay with God if it’s not okay with us? We don’t get to guess at what God is like and assume his character. And the great reality of the risen Christ is that we don’t have to. God has revealed himself in history. He has made himself known to us, and what he shows us is remarkable. The resurrected Christ offers an invitation to come and be in a first name relationship with the God who made you and loves you. That’s what we have in Jesus. You are not a cosmic accident. You are not just a highly developed animal. You are stamped with the image of your creator. You are highly valuable in his sight. He knows you. And if you put your trust in Jesus, you will know him too. Well, there’s one more way that our lives are transformed when we see it. And we see it in the thing that Jesus says to Mary. The last thing that he says. And that’s that the resurrected Christ has a job for us. Jesus said to her, do not cling to me for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her. Mary isn’t just the first to see and speak to Jesus. She is the first of what will become a very long line of people who will tell other people that Jesus is alive. And this line stretches for 2000 years, all the way up to John Marshall High School this morning. We are doing the same thing. Jesus victory over death breaks the stranglehold of sin on the human heart. It reunites us into a relationship with God. That’s why Jesus says that he’s going to ascend to be with my Father and your Father, my God and your God. Now, don’t be thrown by the fact that Jesus refers to His God. He often refers to God the Father simply as God. And that’s what he’s doing here. His point is that when you trust in Jesus, you join God’s family. In that sense, Jesus is playing the role of big brother here in this passage. As the apostle Paul later explains in his letter to the Ephesians, through faith in Christ, we are adopted into the family of God to live with him for eternity. The death and resurrection of Jesus was our adoption paperwork. He closed the deal by removing our sin, making us righteous, which legally bonds us to God’s family. At the very beginning of this book, chapter one verse 12, John writes, to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. You see, it’s an adoption. We’re brought into his family. And now Jesus says to Mary, go! Go! Go, tell my brothers! Go tell them, church. This message has to be shared. Receiving this means sharing this. You don’t get to have Jesus without giving him away. Jesus rose in history. The gospel is the good news of salvation for eternity through a reconciled relationship with God. How could we not share that? How could we not share that? And one last time, let me speak to those of you who are skeptical. Especially if you’re coming from a place where you’re skeptical of the church. Okay? Maybe not of Jesus, but you’re skeptical of the church. Maybe you’ve seen some things done by Christians that seem out of line with what Jesus said. Things like loving your enemies, caring for the poor and marginalized, loving your neighbor as yourself. You’re looking at the sins of the people in the church and you’re saying, well, if Jesus is like that, then I don’t want Jesus. Or at least I don’t want the church. And while there are many things that I could say to you this morning, I’ll just say this. I agree with you that there is still a lot of residual sin among people in the church. See, when you look at people in the church, you’re looking at incomplete, unfinished, fallen people who are growing in Christ but are not there yet. That’s who you’re looking at. Becoming like Jesus, it’s a long process. It’s a lot of hard work. You have never met a fully formed Christian. You’ve never met one. And that’s because the process continues all the way up to the moment that we enter into eternity with Christ. The resurrected Christ shows us what we will be someday. And this is why we preach not the gospel of human goodness, not the gospel of personal achievement, but the gospel of the gracious forgiveness of Jesus Christ. We have salvation that we don’t deserve. We have salvation that we could never earn. It comes to us only by God’s mercy and in fits and starts, slowly but surely, it makes us more loving, more gracious, more forgiving. It wipes away our sorrows so that we become people who want to wipe away the sorrows of others. It gives us hope and it causes us to take this hope to others. I want to invite our worship team to come onto the stage and lead us for the rest of our service. As we close our time in the Bible this morning, church, in this very unique celebration of the resurrected Christ here at John Marshall High School, I want to ask you the same question. I want to ask you the same question that Jesus had for Mary. Whom are you seeking? Whom are you seeking? A dead teacher can’t save you. A dead teacher can’t save you. A human solution can never give you true hope, but the resurrected Christ will. Do you know him? Do you know him? Do you hear his voice calling your name? Let’s pray. Lord God, on this Easter Sunday morning, the morning we focus most carefully on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we proclaim the glory of the resurrected Christ. We thank you, Lord, that you came out of the grave, that you overcame death on our behalf, that we would be able to overcome. Lord, our sins weighed us down. It separated us from you, and you have bought us at the price of Jesus Christ on the cross. You have bought us into your family. You have made the relationship whole again. We could not do that. You have done it for us. You have succeeded. You are victorious over the grave. And Lord, we look forward to the day in eternity when we are with you forever. But in the meantime, Lord, send us out. Send us out like Mary, Father to go and to proclaim that we have seen the Lord, and that you can see him too. Thank you, Father, for all that you have accomplished in your Son and by your Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Couldn’t God have accomplished all his goals, including forgiving us as sinners, without the pain and trauma of the cross? Tonight we gather as a church in spiritual unity with believers all over the world to celebrate the central tenet of our faith. If you look at a fire, you’ll see blue, orange, yellow flames rising to the sky. What you’re seeing is the fire that has cooled. It emanates from a center where the flame is so hot that it’s clear or white. The visible flame is the product. It shoots out in many directions from a much hotter source. Tonight, we as the church are the visible flame produced by a single source. Now this is true all of the time, but you can see it especially well on Good Friday. If you want to know where to find the single source of the white hot center of Christianity, you will find it in this. Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. That’s the white hot center of Christianity. It is the most indispensable truth of our Christian faith. No doctrine of Scripture is more foundational. If you remove it, you do not have Christianity. As Jesus himself explained in Matthew 20, in Mark 10, he came not to be served, but to serve by giving his life as a ransom for many. That’s Jesus mission statement. He came to deliver the required ransom to release his captive people. We are captive to our sin. We are chained down by our evil. The ransom that is required that’s necessary for release is death. That’s what has to be paid. And so God the Son became a man who could die. God took on human flesh so that the flesh could die in our place. That’s why he became a man. When you put your faith in Jesus, what you’re saying is that you trust that his death is your death. You are reaching out and you are taking hold of the glorious gift that God took your punishment to set you free. Now the question comes up every once in a while, from time to time, especially among those who are not yet Christians but who are considering Christianity, they will ask, was the cross necessary? Was it necessary? Couldn’t God have accomplished all his goals, including forgiving us as sinners without the pain and the trauma of the cross? I’d like to revisit a passage of scripture that we were in as a church just two weeks ago. Luke 18:31-34. But specifically, I want to look at verse 31 tonight. Jesus is traveling in this passage to Jerusalem. No one is making him go there, but he’s going because he wants to. And because he’s supposed to. And he explains to the 12 disciples that he’ll be arrested and shamed, flogged, killed, and then he’ll rise again. And they hear this, but they don’t fully understand this. It doesn’t make sense to them why their anointed king, their Messiah, their Christ has to go through all of those awful things. In Mark chapter eight, we’re told that that Peter even took Jesus aside and began to argue with him about why he had to go to the cross. Can you imagine rebuking Jesus? But that’s what Peter did. And yet, when people say things today like, well, I would have done it differently, or I don’t see why the cross is necessary, they’re really doing the same thing. They’re rebuking the plan. You see, it’s the same question, really, isn’t it? Is this all really necessary? Couldn’t we just skip past all the awfulness and simply have a glorious God, a forgiven people, banishment of all evil, and a kingdom that never ends. Can’t we just have that? So let’s answer the question, starting with Jesus words in Luke chapter 18, verse 31. And then I’m going to take you to a rather odd place for a Good Friday. I’m going to take you to Daniel chapter seven to explain what Jesus is saying in Luke. And then we’ll jump back into John chapter 12, where Jesus definitively shows us why we cannot skip the cross. Here’s Luke 18:31 and taking the 12, he said to them, see, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. So Jesus is going up to Jerusalem to fulfill the prophecies about the Son of Man. Now, this phrase, might confuse us because Jesus is speaking in the third person here. It sounds like he’s referring to someone else, the Son of Man being someone else. It would have been easier for Jesus for us, if Jesus had simply said, I’m going, I am the Son of man, so I have to go to Jerusalem. That would have been clearer to us. But what he’s doing is he’s leaving this open to his disciples and to us to make the connection. Jesus is the one who’s going to Jerusalem. And then he says that the prophecy must be fulfilled for the Son of Man. Therefore, Jesus is the Son of Man. And doing it in this way causes us to determine what we believe. It’s an invitation to make a commitment and a confession. I believe Jesus is the Son of Man. Now that is an enigmatic name shrouded in mystery. I imagine there are probably quite a number of you here tonight that don’t quite know what to do with that phrase, with what Jesus means by Son of Man, and don’t feel badly at all, if you don’t. Don’t feel badly at all if that’s you. It’s imagery from one of the most difficult types of writing in the Bible; apocalyptic literature, visions and symbols, sometimes about the future. God would sometimes give his prophets themselves a vision that they themselves did not fully understand when they were recording it. And the vision of the Son of Man comes from the prophet Daniel. It’s recorded for us in chapter seven. He’s laying in bed one night and God gives him a dream-like vision, which he then writes down. He sees beasts and raging seas. There’s a four headed leopard in this vision with wings. It’s all very fascinating and confusing. It’s likely a picture of evil raining. But then there’s a throne in the vision and it’s blazing with fire. And on this throne is a figure that Daniel calls the Ancient of Days. And he’s all in white. And this great multitude of people are all standing around this throne. Daniel 7:10 says, A stream of fire issued and came out from before him. A thousand thousands served him, and 10,000 times 10,000 stood before him. The court sat in judgment and the books were opened. So the Ancient of Days here is clearly a picture of the Lord. He’s sitting on his throne room and he’s surrounded by his people. But there’s a judgment coming. The books are opened, it says. What sort of judgment is about to happen? Well, Daniel looks around at that moment, and he sees a beast that’s killed and destroyed. The body of the beast is destroyed, and the other beasts have their dominion or their rule taken away from them. Although the text does say that they’re given some power for a season, it says. And then we find out what happened. Let me read this part. I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory, and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. So, Daniel now sees a new figure come into his vision, but it’s not one who appears as a beast. This one appears as a human. That’s what a son of man is. A son of man is a human. It’s a human being. And this human being is presented before God on His throne. What will God do? Well, he takes the rule and the power away from the evil beast and he gives it to this son of man. He gives him dominion and glory and a kingdom. Clearly, this Son of Man is going to take over and rule in the place of evil, and all the other nations are going to bow down and come under the supreme authority of the One Son of Man. They’re going to serve him. His kingdom, unlike all the other nations and governments and rulers, is everlasting. There’s no term limit for the Son of Man. He’s going to reign forever. There’s no point when God will take away his reign, and no other nation or government or army or world superpower will ever be able to destroy the kingdom of the Son of Man. When Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, this is what he’s saying. He’s saying, I am this. He wields supreme authority over all the earth. He says it plainly in Matthew 28, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me that granting of authority is what is envisioned here in Daniel. So there is no kingdom or government regime, ayatollah, president, congress, military or nation that will ever unseat the Son of Man. As his gospel spreads and people trust in him, they’re going to enter into this kingdom. Now, of course, we are still part of whatever secondary nation we happen to live in, but the lesser authorities don’t command our primary allegiance. Now, we still have not answered the question, but we can expand upon it. If Jesus is the Son of Man vested with all authority to reign over all of creation, why did he have to die on a cross, if he’s this? There’s no cross in this vision. There’s no cross in crossing Daniel’s vision. He doesn’t talk about any dying at all. In fact, doesn’t a horrible death on a cross seem to fly in the face of a glorious God reigning over all the earth? And yet here is Jesus walking boldly to Jerusalem, because he has to fulfill the entire plan that’s required of the Son of Man. The key here, the key to understanding this, is to understand that once we identify Jesus as the one in Daniel’s vision, all the other passages about the Messiah also apply to him. And I don’t have time tonight to take you on a long journey through all of those, but we can just let Jesus summarize it for us. That’s what he does in John chapter 12. Just before he enters Jerusalem, now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say, Father save me from this hour? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name. Then a voice came from heaven. I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. Does this seem familiar? Does this sound like something you’ve heard? There’s a crowd gathered. Jesus is there. A voice thunders from heaven affirming that what Jesus has said that God will be glorified? A few verses earlier in verse 23, he said, the time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. But then he immediately follows that by explaining that a grain of wheat has to fall into the ground and die for it to bear fruit. Jesus isn’t just explaining how seeds work. He’s using this seed image to explain that the process of him being glorified requires him to pass through death. And that’s what’s troubling his soul now, here in verse 27. He doesn’t want the pain of death, but he knows that it is a necessary step to his glorification and reign. But we still don’t yet have an answer to our question why? Why is this a necessary step? Why can’t we just skip to the end where Jesus reigns in glory? Let me skip down to verse 31. Now is the judgment of this world. Now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So, here’s the judgment, the ruler of this world is a reference to Satan and his limited authority, and he’s going to be cast out. Meaning his authority and dominion will be taken away from him, and then the beast will be destroyed. But here’s what we didn’t have in Daniel’s vision. This is where the cross inserts itself. The method of this judgment will be Jesus lifted up. The way the beast will be destroyed is by having Jesus lifted up from the earth. This is a reference to the cross which John explains in verse 33. The beast will be destroyed. His authority is going to be given to the Son of Man when the Son of Man goes to the cross and dies. And why is that? Because that act will draw all people to Jesus. Do you see him? Do you see what he’s saying here? He’s going to draw all the people to himself through this act. They’ll be ransomed out of captivity to Satan and brought to Jesus. Everyone who trusts in the Son of Man will be transformed from one kingdom to another. Okay, you’re picked up, you’re scooped up out of this kingdom of Satan. You are brought into the kingdom of the Son of Man. They experience a change in rule and the cross makes the transfer of authority complete. It is possible. It is possible to skip the cross and go straight to the glorious reign of Jesus. It is possible for that to happen, but none of us would be in that kingdom. Jesus had every right to skip the cross. He had every right to go right past it. But if he did, we could not be in that kingdom. God would be no less glorious. Jesus would reign. His kingdom would be no less glorious. But you and I would not be in it because we would still be under the grip and the reign of Satan. Our sin requires payment, and without Jesus paying our debt in full, releasing us from the bondage of our sin, we’d never be able to draw near to Christ. We’d never be able to come to him. Listen to the crowd’s response to what Jesus has said here. It sounds just like the person today who can’t understand why the cross is necessary. So the crowd answered him, we have heard from the law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is the Son of Man? How can you say that the king that we’ve been waiting for has to die? How can it possibly be a part of the plan of the Son of Man to be lifted up on a cross? That makes no sense. That’s not even in our Hebrew Bible. Why would you say that? They knew the Son of Man would reign forever, right? Daniel 7, they knew that was going to happen, but they didn’t know that for us to join him, he would have to die. That cross is for you and me. That’s why. That’s why the cross. For you and me. That cross is our entrance to the glorious reign of the Son of Man forever. Jesus answers the question, by the way. He answers their question, but he does it in typical Jesus fashion. He never in all the Gospels, never once in all the Gospels does Jesus say, I am the Son of man. He could have right here. He’s being asked directly. He could have said it right here, Instead, so Jesus said to them, the light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light that you may become Sons of Light. He changes the imagery on them. Isn’t that just like Jesus? To change the imagery, to change the subject almost. But to still answer the question in a different way? Look what he’s saying. You want guidance? You want to know the answer to your question. You want clarity? You want to know the right way forward? Follow the light. It’s an invitation to be with Jesus. And I extend that invitation to you tonight. Jesus died for your sins. It’s the white hot center of Christianity. Have you trusted in the Son of Man who was lifted up for you? Have you come under his reign? We’re going to celebrate communion tonight. The bread represents Jesus broken body. The cup represents his shed blood. When we eat and we drink, we affirm that Jesus death was for our sins, but it also speaks to our citizenship. It also talks about which reign we’re under now. It’s a declaration that we’re no longer under the reign of Satan with his defeated kingdom and sin and death. We’ve now entered the kingdom of the Son of Man, and Jesus is our King. The bread and the cup are open to all of you who worship Jesus as the Son of Man. If you don’t believe that yet, we would ask you tonight not to participate, but to use this time to consider who do you believe Jesus is? Who is he then? I’d say to you what Jesus said to that crowd. The light is right here in front of you, for a while. But will you follow it? Will you believe in it? I’m going to invite our servers to come forward as I pray. Let’s pray.

Through the blood of Christ, God has finally provided a permanent answer for our greatest need.   We are a church located in Rochester, Minnesota.  Our Mission is to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus who live out passion for Christ and compassion for people. Learn more at www.calvaryefree.church   Well, I have the honor of introducing this morning my good friend Brian Farone. Brian serves as the superintendent of the North Central District of the EFCA, which is our district. And actually, you all probably have good reason to thank Brian later, if you see him after the service, because I first met Brian when he was an elder at a church in California that was very close to calling me to be their pastor, and Brian voted no. Yada yada yada, here I am. He also led the expedition up into the Alps, where I nearly fell to my death twice. You know, now that I’m saying it out loud, it’s less friendly, I think. Do you feel like someone’s out to get you? No, I’m just kidding. I love Brian. Brian is a great leader for our district, and one of the reasons he’s such a great leader is because he loves pastors and he loves churches and he loves our movement and he serves really, really well. He’s a great joy to have. And he’s a gift to our district. So would you please join me in welcoming Brian? We were younger when that vote happened. But God is provident, and I’m so grateful now that Kyle is here, grateful too. For those of you who don’t know me, I imagine it’s many of you, as Kyle said, my name is Brian Farone and I’m here with my wife, Terry. I serve as district superintendent. And, really that boils down to being given the privilege of pastoring and caring for pastors, church leaders, and churches. And it’s been the great joy of my life to serve in this way. And over the years, I’ve gotten to know your congregation well, and I’m so grateful for that. Grateful to be here again. Grateful for the good things God is doing here. And my hope today is to do two things. One, quickly, in the beginning I want to just share a little bit about the family of churches that you’re a part of. Just so you can remember, like the Christian church, never intended to be alone, always connected to sister congregations. So I want to share a little bit about our family of churches. But the main thing I want to do today, in anticipation of Easter, is remind you from Scripture about the goodness of Jesus blood shed for us on the cross, and we’ll get to that in a second. But to begin, just a few pictures, I want to show you one. This is a little bit of the shape of our family of churches. Our district here in Minnesota is about 170 congregations. I think the official count right now is 177, but as you could guess, that number moves around a little bit. We’re about 1600 congregations across the nation, and we’re about 600 missionaries around the world. And all of us are doing the same thing that’s happening here today.Loving the gospel, embracing the scriptures, seeking to reach the lost, those who are far from God, seeking to disciple the found, those who have put their hope in Jesus Christ. And you’re part of a big family that’s doing that all over Minnesota, all across the nation, in fact, all across the world. I’m going to skip a bunch of pictures, just a bunch of stuff I would have talked about. Guys like me can talk and talk and talk. So I’m trying to be brief. But the other thing, two other things I want to show you for sure is a picture of our team. As you could probably guess, 170 churches don’t get helped by one person. It takes a team to serve, support, help, and encourage. And so we have this beautiful team of 16 leaders who have devoted themselves to being a part of a church like yours, to loving churches like yours, to building expertise in areas that we have found over the years churches need help with and they love you and are here to help you in any way they can. They are under heaven, easily the best resource we have to offer. And they’re here not just for Kyle, but they’re here for your church leadership team, for your elders. And we’re available to you as well. We are here to serve churches.We love churches because it’s Jesus wife. It’s the bride of Christ. And we love the church and we’re privileged to serve churches like yours. A final picture I want to show is of our infographic. We do this every couple years. We’re about to produce a new one. And this really flows out of the reality that, people are helped by pictures and sometimes bored by text, right? If you have long written descriptions of who you are, in fact, I’m a first gen Christian, as you’ll hear today, and I was trying to figure out how to describe our family of churches to even my parents and my family who aren’t believers. And so we developed this tool to just help you get a feel for who we are as a family of churches. And some of the things that God is doing among us. That picture on the screen is a little dated. You can go to our website and I think you’ll find this one for about two weeks. We have a new one that’s about to be shared, but one stat I’ll share from the new one that’s just so fun and it helps emphasize the good things that are happening. In the last year, in 2025, is the counting year for our 2026 infographic, we baptized across these 170 churches, more than 1100 people. So more than 1100 people publicly declared that they had put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation within our family of churches. And I heard that, and I just thought, what a beautiful picture of what’s going on week in and week out in these churches that you are like siblings with, like siblings with. All right. That’s a little bit about our district. If you want to know more, please come and find me. I would love to share more about what God’s doing in places like Worthington and Grand Marais and Thief River Falls and all over the Twin Cities and everywhere in between. But now I want to invite you to pray with me as we begin to turn our hearts toward God and His Word in worship, continuing in worship. Father, we do in a simple prayer, we turn toward you. We, say to you what you know of us, we need you. We say to you what you know of us, we came into this room and all kinds of places. We say to you what you know of us, it’s our desire, Lord, that the distractions go away and you would, in your grace and in your power, help us to turn our attention towards your word, that we might hear you, that we might hear you, that we might be reminded afresh of what you’ve done for us, that we might be filled for the week ahead for discipleship and service that we might, as this Easter week comes, remember the lost. So help us, Lord, to hear. Give us ears that work and hearts that will embrace. And hands that will act as if we’ve heard. It’s in Jesus name. We pray these things and for his sake and to his glory. Because our King Jesus is so, so good, we pray in his name. Amen. I want to begin this morning my sermon with a question. Have you ever waited for something? Have you ever wanted something? Have you ever hoped for something, needed something, something you longed for but the answer never just seemed to come? It’s the beginning of baseball season, and the Minnesota Twins seem like a good answer to this question about wanting and waiting and hoping. It was about four years ago or so that my wife, Terry, and I decided we were going to go all-in on the Minnesota Twins. We’d moved here from California. We’d never been really baseball fans all that much. And we were looking for kind of a shared hobby and we thought, well, maybe the Twins, we did not know what we were signing up for. But it was midway through the season, I had enough money to subscribe to what was then $100 channel. It’s gotten much cheaper now. It’s very exciting for me, and we just started watching the Twins together, and we discovered it was kind of like watching reality TV. It was sort of like a version of survivor, and you would see who’s on the island this week and who’s going back to Saint Paul next week. And we got kind of just excited about it. And I have, because I’m a pastor and I’m paid to talk, people heard about this story. In fact, some of my pastor friends would say, how did you get your wife to love the Minnesota Twins? And I would say step one I neglected baseball for 20 years and they were usually out after step one. It didn’t sound like it was a plausible like what step two was. But it’s become this thing that we love. And so our board of directors in the district was two years ago, decided to give us what they perceived as a gift from people who loved us. They gave us Twins passes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but you can get a Twins pass, which means you have on your phone a ticket to every game that happens at Target Field. And so we went all-in that season, decided we were going to go. Our rule was, if we can go, we’re not going to think about it. We’re just going to go. And so game one was awesome. Game one was a blast. It was good weather in April, which we’re supposed to have today, right? It was one of those days. Although I know it’s not April. I wish it was April. I know it’s not April. Games two, three and four were fun too. And if you’ve ever been there, you can see like the glowing under the heat lamps. If you’ve been to Target Field when it’s real cold. The next eight games were pretty exciting and we were actually winning and we were in first place. It was just an amazing…in fact, the next 16 games were just fabulous. They were fabulous. And, actually, I think there’s 18 on there and one where my wife was alone and I was with an elder board who was going through a thing, which is sort of what I do for a living. And in fact, I remember being, this was the summer Kyle and I went hiking, and he was a fan of the then pathetic Detroit Tigers. And I remember distinctly, I thought he was going to bring this up, but he chose to bring yet another embarrassing thing up for me. I remember then making fun of him about mid-summer because they were like 12 games back and they had no chance. And this summer, in September, they managed to blow like a 12 game lead. And, it reminded me of this verse I put on the screen. Proverbs has this verse. Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, right? And my heart was sick. And it gets at this idea of a thing. Remember I asked you in the beginning, a thing you had longed for, had wanted, had waited for, but never really seemed to come. Well, with small things like the Minnesota Twins, which I affirm, even though I don’t always remember it, they are a small thing, with small things like the Minnesota Twins it’s not that big a deal. But what about the biggest things? What about the important things? What about the biggest things we have in life, or the biggest problems we have in life? Or if you’re like me, you long ago discovered your biggest problem in life was your you problem. And you hope and you wait and you want. Well, today, today we are going to talk about a place in God’s Word that addresses this hope deferred makes the heart grow sick problem that we all have and our longing, each one of us, for a permanent solution to our brokenness problem, our me problem. And we’re going to see in this passage today that it’s through the blood of Christ, through the blood of Christ, that God has finally provided a permanent answer to our greatest need, to our biggest want. And we’re going to see that by doing really two things. One is this sermon that I’m preaching today comes from a series that I was part of in my home church, and it was, we were working through the book of Hebrews, and the book of Hebrews has a lot of teaching on the New Covenant, and the New Covenant is the permanent solution to our biggest problem. So we’re going to briefly review sort of a summary of what the New Covenant is. These promises we’ve been given through the blood of Christ that change everything for any who would put their hope in Christ. We’ll do that quickly at the beginning, because really, I want to focus on the passage that was read this morning. And in it we’re going to see four finally truths, four longing truths, four waiting and receiving truths on this topic that come from this passage. So briefly, here’s the six New Covenant promises, this is a a summary of Hebrews teaching on the New Covenant by my friend, Pastor Kevin Block, one of the pastors at my church who preached the week before I preached this one, and his summary was so good I just want to walk you through it and remember, help you remember what it is when you see the word therefore, in the beginning of our passage, it’s referring back to this body of teaching. So in the New Covenant and what and what God has provided for us in Christ, we have six things. One, we have big F forgiveness. Brothers and sisters, you and I in the New Covenant have been given absolute, total, full, complete forgiveness for all our sins past, present and even future if we put our hope in Jesus Christ. A second thing the New Covenant gives to us is a new heart. We become alive in Christ. Though we were dead in our sins before, our spirit becomes alive in Christ. In the New Covenant, number three, we are given the Holy Spirit to indwell us, to live among us, to empower us. God present in us, his spirit residing in us and among us. Number four, we are given through the New Covenant, I remember this when I became a Christian i didn’t think this was possible, my heart desires changed. They changed. They didn’t become perfect. But I started wanting things, good things I never could have imagined wanting. I started desiring change. I never could have imagined desire. I started finding love inside myself for others that I could not manufacture. Through the New Covenant, number five, through the New Covenant, this is wonder of wonders. It’s not just that God removes our guilt or satisfies his anger toward our sinful acts or rescues us from judgment, we become his children. We become his children, adopted siblings in the family of God. And then finally, in six, and we can’t miss this. Even in this broken world, we have increasing intimacy with our God. You know, when I talked in the beginning about that longing, people long for a solution to their me problem, but even more, they long to be connected. We long to be connected. Don’t you long to be connected to your maker and through Christ? As we’ll see today, you can be connected to the King of the universe, the creator of every atom that was ever formed, the one who made the skies and the sea and the land. And you can be connected to him, increasing closeness with your creator. So those are the six new Covenant promises we’re going to pivot to for final truths. I put them all on the screen at once, but we’re going to work through them one by one. And the first truth I want you to see in the first part of the passage that was read is this. Finally Jesus death established. That’s the word, established a better covenant. Look down at your Bibles with me. I want to I want to read the passage again, chunk by chunk, as we go through, just so you can hear, especially as the book of Hebrews is kind of related to a culture, not our own, a very Jewish culture. I want you to hear again how this passage says that Jesus death, unlike how the last covenant was established, got established. It says this in verse 15, therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established, for a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Since the one who made it is alive. Let me walk you through how these verses show the way Jesus death established, got started, put in place, this better solution. Notice the word mediator up at the beginning. A mediator is someone that acts as a go between, and the passage is reminding us here that Jesus is the is the mediator between all the good that comes from this new covenant that God has given us, and us, and he’s the mediator between us and God. The passage references an eternal inheritance, which is where it brings in the idea of a will. It pictures all those things that I shared as this great and glorious inheritance. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I had these inheritance fantasies. Like what would happen if I inherited a ton of money? What would that be like? And the passage is tapping into that desire that almost everyone has. What would happen if a windfall came? And the passage is likening Jesus death on the cross and what it provided as the thing that brings the windfall into our life. And it does it through the idea of a will. Most of us know how a will works, right? A will before the person dies is merely a piece of paper with instructions on it, right? And it details how the possessions of an inheritance are doled out, are given out, are used after the person dies. But before a person dies, a will is merely a piece of paper with a signature on it. And the signature actually isn’t the thing that puts the will in force. It’s the death. And the passage is likening here Jesus death to the process of a will enacting an inheritance. And it’s saying those good things that came, they came for sure. They were established for sure when Jesus died on the cross for us. His death establishes it like the death of a person with a will establishes that will. Now, in a minute, we’re going to see what it removed. Because he established a new covenant, removed an old temporary, ineffective solution. And that old solution was Israel’s practice of animal sacrifice to atone for their sins. But I just want to take a moment to acknowledge here when we trade in our temporary solution for Jesus permanent solution, the New Covenant, we aren’t trading in animal sacrifice. That’s not what we do to atone for our sin. In our culture, our temporary solution to this permanent problem is much more like this. In fact, when I was growing up, I was taught by my culture. I’m a first generation Christian that people were saved pretty much if you’re a good person. Like I hope I’m a good enough person. I hope my good outweighs the bad. Brothers and sisters, I just want to suggest that’s not our culture’s answer right now. Our culture doesn’t think much of God, though that might be changing, but our culture in general tries to establish that they’re good enough, or that we’re good enough, or that I’m good enough merely by saying others are on the wrong side. We live in this so massively polarized culture. And do you know who the sinners are in our culture, though we don’t use that language? It’s them. It’s they. It’s the other. You know who the righteous are, the people who don’t need a solution or who have already found a solution. In fact, we tend to justify ourselves in our culture by being on the right side of certain ideas or morals or politics. And I never in all my life seen a culture more divided or more convinced that if you were on my side, whatever my side is, our whole culture, every edge of our culture does this. Says, if you’re on my side, you’re on the right side, and you’re a good guy or a girl. And if you’re on their side, you’re on the wrong side and you’re a bad guy or girl. And that’s how we seek to justify it. The Bible here is reminding us, the Bible’s teaching, that all this us and them stuff that’s going on in our culture is so different from the Bible, because you know who the good people are in the Bible. There aren’t any. Everybody has this problem. It’s an all people problem. Every single person, the Bible says, has a temporary solution that will not work until they embrace Christ’s permanent solution and find real forgiveness. And one of my heartbreaks right now is that people have become so convinced that the other people are wrong, that they’re starting to forget that they really have a need, that they really have a longing, that we, that I am lost apart from Jesus Christ and deeply need him. So that’s the first part. The first part talks about how it got established. The second part, number two. Finally, Jesus blood, his blood provides better purification. Look back down at your Bible. It’s in a passage that talks about how the first covenant got established. And then it makes this statement at the end about the better purification that comes through Jesus blood. Let me read it for you again. God’s very words. Therefore, verse 18. Not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet and hyssop and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, this is the blood of the covenant that God has commanded you here. The first covenant, the old covenant. And in the same way he sprinkled with blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. This section talks about why Jesus purification is better. In the book of Exodus, if you were to roll it back to Exodus, you would see that God gives the Old Testament law to his people through Moses, and at that time he, through Moses among his people, established tabernacle worship in atonement through the Old Testament sacrificial system, the blood of bulls and goats over and over again. And that system was started with blood. And it was done every year over and over again. We will sacrifice these animals. And the cycle went like this. We sin, we fall away. We experience shame. We do the sacrifices. We have a temporary solution. We sin, we fall away, we experience shame, we do the sacrifices, we have a temporary solution. And they knew and we know that that never really worked. It never really worked. But it was started, not unlike the second covenant, with blood, different blood, ineffective blood, blood that didn’t provide enough purification, and it never really worked. In fact, what it was intended to do, in fact, one of the reasons they had this bloody culture, you know, one of the flaws in our culture, if you can believe it, is that we hide from all the blood. Churches used to have cemeteries. We actually own one of them right now as a district because churches don’t want cemeteries anymore. But, you know, it was pretty helpful to have a cemetery out there because you would remember, oh, we’re going to die. We, do you know, you might think, oh, I’m glad we don’t sacrifice animals like they did. Do you know how many more animals our culture kills than their animals? If you’re wondering about this, go to Costco and go all the way to the back. But it’s tidy. They wear white. But all the blood was intended to tell them, and it should tell us, and to our detriment, we’re so tidy from it, we forget all the blood was intended to tell them that sin is serious. It’s deadly serious. That sin leads to physical and spiritual death always. And that some better purification is needed than this over and over again solution. That solution, as the passage says and will say, was looking forward to the real thing. And Jesus blood is the real thing. It’s the real thing. Let me give you an illustration to help you think about the difference between temporary cleaning and full cleaning. Our culture likes temporary fixes. I like temporary fixes sometimes. Have you ever heard this phrase? Sweeping it under the rug. Sweeping it under the rug. What does it mean? It’s when you kind of push stuff out of the way. Maybe in a conflict or a fight or a difficult situation. Let’s just pretend it’s not there. Or sometimes, if you’re like Terry and me and you have people coming over, you literally sweep stuff under the rug, right? If you come to my house, you will find it sparkling clean, except for the places you’re not allowed to go. Right? And I’m not alone in this. Right. Because we’re a culture of sweep it under the ruggers. Or how about this? Have you ever heard the phrase painting over rust? Painting over rust. A superficial covering intended to hide a serious problem. If you have a rusty chair, you can paint it, just don’t sit on it, right? It might look good, but it might not be safe to bear your weight. Or what about this phrase? Putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The metaphor literally, imagine someone who’s been shot, and you go put a little Band-Aid on it. But what we really mean is a serious problem, covering over with a little bit of nothing. So maybe it doesn’t look like it’s that big a deal. Like it’s that big a deal, a quick fix, a temporary solution, a halfway measure. Have you heard the phrase lipstick on a pig? Lipstick on a pig. Turns out pigs are ugly, right? I mean, we can say that I think they’re okay with it. That was how they were made. If you put lipstick on them, do they get prettier? Not much, right? Not much. Right. And that’s the point. We need real cleaning. Real purification. There’s a third thing, Jesus death established it. His blood provides better purification. And then third, his sacrifice was one time for all. Not over and over again. Let me read the third part for you. It says this. Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered not into the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself. Now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself up repeatedly as the High Priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own. For then he would have had to repeatedly suffer since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. These verses emphasize the true, once for all permanent nature of Jesus shedding his blood for us to provide us with the new covenant that we’ve been given. They picture Jesus not going into the old temple, which was a representation of what really needed to happen, but going into God’s presence himself and offering himself up just one time, not over and over again, not over and over again. A perfect sacrifice that did the trick. That went the whole distance. This little phrase once for all. Christians have long contemplated it and felt the power of it. And I just want you to ponder what it means because it’s one of those phrases, too, we say so much. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything, but I think it has two intended distinct play on words meanings. He died once for all, the once part. His death was a permanent solution. It doesn’t need to happen again. It accomplishes. Things that are done are finished. It’s all the way. But the for all peace. I mean, it could be just an emphasis of the once for all peace. But I think it means for everybody. That’s how believers in many times in many places take it. The Jewish people to whom this book was written, helping them understand the transformation that had happened in their faith. They were God’s special people. But it turns out everybody can be God’s special people, only through the cross, can anyone be part of God’s forever family, be rescued by him permanently. It is available to anyone. And again, think about our culture. Our culture does not believe everybody can be redeemed. It doesn’t. It says the goods are okay and the bads are unredeemable, but not so with the Christian faith. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, as the book of John says, John 1:12 says that all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. A permanent solution. So one little story to help you understand the difference between an over and over again and a permanent thing. There’s a crack in my living room. It’s high up on a high wall that I can’t reach. It’s probably part of why it’s still there. Terry and I, when we moved here from California, we barely owned coats. Like literally, we lived in. I worked in a garage in the winter that had no insulation. Imagine it. Right. Crazy. We get here. We were a little afraid we were going to die in our house because we didn’t know how to stay warm. Turns out we were a little paranoid and naive. We were very naive. So we bought a new house and we’re like, oh, good, it won’t have any problems. Which is kind of a funny thing. When you buy a new house, you discover that is not true. And one of the things you discover is they get it mostly perfect, and then it breaks a bunch and then they come back and fix it again. That’s part of the new house buying experience. And this crack formed and they’re like, hey, in about a year, we’ll come back after your house settles. It’s been settling low these nine years, but after your new house settles, we’ll come back and we’ll fix it. And they did. These guys came in and they fixed it all right. And I’m like. And they painted it. You couldn’t tell it happened. I’m like, oh, it’s awesome. And then you know what happened? A year later, the crack came back. The crack came back. And, and I’m like, well, I think I’m outside my, my little magic window of free fixing. So I’m going to have to fix this myself. And I’m, I’m the son of a contractor, so I can fix this, right? My dad was a professional, so I probably know how to do it. And so I get up there, and I kind of, I do a pretty quick job, because I’m like, what if a bad fix would work? Right? And it worked for like six months. And then my crack came back. And so I thought, oh, you know what, I really ought to do it, right? And me and YouTube know exactly how to do this, right. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but YouTube knows a lot about the problems in my house and we. I widened the crack a little bit. I put some of the tape stuff on, I did it over again. I sanded it a little better. I got it all ready and this one lasted about a year. But then you know what? The crack came back. It was worse. It’s widening. Right. And I keep trying to fix it and it keeps coming back. And this last time I fixed it, I thought, okay, maybe I need different material. Maybe there’s a magical flexible thing that’ll fix it and work right? It didn’t work. I’m thinking about lipstick. I’m like, right there going, what would my living room like with a big red line of lipstick? Would that work better? It’s not going to work better. Why? I don’t know how to do it. A permanent solution. All I need, all I know how to do is over and over again. You and I, when it comes to our junk, our mess, our mirror problem. Same. Try as you might, you cannot solve your you problem, Cannot solve your them problem. You can’t solve your us problem. But Jesus can. And he did it once for all. A final truth in this passage that we should not miss, that we cannot miss is in verses 27 and 28. And it says this and hear this. And just as it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that comes judgment. So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. I just want to remind you of two simple truths, brothers and sisters. One is, it is the great, abiding, enduring hope of the Christian faith that Jesus who saved us, will come back. He is returning. He has not forgotten us. Sometimes when people become Christians, they feel all those New Covenant changes begin to happen. But sometimes they’re like, is this all there is? And can I remind you? No, it is not all there is. The Bible promises that Jesus will return and fully restore everything. In fact, in a moment, I’m going to read a passage that reminds you what you should be longing for along these lines. But can I also remind you this passage didn’t flinch from it. We shouldn’t either. Everybody dies and each of us faces judgment. And in Jesus second return, he isn’t coming back to die again, to once again offer to people this new salvation. He is coming also in judgement. It is true, and that everyone in this world has an opportunity now. An opportunity, as the book of Hebrews would say today, to receive the Lord Jesus Christ and to escape the judgment that will surely come when our sins, when my me problem, when our US problem catches up with us before God. And I honestly, I know of no better illustration of this than the end of the book. If you have your Bible, you can turn there now. But I would actually just encourage you to listen to two passages. They’re just, they’re not super long, they’re long enough, but they should be passages that you should contemplate frequently. They are paradigm shaping passages about this idea that it’s appointed to each of us to die and experience judgment and that Jesus is coming back to complete our rescue and to restore all things. So I’m going to read them both. The first passage is in Revelation 20, almost at the end, just pages away from the end of your Bible in verse 11. In my Bible, it’s given the heading judgment before the Great White Throne. Brothers and sisters, the Bible tells us this will happen. And we should warn people that it will. Even if it’s not polite, even if it makes us feel strange. It was my destiny before I put my hope in Jesus. It’s everyone’s destiny before they put their hope in Jesus. It says this. Then I saw a great white throne, and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the Book of Life, he was thrown. He was thrown into the lake of fire. There’s not another sacrifice coming, but there is a day of judgment. It’s coming. We know it’s coming. But you know what else there is? There’s a new heaven and new earth. Because this passage puts the emphasis on Jesus rescue for each of us. So here are these words. You should read these words very often. They should become the center of your thought life. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. Listen to verse four. He will wipe every tear away from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be any mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. This passage reminds us at the end that Jesus made a perfect covenant. Permanent solution. His blood is the best purification. It’ll wash you white as snow. His sacrifice was once for all. It is done. It won’t happen again. And when he returns, it’s going to be to rescue those. To complete the rescue of those who put their hope in him, who’ve been cleansed pure by his precious blood. A final illustration just to tie up the loose ends. In the beginning, I said, through the blood of Christ, God has finally provided a permanent answer to our greatest needs. I quoted this verse in Hebrews. Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick. The second part of that verse is, is this but a desire fulfilled, it’s like a tree of life. You see, I have been happy at Target Field. I have. It was the year before. It was 2023. Terry and I were about midway into our Twins habit and they were in the playoffs. And I’d been told they hadn’t won in the playoffs like forever. It had been decades. And we went to this game and they won a playoff series. And in Minnesota any playoff series win is World Series-ish, right? We need to own it as if we’re champions because that’s pretty much what we’re going to get. And I remember this sweet moment with the Twins rushing the field and saying Twins win. It was just like a little taste of that thing I always longed for. That thing I always hoped for, that thing I had waited for. And moments like this remind me. They remind me that through Christ, my me problem, my biggest problem I’ve ever had, has been solved. It’s been solved. Our us problem. The biggest problem we’ve ever had can be solved. And my future problem. It’s not going to be judgment, but that there is a day coming for me when I will stand in a new heaven and new earth where righteousness reign. And my God, your God, if you put your hope in him, our God, as we put our hope in him, he’s going to wipe every tear from our eyes, every tear. Let me pray. Father, we, it’s Easter week and we need the resurrection so very bad. And we are so very grateful for what you’ve done among us. And I pray for my brothers and sisters here that we would not become distracted, that we wouldn’t think of earthly things, that we would put our minds on gospel and Scripture, life and death, the blood that restores, the son who rose again and all these things. I just pray we walk with you today and tomorrow in Jesus name, Amen.

