South Run Baptist Church

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The Body of Christ Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | August 9, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know.At South Run, we read every message personally. Whether you have a question, want to share how God is moving in your life, or are thinking about visiting in person, this is the place to start. If you click the link below, Pastor Eric will personally reach out to you.

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The Deadly Virtue of Certainty Jim Weavor | Guest Pastor Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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The Deadly Virtue of Religious Devotion Jim Weavor | Guest Pastor Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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The Deadly Virtue of Discernment Jim Weavor | Guest Pastor Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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The Deadly Virtue of Childlikeness James Weaver | Guest Pastor Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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Holy Rhythms Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | July 5, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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We Experienced a power outage in the middle of the service, and unfortunately, only have partial video of the service and no separate audio recording of the sermon

Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

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In this series we are talking about the road to abundant life, but this week we name abundance as a problem. Gluttony, if it is one thing, is an abuse of abundance. And if there is one story in the Bible about such abuse, it shows up in the story of the prodigal son. The younger son in Luke 15 asked for an early inheritance from the father and gorged himself over and over until he had spent every last dollar. When the food ran out, he found himself desiring food from the pig trough. Gluttony is a sin with a bottomless pit. At some point in the overeating and excessive drinking, you lose the joy of why you eat and drink in the first place.

Gluttony Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | June 21, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

What We'll Cover:

How the story of the prodigal son is a story about sin, death, and the way back to abundant life, and how gluttony fits into this mold
The difference between a false abundance that leads to death and the Father's abundance that leads to life
What a 30-day fast can teach you about who is actually in control of your food and drink intake
Why gluttony is on the list of deadly sins, and why it is indeed “deadly”
Why confession and accountability is essential to regaining self-control
How there are seasons for fasting, for feasting, and for ordinary days in between, and how Jesus points us to wisdom in order to determine what time it is

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript Gluttony, the Prodigal Son, and Tying Yourself to the Mast — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Rev. Dr. Eric Gilchrest

Luke 15:11–32; Luke 7:31–35

Father's Day 2026

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Rev. Dr. Eric Gilchrest preaches on gluttony from Luke 15:11–32 and Luke 7:31–35. Delivered on Father's Day, this sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" series on the seven deadly sins and addresses true abundance versus false abundance, the slavery of an undisciplined life, and practical wisdom — fasting, accountability, and learning when to feast and when to fast — for breaking free of gluttony.

A Father's Day Blessing for the Dads in the Room

Happy Father's Day. We celebrate Father's Day, and I celebrate this with you. The world is in need of good fathers right now, and the job of the father is one that has been perhaps too neglected in our society. We need children raised well. We need strong young men and strong young women. We need households in which fathers are capable of raising the next generation of believers. And so my hope and prayer this morning for you, dads, is that you are that kind of dad, and that you live into that kind of calling, because the world needs you.

Before we begin the sermon, I do want to start with prayer, so please bow your heads with me. Heavenly Father, we come and we have gathered here today to hear your word, to be together, to laugh, and to have joy in the company of other believers. Lord, we open our hearts and our minds to what you would have to teach us this morning. We give you thanks for the dads in the room, for the ways in which they have poured out their lives for their kids and for the world around them. As Clint prayed for the sleepless nights and for the strength in times where they probably felt weak, for the times where they needed your sustenance — Lord, we give you thanks for them. And now we ask a blessing over them. We ask for more strength as they will need it, for courage where they need it. But God, we ask for love, that everything they do and are be rooted in a love that mimics and mirrors your kind of love, a love that poured itself out for the world, did not hold back because you loved the world so much. You gave us Jesus Christ, and you showed us the way forward. And so, Lord, this morning as we come, we give you thanks. We give you praise. And we ask for you to open your word to us. In Christ's holy name we pray. Amen.

Where We Are in The Jesus Way Series: From Anger and Vanity to Gluttony

Friends, we are still on this rather lengthy journey together. If you've not been with us, we are calling it the way, which is to say that there's a way to live and then there's a way to not. There are really these two paths in life. There's a way that leads to life, abundant life, and then there's a way that leads to destruction. And on the ways where we're talking about the ways that lead to life, we're digging deep into the teachings of Jesus. And I'm doing my best to show you how the scriptures, how Jesus himself, is very interested in you living, not just half-hearted lives or just kind of making your way through life. He wants you to live an abundant life, like very full, just brimming over with a sense of what life has for you. I think this is what Jesus wants from each and every one of us.

And then there's this other version, and it's a road that leads not to life, but really to death. And it's a false version of the road to life. And there are any number of ways that we can go down that road. And so I've tried to frame this in kind of what the tradition has given us, and we call the seven deadly sins. And so we've already talked about things like anger or wrath. We've talked about vanity. And this morning we're talking about gluttony. Happy Father's Day.

And this is one of these that we probably take less seriously. I think there's probably more laughs out of this one because we all are kind of in this together, actually. You might feel called out a little bit this morning, but I want to frame it like this. This sin cannot be measured by the size of the belt you wear. And I will just say, maybe point of confession here, I think I have been given very good genes. This is nothing to do with me, and this is everything to do with my fathers and their forefathers, etc., etc. And I think in a different body — I have not spent as much time in the gym as I should over my lifetime. I've probably eaten things that I shouldn't be eating. And so I give thanks to God for all of this. But this is simply to say that our relationship with food and with drink is one that should honor God. And we all fall short in one way or another. And so if you find yourself in the evening unable to resist the cravings of that bag of chips that's calling out to you, this is what we're talking about this morning.

The Prodigal Son: Two Versions of Abundance

So in order to talk about gluttony, we have read this morning a passage that no doubt you are very familiar with. Even if you're not churched, you've probably heard the story of the prodigal son. We read it already and we don't need to read the whole thing through. And in fact, we'll probably focus mostly on the front side of it, because this is the son's sin, right? This is where he chooses the wrong path. Like quite literally, he goes the wrong way.

But I do want to start actually at the very end. The last lines of it — the father is celebrating, right? His son has returned home. But here's what he says. He says, go ahead and kill the fattened calf and let's eat and let's celebrate. And then he says, "My son was dead and is alive again." This is exactly what we're talking about through this whole series. It's how his son was not dead, right? Like literally dead. But he may as well have been. He was living that other life that leads to death. But now he's found his way back home in the right place, and he's living the kind of life that leads to life — abundant life.

And so when we talk about gluttony this morning, I'm going to fit it over the frame of the prodigal son. Is this the only sin sitting in the story of the prodigal son? No. But I do think it fits pretty neatly into this story. There are really three acts to this story. There's where the son takes his stuff and he goes off to the far country. There's the second act where he comes to himself, is what it says — he wakes up and realizes this is not how life should be lived. And then there's the third act where he returns home.

And it strikes me, and should strike you too, that the first and the third act are aiming at the same thing for this son. They're aiming at the same thing. And it's a word that I've been using a lot over these last months. Abundance. He is aiming at abundant life. And when he gets home with the father, the father is offering him, once again, abundant life. This is where you're supposed to be. This is the kind of life you're supposed to live. It is filled with joy, and it's even filled with feasting, and it is filled with the people that you're supposed to be around. This is the good life.

But the first act is the son trying to find abundance, but he's finding it in the wrong places. And so what happens to him is he strikes out on his own, and he tries to grasp the abundance for himself. And then it all falls apart.

Which is to say — this is a very nice opportunity for me to say what this series has not been and will not be all along. If you've heard me saying, God wants abundant life for you, God wants abundant life for you, for the last number of months here, and you're thinking to yourself, like, health and wealth, and all the good things of life, and I'm just supposed to get, get, get from God — that is not really what we're talking about. There's a version of that that actually doesn't lead to life at all. It leads to what happened to this son here, which is his death. The father says he was dead and has to come back to life. And so there is a version of abundance that is a false version, and you need to be alert to it. And then there's a version of abundance that God wants for you and for me. And it is filled with true joy and is filled with true life. And it only happens in the Father's house.

Luke 15:11–13: "Father, Give Me" — The Anatomy of Sin

Let's turn with me, if you will. We're in Luke chapter 15. I want to point out just a few things that I think connect nicely with gluttony.

"There was a man who had two sons." It's a father. It's a good Father's Day sermon. He's got his two sons out there, right? And the younger one says to the father, "Father, give me." We're already off to a bad start. This is how sin is often framed, actually. We could probably put just about any sin into this mold right here, which is to say, I know, Dad, you've got your way of doing things, but give me. I'm gonna do it my way. And here the son is already off to a very bad start. And so he asked for his share of the property that is coming to him. The father divided the property between them. And then, "not many days later" — it didn't take long, right — what happens to the son when he gathers up his stuff and he goes on a journey into a far country.

So if sin can be fit into the mold of doing things your way, well, the next part of it is what happens because of the sin, which is to say you are then ushered out of the land in which you are supposed to be living, and you find yourself in a far country. This is the story of Eden, is it not? The story where Adam and Eve are living in the Father's house and enjoying the fruits of the Father, and all is well, and then sin enters the picture, and what happens next? They are in the far country. And ever since, we're trying to get back, trying to get back.

Buccee's, Buffets, and Using Food to Control Your Environment

As this young man, the son, heads to the far country, there is no doubt in my mind — my son has asked me to say this — that there's a Buc-ee's along the way. And there is all sorts of opportunity to spend your money and to eat whatever you want. And there are buffets and there are things that just call out to you and are really hard to resist.

And doing things my way, when we're talking about gluttony, is to say that you are using food or using drink to do what? To control your environment. To say, you know what, I am feeling really restless right now, you know what will help me is that bag of chips that I mentioned. Or, I've had a really rough day at work, you don't know the pressure that I've experienced, I'm going to go ahead and grab that next glass of wine. And you begin to use things like food to do what? To have some kind of control over you, and to fix the problem that is out there somewhere. And maybe a few too many stops at Bucky's, you find yourself thinking that that's going to solve my problem and this will get me through to the next day.

Much like greed, if you recall — when we talked about greed, it was made real by Dante's La Lupa, the wolf, that is skin and bones, and it keeps eating and wanting more and wanting more and wanting more. But the greed, it never gets filled up. There's always one more dollar that you need, one better job, and then you'll feel satisfied. And gluttony is much the same. One more donut, and then I'll feel good about it. But it never satisfies. It never fills you up.

