Gospel Community Church Sermon Podcast: Recent Episodes
Gospel Community Church Chattanooga
We are In Christ to the praise of His glory. That he might be glorified, worshiped, and praised for what he has done. That is why we are in Christ. That is why we are blessed. That is why we are chosen. That is why we are adopted, and that is why we are redeemed.
Even though we say we believe we are In Christ. We often continue to live as if we lack something that God says is already ours in Him. We must not merely know our identity in Christ; we must live from our identity in Christ.
Our affirmation of others should be rooted in the fact that they are created in the image of God, being changed by the gospel of God, so that the result is always and only the glory of God.
Sometimes we never arrive where we believe God is leading us. Sometimes there are good things in my life that I am pursuing for the right reasons, but for some reason, God does not let me experience that. To us getting to the destination is the most important thing. However, God views the journey as much more important. As one writer states, "it is in the journey that we are perfected, and it is in hardships that God is glorified as we trust him.”
God is a missionary God, and he has chosen to accomplish this mission by working through us, his people. We serve God by reaching others with the Gospel because God has reached us with the Gospel.
Everything we do should be motivated by the Gospel and all that God has done. Our motivation is vertical, but our living out that motivation is horizontal as we walk alongside one another.
How can those within the body of Christ who disagree so much still pursue unity without condemnation or judgment of one another?
Because of who you are in light of God's great love for you, you should love others. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is the greatest command because it is the heart and the motivation that leads us to the obedience of all that God has commanded.
Our political ideology does not dictate our submission to civil authority, what political party we belong to, or whether or not we even agree with the acting government. Still, instead, it is dictated by our spiritual identity. We serve as sojourners here under the authority God has allowed in this flawed, imperfect physical kingdom while knowing that we are already citizens of a perfect, spiritual, eternal kingdom.
How do we live in a world that defines and practices love very differently than Jesus commanded us to love as followers of Christ? Loving in light of the gospel means we love others not in response to what they do or don’t do to us, but rather in response to what God has and will do for us.
Love. It’s what God demonstrated when he sent Jesus to die on a cross to take our place, and it’s what should motivate us to go and demonstrate it to others, but what does loving in light of the gospel look like?
There is no doubt that the love of Christ is what must motivate our living for Christ. It doesn’t matter what else we do. It doesn’t matter if we are faithful to do everything else Paul says in these last five chapters, if it is not done motivated by love, then we are not faithful to live in light of the gospel.
When we think rightly about the gospel, we should grow in thinking more rightly about ourselves, our identity, our purpose. We should think more rightly about our gifts and how we are to use those gifts in the context of the body of Christ.
In light of Jesus' life sacrificed for us, we should live all of life sacrificially for him.
This is the good news of God – God accomplishing his plans and his purposes by keeping his promises through Jesus. Jesus is the yes and amen of God’s promises and it is why your faith must be in the work of Christ and Christ alone. For your salvation, for your sanctification, for your glorification – but for God’s glory. This is why Paul ends in Romans 11 by saying, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever."
This is why we have the good news of the Gospel and it is why we must believe it. So that in the end we all look back and see and the only thing we can point to, the only thing that we can declare is that God and God alone is worthy of all the glory! There are no other answers. There are no other options. There are no other ways. We come to God by faith in the Son of God, because of the mercy of God, as a result of the sovereignty of God or we don’t come at all.
God is the only hope for ethnic Israel and He is the only hope for spiritual Israel. Faith is the only thing that matters.
He is sovereign. It doesn’t mean that he is happy about everything that happens, but it does mean that everything that happens will be used to accomplish what he wants and knows already, will happen. His purposes will be accomplished. Our salvation, our sanctification, our glorification, our good and his glory will be accomplished.
In our bible-belt Christian culture it’s very easy for us to take this matter of salvation for granted. Often times salvation is simply assumed whether it’s because one grew up in the church, said a prayer when they were little or because people can point to some past personal experience, but our hope should never be placed in a past experience, even though they are important. Salvation should always be examined through the lens of present faith.
The world today sees the progression of its own virtue and believes that one does not need faith outside of oneself. Rather by believing in one’s own righteous actions, being far greater than those in the past, and because of their sincerity, they will ultimately be provided whatever salvation may be necessary. But is that true? What is the standard God is looking for? Is it just being better? Is it just being sincere?
God in his mercy has made a way for us to be saved, who do not deserve to be, all so that he might be glorified through your life. So that you might fulfill the purpose for which you exist.
Faith in God’s sovereignty is what is going to provide us hope when things seem hopeless, security when we are fearful, encouragement when we are discouraged. Faith in the Sovereignty of God really is the hinge pin of the Christian faith. Because if we don’t have faith in God’s sovereignty, we will place our faith in ourselves, which can only lead one of two directions, to pride because of what we feel we have accomplished or despair because of what we know we can’t.
If we are ever going to really understand God’s sovereignty properly, and truly be able to believe this doctrine in such a way that we don't become prideful but humble, we have to ask God to break our hearts for the lost.
We are loved, we are secure. Nothing can change our standing before God. Nothing can remove our status as God’s children. Nothing can separate us from the incredible love God has for us.