When we understand what Jesus truly suffered, we have a more accurate understanding of both the ugliness of our sin and the cost of God’s grace to save us from it. Well, in just two weeks, we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning together. There are two things that I cannot stress to you enough about this. The first is that Easter is a fantastic time to invite a friend to come to church who may not know the Lord. While it’s true that fewer non-Christians feel comfortable attending church services, Easter Sunday still holds some sway in our culture, and I can assure you that that morning will be both thoroughly biblical, as we always strive to be, but will also be welcoming to those who don’t yet know Jesus. So, invite your friends. And the second thing is, please, please remember that the service is not here. Please remember this. We will not be in this building. We will be at John Marshall High School and the service is at 10 a.m. We don’t even have a service at ten. It’s not 9:30. It’s not 11 like it is right now. Okay? It’s at 10 a.m.. Come early. Come at 9 a.m. there will be cinnamon rolls and sticky buns. That’s how special this is. It’s a two-pastry morning. It’s an Easter miracle. Okay, but it will not be happening here. This building will be as empty as the tomb. Okay, so you’re going to get to celebrate Easter, just not in the way you want, right? So set an alarm on your phone, put a sticky note on your steering wheel and bring a friend Easter Sunday morning. All right. Two days before that, we will be here for our Good Friday services. And I really want to encourage you to come and worship the Lord with us that night. Because, of course, the only reason that we can celebrate Jesus victorious resurrection victory over death was because he was willing to endure death in the first place. And we’re going to gather that night to commune with our Lord, who became a sacrificial lamb, who was led to the slaughter on our behalf. And this morning, in God’s providential timing, we have come to the place in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus foretells his death and resurrection to his disciples for a third time. Now, Jesus has alluded to his death in a few places throughout the book. For example, in Luke 12, he mentions his distress over his coming baptism, which is a reference to the cross. In Luke 17, and at Passover in Luke 22, Jesus mentions the suffering that he will have to endure. But there have been two times in this book, two other times prior to this, when Jesus took his disciples aside and he gave them insight into the cross, insight into what will happen in Jerusalem. And both of those mentions are in Luke chapter nine. Peter gets done confessing that Jesus is the Christ of God, the Anointed One, sent by the Father to save God’s people, and Jesus responds by telling them not to tell anybody yet. And then he explains that he has to first be rejected and killed before he could be raised to life. That’s Luke chapter nine, verses 21 and 22. Just down the page from that, in verse 44, Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men. But it says that the disciples didn’t understand that, and they were too afraid to ask any questions. Neither of those passages goes into any detail of what will happen to Jesus. The most that we get is that he will suffer many things and be killed. Our passage this morning is the first time Jesus gives details about what is going to happen to him once he reaches Jerusalem. And it’s awful. It’s awful. The anger of the religious elite finally reaches a boiling point, and they use the Roman authorities to carry out the murder of Jesus. The way the Romans punished criminals was meant to deter other criminals. And so their methods are both public and brutal. They perfected their torture skills to inflict the most possible pain on their victim. Now, because Jesus tells this to the disciples, and because the disciples would have understood the details of what he’s talking about, I’m going to share with you details of what Jesus is describing. And it’s unpleasant. I don’t enjoy sharing the details of violence, but there are times when the raw truth can’t be avoided and the details matter. You know, one of the reasons that Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, had such a profound impact on culture 20 years ago was that it presented the cross with brutal realism, as it actually was, not in the slicked up, sanitized way that Hollywood usually depicts it. If you see a picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head and a single drop of blood coming down his otherwise untouched face, you are not seeing the truth. So I’m going to say some things that are difficult for the squeamish this morning, but we need to know what Jesus really endured because he endured it for us. When we understand what Jesus truly suffered, we have a more accurate understanding of both the ugliness of our sin and the cost of God’s grace to save us from it. We’re in Luke chapter 18, verses 31 to 34 this morning. We’re going to walk through the details in five parts, beginning with Jesus reference to Old Testament prophecy concerning his suffering. And then we’ll look at humiliation, pain, death and resurrection. Here’s how it begins. And taking the 12, he said to them, see, we are going up to Jerusalem. And everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. The best way to understand the Old Testament is by understanding it the way Jesus understood it. Later, in Luke chapter 24, after his resurrection, Jesus will explain to two disciples who are walking home from the events that they just witnessed in Jerusalem on the day of Jesus resurrection, that all that they saw was a fulfillment of their own Hebrew scriptures. It says he took them on a journey through the Bible. Wouldn’t you love to have been there? As Jesus takes these two guys on this journey to understanding their scriptures as he understands them, showing them that what they just witnessed was predicted. They just hadn’t put together yet, that God’s promises and pictures of the coming Messiah in a way that would show them Jesus. They just. They hadn’t done that piece yet. And that’s what he gives to them. And that’s how we should understand our Old Testament. Jesus and the good news of his kingdom is the interpretive key, because everything throughout all of history leading up to him, was preparation for him. So when Jesus turns to his disciples and says, okay, guys, we’re almost to Jerusalem, and everything that the prophets said will happen is about to happen. This should not be a surprise to the disciples. It might be confusing to them, but it shouldn’t surprise them. Peter has already confessed his belief that Jesus is the Christ of God, as I mentioned before. So they know Jesus is the one that they’ve been waiting for from the Hebrew Bible. But what they don’t yet grasp is that the Messiah who will reign as king, is also the suffering servant sent to take away the sins of God’s people. They haven’t put those pictures together yet. They don’t know Jesus is the fulfillment of the sacrificial system. They know he’s the fulfillment of the Davidic king promise, but not yet of the sacrifices. They’re not yet including scriptures that show the reason that God came to be with us as a man. Emmanuel. Jesus is preparing them here for that. They’re about to see the full picture of the Messiah as the prophets foretold. Remember Genesis 3:15, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So Satan is told he will be crushed by the descendant of the woman. But in the process, the descendant will be bitten by the poisonous snake. So killing Satan will deal a fatal blow to the very heel that defeats him. The method by which Satan is destroyed will destroy the destroyer. Remember Exodus 12. Your lamb shall be without blemish. A male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the 14th day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts, and on the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. So the Lord provides a way for his people to escape the coming death. He gives them a lamb and the lamb’s blood goes on the door. It covers the household in this way. Every member of the house then eats the lamb inside the house obediently, and by receiving God’s plan for mercy and grace, his people are saved. Remember Isaiah 52:13 and 15: behold, my servant will act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up,and shall be exalted. As many were astonished at you. His appearance was so marred beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind, so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him. For that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard, they understand. So God’s servant will be so exalted above the kings of the earth, right? But he will also be so beat up and marred that his physical body will no longer resemble a human being. Remember Isaiah 53, which I’m going to read this morning in full. And as I’m reading this, see if you can pick out why people throughout the history of the church have called Isaiah the gospel of the Old Testament. Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent. So he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offering. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous One, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many. And he shall divide the spoil with the strong. Because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. So when Jesus says he’s going to go to Jerusalem and fulfill all the prophets said would happen, this is what he’s talking about. He’s going to be numbered with the transgressors to intercede for the transgressors. Do you know what that means, church? He’s going to die like a criminal at the hands of sinners to save those very sinners. He’s going to be led like a lamb to slaughter. And he’s not going to open up his mouth and defend himself. Because if he did, they couldn’t kill him, and he would fail in his mission to save people who hate him. He’s going to endure so much suffering at the hands of the people that he’s saving, that they won’t even recognize him as a human being when they’re done with him. And he’s going to go to Jerusalem willingly. Nobody’s making Jesus go to Jerusalem. He’s going there because it’s the will of the Lord to crush him. This is God’s plan. The process of crucifixion is designed to bring about humiliation, pain, and death. And this all happens throughout the humiliation and the pain. It happens throughout the process leading up to death. But we’re going to look at this in the order that Jesus presents it here in our passage. The first is humiliation, for he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the first to humiliate Jesus. They held an unjust sham trial. They beat him and they put a blindfold on him and then they told him to prophesy who was beating him, mocking him. And then they wanted Jesus crucified, but they didn’t have the authority to carry out a legal execution under Roman rule and so they needed the Romans to do it. This is why Jesus is handed over to the Gentiles. They said Jesus claimed to be a king, which sounds like an insurrectionist to Rome. So they needed him to be a criminal under a Roman crime, a Roman sentence, and so insurrection would have been punishable by death. Pilate tries to sort all of this out. He’s doubtful, but he kills Jesus anyway. We’ll get to that when we get to those passages. The key to mentioning the Gentiles or the non-Jews here in the passage is that it’s their methods that will be used to kill Jesus. Jesus is not going to be stoned in the street, for instance. That’d be a way that the Jewish community might do it, but they’re not the ones carrying it out. He’s going to be subjected to Roman crucifixion, which means he will be publicly humiliated. The Romans use crucifixion to dehumanize criminals. It was way more than just physical brutality. It was emotional brutality. It was a punishment so demeaning that you were exempt from it if you were a Roman citizen or if you were rich and they liked you. You were exempt from it then. It was reserved for the lower-class people, slaves, foreigners, people who committed treason. In Jesus case, it was so shameful to be crucified that the very mention of it was considered humiliating. Not even having it done, just mentioning it to somebody as a possibility would be humiliating. There was a Roman senator named Rabirius who was threatened with crucifixion, and his defender Cicero said this quote, the very word cross should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. Shouldn’t even be talked about with a Roman citizen. Why was this so dishonoring? Why was it so shameful? Well, they would parade the criminals through the streets, making them carry their cross on their back, and the people of the city would come out and jeer him and taunt the person that was convicted. The soldiers would write the name of the criminal and his crime on the sign, and they would nail it above his head. For Jesus they wrote King of the Jews. In Jesus case they then put a crown of thorns on his head and a robe on him to make fun of his false reign. Nearly everyone who was crucified was stripped naked. Now we don’t depict Jesus this way because of modesty, which is fine, but we should know that there was nothing modest about what they did to Jesus. Remember church? They cast lots to see who would get to keep his clothing. And when the Romans put criminals on display, they did it in such a way as to maximize the the mental and emotional toil. Now, this didn’t happen to Jesus, but in some cases they would line the roads, when they would conquer a city, they would take all the inhabitants out of the city and they would line the roads leading to that city with the crucified inhabitants of that city. One Roman official explained, he said, quote, the most crowded roads are chosen where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. It was like a billboard of fear for the entire community. They would sometimes kill the crucified man’s family in front of him while he hung on the cross. And I tell you this because the mocking and shaming of Jesus wasn’t just out of cruelty. It had a purpose. The Romans intended to destroy Jesus credibility as king. They demanded absolute loyalty. There were to be no other kings, no other gods above Caesar. And to make that case, they didn’t want to just kill Jesus, they wanted to debase him. So that any person that might even be tempted to follow him as a king would be to their shame. They wanted to say, if you follow Jesus, you’re following a shameful king. Isaiah said, Kings shall shut their mouths because of him. They will, but not yet. This was their attempt to shut Jesus mouth, to erase any inclination someone might have to follow him. That’s the humiliation. And then there’s the pain. And after flogging him, Roman flogging, or scourging was sometimes used as a punishment on its own. When it was used in conjunction with crucifixion, it had two functions. Its main role was to maximise the pain of the entire process. So everything that happens within crucifixion was magnified in pain was far worse, with your whole body covered in wounds. But the other thing that it did was that it made death on the cross happen more quickly. As I’ll explain here in just a moment, crucifixion by itself is a lengthy process, and flogging sped the process along by inducing a shock blood loss. See, the guards had to stay with the crucified criminals until they died, and so they were incentivized to move things along so it would take hours instead of days. Flogging is done by taking a leather whip. It’s got many, many strands of leather on this whip. And what they’d do is they would tie iron balls or bits of bone or other hard materials into the strands. Then the prisoner would be tied to a post, his bare back would be exposed and the whip would be slashed against the skin, lacerating the flesh just turning it into ribbons. One article I read that was written by Mayo doctors back in the 80s said that this whipping wouldn’t just tear the flesh, but it would rip down to the muscles. It would actually rip muscles off the bone. Jewish law limited the lashes to 39. They called it the 40 minus one. But the Romans didn’t have those rules. They could go on as long as they liked. And given the description of the Messiah from Isaiah as being brutalized to the point of no longer appearing human, Jesus flogging must have been especially terrible. Thorns were then forced onto his head, and a robe, as I mentioned before, was placed over his open wounds. Now putting this material on him and then tearing it off of him would have been excruciating. Think of pulling a Band-Aid off of yourself before your wound is completely healed. And now imagine that your whole body is covered in wounds, and the wounds go all the way to your bones. Then they made him carry his cross. Probably just the horizontal crossbeam. The vertical crossbeam usually would be out where the execution was taking place. To carry that beam after being beaten nearly to death would have been almost impossible. And it proved to be because another guy eventually had to take over. Simon of Cyrene was forced to pick up Jesus cross for him. This was not the soldiers doing Jesus any favors. The soldiers didn’t do favors. Clearly, it was impossible for Jesus to carry it anymore. He had reached complete physical failure. And when they finally got to the site, they nailed him to the wood beams. They didn’t have to. They didn’t have to nail him. Criminals could just as easily be tied to the cross. The method of death would be exactly the same if you were tied to the cross. And so often they did it that way. But by using the nails, fiery pain would shoot through the victim’s arms and legs as they writhed on the cross for however many hours or days it took to die. And of course, the time on the cross itself. Approaching death was the worst part of this. They will kill him. The Jewish historian Josephus, who had watched countless crucifixions, called it, quote, the most wretched of deaths. There was no fixed pattern to crucifixion. You could be tied to a stake with your arms at your side. You could be turned upside down. Josephus was describing what the Romans did to a certain city when they were crucifying the people out on the street, and he said he just he says this, quote, the soldiers themselves, through rage and bitterness, nailed up their victims in different postures as a grim joke. The stoic philosopher Seneca made the case for why any death would be better than crucifixion. Listen to this description. Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree. Long, sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly wheels on shoulders and chest. And drawing the breath of life amid long, drawn out agony. He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross. I find it ironic that Seneca asks the rhetorical question can any man be found willing to go to the cross? Expecting a no answer to that. Of course there was one man. There are basically two ways you can die on a cross: blood loss or asphyxiation. You either die of your wounds or you die because you can’t breathe anymore. And crucifixion is designed for the latter. It’s designed to choke you to death. By hanging there, it becomes more difficult to breathe. And so to get air in and out of your lungs, you have to push up your body, push up your body to open up the airways to so that the air can come in. And so really, how you die, what you’re fighting is gravity. Crucifixion kills you by gravity. To extend the cruelty, the Romans would put a small wooden peg on the vertical beam as a seat. And you think, well, that seems nice. Except no, it’s designed to prolong. It’s designed to make it a little bit easier to push up so that the death will last longer. The victim would then push up on the seat to get enough clearance to breathe, but eventually he would run out of strength to do that. He’d no longer be able to endure the pain of pushing up on nailed hands and feet, and the posture of his body would cause him to suffocate. And if that process took too long, the soldiers would eventually come along and break the legs of the victim so that he couldn’t push up anymore. That’s the death that’s waiting for Jesus in Jerusalem. That’s what he’s willingly walking to. Church I know it is hard to hear these things, but we need to remember what it really meant for our Savior to go to the cross. Now, there is no problem with wearing a cross on your neck as a necklace, or printing it on a t shirt, or imprinting it on your Bible, or putting it on your wall. Directly behind me is the largest cross in this building. The cross was chosen by the early church as a symbol of our faith in Jesus, not because of what it is, but because of what Jesus accomplished on it. With his wounds we are healed. With his wounds we are healed. Think of that imagery from Isaiah. Healing requires prior damage, doesn’t it? We are healed by what he did. That means we were damaged before. Prior to Christ. Our souls are shameful, brutalized, dead. Jesus took these wounds. He bore that shame. He died that death not because he deserved it, but because by doing so, we are restored. We are healed. When we sanitize the cross, when we forget its horrors, we lessen the horror we should have for our own sin, and we lose the awestruck joy and appreciation that we should have for our Savior. Jesus Christ willingly walked to Jerusalem knowing that the nightmare of crucifixion waited for him because he knew the nightmare that awaited us if he didn’t. And he knew that even though the shame and pain of the cross would kill him, that would not be his end. And on the third day, he will rise. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the reason that we celebrate any of the things about his death that I have described this morning. I mean, think about it, church. Think about this. If Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, would we even know his name? He would just be one of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who died nameless on a cross in the first century. We just took a fairly detailed look at crucifixion. It’s the most shameful thing that could possibly have happened to him in the first century. These disciples, they’re all going to abandon him because they don’t want to be associated with him, because they’re aware of the implications of the crucifixion that we’ve been looking at. That’s why I was so detailed this morning. We need to see it through their eyes. We often get too far away from what it really was. We need to see it through their eyes. We need to hear it the way they would have heard it. A crucified king, a crucified king is an oxymoron in their culture. Doesn’t make sense. A crucified rabbi in Jewish law, to be hung on a tree is a sign that you have been cursed by God. You’re not going to follow a publicly shamed, dead, cursed rabbi. You’re not going to do that. But you would follow a king, Savior and Lord who rose from the dead. You would follow him. Jesus knew the plan. Death would hold us. It could not hold him. If we die in our sins, we simply go on to eternal punishment. But if God Himself, Jesus Christ, becomes a man and he takes the punishment for our sins into his own body, and he dies in our place, death is not his end. And when we trust in Christ, when our souls are restored to wholeness because Jesus took their brokenness, we know we will be raised to life someday, too. And I bet you can guess. The disciples did not understand this, but they understood none of these things. The saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said. We shouldn’t be too hard on these guys, because this is the second time we’re told that it’s not possible yet for them to understand this. The timing is not right. God prevents the disciples at this point from being able to understand what is about to happen in Jerusalem. And so of course, we ask, well, then why tell them why? Why tell the disciples if God is preventing them from understanding it? Well, it’s because it’s for afterward. He’s telling them now so that when they see his resurrected body, they will remember that this was always God’s plan. This isn’t just something that’s going to happen to Jesus. This isn’t just a tragic accident. This isn’t just injustice. This was God’s plan all along. See, they’re all going to fail in the moment to stand with Jesus. But after the resurrection, the cross will become the cornerstone of their theology, and they’ll be emboldened to live lives shaped by the cross because they know that it’s God’s plan for them to live this way, just like it was for Jesus. I want you to listen. Listen to the apostle Peter. This is from his first letter. This is chapter two, verses 21 to 25. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin. Neither was deceit found in his mouth when he was reviled he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep. But now have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. Do you see what he’s. Do you see what he’s saying here? Church? He’s saying that our lives should be cruciform, that they should look like the cross that Jesus bore for us. This is Peter writing this. This is a man who denied Jesus three times and ran away to safety. He is now telling us, Jesus did this for us. He did this for us. He bore our sins, and he set us free from the power of sin so that we can live in righteousness before our Savior. He’s bought us with what he did on that cross. Church, I’d like to invite you to stand as I close in prayer. Let’s all stand together in honor of what Jesus has done for us on the cross, for the brutal death that he was willing to die for us. Let us never take for granted what Jesus endured in his body to set us free. Let’s pray.