Feasting vs. Gluttony: Knowing the Difference

I will say you should differentiate this between the meal from the meal that you actually really enjoy. The thing that you sit down and you finish and you say, that was like a slice of heaven, that was a really nice meal — because you've probably shared it with some friends or some family. If you were in Sunday school this morning, you and I enjoyed a wonderful conversation together. And for those of you who weren't there, you missed it. And if at 9:45 in the morning you're just kind of chilling and not really doing anything, you should come. This morning in particular was really lively and was really nice conversation. And there was a vibrancy about it. And one of the things we talked about was the difference between feasting and gluttony.

And God wants you to feast in the right times, in the right places, in the right ways. And so when Christmas comes around and you've gathered your whole family together and you slaughter the fatted calf and everybody's enjoying themselves, sure, there is an opportunity for gluttony there, but it's also a right time to celebrate. Not unlike the father in this story right here who celebrates with the son who comes home. But as we said this morning, if every night becomes a feasting, this is when we run into some trouble, isn't it?

Luke 15:13–16: Reckless Living, the Far Country, and Rock Bottom

So the story goes on. He's in this far country. He is separated from the Father. He is living in sin. And then it goes like this. It was there in that far country that he squandered his property — or his inheritance, or the money that was given to him. He squanders it in reckless living. This, too, is a nice definition of how gluttony works. It's a wanting more. It's a taking what you have and giving more. It's an excess. There's no moderation in it, right? And this is what a prodigal is. It's all excess. And then connected with it is the reckless living, which is to say, an undisciplined living.

And if gluttony is calling us into one thing — please hear me this morning — it is a life of discipline. A life of discipline. And I would venture to say that life in the Father's house, at the end of this story, is a life of discipline, which might be why this son wanted to run from it. No one really likes discipline, right? Until you do. If the discipline is good and right, then it shapes you into the kind of person.

The analogy I like to use, and I've certainly used before, is the piano player, right? It requires discipline to learn how to play that instrument, and it's practiced time and time and time again. But eventually, the young pianist will get better, and then a little better, and a little better, and pretty soon all of that discipline begins to pay off. And what happens? Well, the disciplined child pianist becomes a master and is capable of entertaining and is capable of joy and treats the instrument like it is a symphony. I don't think it's all that different with other parts of our life. Living a disciplined life might not be the most fun thing in the beginning, but it is the way to add structure and to produce joy and to live lives that are indeed full. And you might push against it as a child would push against wanting to practice his piano. But man, when you lean into it, this is where life is found. Gluttony is the opposite of this. This is the prodigal, off in the far country, living the reckless lifestyle.

The story goes on, and it says that when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. And this is what we call rock bottom.

Now, it's a little harder to envision this with food, but you can probably envision this if you've seen enough television — hopefully not experienced this yourself — but with alcohol. The person who's drinking too much and too much and too much, well, eventually there is a bottom to it that they hit. It usually involves something else. Maybe it's a trip to the hospital, but it might be a spouse who leaves you. It might be a family who disowns you. But there's a rock bottom that happens. And what happens in the rock bottom is a wake-up call. It's what happens next in the story, which is to say, he comes to himself, and he realizes, I'm living out in the far distant country, I'm enjoying the feed that was meant for pigs, there's a better way out there. This is what happens in rock bottom.

Trouble with gluttony is that there's not always a rock bottom. This is why it's actually a little more dangerous. Now, the rock bottom might be a heart attack — so that's real. If you eat too much and you really lean into that, at some point your health is going to cause you problems, and then you might have the wake-up call. For a lot of us, that isn't what the rock bottom is. There is none. There's just kind of a drifting through life in a half-hearted kind of way, which requires all the more somebody — maybe me — coming along, ringing alarm bells and saying, wake up, there is a better way out there. There is more life available to you if you live the life of discipline and not the life of excess.

Luke 15:15–16: Slavery — The Sign That You're No Longer in Control

The result of the sin and the far country and the reckless life — the result of it all is what happens there in verse 15. He loses his money. He hits the rock bottom. And so he does what? He hires himself out. This is the slavery piece of sin. The slavery. You are no longer in control of your own life. And in the same way that the son is not in control of his life, he has had to hire himself out now. And he is enslaved to some other master — which is precisely what happens with food or drink when you are living a life of gluttony. You are enslaved to the food, and it is in control of you. You are not in control of it.

This is how you know, by the way, if you suffer from this. Fasting is a common and a surefire way to figure out if this is a problem for you. Take, again, alcohol. If you say to yourself, you know what, I wonder if I have a problem here — easiest way to figure out is to say, I'm going to stop for 30 days. If over the course of 30 days you can't make it to 30 days, well then maybe, just maybe, there is a problem there. Or if you say to yourself, I'm going to cut sugar out of my diet, and you begin to notice — oh man, I need those sugary things in my life. And why do I need them? I don't even know why I need them. But man, I keep going for them, don't I? This is how you know if something has more control over you than you over it. You are living a life of slavery. There's another master, and it is not you.

Why Gluttony Is Deadly: Killing Us Softly, Killing Our Joy, Killing Our Trust in God

Why is gluttony deadly? Let me offer you just three quick reasons. The one is from Roberta Flack and the Fugees. It is killing you softly. It is killing us ever so softly, right? It is making us weaker and weaker. And if discipline is intended to make us stronger and stronger, a lack of discipline makes us weaker and weaker.

Two is that it actually kills the joy that was intended to be there. Because we've probably all by now figured out that when you eat too many of anything, that thing that brought you joy at the first eating of it is not really bringing the joy at the end of it all. Now you're just eating it.

The third thing, and this is the most important, is that it kills us. It is deadly because we end up trusting it more than we trust God. We trust it to solve our problems more than we trust God to solve our problems. And so if we get to the end of that workday and we grab for the food, instead of trusting that God is going to get us through, this is the problem.

What to Do About It: Fasting, Tying Yourself to the Mast, and Accountability

All right, so then that leaves us with one more question, which is, well, what do we do about this? I've already mentioned fasting. Highly recommend if you're wondering — does this have mastery over me, or am I in control here? Again, simply just say, well, I think I'm just going to give this up for a month and see what happens. And you'll see how much control you really do or don't have.

The second thing, though, comes to us from a movie that's coming out this summer called The Odyssey. It's Homer's Odyssey, from the 800 BC, I think is when it was written. There's this scene in this, I look forward to, where Odysseus is on the boat. And he's sailing by an island with sirens on it. Do you know this story? And he tells his crew, put wax in your ears. Because if you hear the cry of these sirens, they are going to tempt you to come to the island, and you're going to crash into the island. But he says, I'm not going to put wax in my ears. And instead, here's what I want you to do. I want you to tie me to the mast so that as we ride by, I'm going to listen to them. And whatever I say, whatever I say, do not let — do not listen to what I'm telling you to do. And so if I tell you to go that way, do not go that way, right? And so the boat, indeed, sails on through, and there's Odysseus tied to the mast, and they've all got the wax in their ears blocking them.

The lesson here is that gluttony, or food — whatever the cravings are — they are calling out to you. And maybe it's the drink. You need to get radical sometimes, and to tie yourself to the mast, or to put the wax in your ears. And what this might mean is, if you don't want that bag of chips at night, well, you shouldn't have the bag of chips in your house at all then. Or if the drink is maybe too much, then just get it out of the house altogether. And don't put yourself in the situation where it's even possible. And so if gluttony is calling out to you, I would encourage you this morning to get radical with this.

Along with it, Odysseus wasn't alone. He had accountability. He had friends there who had rallied around him, and they all had a pact together on how they were going to get through this. What this might look like for you is a single friend that you reach out to today, and you say, look, I'm trying to solve this problem in my life because I want to be better than this. I want to be stronger than this. I want to serve God rightly. I want to be a righteous person. I want to be a man of character or a woman of character. And so you pull someone into your orbit and you say, I want to deal with this.

There have been a few times over the course of the last few years since I've been here where I'll offer to you — tell somebody about whatever it is you're wrestling with this morning. I want to offer you that this morning. You should tell somebody. I would encourage you, if you need somebody, I would be happy, more than happy to be that person. Because sometimes people have come to me, and they've shared this with me, and I assure you, this is the best thing that you can do. To bring light into the situation. To not be alone. To not try to muscle through this. But to bring somebody into it. To help you along. To tie you to the mast. And when you say, I don't want to do this anymore, me or somebody in your life says, you're right, we're not going to let you do that.

Luke 7:31–35: Jesus, the Pharisees, and Learning When to Feast and When to Fast

There's an appropriate version of fasting, an appropriate version of feasting. If you turn back just a few pages in your Bible to Luke chapter 7, there is something quite nice here that I don't want you to miss. Jesus calls for wisdom in how this kind of life is lived.

And if you start in verse 31, you might be surprised a little bit about the kinds of things that were said about Jesus and the kinds of things that he does in his life. And it goes like this. "To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like?" And here he's talking about his critics, just so we're clear. He's talking about the critics. "And they are like children sitting in the marketplace, and they're calling to one another. And he says, we played the flute for you" — Jesus is the one playing the flute, or John the Baptist too — "and you did not dance" — which is to say, when you should have been rejoicing, you weren't rejoicing. "And then when we sang the dirge, and you did not weep." And when you should have been weeping and grieving and fasting, you weren't doing that. And so you didn't know when to fast, and you didn't know when to feast.

And then he says — and this is the part that will surprise you — "For John the Baptist" — those Baptists — "they came eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you said he's got a demon." John knew how to fast, apparently, and a lot of Baptists do too. Actually, that's only half true. "But the Son of Man has come eating and drinking. And you say, look at him, he's a glutton and he's a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."

Which is it, Pharisees? Are they supposed to fast and do nothing, or are they supposed to feast and then you call them gluttons and drunkards? Which is it? And Jesus is saying, you must learn to feast at the right time and to have that kind of joy, and you must learn to fast at the right time and to know when it is appropriate to mourn with others or to limit yourself and to not give in to excess. And how do we do this? He says it in verse 35. Wisdom. Wisdom is the way. "This is what is justified by all her children."

Closing: Two Stories of Abundance — Which Will You Choose?