Often so many of us have tunnel vision when it comes to present suffering. We only see what’s happening today. We think if God loves us, we should be spared from suffering, or at least it should be kept to a minimum, but suffering should not cause us to despair, it should compel us to have hope because of what we know God is accomplishing through our suffering, and that he has not left us alone in the midst of our suffering.
Because we are no longer in bondage to the power of sin, we no longer need to fear God’s judgment, the Holy Spirit comes and removes that fear and in its place gives us a sense of peace and security. How does he do that? By reminding us that we are not slaves owned by sin, we are adopted as sons and daughters who belong to God. The Spirit does not make people slaves, but sons.
We often believe the Spirit has provided for our past sin, but then think if we are going to see sin defeated today it’s up to us. That results in us simply trying to manage sin, and we wonder why we it never seems to be defeated. We try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we try to stop doing what we know we shouldn’t and try to start doing what we know we should, and we wonder why we keep failing at both – the answer is because you can’t do either on your own.
We need to acknowledge and wrestle with the tension that exists between who God says we are now in Christ and our constant failures to live in light of that truth. We need to understand the struggle between God saying we are dead to sin, and yet we seem to be fighting sin every day of our lives. We need to address the tension between knowing we can’t perfectly obey God’s word and yet we are commanded to let it guide our lives.
Sanctification is not a passive transformation on our part, it is an active transformation of choosing to say “yes” and “no” to some things and so in the words of J.I. Packer, “let us not “let go and let God,” but rather “let us trust God and get going.”
If we believe what Paul has already told us that we have peace with God, that we are standing in the grace of God, that sanctification is rooted in God’s love and secured because of the work of Christ, then we should also believe God’s word when he tells us the power of sin has been defeated in our lives as a result.
If you try to bridge the gap between you and God, sanctification is always going to seem impossible, but when we stop trying to bridge the gap and remind ourselves of the truth that Jesus already has, it not only becomes possible in our minds and hearts, it becomes what was promised.
Because we are justified by faith, one day you and I will stand before God complete, whole, perfect, righteous, fully experiencing the glory of God for all of eternity, and God is going to use everything in your life to accomplish that. Sin and Suffering. Good and Evil. Your failures and your successes. Nothing is going to prevent God from accomplishing his plan of sanctification for your life.
We cannot overcome sin by doing good, but only by believing in the only one who is good. We can never earn our way to God; God isn’t looking for us to make promises to him he knows we can’t keep, but to believe the promises God has made and kept for us.
The bad news is we are unrighteous, the good news is Jesus is righteous. The bad news is we are all sinners, the good news is Jesus has come to save sinners. The bad news is we deserve the consequences of our sin, but the good news is God in his mercy, has provided forgiveness of sin and as a gift of his grace promised to give us his righteousness through his son, and all that is left now is for us to receive it.
Our good works will never reconcile us to God, because then we would be able to take credit and we can’t. Salvation is only, entirely and exclusively the work of God and God alone in order that God alone, entirely and exclusively gets all the glory for it.
The gap between our sinfulness and God’s holiness is massive. The law showed people they could never bridge that gap; they could never do everything God required, and so they needed God to do for them what they could not do for themselves. God’s word shows us our sinfulness, but it also points us to the hope that we have despite it, but what is this hope?
If we don’t preach about God’s judgment against our unrighteousness, then we won’t see our need to place our faith in the righteousness of God. If we think we can do it, and that God just exists to help you be the best person you can be, you aren’t going to come face to face with the reality that Jesus isn’t your life coach – he’s your judge, your king and your savior.
Too often people believe caricatures of God’s judgment instead of the truth of God’s judgment scripture reveals. It is important that we understand what is the basis for God's judgment in order to understand our great need, and once we see our great need we will truly understand the beauty of what God has provided.
We have to answer the question, “Do we believe God is the one who practices judgment against the unrighteousness of men or do we think we need to practice it for him?”
God never gives people what they didn’t choose. His judgment is not just at work in the past, and in the future but it is actually being revealed today by him giving people over to the very thing they choose – either to his salvation or to their sin.
As we grow in faith in God’s righteousness and in the truth that he has provided us his righteousness through Christ we will grow in living our lives by faith. I think it’s important to understand that faith is not a one time thing. It’s not just something you did 20 years ago when you prayed a prayer. The Gospel of God’s Son is the provision for everything we need to be saved. And it is faith in the Gospel of God’s Son that is required both to be saved and to live saved.
Faith in the Gospel of God is rooted in the work of God, (he loves you and has called you and so we are) and faith in the Gospel of God’s Son should be encouraging one another (both yours and mine; we need to be involved in each other’s lives), and faith in the Gospel is eager to see the fruit of new faith and the fruit of growing faith (so be eager to share it).
The Gospel of God is all about the Son of God, who he is, what he’s done. But if we’re not careful, we will be tempted to think that the goal of the Gospel is us, we will be tempted to think that the goal of the Gospel is to simply get us saved and it’s not – the goal of the Gospel is not the people of God. The goal of the Gospel is the glory of God, by the grace of God, through the people of God.
The book of Romans is a book all about God. It teaches us about God’s son, about God’s grace, and about God’s provision. It teaches about God’s promises, and about God’s person. It teaches us that it’s because of who God is that he has done the things he has done, and it teaches us that the purposes for which he has done all these things is his own glory.