To inherit eternal life with Jesus forever, we need to set aside and sacrifice anything in our lives that would prevent us from following him whole-heartedly. I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained the graphic for our sermon series in the Gospel of Luke. You can see it’s shaped like a flip book with different colors corresponding to different parts of the book. Yellow is for the birth narrative. Blue is for the section of Jesus baptism in preparation for ministry. Orange is for Jesus public ministry, which began in Luke 4:14 and has been going ever since. So, that’s two chapters of birth, two chapters of prep so far, 14 chapters of ministry. So if you don’t remember blue and yellow, I do not blame you. It’s been a while. I bring it up, because we’re almost to the place where we’re going to switch to green. In chapter 19, verse 28, Jesus enters Jerusalem and begins the final week before his death and resurrection, the final week of Jesus ministry and the few weeks following his resurrection constitute five and a half chapters of the Book of Luke, so you can see how important that time in Jesus ministry is. It really commands a large portion of of the gospel. But before we get there, two things are going to happen. First, following Easter, the preaching team and I will begin a new series through the spring and summer preaching the letter of First John. And if you’ve never heard the letter, you’re in for a treat. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s one of the most deeply transformative books in the Bible, in my opinion. Before that, over the next few weeks, as Jesus closes in on Jerusalem, which is what he’s been doing through the book, right? He’s been walking toward Jerusalem this entire time. But before he gets there, he’s going to have some interactions with some individuals. We’re going to meet three of the most famous people in the Gospels. The rich ruler. The blind beggar. And Zacchaeus. And I know what you just did in your head. I know as soon as I said, Zacchaeus. All of you Sunday school kids just went the wee little man. That poor guy. That poor guy. How he’s remembered. We won’t get to Zacchaeus until this fall. The blind beggar will be in just a couple of weeks. But today, Jesus encounters the rich ruler. The other gospels call him the rich young ruler. But Luke focuses only on his wealth. I believe that’s because Luke has a special thematic approach in his gospel to wealth and poverty. That’s something he appreciates, something he really wants to focus on. Luke doesn’t care so much that this young man that we encounter today is young and brash. He cares that he has a lot of wealth and that wealth is holding him back. And I’ve gotta to say, this is a big concern for us in Rochester, too. At least it should be. When you think of the idols of the heart that could prevent people from following Jesus in Rochester, Minnesota. Money is at or near the top of that list. The median household income in our city is 89 to $92,000. That’s the median. So you take all households in America take the middle one, right? All households in Rochester take the middle one. That’s 80 to $92,000. That is 45% above the national average. And that, by the way, is in a nation that is richest in the world. So stack all the nations up, put United States on the top, put Rochester 45% above that. If you don’t think it’s possible that this wealth could mislead us away from Jesus, you’re not reading the Bible very closely. I’m not saying it must, or it will mislead us and become an idol. But if you think we don’t need to be careful about that, you’re being spiritually naive. Our passage today is a cautionary tale of spiritual ruin. It’s one man’s journey into shipwreck because he refuses to let go of the wealth that has gripped his heart. But it’s also Jesus explanation for how it’s possible for spiritually weak people like you and me, who are navigating through our world of idols to be saved despite our own failings. So while there is a tremendous amount of caution and warning in what we’re about to read, there’s also a way forward that is vital and it’s life giving to those who receive it to inherit eternal life with Jesus forever. We need to set aside and sacrifice anything in our lives that would prevent us from following him wholeheartedly. The very first of the Ten commandments that God gives to his people is to make sure that we have no other gods before him. This passage shows us what that looks like lived out. We’re in Luke chapter 18, verse 18 today, so you can turn your Bibles there if you have your Bibles with you. Jesus is going to have three conversations. First, he’s going to talk to this rich ruler, and then he’s going to talk to the crowds who are listening to that conversation. And they’re going to get pretty nervous about what Jesus has to say to this ruler. And then he’s going to talk to his disciples. Here’s how it starts. “And a ruler asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’” So here’s someone in a position of power, probably some sort of an official or a leader in the community who would like to know from Jesus how he can be sure that he will receive eternal life. Calls him a good teacher. Now, that doesn’t mean that he thinks that Jesus is good at teaching. That means that he sees Jesus as someone who is morally good. He’s a keeper of God’s law. This would be a very respectful way to address any rabbi, any teacher or religious leader at that time. I want you to notice something here, because it’s a pretty big correction for younger Christians. I suppose it could be really Christians of any age, but typically it’s younger Christians I talked to who are swayed by so-called progressive Christianity. I have theologically liberal friends in my life. You probably do too. Who will say things to me like Jesus didn’t really care about eternity? The gospel isn’t really about who’s in and who’s out of of heaven. Say something like that. Well, first of all, Jesus cares deeply about our eternal destination, as we’ll see here in a moment. He says that you should sacrifice everything to secure it to make sure you have it. But the other thing that I want you to notice is that other people were very interested in learning from Jesus about their eternal destiny. The people around Jesus came to him to ask him about what was going to happen when they die. What the ruler says here is nearly identical to what the lawyer asks Jesus back in Luke chapter ten, right before Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. So people wanted to know from Jesus where they would end up when they die, and how they can make sure that their eternity is with God. Now, if Jesus had just slapped those questions down and he said, well, you know why? Why do you care so much about eternity? Everything’s about right here, right now. Okay, well, then that’s fine. If that’s what he did with it, then we should probably stop talking so much about eternity. But Jesus doesn’t do that at all. In fact, his answers elevate eternity to the highest place. And he says, now that it’s at this highest place, you should start living your life right now in light of that eternity. You should look forward to seeing what God has for you once you die, and that should affect what’s happening to you today. So, if you’re tempted to minimize the place of eternal life in heaven and hell and salvation from sins in your theology, please understand Jesus didn’t. Jesus didn’t. You’re listening to the wrong source, if that’s what your theology says. Listen to Jesus. “And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.’” Now, at first glance, this might sound like Jesus is admitting that he is sinful and that he’s less than God. But that’s not what he’s doing here at all. Notice he doesn’t deny what the ruler is saying. He’s asking the ruler why he’s calling Jesus morally good, and he’s pointing out that only God could be completely morally good. People are sinful. God is not. Is this ruler calling Jesus God? He’d be right if he was. He’d be correct. But Jesus knows that the ruler is not calling him God. Jesus knows that this ruler thinks goodness is the answer to his question. So, by saying Only God is good, Jesus is setting the ruler up for the correction that he’s about to give him. And I know that that sounds a bit complicated, but it’s really no different than when you’re at a funeral and people go on and on about how good the deceased person was. Surely, you’ve been to a funeral like that before. They just go on and on. What a good man. What a good lady. They’re so, so good. And the more you hear about this, this goodness and how this person is surely in heaven. You start to think to yourself, are we equating these? Are we drawing an equation between these two things? Are we saying the goodness led to being in heaven? Is this cause and effect in the minds of the people here at the funeral, Jesus challenged that only God is good. Is the start of an argument to overturn this man’s bad theology. And you can see what he’s doing and what he says next. “You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.'” Now, if you know your Bibles well, you know something fishy is going on here, right? This guy just asked about eternal life and Jesus starts listing off commandments. He starts listing off rules. Things that you’re supposed to do. That doesn’t sound like Jesus, does it? Jesus. We know from Scripture Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. Jesus said, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will find it. Jesus’s theology of salvation and eternity is unquestioningly centered on faith, and trust in him alone says it all the time. And he’s going to make that clear here. The next thing he says. So, what is he doing here? What is this? Answering a question about eternal life with a list of commands. It seems to imply that Jesus is sort of suggesting that by following these commands, you could get to heaven. Again, we have to look at this very closely. Jesus is not saying that keeping these laws is the way to eternal life. In fact, nowhere in all of the Bible, including the Mosaic Law itself where these commands are found. Does it say that obedience gives us eternal life? What this is meant to do is show this ruler how far short of God’s standard that he’s fallen. Jesus is holding up a mirror to this guy’s face, and he’s saying, you know what you’re supposed to look like, right? You know what? It’s supposed to be, right? The ruler should have looked at this mirror of the law and realized, Uh-oh, I’m not doing too good here. I’m not doing very well as compared to what God has said. But here’s his response. “And he said, ‘All these I have kept from my youth.'” His response is, I’m good. I’m doing great. I’m good. Just like you. Jesus. I’m good too. I’m a morally upstanding keeper of the law. I have been for a really long time. I’m faithful to my wife. I don’t steal from people. All my wealth. I got through hard work. I don’t lie to people. I’m doing awesome. Just ask my mom, who I honor. Right, right. I’m doing so good at this. Now, if this is starting to sound familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s exactly the same argument as the Pharisee praying in the temple in Jesus parable just a couple of passages ago. The only difference here is that instead of going on and on about how good he is, the ruler here just gives a blanket statement about how he’s got all of the law covered. But there’s something going on inside this guy. There’s something going on here. There’s a question that’s stirring in his heart. He doesn’t have the confidence that Jesus Pharisee in the parable had, because why is he asking Jesus about this at all? If he had full confidence in his goodness, why is he asking if he’s so convinced he’s got eternity covered with his goodness. Why? Why? Talk to Jesus. It’s because he wants confirmation. He wants confirmation. He’s a good man who needs a good teacher to sign off on his goodness. That’s the way in, right? Jesus. That’s the way we get it, right? I just have to be really good at keeping God’s law like you. And then I get to go to be with God in heaven, right? Right. Jesus. You know, there’s so many people in and around the church today who believe, deep down in their hearts that it’s their pursuit of goodness that God accepts as entrance into heaven. And their pursuit of Jesus is similar to this ruler. What they want from Jesus is to sign off on their goodness. He wants. They want the Bible to just give them hope that they’re doing pretty well. They looked at the Bible like this man looked at the commandments. It’s a checklist of moral goodness, and instead of seeing how far short they’ve come when they look at this, they actually see achievement. I said, wow, I’m really doing doing pretty well based on the rules that I find in this book. Listen to how Jesus corrects this, because it’s vital for understanding true, eternal life. “When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me.'” “When Jesus heard this”. Those words tell me that that Jesus is using the ruler’s own response to determine where this conversation needs to go. If the ruler had said something like, “I’ve failed at these commandments”, “I haven’t measured up to God’s standard”. Probably Jesus would have gone in a different direction. He probably would have encouraged him to confess his sins and be forgiven by God and come to follow him with the rest of his disciples. He’s been talking to sinners like this throughout this entire gospel, throughout all the Gospels. This is the way Jesus talks. But since the ruler heard the list of commandments, and he gave himself a clean bill of health all the way back to his childhood, Jesus now is going to change it up by calling him out on an area where he’s likely to fail. So, okay, you think you’re looking pretty good as far as the law is concerned. Here’s the thing you lack. Here’s the thing you lack. Go sell all your stuff, give all the money to the poor, and come follow me. What does he lack? He lacks discipleship with Jesus. It’s the same answer that he gave to the disciples. Come. Follow me. You want eternal life, come follow me. Jesus was never building an argument for eternal life through obediently keeping the law. He was simply setting this guy up so that he would see his own need for Jesus. Listing off the commandments didn’t do it. So, he changes it because it didn’t trigger the conviction that it was supposed to trigger. So, Jesus says, well, how about this go get rid of the stuff that’s holding you back. Leave it all behind and then you’ll be freed up to come. Follow me. So now this ruler has his answer, right? That’s what he wanted. He wanted eternal life. And Jesus says, here’s how you can get it. He needs to follow Jesus. But there’s some wealth that’s getting in the way first. So what will he do? “But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich”. Jesus says, you can absolutely have eternal life. It’s yours. You can have it. But you’ve got one major roadblock. Your wealth has its tentacles wrapped around your heart, And the ruler proved it. He was sad. Think about what Jesus just did. Think about what just happened. Jesus threw open the door of eternal life. He said, here it is. The way was very clear that the necessary steps all laid out for this guy. And he responds like someone just came and popped his balloon. He’s sad. He’s mourning. The answer to eternal life. Why? Why is it because he has to follow Jesus? No, actually, that’s not the problem. It’s because in order to follow Jesus, he can’t bring along his great wealth. The wealth is what captured his heart, not Jesus. The wealth was his God, so Jesus never could be. This guy didn’t want treasures in heaven. He wanted the treasures that he could give to himself with his money and also eternal life. He wanted both. He wanted the life he was living with all of his riches and joy and luxury and everything that he could give to himself. He wanted all of that stuff. And he also wanted eternal life. And Jesus is clear on this church. He’s our Savior and he’s our God, but he is not going to share first place in our heart. Jesus is not going to share first place in your heart in order of rank. Christ and the mission of the Kingdom of God is first. Everything else is down the line from him and everything else must be submitted to him. Anything that competes in your heart and prevents you from a total love and obedience to Christ. Anything that would hold you back from his call on your life is an idol, and it has to be dealt with. And I know that’s hard to hear in a crowd of relatively rich people by national standards and elite wealth by worldly standards. Some of you have generational wealth. Some of you have self-made wealth. Some of you have both. Would Jesus say the same thing to you? Would he say this to you? Let me ask you are you sad to hear this too? If your initial reaction is to be very sad to hear that your wealth might be an idol in your life, then it probably is. Imagine that Jesus made the same demand to you right now. Same thing said the same thing. It’s all your stuff. Give it to the poor. Follow me. What emotion would that cause in you? What would stir? What would come bubbling up in your heart if you said the same thing to you right now? Are you sad and unwilling like the ruler here? Do you become defensive? Are you starting to think through all the objections as to why you really are an exception, that this really doesn’t apply to you. Is that what comes out? Listen to Jesus explain what’s going on here. “Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, ‘How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for.'” once again, let me say this as plainly as I believe Scripture is saying this. Your wealth might be the very thing that prevents you from following Jesus. Your wealth might be the thing that is preventing you from following Jesus. In fact, based on how seductive money is, it’s one of the most dangerous idols that exists. Every one of us is prone to worship money over God. And if you have a lot of it, the potential for idolatry increases. Now you can love money and be poor. There’s no question about that. But God’s Word warns the rich about love, the love of money far more than than the poor. And that’s because it’s much easier to become seduced and dependent on something that you have, as opposed to something that you don’t. When wealth captures your heart, there’s no room for Christ. It’s a false god. False gods are very hard to overthrow. Jesus says you’d be better off pushing a camel through a needle’s eye than to be a very wealthy person, and also a follower of Jesus that’s destined for eternity. That should. That should give everyone in here with a 401K reason to to pause. Every three car garage in this place right now should sit up and take notice of what Jesus is saying here. You see this thing, that I’ve accumulated my whole life could damn me for eternity. I could miss out on eternity with God forever because of my bank statement. Is that what you’re saying? Look, I’m not saying that Jesus is saying that. That’s what Jesus is saying. These are his words. They’re not mine. And by the way, I’m in this boat, too. I mean, I don’t own a boat, but I’m in this boat, right? If what you’re doing right now in your heart. Okay, church friends, if what you’re doing right now in your heart is you’re starting to explain away why you’re the exception, that somehow you can love money and live in luxury and pursue all your wealthy dreams and still have Jesus. You’re not hearing him. You’re not hearing him. That error that false exceptionalism going on inside of us when we hear these things is beautifully captured in one of the most unexpected places. I love it when truth just somehow sort of pokes up through culture every once in a while. Decades ago, I think it was back in the 90s. There was a sketch on Saturday Night Live, where actor Bill Pullman played a billionaire who had gathered the world’s best scientists to research how to get a camel through the eye of a needle. This is the premise. He gathered all these guys together so that they could work on figuring out how to get this camel through this needle. And to do this, he was engineering the largest possible needles and the breeding the smallest possible camels. Saturday night live. Right. And I bring it up because the sketch ended with a line that is so great that it is probably the reason it’s hard to find on the internet. You can’t even you can’t even go to YouTube and watch it. They probably have scrubbed it because of this last line. The billionaire turns to the camera and he says, “Unless I’ve completely missed the message of the Bible, somewhere in here is my ticket to heaven.” Saturday Night Live friends, you could completely miss the message of the Bible if you try to find some other way to interpret what Jesus is saying here. The crowd that was listening to Jesus, they understood. “Those who heard it said, ‘Then who can be saved?'” Who can be saved? If money is that seductive, creating an impossible scenario for the person who has it, how will any of us be saved? See, the people listening are now realizing that anything could capture your heart and be more important to you than Jesus. Anything could get in there. How is anyone going to avoid this trap? How can anyone love the Lord so, purely, so faithfully that they would give up literally everything in their lives to follow him. I mean, if the guy with all the wealth who’s been a great guy, a law keeper since middle school can’t do it. What shot do I have? How can any of us possibly attain the purity of heart required to please God? Totally. Well, Jesus explains. “But he said, ‘What is impossible with man is possible with God.'” You can’t do it. The answer this morning is you can’t do it. None of us can do it. There is no person who can achieve the purity of heart and devotion to the Lord, required to enter eternity on his or her own, in his or her own strength. We’re tempted to think like this rule that we’re pretty good at being good people. But all the Lord has to do is show us where we fall short, like he did with this ruler. And then we’re right in the exact same sad situation that he was in. Our goodness is kind of like a queen size blanket on a king size bed. You ever done that before? Try to make that work, right? Sure, we’re covered in a few areas, but we’re exposed in others. Have to be. Math doesn’t work out. You’re going to be cold somewhere. It is impossible for us to overcome enough idols to kill enough sins, or perform enough good works to receive entrance into eternity. It is not just hard, it is impossible. Jesus says, we need a different way to get this done. And that’s what Jesus came to do. What is impossible with our strength is possible with God’s strength. The entire saving mission of Jesus was to make a way into eternity, where there was no way that existed before. And when we put our trust in Jesus death and resurrection on our behalf, our hearts are changed. We are made new because of the grace that God gives to us, and he recalibrates our hearts to Christ and he becomes our Lord. He becomes the one calling the shots, giving the commands in our life. His word becomes top priority in our lives. And what happens is when you follow Jesus, when you come and you follow Jesus, the question is no longer, what must I give up to inherit the kingdom of God? The question now is how do I use all this stuff? How do I use all the stuff that God has given me for Jesus, who bought me by his grace into the kingdom of God? That’s the question now. It’s amazing what happens with wealth when you’re transformed in heart by Christ. It transforms everything. Before Christ, wealth was an obstacle. In Christ, wealth is a tool. Before Christ, money was something that you owned in Christ. Money is something that you steward. Did you know that all the money you have is actually not yours? It’s not yours. We don’t own anything. It all belongs to the Lord. He can give it. He can take it away if he’s given you a lot of it. That means that you have a lot of responsibility. If he’s not giving you as much of it, you won’t have the same results as the one who has more. But you are no less responsible for handling it for God’s glory. If you want to know where I’m getting all of this from, you can just skip down to the next chapter and read Luke chapter 19, verses 11 to 27, where he gives a parable that explains just that. This passage, what’s happening here today is building up to that parable. But the point here is, if you are clinging to money, unwilling to to give it all for the sake of knowing Jesus, it is impossible to follow Jesus and have eternal life. But if you surrender yourself to Christ and you give everything over to the Lord. Well, then your heart is truly changed. Now you know you have Christ’s salvation and now you can have hope for eternity. It feels like a big exchange, doesn’t it? Everything to God for salvation feels like a big exchange, some of you. That’s the choice you’re facing right now. That’s where you’re at. You’re you’re in this spiritually sort of messy place where, you’re interested in Jesus, but you’re not interested in surrendering everything to him. You like his ethics, but you don’t like his answers to the big questions in life. You like the idea of eternal life, but not the cost of following Jesus. Some of you are right there. For others of you, you’re all in with Jesus. You came to the end of your own effort, and you’ve taken hold of the salvation that was impossible for you to get any other way. So, for you. You came this morning because Jesus owns your life and all your stuff. He owns all of it. You’re not clinging to the world like a life raft anymore. You know, there’s no salvation there. And for whatever group you’re in for both the groups this morning, I want you to hear the very encouraging way that Jesus ends this teaching with his disciples. “Peter said, ‘See, we have left our homes and followed you.’ And he said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house, or wife or brothers, or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life.'” `Peter points out that the disciples have done exactly what Jesus has been describing. Jesus, you’ve been talking to this guy. We’re hearing it. We are that guy. We’re the ones who we literally got up and left our jobs to follow Jesus. You know what? I love it. Jesus affirms him. He affirms them. They embody exactly what he’s talking about. He understands the sacrifice, but he assures them that they’re not leaving anything behind. Not ultimately. Sure there’s going to be some sacrifice. There could be temporary loss. Being faithful to Jesus may require some time away from family. Might mean switching jobs might mean moving somewhere you didn’t expect to go just to be faithful. It looks different for everybody. We don’t always know what God is going to call us to give up, to be faithful to him. But what happens when you are faithful in all of those ways is you start to see the other ways that God provides. You join a bigger family, right? You move away from some family. You sacrifice that closeness, that relationship that you have with them, the joy you have with that family. You go someplace to serve the Lord and you get to be part of a bigger family in the church. And God gives new jobs. He provides new ways, and you get to see all of that. It’s not just eternity, okay? It’s not just sacrifice everything now. Live a miserable life. Someday you get to have heaven. That’s not the exchange at all. Jesus says it’s not just everything in the future, it’s now we get to experience the blessings of walking with Christ now that lead to eternity with Christ forever. And I’ll tell you this morning, church, as a guy who started to follow Jesus 27 years ago now, it’s a good deal. It’s a good deal. The sacrifices of following Jesus will never outweigh the blessings you cannot outgive God. Don’t be so consumed with earthly treasure that you miss out on all that God has in store for those who have given their whole lives to Christ. Would you pray with me?

Children should come to Jesus because everyone must come to Jesus like children.   Well, our passage this morning is unique because of how much we already are on Jesus side on this one. We’re on his side of the argument, and that doesn’t happen very much in the Bible. Usually, when I read something that Jesus says, I find it to be deeply challenging because of how far away I am from it, and how far I am from living it out correctly. Jesus says anger is murder. Uh oh. That’s not good for me. He says lust is adultery in your heart. He says you can’t serve God and money. Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. And I take these words in my heart, and they bring conviction and repentance, and it leads to transformation by God’s grace and a new commitment to spiritual disciplines in my life. That is a very typical time of listening to God’s Word for me, probably is for you. But then I hear Jesus say, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. And I think, of course, who’s hindering little children from coming to Jesus? What monster would stop little kids from coming and finding the loving grace of God in Jesus? And then I look in the scriptures and you know who it is? It’s the disciples. The disciples are doing this. Haven’t they ever heard of children’s ministry? It’s like the most important part of church. But then I calmed down and I remember it’s been 2000 years change that has taken place since the days of the disciples. Our Western culture has been saturated with biblical values. And so the status of children has been raised considerably over those 2000 years. And that’s a good thing. Now, it can sometimes tip in the other direction, and we can get to the place where we’re idolizing children. That’s a different sermon. Also, our churches have been applying Jesus words to our ministry to kids for 2000 years. And it shows. I’m going to talk a little bit a little later on about how we do children’s ministry here at Calvary. So we’re doing pretty good at this part of the Bible that we’re going to look at this morning in a way that’s encouraging and different from the more challenging parts of God’s Word. However, you knew there was a however, right? However, while Jesus talks about the value and importance of children and their place in the Kingdom of God, that is not his only point in our passage. As Jesus so often does, he takes what’s happening around him, and he uses it to create a teachable moment. And this second point is quite challenging, especially to our highly educated people who consider themselves to be independent thinkers when it comes to God and only want an intellectual engagement with him. Jesus is going to move from an argument of valuing children to a statement that all saving faith should be child like. Children should come to Jesus because everyone must come to Jesus like children. We’re going to look at both halves of that statement this morning. We’re in just three verses. We’re in Luke chapter 18, verses 15 to 17, if you want to follow along. Let’s start with why children should come to Jesus. Now, they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. You know, we see a lot of failure from the disciples throughout the Gospels, which I’m thankful for, because it means that my failure as a disciple of Jesus is to be expected. Even the 12 apostles who walked most closely with Jesus were works in progress. They were learning through their failures. They were slow to grow. They were slow to conform to the kingdom of God. And if you’re like me, you resonate with discipleship failure. You can be encouraged this morning. We’re in good company. If you feel like a discipleship failure, you’ve got a good team around you. But thankfully, the Lord continues to work on us, doesn’t he? He doesn’t just leave us there, His grace ensures our growth. The crowds continue to come to Jesus and they’re finding healing and he’s happy to receive them. And what starts to happen is people start bringing their children to Jesus. The ESV says infants here, but the word can refer to a range of young children. This is probably, infants through toddlers. So crawlers through walkers, these folks want Jesus to touch these children. Now, in some cases it might be for healing. Some of these kids might be sick and they know that Jesus can heal them. There’s also a tradition of rabbis giving blessings to children in that first century. So maybe something that parallels our child dedication is what they have in mind, but there are probably a variety of reasons people want their children to be near Jesus, but regardless of the purpose, their goal is to have their children encounter Jesus. That’s what they want to have happen. And the disciples see this and they’re determined that it shouldn’t be happening. And again, we’re not told exactly why they don’t want the children to come to Jesus. It’s likely to do with the lower status of children and the higher status of rabbis in the first century. So in that day, children were valued okay. They were loved. They were blessing to the family, just like they are today. But children served a role in the family. They’re not honored like they are in our culture. Nobody’s throwing parties for children in that day, okay? Adults aren’t breaking their ankles at the trampoline park for children in the first century. All right, none of that’s happening. Families weren’t looking to children for their opinion about what we should do this weekend. Right. They were loved. They were cared for, but they were served the household. They were trained in marketable skills, and then they became a functioning member of the family economy. That’s how they functioned. And so the idea of any old family just bringing their kids to Jesus and using up highly valuable ministry time to bless people of such small social status would have been considered countercultural. And I believe if this were any other teacher other than Jesus, these disciples would not have been rebuked for what they did. They probably would have been praised for protecting their rabbi. So what Jesus says here, and the implications it has for raising up the value of discipleship among children is pretty remarkable. Let the children come to me. Jesus is throwing open the door. He’s saying, I have a full invitation to these children. And then he says, and do not hinder them. That’s the word for the adults. The adults, including the disciples, should not put any hindrance in the way of full access to Jesus. If I was doing a full systematic theology of children’s ministry this morning, I would take us back into Luke chapter 17, and I would remind us where it says that it would be better for a person to be drowned in the sea than to mislead one of Jesus little ones that he says there. The clear biblical answer to the question, how should children engage with the gospel of Jesus is that we should show them who Jesus is and what he has done as plainly as we possibly can in age appropriate ways, and do nothing to prevent them from understanding him, because the gospel is true and because Jesus is our salvation. And by embracing the gospel, our children will be given the foundation for life of flourishing that they need in the Kingdom of God. Now, for those of us who are in the church who spent any time in the church, what I just said is not controversial. We know that the best gift that we could give our children is to teach them and model Jesus to them. But the last 25 years have been kind of a weird moment in history. Which I think is worth noting here. There was a small but vocal movement of new or neo atheists, kind of back in that 2000’s range, who were popular for a pretty short time. But they argued that it was akin to child abuse to teach a child about faith in God, any God, not just the Christian God, any God. As one example of this, a guy named Richard Dawkins wrote this. He said this teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue, primes them to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads and crusades. Faith can be very, very dangerous and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. Okay, now I take issue with his characterization of unquestioned faith. Good Christian teaching welcomes questions. We welcome them. The truth always stands up to questioning. But Dawkins means any kind of faith taught to children is potential training for them to become future violent zealots. And I call this a weird moment in history because up to this point, faith in God was generally seen as a good thing for society, even by people who didn’t have it. They thought it was a good thing. The gospel of Jesus Christ has shaped the foundation of our society to such a degree that even people who don’t have faith in Jesus still think and argue in biblically shaped categories. It’s so interwoven into who we are as human beings, you can’t really escape it. But Dawkins and his brand of atheism said, let’s call all faith in God the source of violence and evil in the world, regardless of doctrine, regardless of what’s being taught. The content of that faith. And so, for a very short period of time, for some people, faith itself became an enemy. And to teach faith in Jesus to children came to be seen by some as misleading them or even hurting them. By the way, this is the type of thinking that caused a lot of millennials to react against their faith heritage. And it’s a complete failure of this ideology, this sort of new atheism. It’s a complete failure of it that is driving some of the Gen Z folks back to the gospel, you realize it was just an empty road to nowhere to go the other way. Do you know how I know that this whole sad atheist movement has failed? In 2024 Richard Dawkins went on live TV, went on TV. I don’t know if it was live or not, but he went on TV and he called himself a cultural Christian. That’s the phrase he now uses for himself. I quote, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. We in the UK are a Christian country in that sense, and he rightly got pounded for this by everybody around him. How do you think we got those carols, Richard? Where’d that ethos come from? One Christian thinker, a guy named Rod Dreher, said for Dawkins to mourn the loss of Christian churches and hymns while also celebrating the decline in Christianity is like saying that you enjoy eating, but you’re glad that farms are closed. It just makes no sense at all. This guy has been attacking and celebrating the demise of Christianity his whole career, and now suddenly he’s realizing that maybe, maybe all that Christian culture he’s enjoyed came from people who truly follow Jesus. And that’s really what’s changed the world. You don’t create a Christian culture that leads to human flourishing by rejecting God, but still insisting on biblical values. You do it by making disciples. That’s how you do it. You do it by handing the Gospel of Jesus Christ on to the next generation. When we teach children about Jesus and we invite them to follow Jesus, we’re not just showing them the path of salvation, we’re showing them how God has designed us to live for his glory and our good. That’s our makeup. That’s how he’s made us. Jesus doesn’t want these precious children to grow up rejecting their creator and becoming their own authority and living out worldly values, because that path leads to a life of misery, and it culminates in eternal damnation. Instead, from an early age, he wants these children to understand and live within the values of the Kingdom of God. Serving the Lord by living out his ethics, his values. That’s why he says, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. I understand to such there to mean these kids are the perfect age to learn. They’re the perfect age to learn and understand and receive entry into God’s eternal kingdom. And this is going to be reinforced in just a moment when he says that everybody has to be like these children. But here he’s welcoming the actual children. Clearly, Jesus thinks that childhood is the perfect time to begin teaching kids what it means to know him and to enter into the Kingdom of God through him. And we agree with Jesus on this here at Calvary. I mean, we agree with Jesus on everything here at Calvary, but specifically this morning. Our kids ministry is designed very intentionally to walk with children through the scriptures over and over again. We use a curriculum called the Gospel Project. It’s a full Bible curriculum that cycles kids through the scriptures year to year with a depth and the detail expanding as the as the child grows. And every lesson is anchored in the gospel. We’re instilling in our children a firm understanding of how all of God’s redemptive history hangs together. And we’re applying this to their hearts. We’re not just handing on Bible facts, okay? We’re not just giving them some things to know. We’re working to help these kids see their need for Jesus and the whole world’s need for Jesus. We’re not just teaching them to be good little boys and good little girls. They don’t need that. We’re showing sinful children that God has made them and that he loves them and his grace covers over their sins because Jesus died on the cross for them. Our aim isn’t better behavior. It’s transformed hearts. And we do this all at appropriate ages, right to the best of our ability. We try to do this in age appropriate ways. I’m not a teacher of children. I really am not a teacher of children. But I imagine that some of the finer points of the gospel are often lost on the littlest ones. I had one week, where I was not preaching, and so I had a chance to walk around the building, and I went down the children’s ministry hallway, and I looked in on one of the classrooms, and I saw a little guy in there and he was stacking blocks. Not a lot of gospel content in that. I mean, he wasn’t building them on sand, so there was that. But there’s not a whole lot of gospel to that. But as the kids grow, as they become more able to handle stories and understand the meaning of things, we find more and more ways of helping them see what God has done in Jesus, and what life is like when we’re transformed by the gospel. All of our classes are theologically rich and doctrinally sound, and they’re led by people who love Jesus. These people, they love Jesus. They love Jesus, and they want to share Christ with these kids. They’re passionate about mentoring young people. Do you know, in fifth grade here at Calvary, we have a Sunday morning class called Roots where students learn doctrine, and then they begin to learn apologetics at the same time, the way of defending the faith. And they get to begin forming a biblical worldview so that they can pair that worldview to other worldviews that are out there. Eric and Karen Howden who teach the class said that they’re giving the kids the building blocks of God’s Word, and they give them an opportunity to think through and respond to the gospel for themselves. Awana on Thursday nights, kids are memorizing scripture, which we hope will rest in their hearts and that will come to mind as they develop. And all of this is done in partnership with parents. We work to equip you to be the primary disciple makers of your family, because that’s who you are. You are the primary disciple makers. Our kids ministry isn’t babysitting. It’s not playtime with a Bible story. Our goal is to make disciples who will go on in life, to worship the Lord, and to make more disciples. And because of that, there’s a very important implication for parents that I need to point out here. It’s embedded in what Jesus tells us in verse 16. See that there it says, and do not hinder them. Usually when we talk about our children’s ministry, we think about the sharing of the gospel, the active work of teaching our children the gospel. And that’s certainly important. We should do that. Listen to this. This is instruction to God’s people from Deuteronomy chapter six. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Do you hear that? You can hear the charge to parents to make gospel instruction comprehensive throughout your home life and all of the developing years. So you should be talking about Jesus and applying God’s Word and helping your kids wrestle with their issues through the lens of the gospel. And there’s a lot of ways that you can do that. I’m not going to tell you this morning, here’s what your home should look like. Every family’s a little bit different, has a little bit different shape, a little bit different rhythm to it. But Christ should be a regular part of the interaction that you have with your kids. That’s the positive that should be taking place. But notice Jesus says a positive and a negative. He says, let the children come and do not hinder them. And it strikes me that there are a lot of ways that we can hinder our children from seeing Jesus. Just consider these three facts. The first is that you control their schedule and transportation. By the way, I made these slides delightful to take the edge off the really hard things I’m about to say. Okay, so you control this. You’re entirely in control. Your kids go where you take them, and they only experience the things that you allow them to experience. They don’t have the ability to choose how much exposure to Christ and his church that they get to have. In the passage, the parents are bringing their children to Jesus. It’s the only way those children will get to Jesus. If the parents bring them. And the same is true for your family. Your children’s access to the Body of Christ and the resources of our church community is entirely predicated on your dedication to bring them. And that means when you choose not to take church attendance seriously, they’re forced to not take church attendance seriously. Their dedication to growth within the church is whatever your dedication is. And when you decide involvement in the Body of Christ is not worth your time. They are then hindered from the benefits of life and growth within God’s community. I’m not saying you can’t teach them about Jesus at home. I just got done saying you should. You absolutely should teach them at home. But they need the body of Christ, just like we all do. And if you keep them from it because you’re too busy, or you’re too tired because you don’t like it, you’re hindering an aspect of their access to Jesus. Here’s a second thing to consider. You are their primary model for seeing Christ. The apostle Paul, who identified himself, by the way, as the chief of sinners, said he told his friends, follow me as I follow Christ. So role modeling is a big part of learning about Jesus. And your children will not have a more influential role model in their entire lives than you. Now, don’t hear that as pressure to be perfect. Christianity is not a performance religion. It is a relationship with the Lord built on undeserved grace. Your kids don’t need to see you as the pinnacle of perfection. By the way, they already know that you’re not. Okay? So just give that up. If that’s what you think it is. They know. They know you’re not. What they need is to see someone who’s striving to love the Lord more and more. They need someone who takes walking in step with the Holy Spirit seriously. They get their understanding of discipleship primarily by watching you be a disciple. So, one of the biggest ways that you can hinder your kids from being a disciple of Jesus is not being one yourself. Do your kids see you repent? Do they see you repent? They see you admit your sin before the Lord and reach out for his grace. Do they see you practice spiritual discipline? Do they hear you pray and watch you worship? Here’s the last one. You’re the one who instills values. You’re the one who instills values. What you tell your children is important is what they’re going to find important. If you say this is important, they’re going to say, okay, mom. Dad says, that’s important. I should think it’s important, too. By the way, that’s true of all parents everywhere. That’s why Dawkins argument never really did hold water. If you teach faith to your children, they will learn faith. If you teach skepticism to your children, they will learn skepticism. Every parent disciples their kids in some direction. So the key then is to tell them the truth. If you show them the grace of of God in Jesus Christ that overcomes sin, and you instill them with love and peace and joy and hope that comes in the gospel, then they’re going to understand the kingdom of God. They’re going to see that. But if you marginalize the kingdom and its values, and you instead give them worldly shaped views of success and money and relationships or honor or pride or whatever it is, you’re hindering them from finding the truth of Christ. If your son comes to you because he’s having a problem with another kid at school, and you don’t show love to that other student, the one he’s having the problem with, if you don’t show love to that other student while you engage with parents and school officials or whatever it is, if you’re not showing love to that other student, then don’t be surprised if your son doesn’t learn to love his enemies as Jesus told us to. Because you’re teaching him not to. If your daughter doesn’t make the team and everything you have to say is negative about the coaches and about the other players, don’t be surprised when she grows up unable to accept her limitations and the strengths that God has given to her, and can’t work through the adversity in her life with perseverance, knowing that God is shaping her faith through that adversity. You see it? We model it. Our values as parents must be ever-increasingly biblical, so that the values we hand on are those that are found in Christ’s kingdom. And look, I know that’s a high bar. I get what I’m saying is a high bar. We’re going to fail. I fail all the time as a dad. I fail all the time at this. But when we turn our weakness into an opportunity to show the strength of the grace of Jesus at work in our lives, ironically, we succeed even when we fail. If we fail the right way, if we fail biblically, we fail forward into God’s grace. We succeed. Because we don’t enter the kingdom of God by our own strength or our personal achievement. We enter by being dependent on Christ. Listen to what Jesus says here. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. Not only should we teach children about Jesus and not hinder their ability to come and be blessed by him, we should learn about our own faith and what it looks like by looking at theirs. We should learn from their example. Look very carefully at the wording of this verse. Whoever does not receive like a child. Like a child modifies the act of receiving. So how does a child receive anything? Total joy. Right? Total joy. Total dependence on the giver. My family was recently watching an old home video from many years ago of our kids opening presents at Christmas time. Ali was two in the video, Sammy was four, and we got Ali a baby doll stroller, and she just loved this thing so much she immediately went and grabbed her favorite stuffed animal, threw it into the stroller, and started running around the house pushing this stroller. And we had kind of this sort of circular thing going on in that house. So she just went round and round and round in our house. And it got even better when she realized that she could take that same stroller and ram it into her brother. It was like, wow, I could do this with it? That was amazing. And then the very next present that Sammy opens up is a vest, which you would think would elicit no excitement at all. But apparently he was into his fit even back then. He immediately put it on and was overjoyed! I got a vest! And he’s putting on the vest and, wow! I mean, we were killing it that year on the presents. That was amazing. They were overwhelmed to get this stuff because they couldn’t get it for themselves. It could only come from us. And that’s how kids receive things. Complete dependence on the one who gives and filled with joy for receiving. What’s the opposite of that? No regard for the gift. Because you have no love for the giver. I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything from you. That’s the opposite. If you have this attitude toward God, you could never enter the kingdom, could you? Why? Well, think of what the gospel requires. The gospel is a message of utter grace, undeserved, unearnable salvation. We are completely and totally dependent on Jesus to make the sacrifice for our sins. And that grace is the only entrance into God’s kingdom. You might be a grown, very competent, capable, highly skilled individual who is, by every worldly measure totally self-sufficient. In fact, just by the fact that you live in and around Rochester means you probably are that sort of person. This town is full of self-made, successful people. But when it comes to your salvation, none of that matters. None of that counts. You have to become a child and receive God’s gift entirely as a dependent. That’s childlike faith. Not to be confused with childish faith. Faith shouldn’t be childish, as in simple, shallow, or unserious. No one is telling you to turn your brain off when we talk about childlike faith. On the contrary, Jesus tells us to love God with all our mind, we should be using every bit of intellect that we’ve been given by God to explore every aspect of His Scripture and every aspect of his creation, so we can deepen our understanding of him. But at no point should we ever lose our understanding of our utter dependence on Jesus graciousness to us as a gift. That need for Christ should propel you in your heart to pursue Jesus eagerly, to receive his kingdom joyously, like your life depended on it, because it does. That’s childlike faith. And I wonder how many of you have lost that eagerness. I wonder how many of you have lost it. It’s pretty easy to do. All you have to do to lose it is get too wrapped up in your job. You get too focused on bills and responsibilities around the calendar. We still feel dependent and eager, but it’s its eagerness for vacation, its dependence on a bonus. And those are good things. But if we make lesser things into saviors then we lose our focus on the Savior. You do that too long, and these things become idols in your heart. They become replacements for the joy that we’re supposed to be finding in Jesus. And if you’ve lost that childlike faith, you can regain it. And there’s ways to do it. How do you recapture that? Well, you know all the answers, but let me reframe those answers. Let me reframe them. You should read Scripture. You should read the Bible, but read it with an eye toward what God has provided. Don’t just read it for Bible facts. Don’t just try to figure out what it’s saying. Read God’s Word, looking for direction toward the man or woman that God has called you to be. And you should pray. But pray with a heart of dependence. Don’t just pray for the stuff you need. Ask the Lord to comfort and to guide you, and to thank him for what you’ve received only by his grace, because you’re utterly dependent on him. Try fasting. I know a lot of people don’t fast, but try fasting. Skip a meal or two. Use the hunger to drive you and remind you of your complete dependence on Jesus. And sacrifice. Sacrifice for the good of others. If you’ve become overly dependent on money, give enough. Give enough to the church. Give enough to other organizations until it costs you something. Not just from your excess, but from what you need. And let that remind you of your dependence on Jesus. By practicing these things, we consistently shake the idols from our hearts, and that’s what we really need to do. We need to shake the idols out of our heart, posture ourselves in childlike faith and dependence on Jesus. And you need to do that no matter how old you are. Would you pray with me?