There are two stories of abundance in the prodigal son. There's an abundance in which we try to take it for ourselves. And then there's an abundance that the Father wants to give to us in his household, on his terms, in his way, with his kind of discipline. The offer this morning is, which will you choose? The one leads to life and the other to death.

Let's pray. Father in heaven, we believe that you are a good father and that you know how to train your children and you know how to teach us the way to live a life. The question is, will we trust you? Will we do what we need to do? Will we give our lives to you? Or, like the prodigal son, will we flee? Will we take it for ourselves? Will we live in excess? Will we live the undisciplined life? God, this morning, may we be people who choose you and people who choose discipline. In Christ's holy name we pray. Amen.

South Run Baptist Church | 8712 Selger Drive, Springfield, VA 22153 | Sunday Worship at 11am Serving Springfield, Burke, West Springfield, Lorton, Alexandria, Fort Belvoir, and Franconia, Virginia. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

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A lawyer asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life, and the answer is “love.” Love God and love neighbor. But because the lawyer is practiced in manipulating the law, he follows this up with a question we all secretly ask: who can I exclude from my love? Jesus answers with a story that inverts everything. Not only is the Samaritan the neighbor, he is the very one who does the heart of the law by loving the neighbor, and by virtue of this fact, it is assumed that he is the one to inherit eternal life. Jesus’ point is this: if you want to walk the path of abundant life now and eternal life in the future, you must learn to love.

Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | June 14, 2026 The Good Samaritan Download Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

What We'll Cover

Why eternal life begins now, not in the next life
Why "Who is my neighbor?" is really a question about exclusion and why Jesus refuses to answer it on those terms
How you can tell whether you actually love God (hint: it's not about your feelings on Sunday morning; its about how you love your neighbor)
Why love is a verb, and the difference between the right words and the right works
What the Samaritan teaches us about empathy and compassion
Why self-giving love isn't a rule we're forced to keep but the design we were made to live

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript The Good Samaritan and the Age of Life: Love, Eternal Life, and the Narrow Road of Luke 10 — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Rev. Dr. Eric Gilchrest

Luke 10:25–37

June 14, 2026

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Rev. Dr. Eric Gilchrest preaches on the Parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25–37. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" transformation series and addresses what eternal life actually means in the original Greek, why love and life are inseparable in Jesus' teaching, and how the Good Samaritan parable reveals that walking the narrow road means active, costly, others-centered love.

Opening Prayer: A Church on Mission

Heavenly Father, we come today offering you thanksgiving for Ian and for Emma, the great work that they're doing at GW, but also for this church and for the work that those who are in these walls do for those who are outside of these walls. We, Lord, desire to be a church on mission, and we need to keep that front and center. And so, Lord, plant it in each of our hearts that as we go where we go throughout the week on Monday and Thursday and random points on a Saturday afternoon, that we be reminded that we bear your image, we bring your word to the world, and we make new disciples. And so, God, we pray all of this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

Where We Are in The Jesus Way Series

We are in a series on two ways, right? There is the narrow way that leads to abundant life, and this morning we are talking about that way, and the way that Jesus teaches us to walk — a way that leads to abundance and to life eternal. And then the other way we'll get back to next week, and that's the broad way. It's the easy way, frankly, and it's the way that leads to death and destruction. On Father's Day next week, we will cover the lovely topic of gluttony, so you definitely won't want to miss that, dads. You're welcome.

For today, though, we are in a parable that you are probably familiar with. Whether you've been around the church much or not, you definitely know what a Good Samaritan is. We even have like Good Samaritan laws, right? Well, I want to dive down deep, and I'll say this whole framing for me — the whole like two ways, the life, death — has become clarifying, we'll say, in ways that I've not anticipated and I have quite enjoyed as we've gone throughout this series. And I almost think of it as like this lens that I take and then I put it over top of the scripture that we're reading and then I kind of see what pops out, like what's new. And so here we are in a very familiar passage and it is, well, it came as a little bit of a surprise to me, exactly how Jesus frames this.

So I hope you have a Bible with you. If you don't, go ahead and grab the one that's in front of you — we definitely want to turn to Luke 10 together.

Luke 10:25–28: A Lawyer Asks About Eternal Life

So again, Luke chapter 10, starting in verse 25. It starts this way as you're turning there. "Behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test." Here we have lawyers doing what lawyers do, right? A lawyer, though, you should know in this day and age is not what you're thinking of as a lawyer. He does not work for the IRS. He does not do like tax law or something like this. He is a lawyer of the Torah, the Jewish law, right? And so this is a man who knows his law well, but very specifically the first five books of our Bible. And this is going to become important because Jesus is going to say to him, like, what does the law say? Like, what does our Bible say, the one you and I share together, right? And so this lawyer, he has spent lots of time in the law, as we'll see, as good lawyers often do. They know the law in order to kind of skirt through it, and he's trying to do this in this passage, but he actually knows what he's talking about.

So the passage goes on, and he says, "Teacher" — rabbi, this is Jesus here, our rabbi, the one we should be listening to and following — "what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And as I'm pulling that lens, remember, and I'm putting it on and I see this phrase, eternal life, I think to myself, well, here it is. This is part of what we're trying to do for this season of our church history — looking at ways that lead to life and ways that lead to death. And here Jesus is being asked like the exact question I'm asking you and I'm trying to get us all talking about, and that I think is of utmost importance. We might even say a matter of life and death. And he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Now, if you were asked this question, if somebody on the street came to you, it's worth asking, like, what would you say? How would you answer that question?

What "Eternal Life" Actually Means in the Greek: The Age of Life vs. The Age of Death

Backing up just a minute, this phrase eternal life needs just a little bit of clarification. The word for eternal here is not exactly the platonic, like, eternal sense that you and I often use it. Now, it might mean that to a degree, but only in like a secondary sense. It actually comes from a Greek word, eon — or the English version is eon. Eon is an age, right? There's one eon, and then there's the next eon, there's one age, and then there's the next age. And he's asking him, well, how do I get myself into the age of life?

It's important that you know that there is an age of death — or as Paul calls it, the evil age, right? This age actually is that, right? It's the age that ultimately we all know is hovered over by these two things of sin and death and evil, and it lurks about, and none of us get out of here alive, right? That's why this age is the age of death. And this is why the Bible speaks to this matter over and over and over again. And this is the final enemy, death. And so the man is asking a very good question, which is, how do we make it out of the age of death and then make it into the age of life?

And he has in mind — he thinks like a good first century Jew — and I need you to think this way for a second so that we can maybe make it a little more complicated. His timeline goes like this. There's the age in which we live, the age of death. There's then an ending to that, and there is a resurrection that happens of all people, good and bad. And then there's a judgment that happens, and the people are either judged good or bad. And then there is the age of life. That might be how you're thinking of things right now, in fact.

But here's the important wrinkle. A resurrection has already happened. A resurrection has already happened. And so when Jesus is resurrected, the timeline gets shoved into the present. And then also, with that happening, there is a real sense in which judgment has also happened, and yet is also going to happen. It's a both-and. And Paul, if we had time, he gives us both of these. But the point is actually this — what Jesus does is he drags eternal life and he puts it smack dab into this life. And this life is where eternal life begins. And he'll say things like, "the kingdom of God is in your midst, is among you." He's referring to himself. He's saying, through me starts this eternal life. It's here and it's now.

And so when Jesus is being asked this question — what must I do to enter into this age of life? — he doesn't say it out loud, but he is saying, well, it starts right now. It's not something we're pushing off to the future. We don't just kind of do all the right things now and then punch a ticket and then we get into the thing. No, you're in it right now.

Jesus Tosses the Question Back: How Do You Read the Law?

And so he says to this lawyer — well, he refuses to answer his question, actually. What does he do? He tosses it right back to him. And he says to him, well, you tell me, you lawyer, you know the law. What's written in the law and how do you read it? I actually love that last question — the "how do you read it" — that is so important. I don't have time to dig down deep here, but just know that we should all be asking, like, how do we read this scripture? Like, how do you read it? We all read it slightly differently, but Jesus wants to teach us how we read our scripture.

And so the man says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus, maybe to his shock, certainly to my shock, says, wow, you're correct. You got it right. Like, that is the answer. And in fact, in the other Gospels, Jesus is the one to say these things. Who knows? Maybe this lawyer got it from Jesus.

And he says, you're supposed to love God. And by the way, all of those categories — that just simply means your whole being, everything you are. You're just supposed to love God with like every last ounce of who you are. And then love your neighbor as yourself. And this is the simplification of all things. It's the simplification of the law, the scriptures, what God is trying to do with the world. It is just love, right? Love God, love your neighbor.

Now, I'd add this. When we talk about loving our neighbor, the Bible breaks down for us to love God with our souls and our minds and our strength and all these various aspects of who we are. And I would say, well, that's just a description of how to love. And we should do the same with the people in our lives. We should love them in similar kinds of ways, with our whole being. "He said to him, you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live." Again, there's our word — life, right? Well, how do we live a life? And how do we do it right? And how do we stay on that narrow path? He says, well, do this. The guy gets it.

"Who Is My Neighbor?" — The Question Jesus Refuses to Answer Directly

And if we stopped there, we would feel really good about this passage and it'd all be done. But the man, remember, he's a lawyer and he knows his law. And the job of the lawyer is to get around the law and to kind of sneak through it. And so he says the follow-up. He wants to justify himself and says to Jesus, well, excuse me, who is my neighbor?

Jesus does not answer this question. I'll just go ahead and say that very clearly here. Jesus does not answer who the neighbor is. He pulls up the example of somebody being a good neighbor — that is the Samaritan — treats the robbed man that we're going to meet here as the neighbor, but the Samaritan is not actually technically the neighbor here. He's the one who's doing it right, who is loving his neighbor well.

All of this explodes the boxes that this lawyer no doubt has, and it should explode ours too. And I can't go into exactly what a Samaritan is, but I assure you, the lawyer is thinking the Samaritan is not one of us. Whoever the "us" is for you — not one of us. He's over there. He's one of them. And Jesus is saying, well, look at the them. Whoever your "them" is, they're doing it right. They're the one who's loving well. And it should cause us to stop in our tracks and to ask, well, if they're able to love well, and they're finding what Jesus is calling eternal life or abundant life in this life that's leading to this eternal life, well, maybe I've got some work to do.