While everything in us says “Justify yourself before God with your goodness,” true justification comes when we recognize our need for God’s mercy.

Jesus wants us to pray and never give up when we’re in need of God’s justice, knowing that the God who chose us and loves us will never ignore us.   Well, I know I don’t look it, and this may be hard to believe, but there was a time in my life about 15 years ago when I was really into running marathons. I know, I know, I know, you’re thinking, where’d that guy go? He’s gone forever. He’s not coming back. I never was actually a runner. You know, like I ran, but I wasn’t a runner. I was the most reluctant of runners. I had just come off a failed church plant. My stress was high. My health was bad. I had a buddy who ran marathons. American Ninja Warrior was on TV. It was a confusing time is what I’m saying. It’s a confusing time. And somehow, somehow, in the midst of all that, I decided, hey, I’ve never run a 5K in my life, let’s start with a marathon. And so, I bought some shoes, and I trained with a schedule that I found on the internet, and I went from couch potato to starting line in 18 weeks. I ended up running three marathons over the course of two years. But there was a moment in that first marathon that comes to mind every once in a while for me, especially if I’m going through something that’s especially difficult and if it’s one of those things where I don’t see an end in sight. I had been told, for this race, that there would be water and food stations every two miles in the race. Marathons are so long, you have to eat and drink while you do them. And so, I was counting on these, and I passed the 20-mile mark, I still had 6.2 miles to go, and for a first-time non-runner like me, that is by far the worst part of the race. But as the despair started to set in to that, as I was going through that final stretch, I began to realize that there were no more water stations. I thought there would be some, but there were no more water stations. I’d burned through all my glycogen stores. There was no more sugar in my body. I didn’t have the fuel anymore, and I never found out why those stations weren’t there. For 6.2 miles all I could do was fight through the overwhelming desire to quit. All I wanted to do was just lay down in somebody’s lawn, I was running through this neighborhood, I just wanted to lay down, and everything in me wanted to just blame the race organizers and just stop. But I knew if I stopped, that I was never going to start again. Even if I tried to lie to myself and say, “well, just stop for a minute and then you’ll keep going”, I knew I would never, never start again. I knew I would just be overcome with my own frustration. So, I had to keep my legs churning because I knew that absolutely, without a doubt, the finish line was coming. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know where it was, but I knew it was coming. Today we’re going to talk about endurance, but of a different kind. A much harder kind. We’re going to talk about the mental, spiritual, and sometimes physical endurance it takes to remain steadfastly committed to Christ when the world is crumbling around you and you don’t feel like God is listening to your prayers. Jesus is going to give us a parable today, where he will encourage us to keep our spiritual legs churning and keep our prayers to the Lord steadfast, even when we don’t see the end or we don’t see how God is going to make things right. So, our passage and this sermon this morning is especially for those of you who are exhausted today, spiritually exhausted. And I know you’re out there because there’s always a part of the church that feels spiritually exhausted, and you’re looking for that water station that you thought was supposed to be there. But it’s also this morning, for those of you who are doing real well right now, and if you’re seeing answers to prayer and life is going well and you’re excited about all that God is doing in your life. That is fantastic. But as you’ve heard me say on more than one occasion here, the best time to build your theology of suffering is when things are going well. It’s not when you’re in the midst of suffering. And so, I’d encourage you and encourage all of us today to take what Jesus tells us, put it into your spiritual toolbox so that you have it ready when things get difficult. Because Jesus wants us to pray and never give up when we’re in need of God’s justice, knowing that the God who chose us and loves us will never ignore us. We’re in a new chapter of Luke today, Luke chapter 18, but the change of chapter does not mark a change in topic. What Jesus teaches in this parable follows right on the heels of his description of his second coming and the difficult lives that we’re going to live as Christians as the world gets progressively worse leading up to his return. And so, this parable is intended to show us how to live as faithful followers of Christ while we wait and while we suffer. Last week, we talked about the longing that’s in our hearts for Jesus return, that longing that we’re going to feel as we wait for the second coming of Christ. In this parable, Jesus tells us what we should be doing while we are longing; what we should be doing in the meantime. So, let’s begin in verse one. (Can I get the next slide, please?) And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought to always pray and not lose heart. Let me start by saying, it is really great when the Bible tells you what the next thing you’re about to read is for. That is awesome when that happens, it’s going to happen again next week too, which is pretty great. I didn’t have to spend any time at all this week pondering what Jesus could be getting at here. Luke just says this one is about persistent prayer. This one is about not losing heart. Got it? Unfortunately, that does not mean that the parable is easy to understand. It’d be great if those went together, but they don’t. In this case. There’s an especially tricky part of this here in just a minute that we’re going to look at, but it starts off very clearly. It’s Jesus intention that while we are waiting for his return, that we keep praying, that we keep praying and refuse to give in to despair. Now, before we look at the story, I think it’s important to pause and reflect on what this means, Church. When Luke says this before Jesus parable, what does it mean for us? It means that God knows what we’re facing right now, and he knows that what we’re facing would give us reason to despair. It would give us reason to lose heart and stop praying. To lose heart means to despair. Despair is hopelessness. But the gospel is the source of true hope. And Jesus disciples are those who believe. So, what is Jesus saying here? Right? How do people who have the gospel, who have the hope, fall into despair and into hopelessness? Jesus is describing a situation here where the most hope-filled people on the planet are going to feel, at times, utterly hopeless prior to his return. And will be so despairing and will be so saddened by our situation that we could be tempted to stop speaking to the Lord. It could get that bad. Because why? Why talk to him? What’s the point? God’s not listening anyway. So, if you’ve ever felt that way, if you’ve ever felt like God is not listening, you’re not alone. And it was to be expected. It was even expected by Jesus that this would happen. He knew this was coming. And this parable we’re about to look at is designed to pull you out of that mental space. Luke says that this parable is crafted by Jesus to be used when this inevitable feeling of despair kicks in and you start inching your way toward prayerlessness. Because, and this is the key, Church, this is the key to this. The despair is not the reality. The despair you feel is not the reality. You might feel hopeless, but that is not because the situation is hopeless. You’re wrestling with the very real problem of living for Jesus in a world that doesn’t. You’re feeling the tension of living for God in a godless world, and that can give you the mistaken impression that God doesn’t care. And this parable is designed to correct that. So, here’s the setup. He said, in a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man, and there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him saying, give me justice against my adversary. So, there’s two characters in this parable. The first one is a judge, and Jesus description of this judge is brief, but it gives us a very clear picture of who he is. His first trait is that he doesn’t fear God. Now fear here would be referring to respect and honor. This judge does not see himself as under God’s authority or in need of showing God respect and honor. And that’s a pretty big deal for a judge, because this man is in charge of making decisions of guilt or innocence, of justice or injustice. And the only way you can do that, the only way anybody can say something is just or unjust is by comparing it to a standard, to an authoritative law. In ancient Israel, God’s law, the Mosaic Law, was the authoritative standard a judge would use to determine right from wrong. But this guy, this judge, doesn’t care about whether his judgments are in line with God’s law, because he doesn’t care about God’s authority. And so right away, you can see the problem here. If a judge doesn’t care what is objectively right and wrong, and if he doesn’t fear the repercussions of dishonoring God, well, then how does he make his decisions? What standard does he use? Now, you might think, well, maybe he’s one of those sort of secular, godless humanitarians that we have today. Maybe he just makes the best decision for the people involved. He probably follows his heart, right? No, he doesn’t even do that because it also says he doesn’t respect people. He doesn’t respect people either. So, this judge doesn’t really care what happens to the people that come before him for justice. And that would be on the guilty side of things too, not just the innocent. The guilt or innocence of a person wouldn’t really matter to this judge. In some cases, then for him, the guilty might go free, or the guilty might go overly punished, or the innocent might be punished, or the guilty might receive a lighter sentence and be set free too soon and reoffend. How will we know what this judge will do? Well, we can’t know because this guy doesn’t care about God’s standard of justice and he doesn’t care what happens to the people involved. And we’re going to see in a moment just what standard this judge uses to make his decisions. But I want to just pause here to say that this combination of no fear of God and disrespect toward other people, it’s pretty typical. It’s a pretty typical combination. You could probably do a pretty interesting study of our US justice system, looking at the correlation between unbiblical laws and injustice to people. If you don’t care what God has said about the people that he’s created, then you won’t treat them with the value that he’s given them. The opposite is also true. If you stand before God in reverent fear of God, then you will treat people with respect and dignity that they deserve. This judge cares about neither, and he’s our first character. Our second character is a widow who’s in trouble. Jesus says that she keeps coming to the judge asking for justice against her adversary. Now, we’re not told the exact problem that she’s having here, but the fact that Jesus mentions that she’s a widow probably means someone is trying to take the money that she needs to live. Widowed women were much more vulnerable in Jesus’ time, because the primary earners and owners of property were husbands in the first century. We have a lot more protections today on ownership than they did in the first century. So, this adversary is probably trying to swindle her money or swindle her property, something along those lines. But it doesn’t really matter. The point here is Jesus chooses someone who relies on the justice of the community. She’s vulnerable. She needs this judge to act with biblical justice toward her because she is in a vulnerable position. So, she keeps coming to this judge. She’s feisty. She doesn’t take no for an answer. She knows what’s right. And she needs this judge to do what’s right. So, what does this judge do? Well, for a while he refused. But afterward he said to himself, though I neither feared God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming. So, let’s be clear. How does this judge make decisions? Selfishly. That’s what motivates him. This judge loves himself some judge, right? He loves himself. That’s what he cares about. The internal reasoning of this motivation entirely turns on what will give him the outcome that he desires most for himself. So, his answer at first was to refuse to give the widow justice. Now we’re not told why, but based on what changed his mind, we can infer that there was nothing in it for him to give her justice. Why put your time into caring about a little people like widows if you don’t benefit from it? But then she got annoying. She got very annoying. She didn’t shrink. She didn’t become silent. She needed justice to be done. And so, she persisted. She endured. She badgered the judge into getting the justice that she deserved. I will give her justice so she will not beat me down. The Greek word there literally means to blacken the eye, to punch and blacken the eye. So, the judge here is saying, I’m going to give this woman justice that she wants. Not because I care, not because I fear God, not because I think this is important. Because I’m tired of dealing with this woman. She’s wearing me out. She’s hitting me in the face. So, this isn’t personal growth for this judge. This is annoyance aversion. This is the squeaky wheel gets the grease here. And the judge’s solution to a cry for justice is to wait until it affects him personally before he does anything at all. Now remember what Luke told us the purpose of this parable is. This parable is about staying persistent in our prayer and not losing heart. Is Jesus suggesting that the way to get God to give us the justice we need, while we struggle as we wait for his second coming, is to pray so persistently that we annoy God into doing the right thing. Is that what we’re supposed to do? Badger God with our prayers? All right, Kyle, all right. I’ll make your wife apologize to you. Right? I’m just kidding. That’s usually the other way around, actually. I have to say, if we don’t read this parable carefully, you could land there. That could end up being the way you think. God receives your prayers if we don’t read it carefully. This story could give us the impression that God is fairly indifferent to our situation, unless we do our part to put our needs in front of him, so much so that he’s forced to do something about it. Which is why we need to read the next part of this so carefully. And the Lord said, hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Okay, so with this parable, Jesus is using an argument style that’s called from the lesser to the greater. So, what you do is you give an inferior example of something that is true, and then you argue if that lesser situation is true, how much more this greater situation. Okay? It’s a way of arguing. And Jesus loves this style of argument for teaching. He does it all the time, usually when teaching us about the character of God. He’ll say things like, well, if God cares about the birds of the air, if God cares about the grass of the field, right? Of course he’s going to care about you. And here it’s the same thing in verse six. Hear what the unrighteous judge says. The key word there is unrighteous. If a godless, uncaring, self-centered judge will use his power to bring about justice because a woman is hitting him in the face with appeals and he and she won’t give up, how much more will a righteous God who has established the law? He’s not just following the law. He established the law and who loves his people dearly. How much more will he give them justice when they pray day and night? Of course, of course that God is going to do the right thing. Of course he’s going to ease their suffering and he’s going to protect them from harm. We’re told in Scripture that God’s plan of redemption for all his creation will eventually bring an end to all suffering. When Jesus returns, all sin is going to be judged. And every remnant of sin will be abolished. That includes people who refuse Christ’s forgiveness for their sins. God’s people, his elect in this passage, are those he has chosen to redeem out of the old creation, so that they can be with him in a new, sinless kingdom. As I said last week, Jesus second coming will be the culmination of that kingdom at that time when Jesus returns, the gates of that kingdom will close and final judgment will take place. But in the meantime, the gates are open and the kingdom is growing as people accept Jesus as Savior, as they worship him as Lord, as they obey him as King. But if you’re doing that right now, if that’s who you are now, you’re in the kingdom now, you’re following Jesus now, you’re going to suffer, and you’re going to suffer for Jesus. You’re going to long for Jesus return, and you’re going to experience God allowing sin to affect this world for his purposes. And it will affect you. What Jesus is saying here is, while it is affecting you, don’t lose heart, don’t lose heart, and don’t stop praying. Why? Well, here’s where the difficulty of our passage comes in. We don’t lose heart, and we don’t stop praying day and night because God will not delay long in giving his people justice. Jesus elaborates on that. He says God will give justice to them speedily. If you’re starting to feel some questions bubble up inside of you hearing about short delays and speedy justice, I understand, I understand why. But let me just say it one more time before we address the elephant that just walked into the room on this. Jesus is saying that God the Father is a righteous judge who hears the prayers of his people who are suffering the injustices of sin. They are crying out to him day and night, and because he’s a good and loving God, he will right the wrongs for his people without delay, and he will bring them justice speedily. And because this is his character, his people, his elect should not lose heart and should not stop praying. That is the point of the parable. That is what he is teaching us here. Now I’m just a guy with a Bible like you. Okay. That’s it. I have no more word from the Lord concerning the mysteries of his will than you have. We’re all working with the same information here. My phone has the same calendar on it that your phone has on it. Did you know that you can scroll on that calendar all the way back to AD 33, when Jesus said these words for the first time? Did you know you can do that? At full speed, scrolling, it took me almost 14 minutes to get there. It was a fantastic use of my time, just scrolling as fast as I possibly could. Almost 14 minutes to get back there. It has been 2000 years since Jesus declared that the justice of God would come speedily, with only a short delay to his people who cry out to him. 2000 years is an undeniably long time. From our perspective, what could Jesus possibly mean? Here we’re bumping up against the mystery of God’s unrevealed plan to bring about the redemption of the whole earth in Christ. And we’re not given God’s timeline, but it is unmistakable that Jesus is telling us not to stop praying, or to not stop praying, because if we pray for God’s justice, we will see it. To try to get at the mystery here, I’m going to draw in some other passages that give us some perspective. The Apostle Peter in in his letter Second Peter chapter three describes this delay. He says that scoffers are going to come, and these scoffers are going to say something very specific. They’re going to say, where’s the promise of his coming? Where is it forever? Since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. So, they’re saying, yeah, Jesus came, and then Jesus left, and then nothing. Of course scoffers don’t believe in the resurrection, so they see no interruption at all. They just see Jesus died and everything has continued on without interruption. And to this Peter responds, do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. So, God’s full plan of gathering his elect people into his church has to be fulfilled first, before the return of Christ. Jesus said, the gospel will be preached to all the nations of the earth, and then the end will come. And so, Peter and Jesus agree on this, and that work has yet to be fully accomplished. That process seems slow to us. It seems very slow to us. But God is not bound by time the way that we are. A thousand years to God is like a single day. So, from our perspective, it’s been 2000 years. From God’s perspective, it’s been two days since Jesus gave us this parable. That’s the first thing to recognize. That’s the first thing we need to bring into our understanding of this. Our sense of slowness is not shared by God. The timeline of eschatology can’t be measured by what we think is a long time. That is part of the mystery, but that doesn’t fully address everything that Jesus is saying here in this parable to us, because the clear reasoning for why we should keep praying and not lose heart is that God hears us and he loves us, and he will respond to our prayers. There’s no way that the disciples walked away that day from Jesus, thinking that their persistent prayer for justice will only be fulfilled someday thousands of years from now. That’s not the reason he gave it to them. I think the best way to understand the present reality of God’s intervening justice is by remembering the nature of the kingdom of God, and by looking at what the earliest church saw when they were looking for God’s justice. First of all, remember what Jesus said about the nature of the kingdom, that it’s already started, but it’s not yet culminated. It’s going on right now, but it’s not yet visible everywhere. In a kingdom like that, I’d expect that there would be times when we would see incredible displays of God’s righteous justice, and also times when it seems like evil wins. I fully expect to see God use the prayers of his people to bring about swift, almost miraculous correction of injustice, and also, I expect that God will allow injustice to win the day, either because of the prayerlessness of his people or because his will requires it. And that last one is probably the most important one. Remember that even Jesus prayed right before he was arrested in the garden. Jesus prayed that there would be another way to redeem God’s people, but it was God’s plan that he would endure the injustice of the cross. And the early church shared that same perspective that Jesus had when they cried out to God to bring justice. For instance, they weren’t trying to get arrested as Christians. Did you know this? They weren’t trying to get arrested. But it happened a lot. They were pretty consistently arrested for preaching the gospel. Sometimes they would pray and God would bring about justice. So, Peter and John preached in the streets, and they annoyed some Sadducees, and the Sadducees took them in, and they tried them, but they realized that they had nothing to hold them on. And so, they released them. And so what did they do? They went back to the church community, and the whole church community doubled down on prayer, praying for boldness to continue to go preach the gospel. They wouldn’t stop. In Acts chapter five the apostles are then thrown into prison. Right after this. They were praying for boldness. They get thrown into prison, and that night God opens the prison door so they could be let out into the street and then they kept preaching the same gospel. That’s injustice undone by the angel of the Lord. But just two chapters later, two chapters later, same community, Stephen is captured, he’s given an unjust trial, and he’s stoned to death for preaching the same gospel. Did the church fall apart? Did they say God is no longer listening to our prayers? He’s broken his promise to give us speedy justice. Is that what they did? No. That event triggered a greater persecution that scattered the church unjustly all over the region. Acts chapter eight, verse four says those who were scattered went about preaching the word. They just kept doing it. They just kept going and doing the very thing that they were getting arrested for. The same people who saw God’s miraculous intervention of justice also recognized that sometimes God uses injustice to put people strategically where they need to be to continue his mission. And then we say, well, but what about Stephen? What about Stephen himself? Why didn’t God intervene for the injustice done to him? Does he not care? Did Stephen not badger God enough with his prayers in order to receive justice? Did God not listen to him because he didn’t pray enough. Where was God? I’ll tell you where God was. In one of the most beautiful passages in all of Scripture, it says, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed up and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God the Father. And right before they killed him, he said, behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. God wasn’t absent. He was waiting. He was waiting. The moment had come when God’s answer of justice to Stephen was to welcome him into eternity. The early church understood this. They understood and church, we must understand that God’s promised speedy, shortly delayed justice is going to look different in different situations based on what God is accomplishing as his kingdom expands. Sometimes his justice is going to look like righteousness, crashing into evil and destroying it. That’s what we want when we pray for it. We want to see that happen. Sometimes it’s going to look like wickedness wins the day, and we have to keep praying with an eye toward what God might be doing strategically by allowing injustice for a time. And sometimes it’s going to look like God’s people succumbing to the horrors of sin. But they aren’t. They aren’t. They’re simply being welcomed into the waiting arms of God. God’s justice prevails in all three of those scenarios. And then Jesus ends with this. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? It’s a simple rhetorical question that packs a devastating gut punch. What will Jesus find when he comes back? What will he find in his church? What will he find in you? Will he find a faithful people who didn’t lose heart when things got hard? Will he find his people are praying diligently, waiting on his justice, counting on his justice, trusting that all his promises are sure? You know, for those of you who came to church this morning feeling doubtful, like maybe God isn’t listening or doesn’t care, I hope you’re encouraged this morning. I hope you’re encouraged to keep going this morning. Keep praying. Keep your spiritual legs churning. The God of Justice is right here with us. We’re placed in this unique moment of history to be the ones who cry out to the Lord. We’re the ones that will cry out to God on behalf of the injustices around us in the world. That’s what we’re here for. Let’s pray.

Jesus teaches us the mystery of his second coming so that we will keep our lives focused on pursuing his mission. Well, as you can hear from our reading today, we are going to spend our time in the Word this morning in the area of eschatology, which is the theology of last things. And even as I say the word eschatology this morning, there’s probably a few different reactions happening in the room right now. Some of you are very excited to just talk about eschatology; you’ve been waiting for this, you love to search the scriptures, to learn about Jesus second coming and the new heavens and new earth, and the culmination of the kingdom of God. But sometimes, for some of you, maybe you’re a little too excited, huh? I mean, is that fair? Maybe a little too excited about it. And then on the other end of that spectrum, some of you are not excited at all. In fact, you heard the word eschatology. You just tuned out. You’re already tuning out right now, probably because you’ve interacted with too many people who have too much zeal and certainty on their views. They’ve got a chart. They’ve identified the Antichrist. They have awkward rapture ready conversations with you. And you’re just not into it. But this has caused you to pull away from what the Bible has given us in His Word on this topic, God’s Word on this topic. And there’s part of the Bible that you’re ignoring, and that’s not good either. Some of you are more in the middle in a position that I will label curiosity. You’re far from certain, but you’re not checked out either. Your certain Jesus is returning. You’re not certain how it will happen. I’d like to invite all of us this morning to take a little step closer to that middle position. Today we live right now in between Jesus first coming and his second coming. So, we believe in linear history. Some worldviews are circular. Some have no ending and no beginning. Christianity teaches a clear beginning to our universe, and a forward advancing timeline that culminates in the return of Jesus. So, while we don’t have endless information on exactly what Jesus coming second coming is going to look like, we do have substantial information. And as part of God’s Word, those passages are intended to shape the way that we as Jesus disciples live our lives today. So, eschatology is about the future, but it’s not given to us just so that we can speculate about the future. It’s given to help us to think and to live for Jesus today. So, while we should never claim to have certainty about Jesus return and become overly fixed on it, neither should we ignore it and act as if it doesn’t matter. Luke chapter 17, verses 20 to 37 is Jesus teaching on his own second coming and the judgment of sin that comes with that. It’s a detailed, detailed story. A lot of imagery and metaphor in it. Some of that imagery is clear. Some of it is mysterious. The portions that are mysterious are meant to be. Because part of Jesus point about his second coming is that we’re not supposed to have all the information that we want to have about it. That’s part of his teaching. Did you know that there there’s a part of Jesus teaching where he taught us that we’re not going to know everything that we want to know? It’s like, if I were your math teacher and you came into class one day and I had a math problem on the board, and I said, sit down. Today’s lesson is you are never going to figure this out, right? That would be odd. Now, the mystery, though, is not taught to us for no purpose. On the contrary, Jesus teaches us the mystery of his Second Coming so that we will keep our lives focused on pursuing his mission. Today, this life is fraught with meaningless directions. Some of them are worldly, and they end up in judgment. Some of them simply make followers of Jesus ineffective. And we’re going to see some of that today. But with eschatology, God keeps us on track. That’s the point of eschatology. It is God keeping us faced in the right direction and properly on track. So, I encourage you this morning, keep your Bibles open to Luke chapter 17. It’s a long passage, so it’s not going to be up on the screen this morning. We’re just going to walk through Jesus teaching beginning to end. And it has two parts to it. The first part is short. It’s addressed to the Pharisees, and it concerns the beginning of the kingdom of God. The second part is longer. It’s addressed to Jesus disciples, and it concerns the culmination of God’s kingdom that comes when Jesus return. So, we’re going to start with the beginning, and then we’re going to look at five things to know about Jesus second coming. So, here’s the beginning. It starts in verse 20 and 21. Jesus is once again he’s speaking to the Pharisees, who were Jewish leaders, mostly in opposition to him. I say mostly because some Pharisees did eventually put their faith in Jesus. Did you know this? Nicodemus famously, is one of these Pharisees that that came to trust in Jesus? Joseph of Arimathea might have been a Pharisee. He certainly was a leader in the Jewish world. Clearly, Jesus teaching was having some positive effect on these men who knew their scriptures well. And here it doesn’t say that they were trying to trick Jesus. A lot of times we’re told straight up, these Pharisees were trying to trick him. Not here though. It just says that Jesus was asked about the arrival of the kingdom of God. They want to know when that’s going to be. So implied in the question is that the kingdom will come sometime in the future, and they just want to know when. Which makes Jesus answer very intriguing. The Kingdom of God is in the midst of you. That’s present tense right now. The Kingdom of God is here with us on this hill or wherever they were when he was teaching this. See, they’re asking, when is it going to start? And Jesus says, it’s already happening, guys, you’re just not aware of it. How did they miss that? Well, it’s because the kingdom of God is coming in ways that can’t be observed. Now, to understand what Jesus means here, when he says it’s coming in ways that can’t be observed, we have to quickly review what these Pharisees were looking for when they wanted to know the start of the kingdom of God. What did they expect to see this kingdom be? They were looking for the re-establishment of the nation of Israel through the coming of a Savior who would wipe out the Roman occupation. In other words, they were waiting for a kingdom. You could definitely see a final, permanently established Israel that had, uh, have a kingship and a priesthood. All those things that the Old Testament describes, they’re looking for a visible kingdom. So, to them, whatever kingdom Jesus is talking about would have to be after this moment, because it’s not there yet, hasn’t arrived. But Jesus corrects their misunderstanding. You think? You think it’s going to be an observable nation? You think people will be able to point at it and say, look, there it is. But the actual kingdom of God is not only not observable physically, it’s right here in the midst of you, and you don’t even know it yet. Jesus is referring to himself when he says this. He is the beginning of the Kingdom of God. He is. He is the one who embrace the Kingdom of God onto the earth. The gates of the Kingdom of God have been opened since the start of Jesus ministry, and these Pharisees could enter it at any time simply by putting their trust in Jesus. We saw this last week with the ten lepers. Nine were healed and they took off and they just went back to their old lives. But one of them realized what had happened and turned around and came back. To do what? To worship Jesus. And Jesus told him, your faith has made you well. This, guy saw the unobservable kingdom of God in Jesus while the other nine guys didn’t. And these Pharisees are like the other nine guys. They can see the miracles of Jesus is doing, but they refuse to believe that they are observing a spiritual kingdom. Jesus didn’t come to overthrow the Romans and establish an earthly kingdom. He came, as he tells us, to overthrow Satan and establish an eternal spiritual kingdom. These guys, just can’t see that what Jesus is describing here has a big, fun name to it that will make you sound really smart around all of your theology nerd friends. All of them. It’s got a great name. So, here’s the phrase okay. The phrase is inaugurated eschatology. Isn’t that fun? Write it down. Inaugurated eschatology. Eschatology, like I said earlier, is the study of last things. It’s the return of Jesus, the millennium, all that, that kind of stuff. All the stuff that’s coming in the future. Inaugurated refers to something that has begun, usually with a big moment. Think of a presidential inauguration. Inaugurated eschatology, then is it refers to last things that have begun. Last things that have begun. The last days have started. This is what Jesus is saying. His ministry marks the beginning of the final establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Now this Kingdom of God will become more observable over time, but again, not in the way that you might think. It’s not going to be a nation with borders. Jesus death and resurrection will defeat and crush Satan for all who believe. Those people will then be filled with the Holy Spirit, and they’ll preach the gospel, and they’re going to form local churches. They’re going to spread to every nation. The kingdom of God will be represented among all people everywhere. The Jews will be included, but it will not be limited to the nation of Israel. The church, as the body of Christ, will be outposts and ambassadors representing the spiritual kingdom of God, And the more it grows and spreads, the more visible the Kingdom of God becomes, until eventually there will be a culmination of the Kingdom of God at Christ’s Second Coming. So, the first time Jesus came with humility and grace, the second time he will come with power and judgment. The kingdom has begun, but it’s not yet complete. It is already started, but it is not yet culminated. But it will culminate eventually. Churches. What’s going to happen? Jesus will return and he is going to bring an end to this earth, and he’s going to destroy sin for good. He’s going to render judgment on those who don’t trust in him, and he’s going to establish a new heaven and a new earth for eternity. Eventually, the kingdom of God will be observable to everyone. But it isn’t right now. So, Jesus starts by publicly teaching this. He teaches this to the Pharisees, to everybody who’s around. This is the beginning. This is what it’s going to look like. But then Jesus turns to his disciples, and he teaches them about the culmination when he returns. And he and starts with this, the Second coming will be unmistakable. Unmistakable. Jesus says, the days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it the days of the Son of Man. There in verse 22 is referring to the return of Jesus. So, now we’re looking into the future. Okay? Now we’re now. Now he is out in front. He’s not talking about now he’s talking about some day. This is the not yet part of God’s kingdom. And Jesus says, at some point we’re going to start longing for his return. Jesus understands how hard it is to live as Christians in this world, to be his follower, to be living in his kingdom while still also living in a broken, evil world. He knows that that is a burden to carry. Uh, right now I am. I’m watching what’s happening in Minneapolis, and I’m seeing the effect it’s having on families within the immigrant population and the fear and the grief that it’s producing. And you know what it does? It makes me long for the return of Christ. It makes me long for that. When I hear of the Congolese Christians that are murdered by Islamic terrorists, by the hundreds this last month. I think how long, Lord, how long is this going to go on like this? When, can this part of the timeline be done? Really? Whenever evil flares its head and puts a brokenness of our world on display, it makes me long for Jesus to come to culminate his kingdom, to bring an end to all suffering. I’m sure those of you who love Jesus, you have longed for his second coming. And Jesus knew this. Here in our passage, Jesus is telling us. He knows that we are going to feel that way. He we’re going to long for his return. But what he doesn’t want is for us to go off looking for it. He doesn’t want us to be fooled into going and looking for his return. This is this is the part of the Bible that should bring an end to all the weird speculation that takes place within certain parts of the church. But for some reason, it hasn’t. I mean, are they missing a page? I don’t know. I don’t understand how this has not ended that strange speculation. Jesus tells us there are going to be people who are going to say, look, here it is. I figured out when Jesus is coming back. And you know the people I’m talking about, right? You know them. They got the radio ministry on the AM station, right? They got a book with their face on the cover of it. Right. They claim to have cracked the Bible code or whatever it is. Jesus is telling us here, straight up church. Do not listen to these people here. Let me quote him directly. Do not go out or follow them. Jesus meant follow them physically, but I’m going to go ahead. Follow them on Facebook or Instagram. Don’t follow them. Don’t go. Don’t go after what they’re saying. No one is getting a special word from the Lord about the return of Jesus, because Jesus himself said in the Word of the Lord that we’re not to listen to anyone who claims to. When Jesus returns, everyone is going to know. Everyone is going to know. You’re not going to need a special individual to point it out to you. It will be unmistakable to everyone. It’s going to be like outdoor spring sports. Follow me on this, right? It’s going to be like outdoor spring sports, okay? Any sport will do. Baseball families will understand what I’m about to say here, but really, anybody that’s ever sat outside watching their kid do anything will understand this. You’re out there. You’re hoping that they’re going to get the game in today. But every one of us can see those clouds. We all know it’s there. They’re still playing in the rain. You’re sitting there miserable, but you’re going to make it through. But what happens suddenly? Lightning flashes across the sky. How many people react? Literally everyone. Everyone is up. Everyone is moving. Game’s over. Running for the cars. Lightning is too big, too loud, too scary. Kids are out there with like, aluminum sticks in their hands. Like, got to get them out of here, right? We’re moving. Why? Because lightning is obvious to everyone. No one. And I mean no one is oblivious. When lightning flashes, everyone is in full attention. And that’s what Jesus says his return will be like. Jesus says that that’s what it’s going to be. You’re not going to miss it, okay? You’re not going to miss it. So don’t be fooled by people who want to claim that they can show it to you. And then he says that the Second Coming follows the cross. Now Jesus says this almost as an aside to his main purpose of describing his return. Verse 25 but first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Jesus is describing here his own persecution that will lead to his crucifixion. He’s going to be unjustly tried, falsely convicted. He’s going to be abandoned by his closest friends. He’s going to be beaten nearly to death, and then he’s going to be crucified as a criminal. And he says, all of that has to happen before his second coming. Now, to us, this is an obvious point because we live 2000 years after the cross. We don’t need to be instructed on the order of events here. But remember that these disciples are living on the other side of that timeline. Jesus hasn’t been crucified. And frankly, a lot of the disciples that walked with Jesus struggled on this point. A rejected crucified king doesn’t sound like a victorious king, especially if you’re thinking that Jesus is here to take back the country. These disciples have to understand that the kingdom doesn’t culminate in glory and power until after Jesus suffers rejection and death. And I’ll tell you what this small point does for me church. When I read it, it reminds me that if Jesus had to go through suffering at that point in the timeline, that it makes sense that I would suffer at this point in the timeline. Jesus said that we will experience trouble in this world just like he experienced it. And if it’s right and necessary for God’s plan that Jesus would endure suffering, then of course it’s right and necessary and even expected that I would endure it, that we would endure it. But just like he rose from the dead and he overcame the world, those of us who are in Christ are going to do the same. And then Jesus turns his attention back to the details of his turn, his return, when he says the Second Coming will be judgment on an indifferent world. So here Jesus uses two historical events recorded in Genesis to illustrate what his return will be like in the world. Now, I can’t teach both of those passages this morning, but you can read them. I invite you to read them. Think that’d be a great idea there in Genesis chapter six and chapter 19, when Noah built his boat, the community around him went on as normal. They ate, they drank, they got married. The guy building the boat wasn’t a cause of concern for anybody at that time. When Lot lived in the city of Sodom, the people of the city just went about their days without regard for the Lord. Notice in this passage, in this teaching of Jesus, that he’s not focused on the sin of Sodom or of Noah’s neighbors. He’s not focused on their sin. He’s focused on the fact that they just lived their lives with complete indifference to the Lord. They were eating and drinking and buying and selling and planting and building. Life was just normal for them. And in both cases, when God’s judgment rained down and destroyed them, they were just going about their lives, disconnected from God and unbothered by any authority that he had over them. They didn’t see judgment coming because they weren’t looking, and they weren’t looking because they didn’t care. And I have to say, that sounds remarkably like 2026 to me when I read it. So many people care so much about so many things, but they go about it with total disregard for Christ. There is no thought given to an impending judgment from a creator God, and this is either because they don’t believe in a creator, or they don’t believe he judges sin, or they don’t think that their sin will be judged by him. It really doesn’t matter the reason all of those thoughts create the same attitude. Indifference. And Jesus says that he is going to return right in the middle of indifference. He’s going to catch a lot of people off guard. When he returns. They’re going to face judgment for their sin, and their lives are going to be rightly destroyed. And they won’t even see it coming, not because it couldn’t be seen, but because they were too busy to care to look. The takeaway of that warning, for those of us who will listen, is that the Second Coming reminds us not to love the world. Now, verses 31 to 33 are difficult because they seem to sound like on the day that Jesus returns, there will be two different groups. There will be those who are destroyed by God’s judgment unsuspectingly and they won’t be prepared for him. But then there’s this other group that Jesus describes here that will know what’s happening. And they’re going to try to flee the scene. Jesus says, if you’re in the house, you get out. Don’t try to grab your stuff. Don’t try to get it and go. Just go. If you’re working in the field, don’t go back, he says. It sounds like people are going to scatter in two different directions when Jesus returns. But in verse 34, as we’ll see here in a minute, the day Jesus returns, it’ll be too late for any choice at all. When Jesus appears unmistakably, you’re either with him or you’re not. And so, this description of fleeing the coming judgment of God for believers has to be prior to his actual return. Now, let me just reiterate at this point that there is a great deal of mystery in the exact order of the events of the last days. I hold what I’m about to say to you with a very open hand. Okay. When Jesus says on that day in verse 31, I believe he’s not referring to the actual day of his return, but the day when it’s obvious that the final events leading up to Jesus return are either beginning or nearing their end. I’m not sure which, that period is sometimes called the Great Tribulation, and during this tribulation the world is going to get worse and worse. Uh, but near the end of this terrible period, things are going to get really bad. How bad? I don’t know. And if you have an issue with my order and placement of these events, fine. That’s fine. I don’t have any problem if you don’t see it quite that way. There’s a much bigger point here. There is a much bigger point. Through this period of God’s dismantling of this world in the last days, Christians will endure. If we remain faithful to the Lord and we don’t try to cling to the world around us. That’s Jesus point. That’s what we need to take from this. And it’s a point that applies not just for those final days. It applies right now. If your goal in this life is to accumulate as much stuff as you can and to hold on to things in this world because they’re precious to you, you’re going to go down with them. You’re going to be. Remember lot’s wife. That’s what he says. Jesus says, remember, don’t forget lot’s wife. That’s Jesus way of saying, Flee God’s wrath and don’t turn back with a heart that longs for a godless world. If you’re familiar with the story, you know lot’s wife took a longing glance back to Sodom as they were fleeing God’s judgment, and she was swept away in God’s judgment along with the rest of the city. She was turned to salt. Church, we should be falling more out of love with worldly things as we fall more in love with the Lord, that longing for Christ’s return should be making you every day more and more discontent with the things in this world that take your eyes and your heart off of Jesus. Now, to become more and more discontent with the world is a process of spiritual growth in Christ, and we are saved entirely by God’s work, not our work. We’re saved by grace, not our own ability to overcome. But if you don’t see love for godly things growing inside of you with a matching discontent, even a hatred for worldly, sinful, evil things, then you should question what you truly love. If you don’t see that, you should question, what do I really love? What am I? What am I really grabbing onto? What am I really clinging to? When God’s judgment comes, you need to be clinging to Christ, not your stuff. And this brings us to the last thing that Jesus says about his return, which comes with the direst warning. And that’s that the Second Coming brings final separation of the saved from the lost. Jesus starts in verse 34, I tell you in that night, okay, so that follows the phrase on that day. So, he’s bracketing these phrases frame a period of time that starts with day and ends with night. I think Jesus is showing a passage of time when the tribulation has been occurring and now comes to an end in the moment that he returns, there will be two in a bed. One will be taken. One will be left. Two women will be grinding flour. One gets taken, the other is left. It’s difficult to know if this is describing a rapture of believers taken to join Jesus as he returns to earth, because nothing is more. Nothing more said here about it, but I believe that’s what’s being described. So, if you’re trying to figure out where I am, as logically I think a post-tribulation rapture makes the most sense of scriptures as we have them. Again, I’m not going to fight you on it. If you’ve got a bit of a different view, that’s just fine because it’s not super clear. What’s clear is what this means. That’s what’s clear. When Jesus returns, he’s the dividing point. He’s the dividing point. Those who are with him in heart, who have trusted in his grace, who have lived for him on this earth will join him in the new earth, and those who have lived a life of sin and disregard for him will face his judgment. For them. The wrath of God will be justly deserved. And the disciples knew what Jesus was saying here. They understood the weight of it. They asked Jesus, where is this going to happen? Where is where is this going to take place? And Jesus simply says, don’t worry about location. Don’t worry about it. Because when it happens, it won’t be a secret. Earlier, when the lightning flashed, everyone knew what was happening. Jesus ends this teaching with another sign in the sky. When a corpse is dead on the ground, you can spot it easily because vultures are going to be circling it. When Jesus comes, you’re going to know that it’s happening. When judgment comes, everybody’s going to know that, too. Friends, if you’ve been sitting on the fence, if you’ve been sitting on the fence and you were wondering if you ought to give your life to Jesus, I hope this has convinced you. We’re all living on the same timeline. We’re all marching forward in history at the same pace. Even whether you want to believe that or not, you’re in that timeline. Jesus is coming back, and there’s only two positions that you can be in, taken or left. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. The life without Christ that you’re clinging to is a sinking ship. But the good news is that the gates of the kingdom are open. That’s Jesus point to the Pharisees, they’re open. It’s open now. The invitation is in Jesus hand, and he’s offering it to you by his grace. And if you trust the Savior who came to save your life with his first coming, you’ll have no fear to face him and only joy to embrace him when he comes again. Would you pray with me?

The purpose of God’s compassion to us is to turn us into worshipers filled with joy and thanksgiving for Christ. We have a surprising story from Jesus ministry to consider this morning. It’s a story of Jesus miraculous healing, which is not surprising at all. We’ve seen plenty of that throughout the Gospel of Luke. What’s surprising about this story is that it wasn’t given to us primarily to teach about Jesus power. It does display Jesus power. And so we’ll talk about that. But this story is primarily about the reason Jesus does anything miraculous or kind or generous at all. When I was a missions pastor in Pennsylvania for, I guess about 15 years ago now, I worked a lot with the poor in our downtown community. We had a program called Circles, which partnered people from our church with those who were taking steps to work their way out of poverty. It was a fantastic program. I made a lot of friends. We saw whole families become financially independent and sustainable over time. And I got to share the gospel with a lot of people. At the same time that I was working in this, this ministry, I was also studying at Westminster Theological Seminary, writing a dissertation on the topic of how culturally middle class churches can lovingly embrace and include the generationally poor. And what I ran into over and over again in my research was the complex relationship between preaching the gospel and making disciples of Jesus on the one hand, and meeting the physical needs of people on the other. There’s a slew of literature out there written for church consumption that says things like Jesus loved without an agenda, or Jesus calls us to be his hands and feet, implying that we are not also his voice as we share the gospel. And these writers focus on the parts of Jesus ministry where Jesus meets physical needs, but they generally leave out what Jesus has to say about his own ministry. For example, here’s what Jesus says when he’s confronted with Jewish authorities in John chapter five. “For the works that the father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the father has sent me.” So Jesus is very clear that everything he does throughout his ministry does, in fact have an agenda. He did not come simply to perform good deeds and to help people out of their problems as an end in itself. God the father gave Jesus these works to do to testify to the identity of Jesus as God the Son. They are pictures of a restored creation in the Kingdom of God over which Jesus reigns as king. So the intention is that when we look at the works of Jesus, we will not just see compassion for the sake of kindness, but we will see Jesus and some aspect of his gospel, some aspect of his good news. And the good works that God has prepared for us to do according to Ephesians chapter two should do the same. They are also intended by God to point people to the wholeness, healing, love, and forgiveness that is found exclusively in Jesus. But as we’ll see today, the purpose of Jesus ministry doesn’t even end with seeing him for who he is. There is a step beyond that, even in what Jesus wants to see happen. The purpose of God’s compassion to us is to turn us into worshipers, filled with joy and thanksgiving for Christ. That’s what it’s about. It’s turning us into worshippers. Now, you might feel some tension with some of the things that I have to say today. But what’s new? Really? Right. What’s new? If you have developed over time a very strong feeling that a truly loving act would never have an agenda behind it. I understand that impulse in you. I understand, I get it. As a Christian. But let me just say, it’s not biblical. It’s not biblical. If we truly want to become like Jesus in every way, that would have to include seeing and doing compassionate work the way he sees and does it. And I believe that when we adjust our minds and our hearts to include Jesus purpose for his good works, we become more compassionate, not less. So when we’re in Luke chapter 17 today, we’re going to be in verse 11. I’ll take us through what happens in this account. I’m going to show you Jesus response to what happens. And then we’re going to I want to end with a couple of thoughts on how this should impact our compassionate work as Christians. So, here’s what happened on the way to Jerusalem. He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, and as he entered the village, a village, he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said to them, go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed. So Jesus is traveling through the regions of Samaria and Galilee on his way south to Jerusalem, which is in Judea. So think of three regions. You got Galilee in the north. It’s pretty good. You got Judea in the south. That’s even better. And then you got Samaria in the middle. And that’s terrible. Nobody likes Samaria in that day. Many Jewish travelers even would avoid Samaria because they were racist. Jesus does not avoid it. Jesus does not avoid Samaria at all. He travels right through it because he isn’t racist, and because the message of the good news of salvation is just as much for them as it is for anybody else. So there’s a lot we can learn from Jesus about how we as Christians should treat all people. And this is a good this story is a good example of that. So he enters a town near the Galilee Samaria border, and he’s met by these ten lepers. Now, these guys could not come near to Jesus for healing like so many people had come. Many people came right up and touched Jesus. They couldn’t do that because their skin disease required them to stay away. It’s a contagious disease. That was a big deal back in the first century and in ancient Israel as a whole. And in addition to being fatal, leprosy separated these people from being able to function within the community. So, these men would have been beggars on the street. No one would have wanted to come near to them. And that’s not just because people didn’t want to get sick, they didn’t want to get sick. But that wasn’t the only reason. They also didn’t want to become ceremonially unclean by touching these guys. To be unclean in the Jewish community meant that you couldn’t enter into worship at the temple. Now, that doesn’t mean that these men were unsaved the way we might talk about it or that that, they were, in some sense a god that God didn’t love them or something like that, but it meant that they couldn’t fully participate in worship. And that’s an important note. Okay. Remember that they’re not right now able to fully participate in worship. So, these men, they see Jesus. They’ve surely heard about his ability to heal. So, they keep their Distance and they call out to Jesus for mercy. Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Jesus, you can see our predicament from where you are. You can see what’s going on with us. We know you have the power to change us. Show us your power like you’ve shown to so many others. See, with leprosy, the typical scenario would run like this A person is diagnosed with the skin disease. By the way, if you’re really interested in all the details on this, check out Leviticus 13. Okay, step by step instructions as to what you’re supposed to do in a situation like this. The person would be diagnosed. The priest would examine the skin and determine if it’s leprosy or not through, through a series of quarantine periods. I’m sorry if that brings back flashbacks of Covid 19 for you. Okay. But there was there was this sort of a quarantine process they would go through, and the priest would see if it heals up, then he would declare that person clean again, which means that he can resume normal life and worship with everybody else. And that’s the scenario that everybody hoped for. However, those with incurable chronic leprosy would eventually just sort of slip into the homeless margins of society, and they would eventually die. And that’s where these men are. They’re out on the street. They’re in that incurable stage. They keep their distance from Jesus, not because he’s special, but because they’re made to keep their distance from everyone. They need God’s mercy. There is no hope for them other than God’s mercy. And Jesus does something for them. And it’s fairly unique what he does for them. Usually people with leprosy would experience healing, and then they would go to the priest to be tested. But in this case, Jesus sees these men in their leprous state and he tells them to go to the priest. Notice that he doesn’t heal them and then send them. He just sends them, and on their way it says to the priests they are cleansed. So, faith in Jesus ability to heal came prior to their actual experience of healing. Basically, they’re saying we trust Jesus. We trust him. We don’t. We don’t need Jesus to prove himself before we listen to him. We listen to him because we trust him. And so as they are on their way to show themselves to the priest, they experience the mercy that they trusted Jesus could provide for them. And that would be a heartwarming story, wouldn’t it? If it ended there, if it ended there, that would be. We’d all feel good. We’d go out feeling warm on a cold day, right? We’d all feel much better about it. But not only does the account not end there, if it did end there, it would be incomplete because Jesus has more in mind than just helping ten guys out with their problem. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Jesus feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Okay, so one of these guys turned back. The way that it’s phrased, it sounds like he realized that he was healed as he was heading toward the priest. He then stops in his tracks before getting there, and he comes back to before he gets verification that he’s been healed. He didn’t go get declared clean first. He just knew that Jesus had healed him and he immediately went into worship, which is significant because you’re not allowed to do that under mosaic law. You’re not allowed to do what this guy just did here. See, in the law. The priest is key. The priest is key. The priest has to sign off before you’re allowed to do that. When I when I broke my clavicle, the doctor said that I couldn’t lift more than a coffee cup for six months. With this arm, I couldn’t. I couldn’t lift more than a coffee cup. Do you know how hard it is not to pick things up? Try it. It’s a pretty big part of every day. We’re always picking things up. Have you noticed? Oh, man. But I was told I could rebreak my bone if I didn’t wait for the doctor to sign off on examining by examining my x ray. This guy has been warned by God’s word that he is not to go and make other people unclean, and that he can give them disease. Unless the priest has signed off and said, you are clean, you know what this man knows? He knows the priest has signed off. He knows the priest has declared that he knows the only priest that matters has made him clean. He is. He has been declared clean by the true priest and mediator, the one who merely has to speak. And he can declare a hopelessly unclean man destined to die, to be cleansed before God. Now, even though it is not written here, likely he would have then gone to the other priest at the temple after this to have himself declared clean for the community, which is the right thing to do. Jesus has done this with other people in his ministry, but for him to turn back and to throw himself at Jesus feet, to thank him and to praise him, shows that this man understands the barrier of uncleanness has been removed and he can now worship God again. This is a this is a vivid picture of what Jesus does when we trust in him. See the. This miracle cleansing, along with all of Jesus compassionate works is a display of the gospel. It’s a physical picture of a spiritual reality. See, our sin is like leprosy. It’s it separates us from communion with God. Sin has to be washed away. God uses the broken things that are broken in this world, like diseases, to teach us about spiritual realities. That’s the reason for declaring things clean or unclean. It’s God’s way of teaching us the difference between sin and holiness. The theological term for sins being washed away is sanctified. That’s the word sanctification. It means washed and made holy and clean. You say, how are we sanctified? Hebrews chapter ten, verse ten is very clear. Quote. We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. That’s how we’ve been washed. One way of describing what Jesus does for us on the cross is that he removes our sins by placing them on himself. He becomes dirty so that we can become clean. When we when we trust in Jesus, we are saying the same thing as this one leper who came back. Thank you, Jesus, for your power to make me clean and restore me to wholeness. Thank you, Jesus, for reestablishing my ability to worship my Creator God. And the product of that spiritual cleansing is that I become a worshiper. Jesus doesn’t cleanse us of sins for no purpose. Do you know that there’s a purpose in his? In his cleansing, God cleanses us of our sins so that we become joy filled worshippers of Jesus, just like this former leper that is now at his feet. That’s God’s intention in the healing. There’s a purpose in the healing. That’s the purpose of his compassion. It’s not compassion for the sake of simply being kind. It’s not. It’s not healing for the sake of setting a man free so that he can then go about his life and do whatever he likes. No, that’s not why Jesus did this. It is compassionate healing with the intended goal that this man would be restored in his worship to the one true living God and friends. That’s the same reason that God has saved you. If you put your trust in him, it’s the reason he saves all of us through salvation in the cleansing power of the cross. God is adding to the chorus of his worshipers. We join our voices and our lives with the kingdom people declaring the greatness of God. And that’s how we’re designed. That’s. That’s what you were made for. You want to know what this life is for? That’s what it’s for. You were made to worship. Sin disables us from doing what we were designed to do. It blinds us to that reality. But in Christ, we are restored to our proper roles as worshippers of Jesus. And we know that from this passage, not just because of what this one man does, but because of what Jesus says about the other nine guys. Then Jesus answered, we’re not ten cleansed. Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. You know part of me when I read this ending to the story, by the way, that’s the ending to the story. If you’re hoping for something different, that’s it. That’s how the story ends. And when I hear this, when I hear this ending of the story, part of me wants to say, hey, Jesus, could we look on the bright side here? I mean, I wish I could get a 10% return on my evangelism. I mean, this guy’s this guy’s worship. He’s pretty. This is pretty wonderful. Here’s this guy worshiping, praising the Lord, thanking Jesus by worshipping at his feet. And Jesus is looking around and he says, that’s it. Weren’t there ten guys? Where’d the other nine go? Why is Jesus so discontent here? The way he’s talking, it seems like he didn’t get what he wanted, doesn’t it? He even makes a comment that seems to imply that the guy who did come back isn’t who he expected to be there. He calls him a foreigner because he’s a Samaritan. Jesus is not putting this man down. He’s showing how surprising it is, because apparently at least some of the other guys were full blood Jewish men who should have recognized the significance of what Jesus has done. And now, therefore, who Jesus is. But the only guy who came back is one who doesn’t even have full access to the temple in Jerusalem when he is clean. What is upsetting Jesus so much here? Well, what Jesus cannot understand is how 90% of the people who have experienced his compassion have failed to become his worshipers. The compassionate act of God was intended to restore them to be worshipers. But the guys just took that compassion and they left. They didn’t connect the dots. Okay, God has saved us through Jesus. Let’s worship Jesus. No, no. They took the healing, and then they got back to living life where they don’t recognize Christ as their Savior. They’re really no different from people who are in a tough spot. And they come out to the church because they need something. They want somebody to pray for them. It’s something to get. And once they get the thing that they got that they want, then life gets back to normal. They have no more need for Jesus anymore. It’s really what’s happened here. And church, don’t miss this. That bothers Jesus. That bothers him. Jesus is not indifferent about that result. He doesn’t just say, oh, well, you know, glad I could help out anyway. No, we’re not ten cleansed. Where are they? Jesus reaction tells us there should have been ten new passionate disciples of Jesus that day. He got one and he’s not okay with that. Now, a couple of things to point out here. Okay, a couple things to point out. He is happy for that one Samaritan guy. Okay. He is he is happy for that guy. He tells him to go in peace because his faith has made him well. I believe the word well here is working kind of a two meanings, because this this man is, is not just physically. Well, now that he’s found his savior as a worshiper of Jesus, he is now spiritually well. So, Jesus is glad for this one guy who has become a disciple. And also, I want to point out to you that the other nine guys who were healed of leprosy appear to still be healed at the end of the story. We’re not told that Jesus revoked his healing. Okay, nine guys didn’t contract leprosy on the way home that day. They still had that temporary restoration of their lives to enjoy. It certainly helps them out for some amount of time before they die of something else. But the fact that these guys missed the purpose of their healing and didn’t become worshipers of Jesus means that they missed the significance of Jesus ministry. They failed to find the true eternal life. That was the point of Jesus compassion. And that’s the problem. It’s a problem for those guys, even though they don’t know it. It is a problem that they missed it, and it is a problem for Jesus. Jesus ministry isn’t just about making people feel comfortable for today. Did you know that that Jesus doesn’t just want you to feel comfortable a little more comfortable today? It isn’t just about making people feel better. It isn’t just to help them along through the tough times on this grand journey of life. No, it’s to restore them, to become the worshippers of God that they were designed to be. And anything less than that is upsetting to Jesus, and it should be upsetting to us. I want to suggest two ways. Two ways. This this passage has to impact our compassionate work as Christians. I’m going to I’m going to summarize these two ways in two statements. The first is the goal of our Christian compassion must be worship. The goal of our Christian compassion must be worship. Again, as I said earlier, if you have bathed your mind in the idea that for love to be true, it must be driven by no agenda and no hope at all. This is this is probably the part that’s going to be hard, if that if you’ve latched on to that, if that’s your theology of loving acts, then this is a hard one. I have heard this expressed in so many ways in the church. Um, people who really love Jesus. But they got this part wrong that people will say things like, you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to treat people like projects. If I if I do compassionate work, hoping for an opportunity to evangelize, then I don’t truly love that person. And I get it. If that’s you, I get where you’re coming from, if that’s you, but I want to press back on it, okay? If Jesus is God and His eternity, if salvation is truly found in no one else, if there is no other name given to us under heaven whereby we must be saved, wouldn’t it be the most unloving thing in the world not to share that? Wouldn’t that withholding that? Wouldn’t that be terribly unloving? The most loving thing that I can possibly do as a Christian is help someone with their problem and use that help to share with them. The most important help there is that all of us need. Because if I’m serving like Jesus served, then my goal must be Jesus goal. And his goal was to bring people into worship. Let me take you back to my time working in the poverty community. Um, there was no question that my heart was fully and totally committed to helping my friends climb their way out of the trap that is generational poverty. If you grew up in a home like I did where there was never. You never faced hunger or want or any type of need, it is very hard for us to understand the dynamics of generational poverty and the seemingly impossible obstacles that people have to overcome that stand in the way of climbing out of this, this life. To understand this, to really grasp that world, I had to sit at the feet of my friends. I had to learn. I had to listen to their stories. I had to remove my assumptions about who they are and the choices they’ve made. And when I when I started to learn and really understand what they were, they were up against my heart just melted for them. My compassion for people in general, and these people specifically just rose exponentially. I mean, I was I was a pretty compassionate guy already. But when I started hearing these stories and truly understanding what they were up against, I was I was like the Grinch. My small heart grew three sizes that day, and all I wanted to do was see him succeed. I just wanted to see him succeed. I wanted them to achieve all that they had put their hearts on. But the truth was, some of them also didn’t know Jesus. Many of them did. And they were already my brothers and sisters in Christ. And we could just work on honoring the Lord by defeating poverty. But some of them didn’t. They wanted to get out of poverty because it was such a hard life. And they were they were fed up with living so unsustainably. My friend Virginia captures this feeling very powerfully in a poem that she wrote. I believe Virginia knows the Lord, but she wrote this poem to try to capture her raw feelings of living in poverty, that she wanted to escape. And she agreed to allow me to use this poem in the front matter of my dissertation. I want you to listen to this poem, to read it for you. I want you to listen and listen to how she describes that, that experience, trying to get ahead. Some days I wonder if I’d be better off dead. Just trying to stay afloat. Wish somebody would throw me a boat. Running on this treadmill of life. While trying to be a good wife. Can’t be a good mother, mother. When I feel like I’m going to be smothered. Every day I pray. Even when life gets in the way. All the bills coming down the pipe feels like a flood with no end in sight. Trying to make a deal so we can get our next meal. Still can’t really get ahead. Maybe just better stay in bed. Listen to that church. Can. Can you. Can you hear that? That is not just a financial problem. That is. That is not just a money issue. There’s a gospel solution that is needed for the hopelessness of that problem. Now, my friend Virginia, she knows the Lord. She has the access to that gospel, but she’s writing for everyone stuck in this treadmill of hopelessness. And lots of them don’t know the Lord. They don’t have that gospel. And if I were to walk with someone through the darkness of this problem and help them to get to a place of sustainability, but never show them that they were made for more than just financial success, I would simply be helping them to trade out the hopelessness of poverty for the hopelessness of godless middle class. And that’s no trade. I want my hopeless friends to find the one true hope for eternity. The one who wipes out all of our spiritual poverty by paying a debt that none of us can afford. And that’s true of all of life’s problems. All of life’s problems. Sickness, financial hardship, relational heartbreak, loss of a job, and any problem you can think of. Every broken thing in the world is intended to show us our desperate need for hope in Jesus. And I, as a follower of Jesus, whose compassion must be shaped by Jesus compassion, hope for more than just meeting the physical need. My compassion is to see my friend become a worshipper of Jesus and find true peace and joy for eternity with him. That’s what Jesus wanted in his compassion. That’s what I want as well. As John Piper once wrote, we care about all suffering now is special, especially eternal suffering later. If you’re my friend, then I truly care about you. I hope you have friends that you truly care about. And if you’re my friend and I truly love you, I don’t want you to just to live. I want you to worship forever. And that means, secondly, that Christian outreach must be gospel centered. Christian outreach must be gospel centered. What I mean is every part of the strategy of outreach for us as a church and for you as individuals should have as its aim, sharing the good news of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. That should be right at the core. That doesn’t mean that all we do is share the gospel. Okay? God cares about our bodies and our souls. He made us embodied souls. That’s what we are. We as a church care about both. But this life is short and eternity is long. Human flourishing without eternal flourishing is a terrible trade. And that’s just as true for the rich and wealthy as it is for the sick and poor. How much do you have to hate someone to help them through the next few years but leave them in eternal jeopardy because you were too scared or couldn’t be bothered to tie spiritual help to the physical help. We would cease to be a church on Jesus mission. If we did that, we would be on some mission, but it would be one that we chose for ourselves. It wouldn’t be Jesus mission. So, we have to be intentional. That’s the word I have for you. That’s the word I’m going to use to tie this all together. To summarize it. We have to be intentional. We have to think strategically how we are going to use our time and our resources to help the people we love and the neighbors in our community to hear the message of hope and to experience the Body of Christ. There are always going to be those who receive the help and then refuse to be worshipers. We know that it’s not what we want. We know that’s going to happen. And again, Jesus didn’t revoke any blessings. We want to be a blessing to others. Of course we do. But having true Christian compassion to the people around us means leveraging the brokenness to bring about the greatest number of worshipers, both for their eternal good and God’s eternal glory. Now, you may be very uncomfortable with phrases like that leveraging the brokenness. Is that what we really should be doing? You might be uncomfortable with that sort of approach to loving people, but I assure you this is not our idea. This is exactly what Jesus did. This is Jesus idea. It’s his strategy. And the beauty of Jesus compassion is that it invites all who receive it into a mercy that is eternal, and a mercy that never ends. Would you pray with me?