Jesus replies to the question that the lawyer asks. He doesn't answer it. He, of course, does what Jesus does, which is to either ask a question — which is what he did the first time — or to tell a story, which is what he does this time.

Luke 10:30–32: The Priest and the Levite Pass By

And so he says, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance, there was a priest going down the road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Well then likewise, a Levite came to the place, saw him, passed by on the other side."

I assure you, the Levite knows the law too, right? And the priest, well, he knows the law too. And Jesus is saying, do the priest or the Levite do the law? That is, do they love their neighbor? And the answer is very clearly no, right? They do not.

Luke 10:33–35: The Samaritan and the Meaning of Compassion

Now the Samaritan, whether or not he knows the law is actually not exactly clear, and in some ways not even to the point. The Samaritan does the law. He does the thing that should be done here, which is he sees the man half dead, and he goes to help him.

I would stop here for just one minute and point out this word to you — compassion, at the end of verse 33. Compassion. This word shows up only three times in your gospel of Luke. It shows up in the following ways. The widow of Nain — Jesus encounters this woman who already is a widow. She's lost her husband. She then loses her son in the story that is being told. And Jesus looks at this woman who has lost her husband and her son, and he has compassion. Which is to say, the word itself means like his insides are like turning outside, and he's like physically in pain watching this woman and is feeling her pain, right? It also shows up in the passage we're going to talk about next week as you join us for gluttony, which is the story of the prodigal son, actually. When the prodigal son returns home from his gluttonous encounters, the father is there and he looks at him from afar and he has compassion on him. His insides are turned outside. And then here, the Samaritan — he looks at this man and he has compassion on him.

I would say if we are going to love at all, we need compassion. If we are going to love our neighbor as ourselves, it is going to require us to put ourselves into the very shoes of the neighbor, to walk the mile with them, to see ourselves as the dead man on the side of the road who needs help, and to ask the question, if I were that dead man, what would I want this priest to do for me? If I were that dead man, what should that Levite do? I'm crying out for him, and he walks right on by. That is not keeping the law. But the Samaritan — the Samaritan sees him and is able to put himself into his place and to see the position that he's in, which is helpless, and he has the ability to do something, and he does.

Interestingly, this idea of love is then here for the next few verses explained not as a feeling the Samaritan has — because we all have the feeling when we see something bad happen, and we're like, oh, that's awful, oh man, I feel so bad for this person — love requires action. It requires actually doing something, which is precisely what the Samaritan does in the verses that follow.

In verse 34, "He went to him, to the man dying on the side of the road, and he bound up his wounds, he poured on oil and wine to heal them, and then he set him on his own animal, and he brought him to an inn, and he took care of him." This doesn't even account for the fact that he took time out of his own, no doubt, busy schedule to stop and to help this man and to assist him to a place. And he probably missed a really important meeting. And I'm sure some friends and some family were probably upset with the Samaritan who was supposed to be home for dinner. And he missed the kid's soccer game. But he did this very important thing that was in front of him.

But it doesn't even stop there. "The next day, he took out two denarii. And he gave it to the innkeeper. And he said, take care of him. And if you spend more, keep track of that, because I will repay you when I come back." This is a man who loves in a way that goes above and beyond, and it is active. It's not just a man who walks and says, oh, there's a person that is almost dead over here, and that's tragic, as he keeps walking on by. This is the kind of love that God is calling us into as well, and this is the narrow road that leads to life. You might understand why now it's a narrow road, because it's difficult to walk. It's the road less traveled. It's the one that requires something of you.

"Go and Do Likewise": Love and Life Are Inseparable

And then Jesus finishes up. He says, "Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" And the lawyer has to confess, well, I guess it's the one who showed mercy. And then Jesus says again, well, you got it right. "Go and do likewise." Go and do likewise.

When I think about this passage and this idea that we are to walk down this narrow road that leads to life — life and love, in my mind, are almost like one in the same. They all come together, these two come together in ways that are almost impossible to pull apart as you dig down deeper and deeper and deeper into what a full life is.

I was trying to wrestle with the question, why does this road lead to life? Like, why does loving someone lead to life? And here's what I think Jesus is doing. Remember, Jesus has pulled eternal life into this life. The very one that you're in now, listening to me speak. And love in this life, this eternal life we're hopefully, prayerfully in — it is the substance of it all. Love is the design of humanity. It is what we were made for. In Eden, when we were created, we were created to love God. And then it was not good for man to be alone. So he creates Eve, and we were meant to love one another. And then he looks at the first couple and he says, multiply, make more of you, and then love them too. And this is what it's all for and all about.

The God who made us is in himself self-giving love — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If the Trinity means one thing, it means pouring out love one to the other to the other. And we are made in that kind of image, which means the great commandment — love God and love neighbor — this is not a rule that gets bolted onto the side of life, as if it's like some sort of external hope that you might do this at some point. It is the manufacturer's description of how this whole thing runs. Withholding love doesn't keep you safe, and spending love doesn't drain your life. Jesus, in fact, says, do these things and you will have life.

Jesus Is the Good Samaritan: He Crosses the Road to Find Us Half Dead

We see this love most clearly in the person of Jesus. When he pours himself out on the cross, he redeems us. He snatches us out of death and delivers us into an age of life, eternal life. If Jesus has done this for me, well, then he must love me, right? And if Jesus has done this for you — and he has — then he must love you. But Jesus has loved the whole world and God has sent his son that we all might have eternal life, that we all might be entered into the age of life. And why love? Because God loves you, and he wants us to love one another and to love him as we were intended to do.

Communion: The Table as the Place Where Love and Life Meet

As we come to the table this morning, it is important that we recognize that this two-fold command of love — to love God and love our neighbor — it is kind of one thing. I would suggest to you that when God says to us that we are to love him, what he does not mean is that we have like a really nice worship service together and I have all the feels and it's just me and God and I'm loving every minute of it. And I don't even think he means like, well, I love God and therefore I pray every day and I love God and I'm reading my Bible every day. These are all very good things and they actually do lead you to God. So don't misunderstand me. But what I think he means is he pairs that with love your neighbor, because that is the ultimate understanding of whether or not you love God well. Because every person in this room around you right now and every person you've ever met in your life is bearing the image of God. And if you can't love them well, it is worth asking whether you're loving God.

And so this morning as we come to the table, we are reminded that Jesus has poured himself out for us. He has shown us what love looks like. He literally puts his hands on the cross like this, and he opens himself up for humanity. And he takes the penalty that was due to us, and he offers us a way to God.

I find Jesus directly in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In fact, many interpreters have. It turns out he's not the priest, he's not the Levite, he is the Samaritan, though. He is the outsider, the despised one, yet the one who actually does the law of love. And he comes to our roads where we are lying half dead and he has compassion on us. He looks at us in our estate and he is moved. His insides turn outside. He says, I want something better for this child of mine. I want them to live a full life now, and eternal life forever. This is what I want for them. And so what does he do? He binds up our wounds. He pours the oil and the wine on them. He pays the price. And he promises he will come back to pay the rest of it.

And this is what the table is. On the night before Jesus died, he took bread and a cup and he said, this is my body and this is my blood. And it is poured out for the forgiveness of your sins. We have all been robbed by the age of death. But we have also participated in the age of death. And we need forgiveness from that. So Christ, he crosses the road and he offers us a hand up and out of it. And this morning we get to participate in the forgiveness of sins that he offers to each and to every one of us.

Our Call: To Be the Samaritan for Others

He then expects something of us. As people who are walking down that road with him, the dust of the rabbi getting all over us — you remember that? — as we walk that way of love, we then too must take up the role of the Samaritan for the others who are around us. Our job in this world is to bandage those who are hurt and broken and to pour whatever oil and wine Jesus has given to us onto their wounds too. And we're to lift them up out of their estate. And this, this is what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, Holy Son, and Holy Spirit, you are self-giving love, perfected. God, we have fallen short of your glory, no doubt. We have sinned and are in need of a Savior. And so, Jesus, this morning, we come asking one more time for your salvation. Some of us, this might be the first time, saying, I need a Savior. I need someone to bandage up the wounds that are just too deep. I can't do it myself. Or somebody is lying there saying, I am half dead. I can't do this by myself. And Jesus, we know you are saying to them right now, I am here for you. I am here to bind those wounds and to raise you back to life again. So God, as we prepare our hearts for the communion table, we ask that we do so with sincerity and with gravity, knowing the cost that you have paid — your very life. And that out of this should flow for all of us gratitude, a thanksgiving. And for all this and more, we give you thanks and praise. In Christ's holy name we pray. Amen.

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Deen Salami | Guest Pastor Standing Firm: A Look at Stephen Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript Standing Firm: What Stephen's Martyrdom in Acts 6–7 Teaches Us About Faith Under Fire — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Guest Preacher: Deen Salami

Acts 6:8–7:60

June 7, 2026

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, guest preacher Deen Salami preaches on the martyrdom of Stephen from Acts 6–7. This sermon addresses how Stephen — an ordinary believer full of faith and the Holy Spirit — stood firm against hate and persecution before the Sanhedrin, what his conduct, his defense, and his death reveal about the cost of following Jesus, and why the church's first martyr was not a tragic accident but a catalyst for the spread of the gospel.

Opening: A Passage That Can Almost Preach Itself

I am a little excited today about the message. We've got a lot of ground to cover. There's a large section of scripture that I want us to go through. I'm going to act as your guide. It's not very often that there are passages of scripture that actually can preach themselves. This passage just might be one of them. So what I'd like to do is just to act as your guide. I'll read through big chunks of scripture and I'll just make a couple of observations for us to consider as we do. To do that, though, I'll only need about another hour. Are you guys good with that? I know better than to get in the way of lunch, so I'll make sure that I'll get through this thing in a reasonable amount of time, and I promise we'll survive the experience, all right?

All right, why don't you join me in prayer? Gracious God and Father, behold this time. It is you who have called all these people here. None are here by accident. You have assigned me to this task for this day and this hour, and I just pray, Lord God, that you would act and move. Empower now your servant to be able to bring forth this majesty for your people's benefit and for the glory of your great name. May everything that be said and done would be pleasing to you. We pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Context: Who Was Stephen, and Why Does He Matter?