A disciple serves the Lord with the humble heart of a servant doing his duty, not with an expectation of exaltation. Today, we’re going to conclude a short section of Jesus teaching, where he teaches some pretty deep lessons to his closest disciples. They’ve been challenging, but in in my opinion, this today is the most difficult yet. First he told us to rebuke each other and to endlessly forgive each other when we’ve been wronged. Paul Tripp defines forgiveness as a vertical commitment with God, followed by a horizontal transaction with the offending party. In other words,  it’s because I have a commitment to God who graciously forgives me that that gracious forgiveness is the currency that I use to transact with others. Then Jesus told us that our faith is powerful, not because we have a lot of faith, but because God works powerfully through the faith that we have. So if we have Jesus, we have everything we need to see God work powerfully in us and through us. Now, just those two teachings alone, if we were to fully embrace them, fully bring them in and live them out, they would make us into very different sorts of people in this world. And that’s what discipleship with Jesus is. It’s designed to contrast us against the background of a broken world. We should not seem to fit. Okay. If you if you feel like I just don’t really feel like I fit, you’re probably doing it right. We’re not supposed to. If sin saturates everything and it does, then sin is what feels normal. Jesus makes us abnormal with his righteousness, and that’s a good thing. Now, with that in mind, let me take you to a parable that I would guess is going to sound brand new to many of you. Like Jesus just came out with another album. Okay, so is this his new stuff? No, there is no new stuff. This is just a teaching of Jesus that is very rarely shared and discussed in the church. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that even many of you who are strong Bible readers who have certainly read this parable at some point, I’m going to guess that many of you have never really wrestled with it. Jesus is going to tell us a story to explain the kind of attitude that we are to have as servants within God’s household. He’s going to particularly focus on how we see ourselves, and what should we expect from God in return for being obedient and doing what he commands. And the attitude he tells us to have is so wildly out of sync with the attitude that most of us have, and that our culture celebrates and that feels good to us. It’s no wonder that this teaching is not well remembered. We are conditioned in our minds to be praised and rewarded for accomplishments, aren’t we? We accomplish something. You think I’m going to get praised, I’m going to get rewarded for this. And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments. But there’s a big difference between receiving praise for a job well done and doing your job well so that you will receive praise. You hear that? You hear the difference there. That’s true everywhere, by the way. That’s true at work. That’s true at home. But nowhere does this shift in attitude and motivation do more damage than in our walk with God. Jesus is going to explain that a disciple serves the Lord with a humble heart of a servant, doing his duty, not with an expectation of exaltation. We’re in Luke chapter 17, verses 7 to 10 today. What I’m going to do is I’m going to read the parable in full, because I want you to feel the full weight of Jesus whole argument, and the weight of the humility that he places on us. And then I’m going to go back and I’m going to explain the story. And then finally, I have five attitude adjustments that we should make from this passage. So here’s the parable. Will anyone of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at table? Will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink? Does he thank the servant, because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. You can hear immediately. Why this parable isn’t very popular, can’t you? It just. You just. You could feel it. You’re like, wow, that is that is not something I like to hear. This teaching presents a direct attack on the tightly held, I would might even say, beloved popular idea that we are all autonomous captains of our lives and deserve the praise for everything that we’ve accomplished because of our personal greatness. It’s directly against that idea. Trading that out for a lifetime of being an unworthy servant for most people, no thank you, I’ll pass. This is why we need to pay such close attention to what Jesus is saying here. If you really want to follow Jesus closely, it’s in areas like this where even mature believers need to grow. Even those of you who’ve walked with Jesus for a really long time, this is an area where most of us need to grow. Jesus asks two rhetorical questions here. Both assume a no answer. So, Jesus is picturing a large farm with many servants who work for the owner. This is a typical part of the economic system of the first century. Servants would work in the household to serve the owner, and then their lives and their families would be sustained by the income of the estate. Jesus puts us in the position of the owner for these rhetorical questions. It’s a little hard for us because our culture is so different from what Jesus is describing here that we would probably say yes to both of these, these questions, but we need to put ourselves into a first century mindset just a little bit, so that we can understand what Jesus is saying about discipleship. The first question is whether we would invite a servant to come in from the field and put, pull up a chair and have dinner with us. Is that the master himself would have been the one who prepared the meal for the servant, because he says to the servant, come in at once. Sit down for dinner. It’s already prepared for you. Jesus says, who among you would do this? Now the disciples that are listening to Jesus here in this moment, they would have thought none of us, none of us would do this. This is, of course we’re not going to do that. That’s not how things are done. It’s a servant’s job to make sure that the master’s needs are met. Not the other way around. The master would instead instruct the servant to prepare the meal and then dress properly. Take off all those sweaty clothes from the field, put on proper clothes, serve me the meal, and then watch the master have his dinner. And only then would the servant have his own meal. Now, if you’re feeling uncomfortable with this, I want you to remember that this is how their economy worked. This is how a servant would have his livelihood. And it’s hard to find parallels for us today. But let me just say, every time that you go to a restaurant at dinner time. Okay. And you go to a restaurant at dinner time, you are served by someone who does not get to eat at dinner time. Okay. That that person is that that that server, that waiter, the cooks in the back, the dishwashers, those folks, they have to eat on a break. But they do that because that’s how they make their livelihood. And it’s the same sort of thing here, but in a very different sort of economic arrangement. If that first question about will you allow him to pull up a chair and have dinner with you, if that question makes you squirm just a bit, the second question is only going to increase the discomfort. Jesus asks, does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? Does the does the owner of the estate even? Oh, thank you to the servant who carries out his household duties. Now we are squarely outside of our culture here, right? Because we would all say, well, yes, of course you’d say thank you. Of course you’d say, no matter whether it was their job or not, you’d say thank you to somebody for helping you out and doing what they did. But we need to follow Jesus argument here because he’s making a very technical argument. He’s not asking whether it would be nice to say thank you. He’s not saying, would it be kind to say thank you. He’s asking whether this thanks is owed as a debt to the servant who is merely doing what he’s been commanded to do. In these two questions, Jesus is asking whether a servant should expect to be celebrated and praised and rewarded, and even in this case served by the master for simply doing what a servant is supposed to do. And the answer is no. No, it’s not owed. If it’s your job, then what is there to praise? Jesus says, even if you do your job exceptionally well, it’s the, it’s to be expected that you would do your job to the best of your ability. This doesn’t mean you can’t be praised and rewarded. It doesn’t even mean that you won’t be praised and rewarded. But if someone does their job with the expectation of being praised and rewarded, then they’re doing it with the wrong motivation. And this is why this is such a hard aspect of discipleship under Jesus for us to grasp. We very often do things for credit. We do it because we want to be seen. We want to be heard. We want to. We crave the praise. We want the raise. We want people to tell us how great we are at what we do, how well we do our job, and it’s because there are very appropriate times and ways to build others up, to encourage people to show love and to show thanks. There are those times. By the way, we as a staff just received this week our love gift from all of you. And let me just say on behalf of all of our staff, wow. Thank you. What an incredible thank you for all this generosity. We certainly feel the love that you as a congregation have for us as a staff. But let me flip this around. Let me flip this gift around and use it to make Jesus point. I’m going to throw my entire team under the bus here. But the unwritten rule is that I get to use them in illustrations however I like. It’s one of the hazards of the job. Okay, so, imagine if the staff of Calvary, our pastors and support staff here at Calvary, served you and served you well, in order to draw out from you all of the praise and honor and financial gain that we could possibly get from you. You would be right to run from this place and to get away from this place quickly. And I’d love to say that that has never happened in the 2000 years of Jesus church, but Peter in the first century warned the church elders not to do their job for shameful gain. Even in the church you find this. And that’s because there’s a way of serving God that is really serving yourself. There’s a way to serve God that’s really serving yourself. If you change your view of service from something, you owe God to something that you use to gain from God. You’re not really serving God at all. And that’s why Jesus says here, here’s what you must say as a true servant of the Lord, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. So without that attitude and that perspective, you can’t understand discipleship. You will get discipleship wrong every time if you don’t have that attitude. And we will misunderstand what it means to follow Jesus without it. Jesus is adjusting our attitude in this passage. Here are five attitude adjustments that I see in this passage. And the first is our place within God’s household is right. Our place within God’s household is right. It is correct. This is the first and most important adjustment because without this, there is no discipleship under Jesus. You cannot follow Jesus without owning This. We are servants of the Lord, not the other way around. Okay. We serve him. He does not serve us. God doesn’t exist to honor us. We exist to honor him. We should be servants. We are designed by God to be servants. All. All of God’s creation. His entire created order is designed to reflect the greatness of his glory. And that includes us. It includes humanity. So when Jesus uses an owner of an estate and a servant in the field who now comes in and has to keep serving the master as a way of illustrating our relationship with God, he has picked a correct metaphor. That’s the right way of seeing it. I call this the first and most important attitude adjustment, because seeing our relationship with God any other way creates a foundational error in which it is impossible to understand the gospel. If you see yourself as over God in authority, you don’t really believe in God at all. Okay? If you see yourself as over him in authority, you’re not really believing in God. You believe in yourself. And for you, God is merely a projection of your own authority. And isn’t it amazing how much God tends to agree with us when we’re focused on what we think, and not really concerned at all about what he’s said? But most of us here this morning probably don’t wrestle too much with thinking that we are the master and that God is our servant. That’s probably not where most of you are at. That’s more of a more of a non-Christian take. What we might wrestle with, though, is the sense that we are a fellow master alongside God in his household. This is far more common in the church. We might be inclined to listen and obey in some areas of discipleship. But were resistant and negligent in others where we don’t think it’s as important to be faithful. We might have our own way of seeing things that’s a little different from God’s Word. Or we might be faithful to parts of God’s Word that match up well with our preferences, or our political views, or our natural tendencies or things that we tend to enjoy. And then what we do is we ignore, or we explain away the parts of Scripture that are personally challenging and that that call us to deny ourselves and church when we do that, when we when we pick and choose what we want to, to listen to and what we don’t, we are in essence taking off our servant clothes, and we are pulling up a seat at the table next to God and acting as a fellow master alongside of God. There is no place for us at that table. God is our master. His word is our instruction. We are his servants and any other arrangement is simply idolatry. It’s not Christian discipleship when we find that urge within us. The proper response is not argument, it’s repentance. Once we understand that, we are rightly in the servant role. Here’s the next adjustment. God’s commands for us are normal for servants. Now the Bible is filled with instructions for how to properly be God’s people. Let me just say two things about them. First of all, the Bible contains commandments for servants, not suggestions for our benefit. You hear me say this sort of thing all the time, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this. But do you see the words commanded and duty in verse ten? Look at that scripture again. Commanded and duty. That is not a misprint. We say, well, I don’t like to be commanded. I like to be asked. Yeah, that’s just fine when it comes to your spouse and kids. If I go around at my house barking out orders, I’m probably going to hear about it. That is just not how it works. No one’s going to listen to me if I do that. Scripture does use the metaphor that those of us who follow Jesus are adopted into the family of God to describe the relationship that we have with our Heavenly Father. But it would be a mistake to stretch that metaphor too far, as if it was the only way that we relate to God. Our Heavenly Father’s commands are not like my suggestions to my kids. Okay? When I make suggestions to kids, sometimes they get to speak into it. Sometimes they get to choose differently. We are not just God’s kids; we are also his servants. So. So, when God tells us what to do with perfect holiness and within his ordained will. He’s not inviting us into a negotiation. But there’s a there’s another way that we see this adjustment to we’re not being asked to do anything extraordinary. We’re not, we’re not we’re not being asked to do anything extraordinary in God’s eyes. Faithfulness to God’s commands is an expectation of a disciple. There’s nothing especially heroic about what God has said to us. It might look heroic from a human perspective. I think, especially here, of those all around the world who suffer evil at the hands of others regularly, simply for being a follower of Jesus. It looks heroic, but it isn’t. Especially when this church gave $140,000 to help our church friends in Ukraine. Here, just a few years ago, the newspaper here in town reached out because they wanted to do a story on it and we said no, because responding to a need is just what we’re supposed to do. That’s what we’re called to do. We’re not looking for credit for that. I mean, it was wonderful. It was a great outpouring of love and generosity. It greatly built up my faith to be part of something like that. But caring about the church around the world and doing what we can with a cheerful heart. That’s just standard operating procedure for a follower of Jesus. That’s just who we are. And that’s true of all God’s instructions, all of his commands. God’s commands are our new normal. That’s just how we operate. And if we turn faithfulness into something to be proud of or something extraordinary, we lose sight of what faithfulness is. It’s our duty. And that leads to our third adjustment. We are not in a position to demand or expect. I was talking to a friend of mine about her marriage one time, and she was telling me how her husband didn’t really do all that much to help out around the house, but whenever he would do something like unload the dishwasher or something like that, he would wait expectantly for her to say thank you or good job or something along those lines. And if she didn’t acknowledge what he did, he’d get upset. And then he’d use this perceived lack of appreciation to give himself an excuse for why he didn’t have to do more things around the house. Um, this was hilarious to me when she was describing this. It probably shouldn’t have been. I probably shouldn’t laugh when people tell me things like this, but that sounds more like the sort of conversation you might have with your toddler than with your spouse. But as I consider how deeply immature that. And wouldn’t you agree, that sounds pretty deeply immature, right? There needs to be some growing there. As I think about how deeply immature that sounds, when you say it out loud, it becomes much more sobering and profound when I realize this is exactly how I sound, when I presume God’s blessing simply for doing what I’m supposed to do. Think about that servant. Think about that servant in the field. The servant comes in from the field, and he doesn’t get a seat at the table. What does he get? He gets more work. The servant does his work like he’s supposed to. Jesus asks, is he owed thanks? No. There’s no need for reward or recognition because the servant served. That’s what servants do. This, by the way, is another dagger into the heart of the false prosperity gospel. I talked about it at length last week. I’ll just say just. I just want to point out real quickly here that expectations of God’s blessings for faithfulness are the exact opposite of what Jesus teaches here. We don’t obey to receive. That’s false religion. We obey because we already have received. That’s the gospel. Our faithful work doesn’t put us in a position to expect God to give us blessings or recognition. On the contrary, God’s gracious work for us in Christ puts us in a position where God can expect us to respond by serving faithfully. So, there is expectation here, but there is responsibility. But it’s not an expectation on God. It’s on us. Our whole lives from now into eternity are response to the saving mercy of God that’s been given to us through no merit of our own. When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he didn’t do so out of an obligation to us, but to live with that grace, to receive that from him is to live under obligation to God. Loving. Obligation. Cheerful. Joyful. Far seeing obligation, but obligation nonetheless. If you don’t have a category in your mind for being filled with joy and peace while under the obligation to serve the Lord faithfully, then you won’t understand the call of Christ. You need that category in your in your mind. You can see that in my fourth adjustment here, that servanthood does not lessen love or value. So, this parable is not intended by Jesus to teach us primarily about how God sees us. But, but, but how we should see ourselves in light of God’s commands. But there is a key detail in this story that prevents us from reading it and plunging into viewing God as some sort of a cold and detached God, as if he doesn’t care about us. Now we know that’s true from the rest of Scripture. Plenty of places. All throughout Jesus talks about all throughout the Bible. We know God loves his kids. God takes good care of us. God. God, the love of Christ is the greatest love of all that’s been showered on us. But while this parable is not primarily about that side of the equation, there’s a detail here that alludes to this deep love and this care for us as servants. Notice that the servant eats, he eats. Now, Jesus main point in saying that the servant eats is the order. Okay, he’s talking about the order here that the servant eats after the master. That’s his reason for this story. But it’s important to see that Jesus isn’t describing a cruel, unattached master. He’s not describing a God who is unconcerned about the needs of his servants. And if you read it that way, you are reading that into the story. Okay, we have to be very careful not to read into the Bible, but to read out from the Bible a proper understanding of our servanthood and our obligation to God doesn’t make God a careless tyrant who doesn’t love or value us. On the contrary, to be a servant in the household of God requires his tremendous grace to us in Christ. We can’t even have that position in God’s household without him showering his love and grace on us. And one of the ways we grow closer to God is by becoming, day by day, more and more dependent on his provision. We are designed to be dependent on God. Our desire to be independent, that that thing in you that makes you want to be independent from God, that’s a product of sin. That’s not a product of God’s design. So, when Jesus describes our service to God as an obligation and the servant serves without expectation, and then he eats after the master, we shouldn’t read that God is putting us under his shoe right there. We should read that God is restoring us to the proper place within his creation. And the last adjustment to our attitude that we have to make is maybe the most obvious. We must own our unworthiness to understand the gospel. Don’t miss how this parable ends. It ends with a verbal profession. We shouldn’t just know it. We shouldn’t just begrudgingly acknowledge it. We shouldn’t just sort of assume it but leave it far in the background of our Christian walk. We should say Jesus says this. You should say it. Say it out loud. We are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. Unworthy. That’s how we should feel about ourselves. Not unloved, not uncherished, but unworthy. And it should be such a part of our identity that we have no problem saying it out loud to anyone who will hear it. It’s how we should carry ourselves here at church. It’s. It’s how we should be with our family. It’s how we should work around the people who don’t even know Jesus. If everything we do is done for the glory of God, then there’s really no place for us to be serving for the glory of ourselves, is there? There’s no place for us within that call. You know who this is really hard for Successful people. This teaching is really, really hard for successful people, people who are really good at what they do. People who get a lot of accolades, have a hard time with seeing themselves as a servant of God. And it’s very hard for them to understand the gospel, because the good news of the gracious, undeserved forgiveness of Christ requires you to admit that you’re not adequate. And then once you come to the end of yourself and you realize that to be saved, you must receive God’s undeserved forgiveness of Christ, you know what happens then? You start to realize that everything that you have is an undeserved gift, like all of it is undeserved. All that talent, all that knowledge. Who gave it to you? Who gave it, who? Who designed the brain that can hold all that knowledge? Who opened the door for success in your life. We’d be fools if we thought we were independently great on our own, somehow we did it all. One of the reasons people reject the gospel is because they have to admit that everything they have comes from the hand of God, and so they’d rather live a foolish life of lies than own the truth that every good and perfect gift comes from above. As James tells us, a true disciple of Jesus, a true disciple of Jesus, serves with the humble heart of a servant doing his duty. It was all that we were ever designed to be. Now, let me conclude by addressing what might be a bit of a nagging feeling that you have inside. Doesn’t God celebrate us? Doesn’t he celebrate us? Doesn’t God tell us that he will shower accolades on his faithful people? Doesn’t he commend the servant who worked hard with the pronouncement, well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master. Doesn’t Jesus say that we should store up treasure in heaven? Doesn’t Paul tell us that he’s pressing on toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus? That all sounds like accolades and rewards, doesn’t it? The scripture sounds very much like God is very excited about his faithful servants and is excited to celebrate and reward us. So how do we reconcile what Jesus teaches us here in Luke 17, with all of the celebrations of faithfulness that we find elsewhere in the Bible? Well, let’s remember this morning that this parable that we’re reading here, is about what’s going on inside of our hearts as servants. It’s not what’s going on in God’s heart toward us. There is going to be a day when all of us close our eyes for the last time here, and we open them in eternity. And the Bible’s description of that is a homecoming celebration. It is a party. It is a party in heaven for God’s people who have clung to Christ, who have lived with him faithfully through this world of sin. There is going to be joy, and God is going to be at the center of that party. He is overjoyed at the faithfulness of his people. He is filled with pride and joy when his kids do well. But remember what he says when we step into that eternal party. Well done, good and faithful servant. We don’t receive a hero’s welcome because we’re not the hero. Jesus is the hero. We are merely Jesus servants. So someday, someday, we will receive a servant’s welcome and enjoy the prize of an eternity with our creator, Jesus. Jesus is our reward. Let’s pray.

The presence of faith in Christ in your mind and heart, no matter how small, if it is genuine, will accomplish great things.   Time in the Bible this morning is exciting to me because of the little bit of theology that we’re going to look at. It’s a corrective to one of the more damaging theological trends of our time. It’s a small passage, but it packs a big punch. You know, sometimes when, when, when you think a certain way and then one small observation comes along, or one new fact, it turns it all around. That’s kind of what we’re going to have happen this morning. There’s been a theological trend that has built steam over the last few centuries of the church. That has had a devastating effect on both the core tenets of the gospel and on the practices of the church. And if you walked with us here at Calvary for a while, you have heard us teach a very high view of God’s power and presence and control of all things. This includes his blessings and the happiness and peace that we experience in Christ, and the joy of knowing our sins are washed away. And this is not because of anything that we’ve done. We are not special people. We are not highly skilled people. Or at least of all. Are we deserving people? God has chosen us to redeem us simply because he wanted to. That’s God’s grace to us. And now we point other people to that grace, and we rest. We rest in the firm knowledge that the God who has chosen us and redeemed us and brought us into his family is now working in all circumstances to shape us into the men and women that God has called us to be. That includes both blessing and tragedy. That includes health and sickness. It includes having a lot of things and not having enough things. God uses all of it to shape us, to be like Christ. As James said, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect. They may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. The Apostle Paul talked about this in numerous ways throughout his ministry, but maybe nowhere so clear as when he wrote about the thorn in his flesh, which was some kind of an ailment or a problem that dogged him throughout his life. He said, three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. So, James and Paul knew their faith was powerful, not because they were powerful, but because God worked powerfully through their faith. Now imagine a type of theology that changes faith into something that we produce, and that we strengthen and expand on our own. Picture a God who is who is not strengthening our faith through hardships but is instead sending those hard things into our lives because the quantity of our faith wasn’t enough to earn his blessings. This God would say something like, I have all this wealth waiting for you, healing from your sickness. I have it. It’s waiting for you. I have it all. I’ll give it to you if you can show me that you have enough faith that is called the prosperity gospel. Sometimes it’s called the health and wealth gospel. It’s not a gospel at all. See, gospel means good news. This is not good news. This is terrible news that robs Christians of their confidence in God, because it makes faith into a kind of game. If you have gathered up enough faith, if you force God’s hand to give you the thing that you want. And so, the whole Christian life becomes this mental game of trying to show how sincere and pure your faith is, so that you can claim the blessings that he has for you. And so, when those blessings do come to you, it is a triumph of your faith. And conversely, every failure to get the good thing in your life is an indictment of your faith. You weren’t strong enough in your trust in the Lord, so you couldn’t give God couldn’t give you what he wanted to give you. This is an unbiblical, damnable, heretical teaching of a false church that has spread all over the world. Did you know that? It’s all over, all over the world. As I mentioned, it’s been around for a couple hundred years, but it really gained steam in the 80s when TV preachers became a big thing. That’s when this thing really took off. The so-called word of faith movement roped unsuspecting people into this nonsense from the comfort of their couches. Desperate people heard a false teacher tell them God’s blessing is waiting for you if you have enough faith. And wouldn’t you know it, the amount of faith that a person had was measured by the number of zeroes they put on the check that they sent to that false teacher. Wow, what an incredible coincidence. But I’m telling you, church, you know I’m not up here this morning with a bone to pick about 80s preachers. That would be strange, wouldn’t it, if we spent our morning doing that? That’s not actually the real problem. There are a lot of people struggling under the weight of a false view of their how their faith works. There’s a lot of people that have bits and pieces of what I just described that they carry with them. There are folks here in our church bearing spiritual burdens because they don’t understand where the power of faith comes from. Our passage this morning is a wonderfully freeing passage from Jesus. It’s a message from Jesus that will set you free. And ironically, it’s a passage that prosperity gospel advocates use because they misread it. I want you to be really encouraged today as Jesus briefly rewires our thinking on genuine faith. The presence of faith in Christ in your mind and heart, no matter how small, if it is genuine, will accomplish great things. We have just two short verses today because I know you love it when I take my time through the Bible. So, we’re in just Luke 17, verses five and six. Today the apostles make a request to Jesus, and then Jesus answers them by correcting their assumption and explaining the power of genuine faith. Here’s the request the apostles said to the Lord, increase our faith. That’s enough. Let’s stop there. Apparently, the apostles were challenged by what they had just heard from Jesus. If you were here with us last week, you’ll remember that Jesus just told his group of disciples that their job is to look out for each other. Remember that? Look out for one another. When we see a fellow Christian wandering off toward sin or off toward temptation, we’re supposed to rebuke. And if the sin is against us, we’re supposed to forgive. And this forgiveness is not supposed to end. Jesus said, you might even do it seven times in a day. Which is to say, all the time, every time you’re going to forgive. Christians are to be an endless well of loving correction and gracious forgiveness for the benefit of other people, which in times like these is incredibly rare. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the impact we would have in our culture if living? By contrast, we were endlessly, lovingly correcting and endlessly forgiving. We would stand out in this world. Well, this call to endless forgiveness had an impact on the apostles who were listening. Here Luke switches from disciples. In verse one. He starts to talk about the apostles in verse five. Now back in chapter six, Jesus named the 12 of his closest disciples apostles, which means they are the sent ones. These are the tactical missionaries that he’s training up. So, some or all of these apostles recognize the difficulty of what Jesus is saying to the disciples about rebuking and forgiving. And so, they step forward and they speak up and they say, increase our faith, increase our faith. This appears to be a declaration of exasperation. How are we going to do this? God, how are we going to do this? Jesus. Are we hear what you’re saying? How do we make it happen? We don’t have what we need to keep up that level of faithfulness. You ever feel that way? You ever feel like you can’t do it? I think we all do at times. You’re reading the Bible and you come to some part that just slaps you in the face and you say, how am I ever going to get there? I do not know how to become the kind of person that this Bible is describing that I ought to be. And then you go to God in prayer and you say, Lord, if I’m going to be this person that you’re describing in this Bible, you’re going to have to make it so. You’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to change me by force. That’s what the apostles are saying to Jesus here. Change us. Notice they’re asking Jesus to increase their faith. They realize that to become the kind of person that Jesus is describing, that’s going to be beyond their natural ability. They’re going to need some help. And this is the part of this that they get exactly right. They get a part of it wrong, too, as they often do. We’re going to look at that here in just a minute. But they are totally correct to ask Jesus to work the change that has to happen to become the person that Jesus is telling them to be. Now we can take a cue from these apostles on how to pray differently when it comes to our own personal growth in Christ. So, when we sin and we feel God’s conviction and we repent, sometimes our prayer Sounds like God. Please forgive me. I’ll do better next time. Right. We’ve all prayed that, haven’t we? Or we’ll say I’ve failed again. I need to work on this. Please forgive me, God. And let me just say that’s fine. That’s fine. It’s fine to pray that way. It’s partially correct. And. And God doesn’t need us to wordsmith our prayers before he’s willing to listen to us. He doesn’t. We can go to God with everything and anything that is on our heart and mind. And we can speak to him in just the words that we have, and it’s totally fine. At one point we are told that we can pray in groans and the Holy Spirit will put words to the groans. Okay. So, we don’t have to think through every single word we say when we pray to God. But what we pray is a reflection of our own theological understanding. And so we grow as we grow in knowledge of God. Our prayers should reflect that your prayers should change over time. And in this case, I want you to grow beyond a simple I’ll do it better next time version of repentance. According to the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter two, it is our job to work on our own spiritual growth, but our ability to do that is only because God first works in us by His Holy Spirit. That’s what enables it. So, God works and we respond. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin and then we repent. The spirit produces love, joy, peace, and patience, and then we treat people in those ways. So, when we talk to the Lord about our spiritual growth, we shouldn’t just say, I’ll do better next time. You know, I promise God, I’m going to get my act together. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it better next time. What we should do is align our minds with what is actually happening and say, Lord, make me into the man who does not blow up in anger. Make that work that in me. Make me into the man who doesn’t blow up with anger. Make me, make me into the woman who does not, does not spread lies. Who refuses to spread lies. Or, as King David put it, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit in me. You see the difference? It’s a big difference if it’s if it’s God’s work that forms us in Christ likeness, then our prayer should not sound like our growth is entirely on us. So, when we come to Scripture and we face a high calling from the Bible like this command to endlessly forgive people who sin against us, that reaction that we naturally have that says, I don’t have the patience for that. That’s a that’s a that’s correct. You do not you do not have on your own the patience to endlessly forgive people. No one on their own has the patience for that. You can’t on your own develop a develop thoroughly into the sage, wise, faithful disciple that Jesus describes in the Bible. The apostles get this part exactly right. We’re going to need something more from you, Jesus, to get us where you want us to be. Now it’s that something that they get wrong, and we’re going to look at that in a second. But before we do, what does this say? What does what we’re reading here in verse five say about mustering up enough faith to get God to bless us? I want you to follow me closely here for the next minute, because this is a kind of a detailed argument, but I want you to hear it. Okay? If I think faith is a quantifiable product that I produce and can increase through my own spiritual abilities, okay, it’s not. But if I think that if I think it’s quantifiable and I can grow it myself as the prosperity people say, then what are these apostles asking Jesus for? Exactly what do they want from him? Why would why would King David ask God to create a clean heart for him? Why would he request that? Why would the Apostle Paul tell? Tell us that God is working in us to give us the will to do God’s will? Wouldn’t the correct thing for the apostles to say, here, be Lord, we can do it, we can do it. We will strengthen our resolve to be faithful to this impossibly high standard that you have set for what faithfulness should look like. We’ll make it happen. Now the disciples get things wrong all the time. So, if the apostles are wrong in asking Jesus for the change, let’s say that this is not what they should be asking for here. If it truly is on them to be faithful enough to be the men God has called them to be and to receive his blessings, then what I would expect is that Jesus would now correct them. I’d expect Jesus to say, what? What? Don’t look at me, fellas. Don’t look at me. You’re asking me to increase your faith. Why? Why are you asking me if it’s. It’s on you to get this done. Guys, here’s the bar. You better jump over it. That’s what I expect him to say. Let’s see what he actually says. And the Lord said, if you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you. The most important piece of this answer from Jesus. The part that unlocks everything that he’s saying here, is that he completely debunks the idea that the power of faith is in its quantity. Okay, you gotta grab hold of that. He’s throwing out the idea that the power of faith comes from the quantity of faith. So, when we hear questions like, do you have enough faith or how much faith do you have? These are these are questions that well-meaning Christians ask each other. But they have a theologically incorrect assumption. The assumption is that a person can have more or less faith, like gas in your gas tank. You know how much is in there, how much faith you got? What’s the indicator say on your faith? Are you full up on faith? Are you running on empty? You need a faith fill up. When the apostles request faith from Jesus. That’s the word that they’re using when they say increase our faith. The way that works is they’re saying grammatically, it’s saying add faith to our faith so that the faith increases. And they want Jesus to fill them up. They think that that’s what will make it possible for them to be obedient. But Jesus completely undercuts this wrong. Theological understanding with a dramatic picture. Which of course is what Jesus does all the time. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, he said, which you can barely see. Mainly. Basically, he’s saying the smallest possible thing that you can’t hardly see. If you have faith of a mustard seed, you can do miracles. You can command trees to uproot themselves and to reroute themselves. You can go full Lord of the rings here, right? You can. You can do everything. Now, now, obviously, Jesus is using over the top language here to make a point not to tell us how to make gardening easier, right? The context here isn’t the ability to do miracles. He’s not teaching them how to do miracles. Remember what the context is. It’s the ability to be faithful to the high calling of following Jesus. That’s what he’s talking about. And Jesus is telling us we don’t need a greater amount of faith to do that. In fact, you could barely have any faith at all and see tremendous, powerful works. You see that church? Jesus says the size of your faith could be the tiniest thing that you can think of. The very, very smallest faith isn’t a quantifiable amount. That’s what he’s saying. It’s something you either have, or you don’t. We have to stop thinking of people in terms of having a lot of faith or having a little faith. Genuine faith in Jesus is something that is either at work in you or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then you will experience no spiritual growth. People. People who have no faith in Jesus are not looking for spiritual growth anyway. And if they are, they’re looking for it in in dead religions that have no power. If you do trust in Jesus, though, what Jesus is saying here, even a little faith, you have everything you need to see God work powerfully to transform your heart and mind, and to accomplish great things in you and through you. You can. You can look at every command of God’s Word, every trial you face, every hard road, every difficult decision. And you can say, I am fully equipped. I am fully equipped to handle this with the utmost faithfulness because I have faith in Jesus. And you can say that right from the start. From the moment you put your faith in Christ, there’s no additional faithfulness required. You don’t need to gather up and achieve some new level of faith, because the power of faith is not found in you. And that’s key. Throw out all those ideas that we’ve given each other about amounts of faith. Faith is not measured in liters or pounds. The only thing that matters is the object of your faith, not the size of it. If the object of your faith is Jesus, then you’ll see God working powerfully from the moment you trust in him until you’re in eternity with him. I love Pastor Tim Keller’s illustration on this point in his landmark book, The Reason for God. If you do not own a copy of The Reason for God, skip a meal and use the money to buy a copy of The Reason for God. It is just that important. But one of the great quotes of that book is this: it is not the strength of your faith, but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. Okay, so let’s say instead of uprooting that mulberry tree, we’re climbing it, right? And you see, you’re moving your way up and you’re getting near the top and you see a branch near the top, and you’re going to pull on it and you’re going to pull yourself up to the top. If you reach out and grab that branch and you put your weight into it, what matters at that moment? What’s important is it your confidence in the branch or the strength of the branch itself? Well, of course, obviously the strength of the branch is all that matters, right? No matter what you think of the branch, the branch is what is doing all the work. So, so weak faith in Jesus, strong faith in Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you are saved not by the strength of your convictions. You’re saved by the strength of Christ. And that same dynamic of faith is for all the Christian life, right? Faith doesn’t change in nature. Okay? It’s the same all the way throughout our entire lives. There will be times when your confidence is going to fail you. There are going to be times when fear creeps in. When doubt starts to bubble up. We have a whole book of the Bible that is peppered with songs written to help us when we are in the valley of the shadow of death, right? When. When God seems distant, when our, when we fear that our faith is going to fail. A lot of you are experiencing that right now with what’s happening in our state. There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future. There’s fear for our neighbors, maybe even genuine concern for what this means for your family. You know, I have a couple of naturalized American citizens at home myself. I personally understand wondering the direction all this is going. There will also be times of overwhelming grief, especially when loved ones get sick and we experience great loss. Sometimes you find yourself searching for answers. Is this really God’s will for my life? Did I fail in some way to bring this about? You might. You might find yourself starting to doubt whether God really has his hand of blessing on you. And this might cause you to question whether your faith is genuine. Because God wouldn’t really do this to his kids, would he? And then there are times like the apostles here, where you’re faced with a mountain of spiritual growth that’s in front of you. Don’t you find that there are so many times when you feel like you’ve made so much progress in your growth in Christ, and about the time that you feel like you’ve achieved victory in in one area of your life, you’re suddenly met with all of your inadequacy in in another area. It’s like when I was hiking the Alps here a couple summers ago. We’d spend, our group would spend three hours going uphill at 12 degrees, which, if you’re not familiar, is terrible. It’s a terrible experience. Just constantly up, up, up. Your feet hurt. Your legs hurt. Your back gave up two hours ago. You’re questioning your life choices. Why did I think I could hike the Alps? I’m a flatlander. I don’t know what’s going on here. And eventually you get near the top and you start to see it crest over and you think, oh, good, this is it. It’s about to be all downhill from here. We’ve all drawn a mountain, right? It’s that right? It’s what we’re looking for. I want this, I’m looking for this at this point. And just as you come over the crest, somehow the path curves and it’s just more uphill. How is that possible? And job’s wife starts to creep in. Just curse God and die, right? No matter if it’s fear or grief or spiritual growth, the faith that you have in Jesus will be sufficient, because the power to overcome comes from the creator of the universe, The marvelous power of God comes from the power of Christ. Not the quantity of your faith. The power does not come from inside of you. It comes from Jesus. It comes from our creator God. Now your faith in Jesus over time will become stronger. It can be tested and strengthened. You’ll grow in spiritual maturity as you walk with Jesus. And a lot of that maturity is going to come as a result of you witnessing the power of Christ uprooting metaphorical trees. You’re going to see great things. You’ll pray and see God bring about uncommon results. You’re going to see lives transformed. You’ll watch someone act with otherworldly forgiveness that no one can conjure up on their own. And it is going to confirm your confidence, and it’s going to temper your faith like steel. But that’s all the powerful branch of Christ that is all coming from God. That is not you tapping into some big storehouse of your faith. Let me conclude this morning by rendering what I think is a final death blow to the totally erroneous, spiritually misleading idea that is the word of Faith movement. As I said earlier, this passage is often used in favor of that movement. So, they will say things like, you can your faith can move mountains, or in this case, trees. I was just talking to Pastor Tim this week, and he told me a story about a guy who lost his wife, and a pastor came to him and said, if you’d had more faith, your wife wouldn’t have died. Yeah, he said that. Look, if a pastor says or thinks something like that, that that guy should find another line of work. That guy doesn’t read very well. What? Unbiblical nonsense. Tell that to Job. Tell that to God the Father. Terrible pastors who twist God’s word lay huge burdens on the backs of God’s people, and sometimes they carry them for a lifetime. Some of you may be carrying burdens for your whole life, or have been hopefully up till this morning, where you finally lay them down because it wasn’t on you. You didn’t have the power. Prosperity gospel preachers say, if God’s you know God doesn’t bless you, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith. I want you to hear Jesus this morning. Jesus says the tiniest conceivable amount of faith in him will uproot trees if you tell them to. If you use their logic. Okay, again, let me put myself in the position of one of these prosperity people. If you use their logic to interpret what Jesus says here, if you if you name and claim the blessings of God and you don’t see God move in power to give you what you’ve asked for. If you compare that to what Jesus says here, it doesn’t mean you don’t have enough faith. It means you have no faith at all. Remember, the tiniest amount you would have nothing. According to their logic, it would mean your faith doesn’t exist because it’s smaller than the smallest thing. If they’re right about this passage, unless you can speak miracles into existence with just your words because of the extreme quantity of your faith, then you don’t actually have faith in Jesus at all. And there are genuine believers in Christ who love the Lord deeply, who are carrying around emotional burden of feeling their inadequate quantity of faith is somehow hurting their family or hurting themselves, or they’re kicking themselves over and over again because of something that happened in the past that they can’t now change. They feel like their situation would be so much better if they could just fill themselves with greater confidence. And if that’s you this morning, please let Jesus take that off your shoulders. You are not strong. You are not powerful. God does not and has never determined the length of your loved ones lives based on how much faith you were able to muster up. He doesn’t withhold his blessings to his children until they show themselves worthy, with their incredible displays of well-developed faith. On the contrary, God knows our end from our beginning. He knows the day we die before we’re even born. And he uses everything we experience along the way, both the blessings and the trials to forge us into the godly men and women that he means for us to be. That’s what God is doing. Take that burden off your shoulders. Would you pray with me?

You serve a vital role in the development of the faith of the people God has brought into your life.   Well church, we are off and running on what will be surely another exciting year with the Lord. Of course, I have no idea what exactly he has in store for us barring his return, but I do know that he is God. He is sovereign over everything, including the calendar. That he has a mission, and we are on it. What? What that means for us is varied. Lots of things. That means there are people to reach with the gospel. In our community, there are people who are struggling to find purpose. People are wrestling with anger and addiction. There’s relational breakdowns. Anxiety is on the rise. And through it all, the gospel provides the unchanging answer and the hope that fills every need. And we’re part of the team sent to declare that Jesus Christ is Lord to people who need to hear it. We’re there to declare that Jesus died for our sins, that he rose to secure our salvation and our eternity with him. That’s what we’ll be doing with our 2026. And I’ll let you in on something a little bit fun. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, you might have heard it through the grapevine, but our elders and lead team have been contemplating what to do for Easter. Last year, we maxed out three services in this room, and there’s only so many hours on an Easter Sunday morning. I’m not sure where to put another one. And we had even more people come out for Christmas this year. And so, for this year, we’re going to try something new. We’re going to have one big, massive service for all of the people who call Calvary home. And all of our guests. This Easter, we have rented out the 1750 seat auditorium at John Marshall. And we’re going to have one. Yeah, someone’s kind of freaking out down here about that. It’s going to be a great time. Really, really excited about it. I’m sure. I’m sure, even as I say that you’re like, well, did you think about. Yes, the answer is yes. We are thinking about everything that goes along with that. Um, and so there will be more details to come on that. But that’s something very exciting here in the next couple of months to look forward to. This morning, we are in Luke chapter 17. There’s a section at the beginning of Luke 17 where Jesus turns to his closest disciples and he goes deeper in some areas, he goes deeper with them on the need for accountability, for the strength of our faith, for the attitude of a servant. And it’s just ten verses before Luke gets back to talking about Jesus public teaching, the teaching he gives to everyone. But this section has such depth to it that we’re going to we’re going to look at it over the next three weeks. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ and your desire is to grow deeper and stronger and broaden your walk with Jesus, you’re going to find what you’re looking for in these verses. If that’s not you, if you take more of a sort of a casual, not so serious approach to Christianity, let me suggest to you that it’s possible you haven’t really listened to Jesus on this, which is to say, you haven’t heard Christ on Christianity, which seems like a pretty obvious oversight, doesn’t it? When you have an active living relationship with Christ, it is constantly developing. It’s not stagnant. It’s not a thing that stands still if you’re not developing an ever-deepening relationship with the Lord, informed by His word, guided by his spirit. That’s a good indication that to you that that you don’t understand what it means to be a Christian in the way that Christ himself described it. So let me show you. That’s what we’re going to look at today. This morning, Jesus is going to show us how much we need each other and how we’re supposed to interact with each other when we follow him. And for some of you, this topic in particular is, is going to be difficult because you don’t like having spiritual conversations. For some of you, that’s true. You just you don’t like you don’t like talking about spiritual things. You don’t like talking about your own spirituality. You don’t like talking about spiritual things with others. You don’t like confrontation. You’d rather just look the other way when it comes to things about sin. But as we’ll see today, Jesus says that we should confront sin head on and that we need each other because spiritual growth requires us to have others guide us and that we would then be guides for others. You serve a vital role in the development of the faith of the people that God has brought into your life. Do you know that you serve a vital role for them? You can open your Bibles to Luke chapter 17. I’ll also have it on the screen here this morning. Jesus is going to show us two ways that we interact with each other on issues of sin. First, he’s going to show us the wrong way that comes from the world and then the right way. That’s vital for our spiritual growth. So, let’s start with the wrong way, which includes one of the strongest warnings that we find in Scripture. And he said to his disciples, temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. You know, one of the aspects of the Bible that I, that gives me a lot of confidence that it is God’s word is how true to reality it is. Sometimes Christianity gets painted as sort of a, a state, a state that you achieve where people get to a place where sin is no longer an issue for them. I had a pastor friend of mine one time, a guy that I really respect, tell me that he’d done an inventory of his own heart and mind and that he’d found that there was no sin anymore there and no inclination to sin. Pride, maybe I don’t. I don’t know about him, but that’s not me. That’s not how it is for me. I face temptations to sin every day. I fail every day. By God’s grace, I see increasing victory over my sin. That through the Holy Spirit’s work in my heart and mind. But the temptations are there all the time. And here Jesus says, yeah, I know, I know that the temptations are there. Temptations are sure to come. It’s not a question of will they or won’t they. They are coming. They will be there, present in your life. Jesus doesn’t describe discipleship as some sort of a state of release from all sinful temptation. Discipleship in Christ is what helps us overcome, to battle through, to defeat sin with the help of our friends, as we’re going to see here in just a minute. But then Jesus goes in a direction that I wouldn’t have expected here. See, when he brings this up, I would expect that he would now spend some time describing how to overcome these inevitable temptations that are that are on the way. But instead, Jesus addresses the source of the temptation. He turns his attention to the person who tempts others to sin. Now, why would he do that? Well, it’s because of Jesus topic here. Jesus is not here addressing sin per se. He’s talking about our interactions with each other, and one of the ways that we can interact with each other as people is in a devastating, destructive, soul crushing way by being a tempter of the other person. Woe to the one through whom they come. So, what Jesus is picturing here is a person who either knowingly or carelessly misleads a person to violate God’s commands to sin against him. I say, knowingly or carelessly, because it could be either one of those. You could know you’re trying to corrupt a person and get them to choose to sin. Or you could just not care enough about God’s Word and mislead them in the same direction. Either way, the tempter is the cause. Do you see that there in verse two? The cause? There’s a source to every temptation. And if and if the source is another person, that tempter, Jesus says, is in a very dangerous place spiritually. He says it would be better, better for a person to die at the bottom of the sea with a millstone tied around their neck, than to be the cause of someone else’s sin. Now, our immediate reaction to that from our sort of limited human perspective is no, it’s not. No, it’s not. That’s not better. How could that possibly be better? This sounds like hyperbole. And Jesus does often use hyperbolic language. Sort of over-the-top illustrations to make a point. But is that what he’s doing here? I think he’s using the same kind of gripping language that Jesus usually uses. But this is different because here he’s talking about death and eternal destiny. Jesus is saying it would be better for a person’s life to end than to face the consequences of being a person who misleads others into sin. I believe Jesus is talking here about degrees of punishment in hell. He’s saying you’d be better off dead immediately than to add tempter to your list of crimes against God. That’s the sense in which it would be better. That’s how serious this is. It’s better to face God’s condemnation with just your own sin than to stand before God, having enticed others to sin. The reason that temptation or tempting others to sin is, is such an egregious affront to God is that it’s false discipleship. It’s really what it is. Temptation is false discipleship. It is literally pulling people away from the truth and sending them on a path of destruction. In John chapter 14, Jesus describes making room in heaven for his faithful disciples who are part of God’s family. He says that that that he is the way and the truth and the life, and that to be part of God’s eternal family and to be in this, this room that he’s preparing for them, they have to trust and they have to follow his way, the way that he has made. The temptation is an offer of a different path. Temptation is sending someone down a different road. When we give into temptation and we sin against God, we are in essence saying that we want to follow a different path that leads somewhere other than Jesus. Now, the wonderful news of the gospel is that Jesus has walked that path faithfully and perfectly for us. We’re not trusting in our own ability to stay faithful. We’re saved because Christ was perfectly faithful and we are in Christ. But our walk with Christ now, now that we have it, is through a world of temptation. Our spirit is now willing. It wasn’t before. We weren’t willing to be faithful to the Lord before our spirit, when we are made alive in Christ, is now willing to follow Jesus. But our flesh is weak, and when we fail, we turn and we repent, and we rejoice in that salvation. We remember our salvation, and we keep our eyes on Jesus, and we continue to grow to be like him. That’s the Christian life over and over again. That’s the Christian life. But a tempter is one who stands at the trailhead of that other path and says, well, why don’t you come down this way? Why don’t you? Why don’t you see what’s down this way? And so, he tries to steal people from Jesus and lead them with lies down a path that ends in their destruction. That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? That’s what sin is. It’s a pathway to destruction. The only reason that sounds dramatic to us is that we often don’t think biblically about sin. We treat it too lightly. I want you to listen to this. This is from the first chapter of the Book of Proverbs. My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, come with us, let us lie in wait for blood. Let us ambush the innocent without reason like Sheol. Let us swallow them alive and whole, like those who go down to the pit. We shall find all precious goods. We shall fill our houses with plunder. Throw in your lot among us. We will all have one purse. My son, Do not walk in the way with them. Hold back your foot from their paths, for their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. For in vain is a net spread in the sight of any bird. But these men lie in wait for their own blood. They set an ambush for their own lives. Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain. It takes away the life of its possessors. That’s the way the Bible describes sin and the dangers of sin and the direction of sin. Do you see how much weightier that is than we often think sin is? These men, these tempters, lie in wait for their own blood. They think they’re going to give them something good, but it’s actually a trap that leads to their own death. And when we listen to temptation and we choose a sinful path, we are stepping into that trap. And when we become a tempter, we lay out that trap for other people. So, who are these Tempters? Who are they? Well, Jesus here does not specifically say. And that’s on purpose. The effect of Jesus not identifying the specific threat is that now these tempters are everywhere. They’re everywhere. Some are obvious. There are people outside the church that don’t profess Christ. They may even be open mockers of Christianity. They’re easy to spot and they could be corporate or they could be personal. Corporate Tempters are organizations that produce products designed to get you to sin. So, think about things like movie studios, pornographers, influencers, book publishers. Some media are good, okay. Some groups are corporations are producing good materials. Others produce things that make money by enticing our sinful impulses. They know how to do that, so they make money off of it. We just heard an ancient proverbial wisdom from a tempters reason, right? Listen to the way they reason. Let us ambush the innocent. Let us ambush the innocent. There are lots of people in our world trying to ambush the innocent. Parents, look at your kids’ books really carefully, okay? Even the little ones. Little children’s books. Look at them carefully. Because it’s all the way down to children’s books. The vast majority of what is produced in media is not designed to move you toward Christ. It’s intended to get you to move away from him for the financial benefit of other people. Under this sort of heading of corporate tempters, I might also put false teachers, so-called pastors or Christian influencers or whoever who build up a following but are actually misleading Christians away from the gospel. You need to be. We all do. We need to be very careful about who we allow to tell us about God. We need to be really careful. I’ve seen far too many believers fooled into listening to false teaching, simply because the guy on YouTube has a big following, or is easy to listen to, or says the name Jesus. You know, not everybody who says the name Jesus is teaching you about Jesus. And I say that as a guy on YouTube talking about Jesus, okay. Anybody can say what they want as much as they want to. Everybody in the world think about how little accountability there is to that. Everybody can do that. But I don’t actually think that the greatest threats to our discipleship are corporate. I think the bigger danger is the personal friends, family, people at work, people at school. These people are far more convincing when they mislead us because they can make an argument, an ongoing argument. People we know and we spend time with, they can personally persuade us. They know our weaknesses better than any algorithm. They can offer personalized advice that sounds wise, but is actually biblically foolish, and they can lead us down the wrong path and make it sound like it’s in our best interest. They can join with our peers, and they can pressure us in a direction that they want us to go. And I know peer pressure is a big deal among young people, but adults can fall for it as well. And Undiscerning Christians step into the trap of temptation from people we know all the time. Why do we do that? Well, sometimes it’s because we don’t want to disappoint those people, right? We care what they think of us. We want to keep those friends. We want to appease those family members. That’s one reason sometimes it’s because we have a very false sense of God’s grace. We have such a low view of God’s lordship in our lives that we treat his grace like it’s ours to control, like it’s ours to use whenever we need it. For Christmas, my mom bought our family one of these fire blankets. Have you seen these? Fire. It’s a blanket if you have a fire in your kitchen. Instead of grabbing the fire extinguisher, you grab this blanket and you throw it over and you smother it. And as soon as we unwrapped it, my daughter immediately says, let’s try it out. I was so proud in that moment. I was like, ah, the timing, the quick wit. Mhm. My work is done. But think about that for a moment, okay. I want you to think about that, that blanket for just a moment. Here we have this grace from God that covers over the fires of our sin. When we fail, God’s grace is there. Christ saves us from our failure and our weakness because we are safely under his protective grace. In a sense, whenever we sin. But then we repent and we rest in the grace of Christ. It’s like we’re throwing a gospel blanket over our sin. But to choose to openly, defiantly sin against God because we presume on his grace that it will cover it like is like intentionally setting a fire in your kitchen because you have the blanket. There are people in church today who treat God’s grace just like that. That’s how they see it and treat it, and they entice other people to do the same. Church, we need to be on our guard because ungodly tempters lurk. They come from all angles. They can be. They can be as far away as Hollywood, and they can be as close as your spouse. And their goal is to get your eyes off of Jesus and onto another path that is leading away from him that ends in your destruction. So, what do we do? What influence should we have? What guidance do we need? Well, Jesus explains. Pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in the day and turns to you seven times, saying, I repent, you must forgive him. You know, we might think that the best way to avoid tempters is to spend less time listening to people. But Jesus says that what we actually need is more interaction with the body of Christ. And here’s where I, as I mentioned earlier, the interaction is not always comfortable because Jesus says that the way to make sure that we’re kept safely on the path of discipleship is to watch after ourselves and each other carefully. We need each other, and that means speaking up when we see our fellow Christian engaging in some sinful behavior. The word brother here is just a collective term for any fellow Christian, because Jesus command to pay attention here, I believe what he’s commanding is includes saying something even when someone is moving in the direction of temptation. In the Proverbs, the wise father tells his son not even to go down the street where temptation is calling. I’ve had pastors and elders in my life point out the potential of temptation to me, and I really appreciate that there would be people close enough to me and care enough about me to want to see potential dangers down the road for me. It might feel difficult, but this is a very loving, intentional process for helping each other avoid the trap of sin. I mean, look at the process. It begins with rebuke if your brother sins, rebuke him. Rebuke is pointing out a sin and showing disapproval. Now, this is not just yelling. Okay, I know that when we think of rebuke, we get it confused sometimes with being angry with people. Rebuke can be angry, but it doesn’t have to be. Rebuke is pointing out sin and disapproving of it. And since God is the one who defines sin, it requires showing how the sin is a violation of God’s Word, not just our personal preferences. Okay, godly rebuke requires godly parameters and commands. If I just yell at someone because they didn’t do what I wanted them to do, I haven’t biblically rebuked them at all. In fact, there’s a good chance that my anger in that situation also requires rebuke. Ironically, when we rebuke biblically, we are guiding them back to the truth of God’s Word so that they continue to pursue Christ. And this is a vital part of the operation of the church community. And it is necessary as a discipline so that we will stay faithful to Christ. So, let me ask you, church, why don’t we do it? Why don’t we do this more? I can think of dozens of reasons why we don’t do this, why we don’t rebuke like we should, but I. I don’t have time for dozens. So let me just give you a few big ones. How about, we don’t point out the sins of others and help guide them to God’s Word? Because we don’t know God’s Word well enough to do it accurately. Or how about we’re afraid they’ll be mad at us, and we don’t like it when people are mad at us. Or how about we’d rather just not get involved because it’s time consuming? Or how about we’re afraid someone will then point out our sin, and we’d rather not deal with it because we’ll be embarrassed. We’ll feel like a hypocrite. Or how about we’re part of the reason the person chose to sin in the first place is to do this would implicate ourselves as well. Or how about we actually reap some of the benefits of their sin, and we don’t want to lose what we have. Or how about we just don’t care? Now we say we care because we know that’s the right thing to say, because we’re Christians, but we don’t. When it comes to actually doing the hard things that Jesus tells us to do. We’re just not that interested. I could go on all of these excuses for failing to lovingly rebuke our fellow believers in God in a God honoring way is basically, you’re basically saying to them, I’d rather you go down the path of your own destruction than, say a hard thing to you. Think about that church. That’s what we’re called to be for each other. We’re called to be this for each other. Discipleship is a group project. You and I need godly rebuke because the deceitfulness of our hearts is there. We can convince ourselves of a lot of things that are not true. When I when I tell myself, oh well, it’s just a you know, what’s the harm in a little sin? It’s not hurting anyone. That’s not true. That’s not true. Sin is war against God. It damages my heart and my mind. It pulls me away from Jesus and it affects the people around me. There’s no such thing as a little sin. I need an outside voice that shares the truth and the real consequences of my sin. I need a reality check that brings my mind and my heart back into alignment. And I can’t do that myself because I can’t see myself with outside perspective. We need rebuke for the same reason we don’t do our own surgery, right? We don’t do our own surgery. You do your own surgery on yourself? I hope not. Why don’t we do that? Because I don’t know what the surgeon knows. And I can’t see what the surgeon sees. Knowledge and perspective that is embedded in a loving rebuke is a gift. And it’s a gift that we’re missing out on when we refuse to give it to each other. I left out one reason that we don’t rebuke like we should. It’s a big one. I left it out because it’s addressed in the second step of the process. You see, the second step is to forgive the person who wrongs us with his sin when he repents. So sometimes the rebuke we give is for a sin that wronged us personally. Now everything that is involved with the process of restoration is not listed here by Jesus. For example, in the sermon on the Mount, Jesus includes the step of assessing yourself to see where you went wrong first before rebuking. But here Jesus focuses just on the first step and the final step in in the sin you’re rebuking. If that sin is against you and the person apologizes for it, then forgiveness is a requirement. It’s a requirement. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not just the best way to live. It’s not contingent on whether you feel like it. It is a command from Jesus. If you rebuke a person for a sin against you, you must forgive them when they repent. And of course, the reason we don’t do this, the reason we don’t rebuke, is because we don’t want to forgive. We want to hang on to that bitterness. That’s what we would rather be bitter than call out the sin. But that’s what we’re called to be church. We have to do this. And how often must we grant this forgiveness when they repent? Every single time. It’s the third step of the process. Like shampoo, lather, rinse, repeat. Right. You just get. You just keep going. Notice that’s not a total of seven times. Okay. You’re thinking well okay, I asked seven times. Now we’re on number eight. Now I don’t have to do it. It’s not a total of seven times. It’s seven times in the day. I don’t think I even talked to anybody long enough to go through seven cycles of forgiveness and repentance in a day, and that can’t happen. And that’s the point. It’s an excessive way of saying every time, every time you may feel like your patience is running out with someone, but the command to forgive them does not run out. And the reason this endless cycle of rebuke and forgiveness is so important is that it is the opposite of what happens with temptation. Okay, the tempter takes you down a wrong path away from Christ. Rebuke addresses the lies of the sin and forgiveness removes the bitterness of sin so that we stay firmly on the path of discipleship. You see how they work in opposite ways. In other words, it’s the application of the gospel that’s really what we’re doing here. We’re applying the gospel. Think about what Christ did to address our sin. He called our sin what it is. He didn’t shy away from it. He took the punishment for that sin in himself on the cross. And then he forgives and restores the relationship with God for those who repent. What we’re doing is exactly the same. We’re acting out the gospel. The only difference is that we don’t die for the sins ourselves. What we do is we point to Jesus. We remember what he’s done. And as we do this over and over again, we help each other grow in Christ. This is this is part of the process of growing in Christ, stepping forward in our relationship with him. We are the opposite of tempters for each other. We’re restorers. We’re disciple makers. I want to challenge you this morning, especially if your inclination is to hide your own sin and to shy away from your duty to rebuke and restore other people. You’re not avoiding any pain by doing that. You’re not avoiding anything, really. You’re actually putting yourself and others in a very dangerous spot where you’re more susceptible to temptation. There’s a great description in Genesis chapter four on the strategy of sin. God is speaking to Cain, who just offered an inferior sacrifice to that of his brother Abel. And Cain is angry. He’s got sort of murderous thoughts beginning to swirl in his mind. And the Lord says to him, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Its desire is to crush and destroy us. Church. That’s what sin wants to do. It wants to crush us. Its desires to take over our hearts, to rule over us. But God has given us His Holy Spirit. He has united his believers together as one body, the church, and he has given us the instruction to look out for each other. And that includes uncomfortable conversations. And sometimes it includes confrontations, and sometimes it even includes intercessions from leaders when our hearts are especially misled. But it’s all good. It is all for our good that we would grow up in godliness and be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Our faith needs to be strengthened and bolstered through this. So let me encourage you. If you’re not in a small group where you are getting to know fellow believers, where they can know you and you’re investing in each other’s lives so that you can be real with one another. You need to get into one of those. Pastor Brian would be thrilled to hear from you. If you reach out to him, he’ll get you involved in a group. And if you’re in a group, you’ve been going there for a long time. But most of the time when you’re in your group, which you which you sort of do is you sort of just have these sort of little Bible chats and sort of talk about Scripture at arm’s length, and then you pray for people, but you never really get to the heart of your struggles. You never really open up. You never really talk about what’s really going on in your life and where you need to improve. I encourage you to go deeper this year. Groups go deeper. Be vulnerable. Be willing to receive the guidance of other people, and have the courage to provide that guidance, to say hard things in loving ways so that we truly address sin and we get back to righteousness and then forgive each other every single time. Lather. Rinse, repeat. Let’s pray.

Now that we have a new life in Christ, what does living that out look like following His example? Good morning, Calvary. My name is Josh Laack, and I have the honor to serve as one of the elders on your elder board team. I like to make this announcement whenever I can. I’m always open for, as Brian, pastor Brian would say, questions, comments, or wisecracks. So, if you see me in the hall or in the gym, or if you want to send me a note, I’m always happy to connect with you and chat about the church or about faith or any of those things. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had three different messages. Pastor Kyle preached the last message of the Advent series, then preached for services on Christmas Eve. And then, Jason, another member of our elder team, preached the last message of the year on the 28th and first, Kyle talked about the righteousness of Christ and how that becomes ours. Because of God’s plan and our need, in turn, we become a new creation in Christ. Then on Christmas Eve, the Christmas message of how and why Jesus came and how we can accept him went deeper into how we gain this new life in Christ. Last Sunday, Jason gave us a message on peace with God and hope for the future, because we are now reconciled with God through Christ. And that all leads us to today. In this first message of the New Year and thinking in this new year about this new life that we have in Christ, how should being reconciled to God through Jesus affect us? How should we commit to living in Christ? And this seemed very appropriate for me to talk about today, because I am terrible at committing to new ways to live. Um, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore, and I think I’ve probably mentioned that here before, but I don’t make them because I’ve never had one survive past January. The problem isn’t just with New Year’s resolutions. I have this bad habit of getting excited about new things and starting them and not finishing them. I watch hours of YouTube videos on how to do a new thing, and I will read books and articles and just about everything I can find. And I will be so excited and I will burn out very quickly in the project. To my shame, I have a pile of things all spread out throughout my basement and shop, some of which I moved from my last house into this new house and they still sit there. The first time I brought Kate, my wife, to my house, I told her I had remodeled the whole thing and so she drove to this house expecting to be impressed. And pulled up to a home that had siding missing and falling off all over the place because I had done an addition and finished most of the inside so I could live in it and hadn’t gotten around to doing the rest of the siding. Sometime later she begged me and I did go back and do the rest of the siding, but since she knew this about me, we started a new project together in which I told her I needed to build a house, and she told me no. Um, she did come around, but she had some stipulations. And one of those was very wise, in which she said, there will be no projects left in the main part of the house, or we will not move in. Now, I share all that at the beginning here, thinking of this new life in Christ, because the interesting thing about that project is that I learned that I could do it. I learned even with a complicated project and a long time window. It took me 18 months to build this house. I completed it and actually mostly on schedule. So what was different about this project than all of the ones that still sit in my basement? Two things come to mind. One, I was strongly invested in the outcome of living in my future home. And two, I was motivated by the example of and the accountability to my wife Kate. And in Christ, we have a very similar thing. We have a new life that we are meant to live, and we live that way. Following the example of Christ and accountability to Christ in that life as our Savior. My point for us today is this the new life in Christ is not just a momentary spiritual change, but a new life lived out both now and for the future. The new life in Christ does begin with a momentary spiritual change, which is the gift of God given to us by faith. But life is not just the moment it begins. Life is something that is lived. In other words, we have a new life and all that that entails in Christ. And then we can’t continue to live as if we were still part of the old life. Today we’re going to explore why we should want to live a new life in Christ, how we actually do that. And we’re going to look at the example of that life lived out by Christ himself. And we’re going to find those today in our passage from Philippians two starting in verse one. So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy. Now the context of chapter one is Paul speaking of how the church at Philippi should live, whether Paul is there to see them or not. And Paul’s hope is that the church will stand firm in the spirit, that they will live out the gospel, the good news that they have both heard and received in Jesus. The readers of the letter Paul identifies as the saints at Philippi. Paul recognizes these men and women as people who have begun this new life in Christ that they have received from Christ. This momentary spiritual change. And now he’s trying to tell them to teach them how they live it out. And he’s asking a rhetorical question here, phrased this way, to encourage the church to consider the reality of this new life that they’re in, the experience that they have already begun to receive and to and to have in this new life, so that they will recognize that the call that follows the instruction that follows is meant for them because they have received this experience. They know that the teaching is also for them, and that applies for all of us as we think about our new life in Christ, and we think about what we have experienced, the changes that have begun in our life because of our relationship with Jesus, then we can know that this teaching that’s about to follow is also for us to live as well. And Paul lays this experience out here, I think, in the perfect way. He lays it out in the order in which we experience it. As we make the change from our old life to the new life in Christ. And while we are in the flesh before we know Jesus, our life is nothing but discouragement as we discover time and time again that the things of the flesh, things of the earth, they cannot satisfy. Food is good, but we’re hungry again very quickly. At least I am. Wealth. Happiness, pleasure. All of it is fleeting. The older we get, the more we recognize how fleeting those things really are. When we experience life in the flesh and in the world, we inevitably will be discouraged. Eventually, we discover the same thing that Solomon discovered as he explored all of the earthly things he could and came to a conclusion. And Solomon tried it all. He tried more wives than any person should ever possibly consider. He tried all the food and wealth and power and privilege and all of it. And here’s what he said in Ecclesiastes one verse 14, I have seen everything that is done under the sun. It’s a lot of things. And behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. Solomon found the truth that there is no lasting value in the things and the experiences of the earth. It quickly fades away like a wind that gusts and then is gone. All that you have earned. The beauty of youth. The storehouses full of grain. The wisdom you have gained. It all wastes away. Becomes irrelevant or dies with you. Now imagine into the midst of this search for value in anything someone comes and says, I can offer you something that will last for this life and for the life to come, for an eternity to follow. That is the encouragement, the hope that we find when we first learn about Jesus and about what he can offer. The hope we find when we know that there is a good God who cares about us and wants something better for us, a God who has promises that will last for eternity. And the first light of hope. Encouragement shines in our lives Now knowing that there is a way to have a life of meaning and that there are promises available is encouraging. But encouragement is not enough. We must experience the result of the love that God puts into our lives. And Jason shared with us last week from Romans five verse eight, that God’s love is displayed for us in that Christ died while we were still sinners. Not just that he died, that he died specifically for us. When we accept Jesus as the only way to have a life of meaning, Paul is suggesting that the experience is this experience of comfort from love. Love that is poured out freely toward us. And this is the next step of walking into this new life in Christ. Jesus expressed this self-sacrificial love when he went to the cross. We experience it when we enter into a real and personal relationship with him by believing what he has shared and the good news that we can know and have a life in him. Accepting this good news means that we have moved from death to life. We don’t just have encouragement now, we actually have life. We were dead in our sins before Christ, destined only for destruction. But now, in the love of God, we have become heirs with Christ of eternal life. But we still must live in this world, this life, for now. So God does not abandon us to try to live this new life in our own strength. Rather, we are provided with a helper, the Holy Spirit. And Paul says here that the next thing we experience, the next thing that happens after we receive the love of Christ, is we receive participation in the spirit, the helper who can help us to live out this life as we are meant to. And the final thing we experience now that we have the Holy Spirit in us, guiding us as we begin to have a mindset shift away from ourselves and toward affection and sympathy for other people. The point of Paul sharing all this is that if you have experienced these things in this order, in your own life, by receiving the free gift of God, accepting Jesus and your need for him, then you have taken the step to begin a new life in Christ. Now notice I said, step to begin. Paul is giving this list as a rhetorical question in this way because it is a beginning, not an end. Now he wants all of those who have experienced this life in Christ to respond to it, to live in it. And he says, complete my joy, then by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. And here we see the shift from why to how. And what we find is that the response matches the new life that we have been given. Why we should want to live this way comes directly from what we have received from Jesus. And what we do to begin living it out is to take what we have received, and to turn it back around and give it out. We didn’t deserve this new life. We didn’t earn it. We can’t possibly afford to pay it back, yet we receive it from Christ in faith for free and the very things that we have received, that is what we should use to live out this new life. The same love we have received from Christ. It is with that same kind of self-sacrificial love that we then should love God and love others. The mind of Christ, with which he chose to sacrifice himself in this way for us, is the same way that we should think about how to live this new life in him. This mindset, this way of life. And it’s not just an individual thing. This is a corporate thing. This is how the church is meant to live out this life together. The whole body of Christ, all of us meant to live in this love for each other and for God. Now, this same mind or one mind idea here does not mean exact sameness. Rather, it carries the idea of different people with different gifts and different abilities and different personalities, unique individuals. And yet all of us coming together with one focus, one purpose, one desire. We know the body of Christ is meant to be made up of different people. In fact, the Holy Spirit that we. Paul says we have participation in gifts us all differently as he sees fit, and yet we are all to use those different gifts, our different personalities, our uniqueness together to build up the church and to invite others into it. This is the goal for living out the new life while we are still here on earth. That we would receive and then spread the love, hope and reconciliation that we have in Christ. The best analogy that I know of here is one that the Bible uses frequently to think about our relationship with God and how we live it. And that analogy is marriage. My wife, Kate and I have been married for ten wonderful years now, and I still remember the excitement, the initial joy of finding somebody who I thought I might want to spend this life with, and who might want to spend this life with me. I remember long nights of conversation, getting to know one another and planning a life together. But as good as that talk was, as those planning moments were, our marriage would not be where it is today. If all we had done was talk and plan. We had to choose to actively live as a married couple to make good on the plans that we had made to live for each other. Before I was married, I made all of the decisions about my life as a bachelor for myself and in my own strength. I decided where to spend money, how to save it, what color siding not to put on my house. Now Kate and I together have to agree. We have to work together toward a shared goal, a shared purpose of building a family that is centered on Christ. We decide together the things that matter. Two different people with different gifts, building one life, sharing in similar goals and love and purpose. And in much the same way, becoming a Christian is not just a momentary agreement. It’s not talk and planning. It is being part of Christ and of His church and of what he is doing, of using our gifts and our individuality for a shared purpose. But what exactly does that mean? How do we practically live this out as believers? All this talk of same mind, one mind and mind of Christ tells us that this will involve a mindset shift. This is not how we naturally think. This is not how we naturally are as human beings. If we’re honest with ourselves, our innate desire as humans is a selfish one. How do I get ahead? How do I have pleasure and success and power and all that? The mind of the flesh is all about me. A marriage cannot survive this mindset and neither can the church. Both must be other focused, not self motivated. And so Paul says, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. The whole economy of the new life is different than the old. Before knowing Jesus, our best hope at gaining anything of value for ourselves was to amass wealth and power and privilege without him, without hope for a future life in him. It actually makes total sense to be self-serving, to seek after the things that we can gain for ourselves in this life. Because if Jesus was not raised from the dead, Paul says in another place, if we do not have new life in him, then we as Christians are most to be pitied. If we do not have new life in him, then these earthly pleasures, the things we can get here, are the best that we can possibly hope for, and we should spend our time seeking after them. Van Halen singer David Lee Roth is quoted saying, money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it. If all we have to look forward to are the things of this earth, then seeking after those things makes sense. But if we have hope for a life of great value beyond this life, if we have hope at something that is infinitely bigger than any earthly pleasure or treasure that we can gain, then a life focused on those things would be foolish. And Paul points to the experience of the new life in Christ as evidence for us that we do have this new identity, this new reality, to show us that living out this life makes sense because there is already beginning in us, through Christ, an experience to show us that it’s real. To show us that we have hope and reconciliation with God. And so we can know through experience that God’s promises are real and we can know personally because of the encouragement, love, participation in the Holy Spirit and the changes that are happening in our own spirit as we begin to live out this life for others. So how does God’s economy compare? How is the mindset of Christ different from that of the world to God and to those who follow him? People have more value than stuff, and God rewards those who treat his valuables with the respect and honor that they deserve. Each of us should be seeking to live lives that are outward facing, not selfish. In fact, Paul says nothing. Do nothing from selfish ambition. This doesn’t mean we don’t earn money or even enjoy the blessings that God has given us, but it does mean that our motivation has to change. I don’t pile up money so that I can be rich. Kate and I together save wisely so that we can care for each other so that we can be generous when the opportunity arises, so that we don’t become a burden for other people in our old age, so that we can leave a legacy behind for the next generation. All of those interests are ultimately motivated by a concern for others rather than a concern for myself. All of them are decisions not that I made as a person by myself for myself, but decisions made together with Kate, both for our good and for the good of others. And that’s why Paul says, let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. This makes it clear we do still have our own interests, and it’s not wrong to plan wisely for your family and for and for yourself in how you can care best for that family. Saying all earthly things are evil would fall into the Gnostic heresy that teaches that all possessions, all earthly things, the body of flesh, all of it is evil, and that the only way to get back to God, to the divine, is some secret knowledge that lets you avoid every earthly thing. That’s not what Paul is advocating here. Paul is advocating for proper focus on earthly things and heavenly things. He’s advocating for proper order, right balance between three things caring for others, enjoying what God has given, and planning for the future. So it’s fine to enjoy a good meal, but if you eat fancy meal after fancy meal while Lazarus starves at your gate, your focus is wrong. If you work all the time so that you can have a fancy house and a big boat you can’t afford, and you don’t spend any time with your family because all of your time is focused on getting toys that you can play with. Your focus is wrong. If, however, you are spending as much time as you possibly can so that your family has a roof over their head and food to eat. Your focus is not on yourself, on others. Even if you have enough money to buy a nicer house and to have that boat, but you’re using them to host others and to spend time with your family, that is a blessing to you and to them, and you’re using that to bring neighbors over and share the good news with them as you take them out for a boat ride. That focus is on enjoying the resources God has given you, but using them for his kingdom and for his purpose. That’s outward other focus. If you work hard, then you should receive some of the benefit of that. But a new life in Christ is not an inward focus, but an outward focus. So in all of this, Paul is looking at income and outgo in our lives and asking a question we should all ask ourselves. Thinking of what I have received in Christ in this new life, does my love and care for others flow out of what I have received, or does it flow out of my own worldly desires and selfishness? That is the mindset of Christ and He is the who the example that we should be seeking to follow. Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus. That’s the mindset shift, and it is the mindset that Jesus himself best displayed for us. If he had chosen to be selfish instead of selfless, we would have no encouragement, no love, no sharing in the spirit, and no new life at all. Instead, he has given us all that he had as the ultimate example of how God’s economy is lived out. He gave us this new life, a mindset shift, the spirit and all that we need in order to be able to live this new life. And he did all of that while living it himself as the firstborn Son of God. And he did it completely for us because he didn’t need to do it for himself. He had nothing to gain. Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. Jesus already had ultimate riches. He had everything he needed in the perfect, loving embrace of the Trinity. He had love and power and eternal life. All of it was already his. And if he had focused only on what he had on keeping that for himself, our story would be very different. It would have ended before it even began. Instead of grasping at this power and position that Jesus was in, he considered the whole world as more important than himself. He didn’t grasp, but emptied himself. Verse seven by taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men. Jesus went from full authority and power to the weakest human, a baby. I think even here some people imagine this powerful baby, this powerful Christ child. And I’ve seen paintings from the Renaissance that are this baby sitting up straight in a golden halo around his head, and he’s probably already talking at one month age. There’s a Christmas song about no crying he makes. In reality, he had to have his butt wiped and he cried like every other baby when he was hungry, when he wanted to be held, when he was scared. Jesus went from ultimate power in the universe to someone who could do nothing but rely on Mary and Joseph for everything that he needed in that moment, Jesus completely emptied himself. And if that were not enough, he lived his whole time on earth through suffering and struggle and ended his time dying, not just in any way, but in one of the most humiliating ways possible to the Jews, a way that was considered a curse. Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Not death for something he deserved. Jesus died a humiliating death while innocent so that the guilty could live. The humility of leaving behind heaven and becoming a man was only the beginning of his sacrifice. He both lived and died in a way that no human being could or would. We heard this read last week’s message Romans five seven about how we would live in the same position, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. At most our human nature would allow us to die for someone we loved or die for somebody we thought was good. Yet the crowd around Jesus cried out, crucify him! And Jesus died for that same crowd. While we will never be as good as Christ, he set for us an example of humility and of seeking to live in that humility for God’s purposes in our lives. And that’s God’s desire for all who follow him, all who have experienced his love and have relationship with him. And it is this kind of humility that will ultimately receive the greatest reward in God’s economy. Jesus made the sacrifice, emptied himself of glory, and went humbly to the cross and then to the grave. But the father did not leave him there. The father raised Jesus and gave him even greater rewards for his humility. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Jesus emptied himself of heavenly glory that he shared with the father, lowered himself lower than any other human before him, and then was rewarded with the full return of the heavenly glory. And on top of that glory that he always shared with the father, he was rewarded with all earthly glory, power, and position. All of this new glory that Jesus receives, he didn’t do it even for himself. But even this he did ultimately to increase the glory of God the Father. I love the picture that Paul paints here of the expanse of the glory that Jesus receives. You have all the knees on earth, or basically everyone who’s still alive, and then you have all the knees in heaven and under the earth. I don’t know for sure, but I read this as those who are waiting with God and those who are waiting for judgment. In any case, Paul is describing a reality in which it seems that all the knees and tongues that ever existed all will bow before Jesus and recognize him. Some of them probably very begrudgingly, but they will all give him the glory he is due in living this out. Jesus shows us that living God’s way in his purpose and in humility does not end in a bad outcome, even if it can be hard along the way. Rather, living God’s way results in more joy, in more glorious life, not just now, but for eternity. Hebrews 12 two tells us that for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross. Jesus sacrificed himself for a greater purpose, and that purpose was seeing all of those who would follow after him and who would have life in him. We know it can’t have been for selfish purposes, because Jesus already had everything he ever could have wanted. So this joy for Jesus was about us, not himself. This is the same joy that Paul was talking about all the way back in verse two, where he said, complete my joy by having this mind. Because the Philippians, who Paul shared Christ with, were living this way. Paul had joy in sharing in their humility and in their reward. Living God’s way brings joy not only to the person living that way, but to those who have helped them to grow and ultimately joy to God himself. The whole Christian life is a life style and focus change, not a one time decision. So the new life in Christ is not just a momentary spiritual change. It’s a new life, lived out both now and for the future. Therefore, because of that, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now not only in my presence, but much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Because it is a new life that is meant to be lived out. And it is a life worth living out both now and for the future. Then do it not just because Paul or someone is watching. Do it because it is the right response for what you have received in Christ. Do it because of your future hope, and do it because it is what your God desires of you. So we already have this new salvation, this participation in the spirit, this showering of the love of Christ in us, one that we cannot earn find on our own, but we can receive it. And now we can live it out to the best of our ability. And look at this. Even in this, it cannot be a way for us to earn or repay what God has done. It is acceptance of what God is doing because it is God who is doing it in us. For it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. All of it ultimately not for our glory, but for God’s glory. God makes a way through. His son, gives us the spirit to guide us, showers us in his love, explains how he wants us to live, and then helps us to live that way, preparing even the good works that we do for us in advance, giving us the mind of Christ and working in us to be able to live this way for us, then what is left? The example and the experience of Jesus in our lives should give us both the drive to want to, and the accountability needed for us to just say yes to what God is doing in our lives. To step into this new life. So I would ask you to examine yourselves this morning. What is your motivation for how you choose to live? Not just today, but every day? Is your focus on God, family and others, or is it still on yourself, on what you can gain on your earthly treasures? New life in Christ begins with saying yes to the grace that God offers in Christ, but it continues with waking up each day and choosing to live in that grace for his glory and for others good. Please join me in prayer.