Now, we've already had the first section of our passage read to us. We're going to look at the first martyr of the early church. If you guys know, that is a follower by the name of Stephen. Before he was crucified, Jesus warned the disciples that the world would hate them because of him, and as a result, they would suffer persecution. So how do we stand firm against the hate and persecution? Well, Stephen is going to help us answer that question because he experienced exactly what Jesus said he would. How he handles the hate is a great example for us to follow.

Now, again, we've already read that first section in Acts 6:1–8, but as we go into the commentary of it, I want you to consider three simple things: the charges brought before Stephen, his conduct throughout this whole trial, and what it costs him at the end. Three things — charges, his conduct, and the cost.

The gospel was being preached early on. It's the early part of the church's existence. The gospel was being preached, and after an early reception by the masses, opposition began to rise, specifically from the religious leaders. Stephen was a Hellenistic Jew, which means that his native tongue was not Aramaic, but it was Greek. He was also a Diaspora Jew, meaning that he was not born and raised inside Israel proper. He was born and raised outside of Israel. He came to Jerusalem, heard the gospel, and became a believer. He was not one of the original 12. He had no special place of prominence. In fact, when we first learn of Stephen a few verses earlier, he was in charge of food distribution for the church. In other words, Stephen was a simple, normal person, just like any one of us. His only desire was to serve and to be used by God.

Now look at how he was described in this section. It says that he was full of God's grace and power, and he performed great signs and wonders. Up until this point, that description was only made of the apostles. But he ran into his fellow Diaspora Jews, and they could not withstand him in debate, because the Spirit of God had given him great wisdom. Since they were unable to defeat Stephen in debate, they slandered him, brought him up on trumped-up charges, and dragged him before the Sanhedrin. And this, by the way, is the third time that a follower of Jesus was dragged before the Sanhedrin. The first time it was Peter and John for healing a lame man. But because the crowds were praising God, they let them go. The second time was with all 12 apostles. They were beaten and sternly warned no longer to preach the gospel. This time, the Diaspora Jews were mobilized as a mob against Stephen, and if you were hearing properly and paying attention, you noticed that Stephen is alone. Incidentally, this is the same council that sentenced Jesus to death.

The Charges Against Stephen: Disrespecting Moses and the Temple

So let's hear the charges brought against Stephen. It was the disrespect of the law — which is referred to as Moses — and the disrespect of God, the temple, because they believed that God's presence was in the temple. But Stephen is going to take these two charges and turn them on his accusers.

But for now, I want to draw your attention to how Luke describes Stephen as he stands before the Sanhedrin. He says that he has the face of an angel. Now, I doubt very much that the Sanhedrin thought Stephen was hot, right? But what is it that made his appearance unmistakable? The question I want us to consider is, how is it possible that a normal person like Stephen — who was not part of the inner circle of Jesus — is able to do the things that Stephen had done and was described the way Luke describes him?

Acts 6:5 — Full of Faith and the Holy Spirit: What That Actually Means

And I believe that the answer is found in verse 5 of chapter 6. This is the very first description we have of Stephen: he's a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit. But the question is, what does that mean exactly?

Let me start with full of faith. Because there are three aspects of faith that we see in Stephen. First, there's an intellectual determination. What do I mean by that? It simply means that he's asking himself, is the gospel true, and do I believe it? Am I a sinner, like the gospel says, and do I need a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ? Stephen's answer is yes. The second is, do I trust Jesus? Will I submit my life to him and proclaim him as my Lord? Again, Stephen answers, yes. But finally, will I commit everything to him, even if it means my death? And as we will see, Stephen will answer that question yes as well.

But let me ask us all a question here. How are we doing in these three aspects? For most Christians, they're okay intellectually up here. Do I need a Savior? Yes. But it's the other two that they stumble at. Is he actually Lord? Am I running my own life? Do I just need Jesus as an advisor — I'll call on him when I need to? Or is he actually Lord? Do we actually commit our lives to him, willing to die?

Because Stephen was all in with Jesus, it gave the Holy Spirit free reign to use Stephen any way he wanted. Not like a puppet, but as an active and willing partner in the work of advancing the kingdom. It's like the Fellowship of the Ring. Do you guys remember the Fellowship of the Ring? Remember when Frodo said he was going to go and take the ring to Mordor? Aragorn said to him, if by my life or death I can protect you, I will. Why? Because the fate of Middle Earth hung in the balance, right? But for us today, it's the souls — the eternal souls of people — that hang in the balance. And the only hope for them is Jesus Christ. Amen? If by our life or death, if we have the opportunity to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ, will we? Are we all in like Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit?

What the Sanhedrin saw in Stephen was the very presence of the divine emanating from him. But let's move on and see what happens next.

Acts 7:1–16: Stephen's Defense Begins — Summarizing Genesis 12 Through Exodus 1 from Memory

I'm going to read from chapter 7, verse 1. "Then the high priest asked Stephen, are these charges true? To this he replied, brothers and fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran. Leave your country and your people, God said, and go to the land I will show you. So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living. He gave him no inheritance here, not even enough ground to set his foot on. But God promised him that he and his descendants after him would possess the land, even though at that time Abraham had no children. God spoke to him in this way, for 400 years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, God said, and afterward they will come out of that country and worship me in this place. Then he gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision, and Abraham became the father of Isaac and circumcised him eight days after his birth. Later, Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs. Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him and rescued him from all his troubles. He gave Joseph wisdom and enabled him to gain the goodwill of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. So Pharaoh made him ruler over Egypt and all his palace. Then a famine struck all of Egypt and Canaan, bringing great suffering, and our ancestors could not find food. When Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent our forefathers on their first visit. On their second visit, Joseph told his brothers who he was. And Pharaoh learned about Joseph's family. After this, Joseph sent for his father Jacob and his whole family, 75 in all. Then Jacob went down to Egypt where he and our ancestors died. Their bodies were brought back to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought from the sons of Hamor at Shechem for a certain sum of money. And as the time drew near for God to fulfill his promise to Abraham, the number of our people in Egypt had greatly increased. Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. He dealt treacherously with our people and oppressed our ancestors by forcing them to throw out their newborn babies so that they would die."

Now, for those of you who may have picked up on it, Stephen just summarized Genesis 12 all the way through Exodus 1. Genesis 12 is where we have God's promise to bless the world through Abram. Stephen starts there and ends in Exodus chapter 1. That is approximately 39 chapters that he summarized from memory under pressure. Now, if you were on the Sanhedrin, what would you be thinking right now about the charge of disrespecting the law? At least at this point, it looks like that charge is on kind of shaky ground. In fact, some of the Sanhedrin might be looking at Stephen and secretly giving him a thumbs up. Way to go, bro. Good job, all right?

Why Stephen Uses Geography and the Stories of Joseph and Moses Strategically

What I don't want you to miss, though, is how Stephen is telling this story. I want you to notice the way Stephen is making use of geography — Mesopotamia, Haran, Israel, Egypt. He is summarizing what God did in those places, but why is he doing this? Also, I want you to keep in mind what he says about Joseph and his brothers. I'm going to develop that here in a minute. Just be patient, okay?

Now, before we move on, I want to highlight how Stephen addresses his adversaries. To the mob, he refers to them as brothers. To the Sanhedrin, he refers to them as fathers. This mob who dragged him forcefully before the Sanhedrin, and this council that not only sentenced Jesus to death but beat the 12 apostles — the question on the table is, why is Stephen so cordial?

A few observations. First, he does not seem to be taking their behavior toward him personally. The moment is not lost on Stephen. He's acutely aware of the danger he is in, but he remembers his mission, which was the same as Jesus. He does not want to condemn them. He wants them to know the truth. So he speaks to them in a way fitting that purpose. He does not retaliate against them for mistreating him.

Second, Stephen understands that their behavior is symptomatic of a bigger issue. He knows what the Apostle Paul will later go on to understand and share with Timothy. As we read in 2 Timothy 2:25–26, Paul says this: "Opponents must be gently instructed in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will." Stephen understands that these people have been taken captive by the devil so that they would do his will. But Stephen hopes that they will come to their senses. So he begins by instructing them gently. And in his approach, Stephen is reflecting the very heart of God. Back in Ezekiel 33:11, we hear God say this: "As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways. Why will you die, people of Israel?" Stephen does not clap back at them.

Third, he is gentle because he is focused. He knows it's not about him. This encounter is much bigger than Stephen, and he is keenly aware of it, and we can tell by the way he conducts himself.

It's a powerful lesson for us today, isn't it? If we're going to stand firm against hate and persecution, we will resist the urge to take people's behavior toward us personally. We remember that their behavior is symptomatic of a bigger issue. They are captives of the devil, and what we want to stay focused on is our mission to be active agents in freeing them through spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now one last point before we move on. We are 19 verses into Stephen's speech and in all his words, Stephen is not trying to defend himself. He has not yet answered the question that was put before him: are these charges true? He hasn't quite answered that question, at least not directly.

Acts 7:20–43: Moses, the Burning Bush, and the Pattern of Rejected Messengers

But let's get back to the rest of Stephen's speech, because I think we'll find some more for us to consider.

"Now at that time, Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child. For three months, he was cared for by his family. When he was placed outside, Pharaoh's daughter took him and brought him up as her own son. Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. When Moses was 40 years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. The next day, Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, men, you are brothers. Why do you want to hurt each other? But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday? When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons. After 40 years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight. As he went over to get a closer look, he heard the Lord say, I am the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look. Then the Lord said to him, take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt. This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, who made you ruler and judge. He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and for 40 years in the wilderness."

Once again, Stephen has done an excellent job in summarizing that next section. He pretty accurately brings the story to the lawgiver himself, the man Moses. But let me begin to tie some pieces of this puzzle together for us.

Stephen brings up Joseph and Moses very strategically. Joseph, with his dreams, and Moses, even at his birth, were both marked by God for God's use and for the good of his people. But in both cases, they were originally rejected. In other words, our ancestors, says Stephen, missed God's messengers the first time. Even though the signs were there, they rejected their God-appointed leaders the first time. And Stephen is about to be very clear about the implications of this for them.