Peace and hope are found in Christ alone, who has reconciled us to God. Good morning, Calvary. It’s so good to be with you here. Thanks for braving the snow. I’m Jason O’Grady, I’m one of the elders here, and I also am privileged to be on the preaching team. I’m so grateful that I’m able to be with you here on the December 28th, just a few days after Christmas. Hopefully you all had a blessed time. I know that maybe you spent some time with family. With friends. And as you could probably hear, I got a Christmas present I wasn’t expecting, this viral thing. I didn’t want to unwrap it, but it unwrapped itself, shared with me by my family. So hopefully you’ll give me a little grace today as I power through. I know that sometimes these holidays can also be difficult for folks. And so, I wanted to acknowledge that maybe you’re missing a loved one that’s been gone on to be with the Lord, or maybe there’s some broken relationships that haven’t been mended yet, or you’re dealing with health issues yourself. And these times can also be difficult for you. But I’m hoping that today, as we read God’s Word together, that you would be able to be comforted and find peace with Jesus. How many of you have a nativity scene at your house? Okay, good. So this was closer to the 8:00 service. So about half of you have a nativity scene. So this here is our nativity scene. And so some of you are probably looking at this and thinking a couple of things. First off, yay! Jesus should always be in the center of the manger. He is the center of all that we do. And then some of you also may be wondering, okay, what is going on with those wise men? So my nine-year-old actually put all these together, and because she desires to be theologically accurate, she said that, you know, the wise men were not there at the birth of Jesus. So we need to put them far, far away. And that’s exactly what she did here. Some of you may also be wondering, wait a minute, there’s only two wise men. I thought there were three wise men. Well, go check your scriptures. We don’t know, actually, whether there were three wise men. We know there were more than one, but to be perfectly honest with you, this box did have three wise men but the third wise man is missing his head and is still in the box. But that’s a story for another sermon. The reason that I’m bringing this here is because what we do know from Scripture is that they brought three gifts. The wise men brought three gifts gold, frankincense, myrrh. And I want to have three gifts to unpack today from Romans for us. And that’s peace, hope, and reconciliation. So if you turn in your Bibles with me to Romans five, that’s where we’re going to be for the majority of our day today. Before we begin, are you okay if we pray together? Father, thank you so much for your goodness. Thank you so much for your son. Thank you that we can worship together here on this snowy Sunday. Lord, I pray as we delve into your word that you would open our eyes to see your truth, that you would use your word to convict us, to guide us, to give us comfort. Lord, I pray that you would give me strength today, that in my weakness you would show your power. And father, above all, I pray that you would be glorified. We thank you so much for your son, who we celebrate in this season and truly every day. It’s in Jesus precious name we pray. Amen. So the first gift that we want to unpack today is peace. In Romans five verse one, it says, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Any time that it begins with, therefore, we need to figure out what came before. So we know what the writer is referring to. And in this case, I’m just going to do three different verses from Romans three and Romans four to show you exactly what he’s talking about here. Romans three verse 28 says, for we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. And further, in Romans four verse two, it says, for if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And then in verse 13, for the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. So therefore, what he has been talking about this entire time is that Abraham, his righteousness was credited to him because of his faith, not because of anything that he had done or because of who he was, but because he had faith in the promises of God. And we see in verse one it says, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we hear about that word justified, often justification. What does that mean? You see, I’m a sinner, and because of my sin, I am eternally separated from God. And there’s nothing that I could do or earn to get into God’s good graces, to be reconciled because of my sin, the debt is too great to pay. So God had sent his only son so that his righteousness, his sinlessness, could be mine. And so this justification really is a legal term, that is Jesus debts, which were none, were given to me in place of all the debts that I have. And because of how this justification happens, I am now, right before God, so justified by faith. Paul further notes this in Ephesians two. You don’t have to turn with all these passages that I’ll have today, you can just write them down and read them later if you want to further delve into God’s Word on your own. Ephesians two verse eight, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. So we have been justified by faith. Therefore, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Before we delve into what this peace means, I want to highlight what it says there through our Lord Jesus Christ. John 14 six says, Jesus is talking, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. It is only through Jesus that we can have this peace with God. We may try a multitude of other ways, whether it be relationships or family or friends, or money or success or substances. I can tell you that all of those things won’t bring peace, only peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. But what do we mean by peace? It’s not just an absence of conflict. J.I. Packer said it this way the peace of God is first and foremost peace with God. It is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God’s peace, which does not start here, can do other than mislead. The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God. The prophet Isaiah said it well in Isaiah 26, verses three and four. You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. We can have God’s peace. We can trust in that everlasting rock. We can have that peace that passes understanding. Paul in Philippians says it this way. Philippians four verse seven, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. This peace that is from God guards our hearts and our minds. Jesus spoke about peace often. I just wanted to pull out two passages from John where he spoke of this peace. John 14:25, these things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the helper of the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives to you do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. And then in John 16:33 he says, I have said these things to you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart I have overcome the world. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. But some of you might be saying, well, wait a minute. Wasn’t there a time when Jesus said he did not come to bring peace? And I wanted to respond to that. Yes, Jesus did say that in Matthew ten, but he talks a little bit differently about it, and I wanted to piece that out for us today. Matthew ten verse 34. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. You see, this gospel of Jesus Christ. Both can provide our personal peace, but it can also be quite divisive. And we’ve seen that, unfortunately, in our world. It started wars and, in our families, maybe you’ve had families or friends that came over, even over Christmas, that think this manger story might be a folklore or myth, and they might ridicule you for it. You see Jesus in his holy sinlessness. There’s no middle road with him. You’re either going to fall deeply in love with him because of all that he has done, or you’re going to reject him, and that rejection of him is going to cause that sword that he spoke about in Matthew ten. But we can have that peace because of what Jesus Christ has done. So let me ask you today, have you received that gift of peace? So we’ve unwrapped the first gift of peace. Let’s unwrap the next of hope. Hope. This word hope is used 58 times in the New Testament. But let’s look about this time in Romans five. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. A few things here that I wanted to tease out for you. Through him we have obtained access through faith. He is our intermediary, our high priest. It hearkens back to the Old Testament times, because a holy and righteous God cannot be approached by a sinful man. He set in place the tabernacle and then the temple to give an opportunity for the high priest once a year to go into the Holy of Holies, where God chose to dwell, to intercede for the people. And when that high priest would go in, he would have bells on his dress and tie a rope around his ankle. Because it may be that his sins may not have been unconfessed. And when you are seen with a holy God, it might result in death. And then they would have to pull that high priest out once they heard those bells stop jingling. And you might think, well, that’s pretty grotesque, especially when our in our 20th century mindset. But let me tell you, that’s the stark difference between the holiness and righteousness of God in our sins. However, this is the good news, the hope that we have through him. We have obtained access by faith so we can approach that throne of grace with confidence. As the writer of Hebrews said. Obtain access by faith into this grace in which we stand. Into this grace in which we stand. You know, this was also spoken of in Ephesians chapter six. Ephesians chapter six, Paul noted this peace of standing. Verse 13, therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. That we could stand in the grace of God. This came most, uh, I would say intimately to me a couple of years, a couple of decades ago, actually, now, when I was leading an inner-city outreach trip to Detroit. How many of you have been to Detroit? Yeah, a handful. About half. Detroit’s a great city, but it also has areas that are not as great. So, we were there and we were doing inner-city mission for Vacation Bible School. And we were also helping a local church through some racial reconciliation. And there was one night in particular, that I took a smaller group of the team, and we went out to go grab dinner for everybody, went to the grocery store. Well, a couple of things you have to know for this story. One, this was way before GPS, so we were using paper maps. And the other thing that I did not know about Detroit, because of course, I felt called to go lead a mission trip there that I had actually never been to Detroit. Right. Is that the two you can have streets that are not connected, that have the same name and are not totally related to each other. And it was so frustrating for me because I’m driving and after we had picked up groceries, I could not find the place that we were staying. It was over an hour that we were driving around and I’m praying to the Lord I don’t know how to get back. I’m asking everybody in the car, do you guys know how to get back? And they’re like, no, I told you to go to that road. I’m like, I did go to that road, but it wasn’t taking us where we wanted. And I prayed to the Lord that he would find our way back safely. And then I look up in the rear-view mirror and I see police lights. And I said, well, this is not exactly how I wanted to find my way back. And I was pulled over and I wasn’t speeding. I didn’t think I rolled down my window and the officer said, sir, do you know where you are? I said, no, I have no idea where I am. Is it that obvious? And he said, well, sir, you were in the Eight Mile. It is not safe for you to be here. I need to escort you out now. Wow. Okay. And so what happened exactly in that time is he took me and, you know, I followed him out of the Eight Mile, and he then was able to point us back safely to the house that we were staying at. And that evening in devotions and worship we were in Ephesians six, and I had tried so hard to get back home, and I couldn’t do it on my own. And that’s where the Lord showed me that, oh, no, no, no. It’s what I’ve done for you that’s going to get you home. It’s in my grace that you stand. And I think that we need to remember that. That we have that access by faith into this grace in which we stand, not because of everything we’ve done, but because of what it is he has done. We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. The same words that rejoice, exalt, boast in the glory of God, not hope in just lesser things. The object of our hope is most important, and we hope in that glory of God. Several years ago, I was seeing patients in West Africa and a woman came in with an obvious cancerous mass on her jaw, and she wanted to be healed. And I knew that this was incurable. There was nothing, no access to any meds that could save her. In fact, even if we were in the United States, I didn’t think that this was a curable illness. And I despaired a little bit that there was nothing I could give. And then I felt that nudge of the Holy Spirit to share the gospel with this woman, this woman that you just told that this is likely going to end her life. And so we did, through an interpreter, share that hope of the gospel, and by his grace, she accepted God as her Savior through Jesus Christ. And I will always remember the change in her countenance. She had a large mass on her jaw, and her countenance was downcast as she came in looking for answers, because she had no hope. And I wasn’t able to heal that, but I was able to introduce her to the one that could provide ultimate hope. And because of what Jesus did, her countenance changed and she had hope. Hope of eternal life and future glory with him. That’s the hope that he provides. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. What? Rejoice in sufferings. How can I do that? How can I boast? How can I exult in sufferings? This process, you see here, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance, character and character, hope. That is the process of sanctification by which we are made right with God. Because, you see, we talked about justification where we’re already right with God. But then that sanctification is as he’s changing us, our minds and our hearts and our actions to make us more like him. And he does it through suffering which produces that endurance, character, and then hope. Suffering is also how he grows his church. Many of our brothers and sisters are being persecuted all over the world. We hear about our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, a church that we helped support even though they are literally in a war zone. God is growing his church and we, I had done some work in central India, in Madhya Pradesh through Central India, Christian mission and unfortunately persecution is rampant there. Christians are literally being killed and yet he is growing his church in the Middle East where there is so much persecution. Christ is growing his church. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Hope does not put us to shame. The psalmist made mention of this in Psalm 119. Psalm 119. Longest chapter in the Bible 119:116. The psalmist says this. Uphold me according to your promise that I might live and let me not be put to shame in my hope. How can we not be put to shame in this hope? For two reasons. Because God’s love, his agape love, has been poured out into our hearts. That’s the first of the fruits of the spirit that we read about in Galatians love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self control. That love is evident in our lives that can help us know that that hope is true. And ultimately, the Holy Spirit has been given to us as a guarantee. In Ephesians one it says this. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. So this hope doesn’t put us to shame, because we have God’s love in our hearts, and even more so we have His Holy Spirit as a guarantee. So let me ask you, have you received that gift of hope today? We’ve talked about the gift of peace. We’ve unpacked that. We’ve unpacked the gift of hope. And lastly, let’s unpack this wonderful gift of reconciliation. For while we were still weak at the right time, God, Christ died for the ungodly. While we were still weak, some of your translations might be saying powerless or sick. That same Greek word is actually the root of the medical term athanasia, which means lack of energy, weakness, loss of strength. There is nothing you and I could do to make it right with God. For while we were still weak at the right time, which shows the sovereignty of God and the perfect timing, he sent His Son to die for the ungodly. Pastor Kyle was talking last Sunday about 2 Corinthians five. That God that Christ God made him Christ, who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might experience and have that righteousness of God. Christ died for the ungodly, and it wasn’t a secondary thing. It was his plan from the beginning. In revelation, we see that the names written in the Book of life, they were written there before the foundation of the world. This is God’s plan. Reconciliation, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. So we see this little parenthesis where Paul is saying, hey, maybe sometime somebody would die for the righteous. That hearkens back to Jesus’s words in John 15:13 where he says, greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. But you see, there’s no one righteous. We see that in Romans 3:10, in Psalm 14 and Psalm 53. No one is righteous, no, not one. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That’s the wonderful hope of the gospel. He demonstrates his love for us while we were still sinners. Christ died for us. What wonderful news of reconciliation that is. A few Sundays ago, Pastor Brian was talking about September 11th. Many of you remember it. Some may be too young to remember September 11th, but the reason I’m bringing it up now is I’m trying to get a word picture to understand even a modicum of how much this love cost God. I would think about one of those terrorists that maybe they were on trial or about to be executed. And I would say they were enemies of me as an American. And yet what God did for me is greater than this. But a picture of it is if I were to give my only son for that convicted terrorist, it wasn’t a friend that he died for. It was an absolute enemy. That’s what he did for you and for me while we were still enemies. Christ died for us. These next three verses are a big climax towards this final piece of reconciliation. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. So he goes back to what he said before, that we have justification. We are now right with God. And because of this, how much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God? That’s the picture that Zephaniah was prophesying about that future time where we will be forever with him in glory, and that the wrath of God we will no longer need to be concerned about because Jesus has paid that price. Zephaniah 3:11 on that day you shall not be put to shame because of the deeds by which you have rebelled against me. But I will leave in your midst a people humble and lonely, they shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord. Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion, shout, O Israel, rejoice and exalt with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away the judgments against you. He has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the Lord is in your midst. You shall never again fear evil. And at that time I will bring you in. At that time when I gather you together, for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth. When I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the Lord. Since we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. And he goes on. For if we were while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. Much more. Now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life? Because Jesus didn’t stay dead, he rose again three days later. And because of his resurrection, we too can look forward to eternal life. First Corinthians 15 Paul says this. First Corinthians 15 now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how could some of you say, there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came, death by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead. Now that we are reconciled, we will be saved by his life. And lastly, more than that, we also rejoice. We exalt, we boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. What a wonderful news that is that we truly can be one with God for eternity because of what Jesus has done. So let me ask, have you received that gift of reconciliation today? As we close, I want to talk to three different groups of people. You’ll probably find yourself in one of these groups. One of these groups are those brothers and sisters that have been walking with the Lord for a while. You’ve unwrapped those gifts of peace, hope, and reconciliation, and they are with you every day. I just want to encourage you. I want to encourage you, as we go into 2026, to stay in that word, to stay in that assurance of his peace of hope, of his coming, of the glory of God and of eternal reconciliation, and then share that with others. There may be some of you here, however, that maybe believed at one time you said yes. Maybe you prayed the prayer or you said yes to Jesus, but you’re not experiencing peace in your life currently. It’s been a long time since you’ve felt that hope, and you certainly don’t feel reconciliation. I implore you, preach the gospel again to yourself. Come back to the truth of Scripture. God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And then lastly, there may be some of you here and I’m so glad that you’re here. But hear me, those that are here that do not yet know Jesus as Savior. Today is the day of salvation. And so my hope for you is that you would examine these gifts that are provided only through Jesus Christ, and you would ask that he become your Savior. Not of anything that you did but because of what he has already accomplished. Would you accept him as Savior today? Let’s pray.

What happened here, in this simple manger, in a small town, in a tiny corner of the world, on an ordinary night, would become the center of all human history. Let me tell you about one of my best Christmases ever. It was 1999. Rachel and I were still in college and had been dating about two months when we decided to take a day trip to Chicago at Christmas. Now, when you’re an unmarried couple like we were, you got to do it all in one day. And so, since we lived in West Michigan, that meant seven hours on the road for five hours in the city. It was dumb, but exciting. So we did it. It was fun. And we went, and we shopped like two broke college students, mostly with our eyes. She bought me a watch. I bought her a sweater. We stopped off at a fancy little coffee shop. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Starbucks saw our little place. And, at one point, somewhere on the Magnificent Mile, we, I saw a Christmas tree ornament for sale, and I bought one. For us fellas, side note, if you ever find yourself shopping for a Christmas present for your girlfriend and you decide to buy a Christmas ornament for us, you might as well just go ahead and buy the ring while you’re right there at the store anyway. Save yourself some time, because a tree ornament for us implies that we have a Christmas tree for us, which we didn’t. Where do you hang it otherwise? At least not yet. In her mind, we didn’t have that Christmas tree, right? I’m just saying, if you buy shared home decor, you’d better know what you’re doing. Okay, but I did know what I was doing. We were engaged the next month. We were married the following Christmas, and we just celebrated 25 years back in Chicago. This Christmas. So, here’s the ornament that I bought for her. It’s a little, little manger scene. All the little lambs are looking at the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. I was 21, and I was a brand-new Christian at the time, but even I knew then that if Rachel and I got married, what we see right here in this ornament was going to need to be the center of our marriage. Because what happened here in this simple little manger in a small town in a tiny corner of the world, on an ordinary night, would become the center of all human history. The God who created our world had entered into it. He physically came vulnerable, helpless, and weak to save those who are spiritually vulnerable, helpless, and weak. And the work he came to do to die in the place of sinners in need of a Savior would bring about the greatest spiritual transformation that the world has ever seen. You’ve heard the Christmas story read from Luke chapters one and two. Let me briefly show you four things that we learn about our Savior, Jesus, from this story. The first is that he’s a Savior for all. One of the most famous parts of Christ’s birth story is that he was laid in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And this part of the story has been expanded over the years to include a heartless innkeeper who turns away Mary and Joseph, probably because he hates Christmas, right? He’s twisting his evil mustache. I don’t know why people have inserted all sorts of meaning into this housing issue. Things like Jesus was homeless. He wasn’t. They were on a trip to Bethlehem. His home was back in Nazareth. Or they’ll say Jesus was poor. He wasn’t. Although he certainly did love the poor throughout his lifetime. Joseph was a carpenter. He had a pretty good job. Now. Jesus was not turned away at the end and laid in a manger because of some evil done to him, or to identify with some problem in the world. We don’t have to leave the story to learn why this manger was used. A sovereign God orchestrated that night precisely to show that this is a Savior for everyone. Now, in a moment, the shepherds are going to show up. Let me ask you, if there had been room in the inn, how would the shepherds have ever found Jesus? I imagine the angels instructing the shepherds, and you will find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying at one of the ends. Or perhaps a guest room. You’re going to have to knock on some doors, right? It’s not going to work. Listen to the angels say why. Listen to the angel, and this will be a sign to you. You will find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. You see these shepherds with, with, with no attachment to this family had to find this baby, and they had to know when they found the right baby. And so, God gives them a unique, publicly accessible location to find the promised Savior. And this is such an important aspect of God’s plan of salvation. When a baby is born, most of the time, the people that show up are our friends and family. Random strangers don’t usually just run to the hospital to see who’s been born. I assume they discourage that down at Mayo, right? People just showing up. Hey, what do you got in there? You know they’re not going to let you in there. But in this case, God has orchestrated the exact details of Jesus’ birth to show the world that all should rejoice, that all are invited because Jesus and the salvation he brings is for everyone the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus will eventually expand across the globe. Everyone is invited to come and to see him, and to meet him, and to find peace in him. The second thing I want you to see is that he is a Savior who brings glory to God. Maybe the most famous line in all of Luke chapter two are the words of the heavenly host of angels praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased. Now, usually when we think about this verse, we focus in on the peace. Jesus came to bring us peace, and he certainly does that without Jesus coming into the world as a man and living a sinless life and dying on the cross to bear our sins, punishment, and rising again to conquer death. Without that, we would have no hope of peace with God. We would not have it. But if you trust in Jesus, you have peace with God and hope for eternity because of it. That’s how Christmas impacts us. Okay, that’s what it means. That’s what it brings to us. That’s what it means for us. It reconciles us back into a peaceful relationship with God. But we don’t want to lose sight of the even greater purpose of Christ’s advent, which is to declare the glory of God. Now, if you’ve spent any time here at Calvary, you’ve heard me define glory before. Glory is greatness on display. Okay, the greatness of something made visible. It’s the greatness of something or someone. You can see it because of the praise of others. So when you clap your hands, when your team wins on the field or after a theatrical performance, you are making the greatness of the thing you just watched audible and visual. When Jesus comes into the world, what do the angels declare? Glory to God in the highest. The Savior who’s been born is first and foremost a display of the glory and the greatness of God. Christ is the culmination of a redemptive history that a sovereign, powerful God has been unfolding for years up to this point. A promise was made in Genesis chapter three that Satan would be crushed by the descendant of Eve. A promise was made to bless the whole world through the nation that he would form with Abraham. A promise was made that there would be a king who would always sit on the Davidic throne, ruling over God’s people. A promise was made that a man would come and die in our place for our sins, that he would be a sacrificial lamb taking our punishment. And all these promises, all these promises are made by God. They’re not human promises. They’re not. They’re not things that we came up with. God said, this is my plan. I’m the one that’s going to bring this about. Let me just pause here and say, aren’t you glad that these are not man-made promises? Think about man-made promises. We have a particular problem with promises, don’t we? We tend not to keep them. But the Lord is neither a liar nor a failure. Every part of every promise of every stage of his plan hinged on God becoming a man, being Emmanuel, which means God with us. It hinged on him coming into his creation. Christ’s birth is a powerful, dramatic moment in human history where the glory of the Lord is what’s on display. So, when we think of Christmas, we shouldn’t allow our view of what we’re celebrating to become too small. We can become too focused on ourselves at Christmas time. And I’m not. I’m not referring to that, that selfish way that we’ve commercialized Christmas. I mean, we have done that, but that’s not what I mean. I’m saying that we can get so focused on what God has done for us in Christ that we lose sight of the fact that Christ glorifies God, not us. In fact, what happens to us when we’re saved through faith in Jesus is that we become part of the God-glorifying chorus. That’s what we’re doing here tonight. We’re joining in the God-glorifying chorus. I’d like to say that we become part of God’s audiovisual department, and you can see that in the other two items that I want to show you here from, from Luke chapter two. The third is that Jesus is a Savior to be shared. So the shepherds find Jesus in swaddling clothes. He’s laying in a manger just like the angel said he would. I like how it says that they went with haste. I bet they did. I bet they did. I’ve never been confronted with a chorus of angels, but I imagine if I did, it would put a pep in my step. Right? So I’m. I would be rushing there as well. And when they get there, it says they make known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. If you look at verse 18, it’s up on the screen there. Do you see where it says all who heard it, all who heard it? This implies a crowd is gathered around. If it was just Joseph and Mary there, they wouldn’t write all Luke wouldn’t have written. All. Jesus is going to draw crowds. He’s going to draw crowds throughout his entire ministry, and he’s doing it on day one. There’s a crowd already there. He’s God has orchestrated for him a public birth. I bet most of you ladies with kids here today are really glad that God did not orchestrate a public birth for you, right? But he had to in this case. Why? Because this birth isn’t just a private event. It’s a public announcement. His birth is an announcement. And the shepherds are the first people to give that announcement. They’re handing the message on to everyone they see. And so what is it that they’re handing on? It says they’re handing on that which had been told to them. So what is it they’re handing on? Let’s review. Unto you is born this day a Savior? Who is Christ the Lord? Jewish people had been waiting for their promised Savior for thousands of years. The shepherds are saying, here he is. The one that we have been waiting for our entire lives is now here. Now, that might not mean very much to you tonight. You might. You might not really think much of that at all. You might be thinking, that’s fine for them, but I’m not Jewish. I don’t follow the Old Testament, so I’m not waiting for anyone. I’m not waiting for a savior. Well, I will grant you that you are probably not Jewish. Although if you are Jewish, we’re glad you’re here. Glad you came. You probably don’t know the Old Testament very well. Lots of people don’t know the Old Testament very well. Many more have no interest in what it says. But even if those categories don’t apply to you, I would guess that you are probably still interested in a savior because we’re all interested in a Savior. Everyone is looking for a savior, I mean, what is a savior? What is it? It’s someone who rescues and someone who brings salvation from anything, really. A lifeguard is a kind of savior, right? If you’re out there in the water kicking and flailing, you’re trying to save your life. And then. Then the lifeguard dives in and scoops you up and swims to you to safety. That lifeguard is a savior. Spread that idea over all of life right now. Does it appear to you that people are out there just swimming strong, doing great in the problem-free kiddie pool of life right now? Or does it look more like people are angry and confused and cynical and desperately grasping for some kind of intervention that will rid the world of evil because they’re drowning in it. Everyone. Everyone is always looking for the next thing. They’re looking for the regime change, the laws to change. They want other people to change. They go to therapists to try to figure out what it is that they have to change. Self-medicating is on the rise to try to escape reality. People are trying to manipulate the world around them, to create a sense of safety, to stave off the danger of reality. I would suggest to you that even if you haven’t followed the Old Testament promises of a Savior, you certainly understand the need for one. And that’s the message of Christmas. See the message of Christmas, friends, that is, we share it with the shepherds, the crowd. We’re in that crowd. We hear what they say. I’m sharing with you tonight what they shared with that crowd. That God has intervened. God has sent a Savior, a lifeguard for those of us who are drowning in sin, who feel overwhelmed by the chaos and the brokenness and the evil of this world. This happened. This happened in human history. The God who created the world entered into it to save sinners and to save us from our own sinful hearts and to keep us from drowning in the evil of others. And I’m telling you what things are happening. Things are happening around the world with this gospel right now. As the tide has risen on evil and hopelessness, so has the perceived need for the Savior, Jesus Christ. Spiritual curiosity and hunger are on the rise, especially among younger generations of people. Particularly the 13- to 28-year-old Gen Z generation. The dissatisfaction with the self-assigned purpose and meaning has created a desire to find truly good news that is rooted in the Creator God, not the fake posturing and nonsense that were flooded with daily, every ten days, a new gospel-centered church is planted in France. France. That is some of the hardest spiritual ground in the world. And the and the. And every ten days, there’s a new church popping up across that country. The gospel is spreading like wildfire across Iran, as the underground church is reaching out and people are joining with it. And the government doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s become a national problem for them because so many people are coming to Christ. There’s a quiet revival that’s taking place across the United Kingdom right now where there’s been a huge jump in church attendance among those in the 18- to 44-year-old bracket. And we’re seeing similar rise here in the United States. People are desperate for a savior and they’re finding their way to the Savior. The last thing I want to show you tonight about our Savior Jesus, is that he is the one who lifts our praise. Verse 20 says, the shepherds returned to their fields, glorifying and praising God for all that they had seen. This act of worshiping is the culmination of everything that we have seen in the story up to this point. See, the shepherds knew the Savior was for all, which meant he had to be shared with other people, and that all the credit then would for this salvation needed to be turned into praise, because it demonstrated the glory of God’s fulfilled plan. And so, they’re singing and they’re praising. Thank you, God, for this baby. Thank you, God, for this coming salvation you have saved us. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. That’s our song. That’s the doxology. We don’t know that we do not create what we need or we don’t find what we need. We receive what we need from God. The shepherds wouldn’t have known. Our doxology. But they certainly had the words. They might have walked back that night, back to their fields, singing Psalm 150. Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his mighty deeds. Praise him according to his excellent greatness. Praise him with trumpet sound. Praise him with lute and harp. Praise him with tambourine and dance. Praise him with strings and pipe. Praise him with sounding cymbals. Praise him with loud crashing cymbals. Let everything that has breath. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. We’re going to respond tonight in praise to. We’re going to do it more quietly, though. We’re going to sing Silent Night, light our candles as we do every year here at Calvary. But maybe, maybe this year is different for you. Maybe you’re starting to see beyond the traditions of Christmas and the trappings of Christmas, and you’re starting to see the faith in Jesus that is the foundation of Christmas and the reason that we celebrate. If you are drowning in your sin, if you are frustrated by evil, if you are dissatisfied with the saviors that the world has to offer you, can I invite you tonight to put your trust in the Savior that God has provided for you? Stop trying to find your own or be your own. Find the one that God has provided. He is the true Savior and he has come to rescue you. Would you pray with me?

The righteousness of Christ is the sinless record of Jesus, given to us as a gift, that makes us into new creations who are reconciled to God.

For one with all the power and authority in the universe, Jesus’ ministry was marked by His gentleness, meekness and lowliness of character. Even His humble birth conveys an amazing message to humanity: He is approachable, accessible, and available to us.

1 John 1 is not often considered a Christmas text, but we can see Christmas within in. Jesus manifested himself to us, and he is the Light!

Genealogies are easy to skip, but when considered more carefully Jesus’ family tree has priceless applications to life and gives us unshakable confidence in his address in history as God’s anointed King.

What you do with the wealth God gives you now, in this life, is an indication of both the state of your heart right now and the direction you’re heading for eternity.

Because it’s adultery to leave your spouse, break the marriage covenant, and remarry another person, we must work to save our marriages for the glory of God.

Jesus is the sole authority for those of us who follow him. If you want to be in his kingdom, you will listen to and obey God’s Word, even when it hits a nerve.

As disciples of Jesus we must always remember that what God has given to us is to be used as an investment in the disciple-making mission of the kingdom of God.

Jesus came to save two kinds of people: The one so sinful he has no hope of earning God’s grace, and the one so holy he doesn’t understand he needs God’s grace.

Because we are saved from our sins by the grace of Jesus, our new heart leaps for joy when others repent and put their trust in Jesus, too.

The gift of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ is free, but it is not cheap. To follow Jesus as his disciple requires giving everything in your life over to him.

While God is actively guiding his people through the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, he consistently points us back to Christ, never contradicting the truth of his written Word.

Is there ever a time to stop contact with a family member over my faith in Christ, to stand up for the truth?

The best way for us to love people in the LGBT community, and those who support them, is to cultivate the heart of a missionary.

When God looks at us, he doesn’t determine who we are based on our appearance, our success, or even our potential; he looks past all that to see our hearts.

Faithfulness to the Lord is not a mixture of his Word and our values. Faithfulness to the Lord is our commitment to listening to the Lord and walking in step with his Spirit because of our passion for Christ.

Sin’s strategy, to keep you from faithfully serving God, is to content you with the idea that you’ve addressed your sin properly without ever getting to the root causes.

Faith in God’s saving power can bring unexpected victories.

If you have ever struggled to REALLY trust God, you’re not alone. Saul’s story takes a sharp turn, and we explore the question throughout: “What does ‘faithfulness’ look like?”

As Samuel nears the end of his life, he takes the time to challenge and encourage the people of Israel with a particular plea. He asks them to consider the praise-worthy character of God, remember all the good He has done for them, and implores them to respond with their obedience and repentance.

The people of God are successful to the extent that they rest in the power of the Holy Spirit. With a call to repent where you may be trusting in your own strength rather than resting in the Spirit.

Israel’s rejection of God’s leadership challenges us not to trust in people or things, but to trust in God. God’s sovereign choice of Saul as king reminds us that God is in control, even when we make poor choices. The fact that Saul was more about style than substance tells us that God can’t just be in my life – He needs to be Lord of my life!

God is building a longing for the true king, King Jesus. And he’s doing it by showing us the flaws and failures of every other lesser king we choose for ourselves.

This God—His way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true.

Sin is so deceptive that we will often choose it despite all God’s warnings that it will destroy us.

The Lord longs to redeem you; redemption is available through Christ alone.