He mentions God being with Moses in Midian and in Egypt. All the geographical references that Stephen has made is the point he's taking aim at — the misunderstanding of the temple. They refer to the temple as this holy place. But yet Stephen reminds the Sanhedrin that when Moses was in Midian on Mount Sinai, Moses was commanded to remove his sandals because where he was standing was holy ground. So which is it? Is it the holy ground that Moses was standing on in Mount Sinai in Midian? Or is it this holy place, the temple in Jerusalem? Wherever the presence of God touches down becomes holy. What Stephen is saying is that God is not bound by any single location. This is what the Sanhedrin failed to see in their attempt to defend the temple. And it is a pattern that Stephen is pointing out for them.

In addition, Jesus sternly rebuked the religious leaders when he turned over the tables of the money changers and called the temple a den of thieves, because they were keeping people from God. God had left the building, and they were completely oblivious.

Let me highlight the wisdom Stephen is using here. First, he knows the word and how to apply it to the situation he is presently in. Second, he understands the charges brought against him and how to use those same charges to highlight the error of his accusers. And finally, he does not lose focus of his mission. And the question on the table for us is, if we were under this pressure, could we do the same?

Acts 7:44–53: Stephen Flips the Script — You Are the Ones Who Violated the Law

Now Stephen is about to end his time with the Sanhedrin, and it's going to be a colossal end. Let's finish reading.

"This is the Moses who told the Israelites, God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your own people. He was in the assembly in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai and with our ancestors, and he received living words to pass on to us. But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him, and their hearts turned back to Egypt. They told Aaron, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him. That was the time they made an idol in the form of a calf. They brought sacrifices to it and reveled in it in what their own hands had made. But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. This agrees with what is written in the book of the prophets: did you bring me sacrifices and offerings 40 years in the wilderness, people of Israel? You have taken up the tabernacle of Molech and the star of your God Rephan, the idols you made to worship. Therefore, I will send you into exile beyond Babylon. Our ancestors had the tabernacle of the covenant law with them in the wilderness. It had been made as God directed Moses, according to the pattern he had seen. After receiving the tabernacle, our ancestors under Joshua brought it with them when they took the land from the nations God drove out before them. It remained in the land until the time of David, who enjoyed God's favor and asked that he might provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built a house for him. However, the Most High does not live in houses made by human hands. As the prophet says, heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build me, says the Lord? Or where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things? You stiff-necked people, your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You were just like your ancestors. You always resist the Holy Spirit. Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him. You who have received the law that was given through angels, but have not yet obeyed it."

Stephen ends his speech with a powerful rebuke of the Sanhedrin and this mob. The history of the Jewish people had been one of rebellion, culminating in the murder of Jesus, their long-awaited Messiah. Just as they did with Joseph and Moses, they missed Jesus the first time.

I want you to underline verse 53. Stephen courageously tells the truth and provides a proper diagnosis of their problem. In so doing, he flips the script. So you accuse me of violating the law and desecrating the temple? I'm not guilty of either one of these, but you are. The evidence he provides is rightly in the law of Moses, and he records the embarrassing incident with the golden calf. This was abject idolatry, which got them exiled, and it's clear that their stubborn rebellion continued to blind them.

Making the Means the End: The Sanhedrin's Fatal Error with the Law and the Temple

The inherent problem the Sanhedrin and the mob suffered from was that they made the means the end and did away with the end itself. What do I mean by that? Well, in Galatians 3:24–25, Paul says this: "So the law was our guardian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian." The law was the means by which we would be ready for Christ, who was literally the end of the law — he was what the law was preparing us for. But they made the means, the law, the end, and did away with the end itself, Jesus.

Jesus says the same thing about the temple. In Mark 11:17, Jesus says this: "My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves." The temple was the means by which all the nations would come to know who God is and pray to him. They turned the temple into a money-making machine, and they did away with God altogether. It's the same pattern.

Acts 7:54–60: The Stoning of Stephen — Dying Like His Lord

Like all who stubbornly live in rebellion and refuse to hear the truth, they go after Stephen. "When the members of the Sanhedrin heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Look, he said, I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of the young man named Saul. And while they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Then he fell on his knees and cried out, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. When he had said this, he fell asleep. And Saul approved of their killing."

Stephen took a bold stand and it cost him his life. But here's the beauty of this passage. Stephen died in the same way his Lord did. He dies praying for the forgiveness of the people stoning him, just like Jesus. And because Stephen was so faithful to his call, the heavens opened so that Stephen sees the Lord Jesus rise from his throne to welcome his faithful servant home.

How to Stand Firm Against Hate and Persecution: Look Up, Not Around

How do we stand firm in the face of hate and persecution? First and foremost, we look up, not around. We look to Jesus. We need to be focused on Jesus because he is all he's asking us to be, and he has done all he's asking us to do. That includes suffering for his sake.

Second, we need to remember one important thing. We're not simply spectators or victims. We are active agents of change. In other words, we do not lose sight of the mission, because this is why we are here. You know, I know some people — I've spoken to some people about this passage — and they seem to think that it's unfair for Stephen to have died. After all, why couldn't God have saved him? He saved the apostles. He saved John and Peter. Why couldn't he have saved Stephen?

But if we read Acts 1:8, where Jesus told the disciples that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and in the uttermost parts of the world, we begin to realize one important thing. Up until this point, guess where the church was localized? Jerusalem. Guess where they had their small groups? Jerusalem. Guess where they had their worship time? Jerusalem. But where were they supposed to go?

But after Stephen was killed, we read this: "On that day, a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria." Stephen's death was the catalyst for the advancement of the gospel outside of Jerusalem. Remember, our faith is not a faith that we simply talk about. Our faith is a full contact sport. If by my life or death I can advance the gospel, I will. Stephen did it by his death.

Closing: Active Agents of God's Redemptive Work

Let me read you one quote as I close. It says, "Suffering becomes the ongoing evidence that creation awaits restoration. And believers, bearing God's image and indwelt by the Spirit, participate in that redemptive work. Rather than passive victims of evil, they become agents through whom God's original creative intention progressively reasserts itself against the disorder introduced by sin."

Will you be a part of that? Because this is our purpose. And once we understand our purpose and totally embrace it, then we look at the world very differently. We can stop asking why the world is the way it is. Because that's really the wrong question. The right question is, what are we going to do about it? Because we are supposed to be the active and willing participants in God's redemptive work. Is this work dangerous? Yeah. Stephen found that out very clearly. Remember, Jesus died for us first. So it is not like God is asking us to throw away our lives cavalierly. Far from it. Stephen understood the stakes and was keenly aware of the moment. But he determined that his life was worthy of sacrificing for the gospel. He stood firm. Can we?

Let me pray. Our gracious God and Father, we thank you for this time that we can be in your word. We are reminded, Lord, that it's you who preserved your word, lo, these 2,000 years for us, this generation of believers, to learn and glean from. I pray, Father, for whatever lessons that may have been brought out here, that those seeds would be scattered in the hearts of your people and that they would grow into folks that would stand firm for the advancement of the gospel. Our only desire, Lord God, is like Stephen. We ask humbly that you would use us as we serve, and that you would be glorified. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen.

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What is enough? How do you know when you have enough? Is the answer: “Just a little more . . .”? If so, you’re not alone, but you’re also on a dangerous road. From the rich fool who built bigger barns to the algorithm that lives in our pocket, something has always been working to convince us that the next thing is the thing that will finally make us secure. But Jesus names a deeper truth: greed isn't really about money at all. It's about where we go for safety, and whether we trust our stuff or our Father to be the ground beneath our feet.

Greed Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | May 31, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. While you’re at it, check us out on Facebook and Instagram too.

This Sunday we’re exploring:

How Greed is like the hungry wolf within, that is never satiated, never satisfied, and never content no matter how much it gobbles up
The rich fool of Luke 12 and how building a bigger barn was a dangerous replacement for the work only God can do
How the algorithm and our social media networks form us every day into people who can never quite be satisfied
Greed as a trust problem: the quiet transfer of our security from God to the things in our closets or our bank accounts
Why the offering plate is one of the most counter-cultural things we do — and how the practice of charity and generosity is an important way we take the offramp from greed back onto the narrow road that leads to abundant life

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript The Hungry Wolf: Greed, Anxiety, and the God Who Has Enough — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Luke 12:13–21; Matthew 6:24–34

May 31, 2026

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on greed from Luke 12:13–21 and Matthew 6:24–34. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" series on the seven deadly sins and addresses how greed works as a hungry wolf that can never be satisfied, how our technology and online consumption feed our covetousness, and why the tithe is one of the most powerful weapons against the greed that sits in all of us.

Where We Are in The Jesus Way Series: The Broad Road and the Seven Deadly Sins

If you haven't been here, if you're kind of forgetting — there's this road that Jesus talks about that leads to life, abundant life, good life, eternal life. And then there's this road that leads to death or destruction. It leads to like a half-life in this life. And it frankly leads to eternal death. And so he opens up for us this way of thinking about how we operate in this world. And I keep pivoting back and forth between the two. And one Sunday, I'll talk about things that are encouraging. And so a couple weeks ago, we were talking to the seniors, and we were talking about, you know, what does it take to live a good life? And when you get to the end of it all, how can you look back and know that was a life well lived. And then the week before that, we had been talking about the broad way, the way that leads to destruction. And for that specific day, we were talking about anger. But we've also talked about vanity, right? And today we're talking about greed. We are back on that broad road. It's one that leads to destruction.

And I hope over the course of all of these — these are the seven deadly sins that we're walking through — my hope is that over the course of all of these, you come to realize that as Jesus and scriptures are teaching us how to live a life, whether it's the Ten Commandments or the laws or the, quote, rules that the Bible gives us, they're not actually meant to squelch life. They're not meant to tsk, tsk, don't do this bad thing, you know, and question our morality or something like this. They're there to protect us. They are the guardrails on living a good life. And if you follow these rules, it actually increases your chance of living the life that you were meant to live and that how you're supposed to operate in this world. And it's the design that God has for your life.

And so as we talk about greed this morning, there are two ways you can think about it. It's a preacher getting up here yelling at you, don't be a greedy human being. But that's not the kind of preacher I am. Instead, I want to come at this as God has a better way for you. There's a better way of living a life than a greedy one. And this better way leads to fullness of life. And God wants that for you. I want that for you.

How Technology and Amazon Feed the Greed Inside All of Us

And then with all of this, I am trying to remind us of the ways in which our technology influences us. And I think there's a misconception out there — or maybe it's not even a misconception, maybe it's just like a blindness — that whatever we're doing online, whatever we're seeing on our computer screens, or maybe it's TV screens, or right on the phones in our pockets, that it's actually not really doing much to us at all. But the truth couldn't be more opposite.

When we talk about these two roads, it's easy to think of a road in real life, right? We've got roads all around us, and you can think about the ways in which we walk through the, quote, real world. And you can be a greedy person or a not greedy person in the real world. But the truth is this, and we need to come alive to this — what you're doing on your devices, when you spend time online, and each of us is spending more and more and more time online, it is shaping us. It is changing us. To go back to earlier sermons, it's making us more vain people, as your social media is driving you to want more likes from that post that you put online. Or anger — your social media is generating lots and lots of rage. This is how they get you to come back. It's one of the greatest tricks that they pull on you: if I can make them angry again, if I can make you think, oh, those bad people over there, you're going to come back to my device, to the app that I've created for you. And what they're doing is they're hacking us. They're hacking the deadly sins that plague all of us. And they know this quite well, and they do it anyway.

And so this morning, as we talk about greed, I would encourage you to think: how does my internet consumption change my desires? How greedy or not I am, like what I want in this world, what I think will bring happiness in this world. I've got Amazon up here as an example of a product that pumps greed in and through us. And why? Well, because you can get on Amazon — you can buy anything on Amazon now, it's both a miracle and an awful kind of miracle, whatever that might be called — and you can think, I want a new shirt, and you can find it, and you can click buy now, and within 24 hours, or pretty soon they'll have the drones coming and dropping at your door within a few minutes, and you can literally go from a thought or a desire to the actual product being in your hands within minutes. And boy, that's seductive, right? Boy, that's seductive. Why? Because you might think, yeah, if I just buy that shirt, well, then I'll be happy. Like, it'll fill this void. But man, if you've done that enough, then you know what? That shirt's not going to fill that void, is it? And so this is what we're talking about this morning. The ways in which greed and these pieces of who we are — they actually are an infection, and God wishes to heal us of these infections.

Before we begin, let's start with prayer. Heavenly Father, we come before you, and we give you thanks for Jesus Christ, our Lord, our Savior, the one who goes before us, who leads us down that narrow road, who has shown us how to live a life, who is teaching us how to live a life, and who has died for us and for our sins, to whom we give thanks and honor. But more than that, we give allegiance, and we say, Jesus, you are our God, and you say so, so we will follow you. We trust you. We trust you for life. We trust you for eternal life and for the forgiveness of our sins. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

Dante's Inferno and the Hungry Wolf: What a 700-Year-Old Poem Says About Greed

When I was in college, my sophomore year, I was at a place called Asbury College, and I was taking a class called Western Literature. And it is a class in which you read through the major pieces of literature in the Western canon. This is actually the class that I first met my wife in. Dr. Strait was the professor, and Dr. Strait was one of my favorite professors of all time. He, in fact, attended our wedding — a brilliant man. And one of the pieces that he had us read was called Dante's Inferno. Perhaps you've heard of it.

Just a few weeks ago, I decided, you know what? It's been about 20 years. I'm going to pick up Dante's Inferno again, and I'm going to try to read through this. And I have, and I've been enjoying it thoroughly. One of the reasons I wanted to read through it again was because he actually really digs into these deadly sins that we're talking about. And I was fascinated. This was written like 700 years ago. What might this man have to say to me, living in 2026, about any of these topics? And it turns out quite a lot.

So he begins the Inferno. The opening passages — like if you go home and do one thing here, this is a worthwhile read. He's a man in the middle of his life, which already started to ring a little too true. And he finds himself lost in a woods. And he's struggling to know what to do. And he's kind of darkened. And if you ask me, it sounds like he's in a midlife crisis. And he's wandering in this wood when he comes along three beasts.

He meets a leopard, and many think the leopard represents lust. And he's able to avoid this beast, and he kind of gets around it, only to meet a second beast. This one is a lion. And the lion is representative of anger and even violence. We've talked about this already. He manages to evade that. And these are not the two things that send him down into hell, into the inferno. It's the third one. He comes across la lupa — a wolf. And the wolf is described this way. It's bony. It is gaunt. You can see it's very hungry and sickly looking, and it's going to devour anything in its path. And Dante comes upon the wolf and cannot get around it, cannot outmaneuver it, cannot trick it. And so this wolf eventually leads him down into the inferno, where he is then guided by Virgil — if you've ever read it — through hell. And then back on the other side, has to get out of hell, up into purgatory, and eventually into heaven. But as he's heading into hell, he is driven there by the wolf.

The wolf almost certainly represents what we're talking about today, which is greed. You see, the wolf will devour, and it will devour, and it will devour, but it will never be satiated. It will never feel contentment. It will never experience a fullness. And so that wolf just wants more, and it wants more, and it wants more. But there is no such thing as enough.

This is what greed is. Greed is you looking at your 401k and saying, just a little bit more and then I'll feel good about my future. Or looking at your bank account and saying, just a few thousand dollars more and then we can do this. Or just a little bit more. Or it's maybe your salary and you're thinking to yourself, you know what would be great is a pay raise — if I could just, if I were making this, then, right? It's all of these ways in which we say, if I just had that one more thing. You're walking through the mall, if I had that suit, you know, I'd feel really good about myself and the trajectory of my life. And then the hungry wolf that sits inside of all of us is never satisfied with these, right? And there's always something more to consume. And this is precisely what greed is. It's the wolf in all of us. And Jesus is showing us this, and he's saying, don't try to feed that. It is a never-ending cycle, and it doesn't lead to life. It actually leads to a lesser life, a half-life, and eventually just destruction altogether, because that wolf will devour you.

Luke 12:13–21: The Rich Fool and the Question of What You've Actually Prepared

Let's take a look at our passage for today. This is Luke 12:13 to 21. In Luke 12, there's a few things happening. I really would like you to turn there with me. If you don't have your own Bible with you, there's one right in front of you. I would encourage you to open it up. We're in the Gospels. This is Jesus teaching, and he is showing us both the good way, but in this case, he's showing us the way of greed and this broad way that he's encouraging us not to go down.

It starts in verse 13. We'll start in 13, Luke 12. "There was someone in the crowd who said to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he said to him, man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?"

A couple things right off the bat. There's a guy coming — I can imagine someone, maybe one of you, coming to me and saying, hey pastor, tell my brother that he needs to split all of the possessions with me — and me saying, that's not my job. I'm not a judge, right? I'm not an arbitrator. But you did get one thing right. You called him teacher, rabbi. This is who he is, right? And so he takes this moment. He's like, I can't make this call for you. I'm no judge, but I am a teacher, and so I'm going to play my role here. I'm going to teach you something. The thing that you really need to be worried about anyway, because the inheritance is great and all. But as we talked about a couple weeks ago, you can gain the whole world and lose your soul. And this is what this man is about to do.

And so Jesus goes on and he says to them, "Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness. For one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." The word covetousness here in some of your translations is going to read greed, and it is precisely the word we're talking about this morning. Pleonexia is the Greek here — greed. Be on guard against all greed. And then he makes it very clear: your life is not about your possessions.

We have a saying in our family that is something along the lines of people over possessions. What matters most, right? If one of our kids breaks the toy of another child, yes, we try to make it right. But we try to also explain that people are more important than possessions. Greed will tell you the opposite. It will tell you that those possessions are really, really important to you, and you should be aggrieved and you should make sure you get that thing back. But people are always more important than possessions. And it turns out that one's life, as Jesus says, does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. And what I take him to be saying here is that the road to the fullness of life, to abundant life, is not about all the toys you acquire in this life. That is not the way. It may be fun to ride those jet skis. It may be fun to have all the newest and latest gadgets, but that is not the road to an abundant life.

And in fact, he warns us that the greedy life is one that is quite the opposite. And as I started, it is that ravenous wolf that will never be fully satisfied. But he goes on here, and so he starts to tell a parable in verse 16.

"He told them a parable saying, the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what should I do? I have nowhere to store my crops. And he said, I know, I will do this. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods."

Now let's be honest. Let's try to take the side of this man for a minute. If you come into a significant amount of wealth, what would you do? How would you behave in this circumstance? If you found yourself suddenly living in the ancient world in first-century Galilee, and you're a rich man, and you have a bunch of crops, and there's a bumper crop year — well, you've got to find some place to store those, right? It's the prudent thing to do. And it seems like he's doing the right thing according to much of our logic today. Much of the logic I would even espouse.

And I'll be honest, this sermon has been hard for me to pull together because there's this real fine line that sits between prudence on one hand — saving and being thoughtful about your future and making sure there's enough food in the barns for the years to come, which is certainly a good, godly thing — and then on the other side of the ledger is the sin we're talking about, which is greed, which is hoarding. And there might be people out there that actually need this food in that circumstance. And Jesus is clearly aiming at the sin side of all of this. And I don't want to take away the wisdom and the prudence side, but I do want us to get a little uncomfortable this morning and to ask ourselves, where are we hoarding when we could be giving? What is the status of our hearts as we build — whether it's our 401ks, our bank accounts, or our closets, or whatever it might be — what is the status of our hearts?

There are a few places in your scripture that tell us that the love of money is the root of all evil. And we talked about this this morning in the Sunday morning Bible study, and we said that it's not that money is the root of all evil, but the love of it is, which is what Jesus is getting after all the time. He's always asking you, what do you love? Where's your heart with this? We could have said the same thing — actually, he could have, or scriptures kind of do — about any of these deadly sins. If we're talking about lust, the love of sex is the root of all kinds of evil. And it's true, it is. Or the love of food is the root of all kinds of evil. It kind of is, right? And so if we love things in the wrong way, watch out. But the scripture is pretty clear that there's something different about money. That there's something about money and possessions. We want to hoard it and we want to glom onto it. We want to make sure we have it.

Jesus keeps going here and starts to explain a little bit why. And so in verse 19 he says, this is now the rich man — he gets called a rich fool, by the way — "I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat and drink and be merry."

Again, I feel bad for this guy a little bit. He just wants to retire, just like the rest of us, right? He just wants to know that there's enough food and there's enough money in his bank account for him to get to the end of his life. And now he can eat and drink and be merry and go to Cancun when he wants to and go to Europe when he wants to and he can do all the things and live this full life. And then Jesus comes along and delivers some bad news. And he says, "God said to him, fool, tonight your soul is required of you, and the things that you have prepared, whose will they be?"

And it's that part that should probably stop us. What have you prepared? We don't know the rest of the story. This is just a parable here. Jesus doesn't fill out the parable. But I take the assumption to be that this man was so focused in his life on the hoarding of goods and the hoarding of food and the hoarding of money that he didn't actually prepare other parts of his life for the things that matter. And he chose possessions over people. And he didn't give to those who were in need. And he didn't think about the things of God. And so Jesus says he dies this night and the soul is required of him. And he says, "So is the one who lays up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God." He has not been rich toward God like he should be.

Matthew 6:24–34: You Cannot Serve Both God and Money

Jesus tells something similar if we look in Matthew 6:24 and following. Keep your finger on the Luke passage, because I'm going to want to show you something in a minute. If you look at Matthew 6, this is the Sermon on the Mount. It's a classic Jesus teaching here about money and how to think about it all. And he says, "No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. He cannot serve God and money." Some of your translations say God and mammon.

What Jesus is getting at in this passage, and I think in the other one too, in the Luke one, is that in life we choose who we trust. And Jesus is always asking, who do you have faith in? Do you trust me, Jesus? Not me, Eric. But do you trust me, or do you trust you? And when you toss your lot into greed, you are saying, I trust me. I trust me to hoard the goods, to have enough, to get myself to the end of it all. That's who I'm trusting. And Jesus is saying, I need you to trust me. I need you to trust God. The God of all abundance has more than enough to give. We sang all about it this morning, by the way. Beautiful songs, great choices. It's all about gratitude, about the generosity of the Father, about his willingness to meet every single need that we might have.

But to live those lives is kind of hard, because the one thing we want is security. We want to know that everything is going to be okay. And Jesus is telling us you can trust the Father. He is a good, good Father, as we sang this morning.

The Same Teaching Follows Both Passages: Don't Be Anxious, Seek First the Kingdom

There's one little piece, and I said I wanted to show it to you. So hopefully you've got your fingers in Matthew 6 and in Luke 12. You see, Matthew 6 is this nice kind of teaching about money — and we didn't even read the parts before, but this is where he's saying, don't lay up treasures on earth, lay up treasures in heaven, right? And then the Luke passage we've already read. Both of them are followed by the exact same words of Jesus. They're words you've probably read before or heard about, and I'm going to read you the Luke version, but if you want to look at the Matthew version, you can see that they're the same teaching.

And so Jesus finishes these two teachings on money with a teaching on anxiety. And he says it this way. "Therefore, I tell you, don't be anxious. Don't be anxious about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will put on."

And this is exactly what greed is trying to do. It's trying to make you anxious. It's what the advertisers are doing on your social media, whether it's your television, whether it's the billboard as you drive down the street. They're trying to make you anxious to say, I don't actually have enough, right? Oh, if I just had that one more thing, then, then I'd be good. And Jesus is telling you, do not be anxious. Don't believe the advertisers. They are paid to lie to you. He's saying, don't be greedy. Don't give in to pleonexia or covetousness. Instead, don't be worried about what you'll eat or your body, about what you'll put on.

"For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens. They don't sow or reap. They don't have money. They don't have barns or storehouses, but God feeds them. And how much more valuable are you than the birds? And which of you, being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Or the lilies — imagine how they grow. They don't toil, they don't spin, they don't collect money. But I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And if God clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, how much more is he going to take care of your needs? Oh, you of little" — and here's the word — "faith."

He wants our faith. He wants our trust. And greed is coming at you saying the opposite. Trust no one. Trust yourself. Hoard. You can do this. And Jesus is saying, no. Trust. Have faith in the Father. Do not seek what you are to eat or drink or be worried, for all the nations of the world seek after these things. This is the broad way. And your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek what? His kingdom. And then all these other things, they get added. Seek first his kingdom.

Our Technology Is Designed to Feed the Deadly Sins, Not Fight Them

Our technologies, as I've been saying, they tell us a very different story. They are not designed to aid you and to help you in righteousness. They are not designed to lessen your anxieties. They are not designed to help you with your greed problem, or your lust problem, or your gluttony problem, or any of these problems. Instead, they're designed to actually feed them all. And so I would encourage us to be careful. Very careful about how we spend our time online and on our devices, because they are feeding things that they should not be feeding. And they often do so unwittingly. We're blinded to them. We just think it's part of the world, but it should not be, and it need not be.

The Tithe as a Weapon Against Greed

As far as greed, though — if there's one way that the church has consistently, over time, talked about combating greed in this life, it's the tithe. It's the tithe. And I know there's a lot of bad press out there about churches and tithing and the greediness and the rampant misuse of funds or whatever's out there. I don't know what you've experienced. But the true heart of what the tithe really is, and what it's supposed to be, is a weapon against the greed that sits in all of us.

And the weapon goes like this. The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. It is all God's. He created everything you've ever seen out here, everything you've ever smelled, touched, tasted — it's all God's. It was all created by God. You can take none of it with you, and everything you've received in your life, even no matter how hard you've worked in this life, it is still all a gift from God. That is step one.

Step two is the tithe itself, to say, you know what? I'm going to give some of this back to God as a way of voting with your pocketbook to say, I don't want to be a person who hoards. I don't want to be a person that is so self-reliant that I don't need God. But instead to say, God, this was yours anyway, so I'm giving it back to you. That is what a tithe is. And we put 10% on it typically, because that's what the word tithe means, a tenth. But the truth is this: some people should be way higher than that. And for some of you at different stages, it might be lower. But the goal of all of us should be to notch that up some over time. To trust more, and to trust more, and to trust more. And to be generous givers — and not just to the church, but out in the world. So that when someone comes to you and says, I need X, you say yes.

Luke 12 Closing: Fear Not, Little Flock — Where Your Treasure Is, There Your Heart Is Also

Jesus concludes this whole Luke passage in a way that I quite like, and it digs down one more layer deeper about our fears and our anxieties and how greed undermines all of this, and what Jesus wants for us. And he says, "Fear not, little flock. For it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, give to the needy, provide yourselves with money bags that don't grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that doesn't fail, where no thief approaches, no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart is also."

Let's pray. God our Father in heaven, we thank you for your many good gifts. You are teaching us the way of life, a way of abundant living, a way in which you shower your gifts upon us. Lord, our request this morning is that you teach us to be people of faith and trust, that we might trust you with all that we are, all that we own, all that we have in this life, and that we seek first the kingdom of heaven, and that we store up our treasures there. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

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What if Jesus' most demanding words are actually his most life-giving? On Senior Sunday, Pastor Eric unpacks three commands from Matthew 16 — deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me — and makes the case that this isn't a burden to bear but a blueprint for a life worth living. Science, biography, and Scripture all point the same direction: the people who grip their lives the tightest end up with the least, and the ones who give themselves away end up with everything that actually matters.

Meaning Over Happiness Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | May 17, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

What We’re Talking About

What Jesus would actually say in a commencement speech — and why it's harder and better than the usual advice
What "deny yourself" means, and the trap of thinking it means killing the passions God planted in you
Why doing hard things isn't punishment — it's the path to the life you actually want
The hedonic treadmill: what science finally caught up to tell us about pleasure, pain, and why your phone is making you miserable
How to follow Jesus wisely — and why who else you follow matters more than you think

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Matthew 16:24–26

May 17, 2026 — Senior Sunday

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest delivers a commencement address to the church's graduating senior class from Matthew 16:24–26. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" transformation series and addresses three commands Jesus gives his followers — deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me — and what each one means practically for young people stepping into adult life.

Opening: A Pastor-Dad Starts to Feel the Feels

Good morning. It's really nice to have the room fuller and to be with all of you who have gathered for this class of seniors. As I was sitting over here, I think I've made a grave error. I thought to myself, I'm going to do something a little different this morning. And Danny, despite what you said, my gift to you all is that this message will be a little shorter today. The grave error, though, is that I don't have notes to read, which I think was going to be fine until I was over here and thinking, this is not the morning to just...

Someone was asking me earlier, like, how do you feel about all this? Because I have a senior, in case you don't know. One of my seniors in the room here, one of the 11 — there's 11 of them — is mine. And the question was, how do you feel about that? I said, you know what? I feel fine. I've not had any time to process. I've just kind of been doing the thing. And then as I'm sitting over here, I'm starting to feel the feels. And I'm like, this could go terribly. So my hope is that it doesn't.

I'm going to talk to you all this morning, and they can listen, and this message is for you.

What Would Jesus Say in a Commencement Speech?

As I was thinking about what to talk about, the question popped into my head: if Jesus was asked to give a commencement speech, what would he do, right? What would Jesus do, WWJD? And, you know, if you were at the homeschool commencement yesterday, Dr. Yingling gave a very nice commencement speech. Let's go ahead and practice what he said. He said, you need to remember four things, right? They are — as we're kind of cheated — yes, lead courageously, and then the second was? Yes, accept responsibility. The third was? Reject passivity. Adam, can I just say, you did something right here. Three out of three so far. The fourth is? The most important one. Invest eternally. Yeah.

I went home from that, and I thought that was beautiful. And then I opened up the social media, and I saw that there's a musician named Eric Church. He gave a speech yesterday, and he was up there with his guitar, and he had six points, the six strings of the guitar. Each were their own point, and the bottom E string was that you need faith, and you need a belief in God, and this will see you through life. All of these would be great. But this is not how Jesus talks. And so he doesn't usually give us the six points to living the right life. As much as I would wish he did, by the way, I really do. But instead, he often talks in parables and enigmatically. He gives us things like we heard this morning: if you try to save your life, you'll end up losing it. And yet if you lose your life for his sake, you find it, right?

And so this morning, I want to give you some of what I think to be Jesus' wisdom. Again, as a dad who's in the middle of my life and have a few years under my belt now, and the thought of sending one of my own out into the world — what would I want to say to you? Like if this was my last chance and I never got to talk to you again, what would I want to say?

Before I do, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come this morning and we ask that your word is spoken here. Lord, we believe that you have something to say to these seniors especially, but to everybody in the room. God, we are on a path of some kind — a narrow path, prayerfully, one that leads to life. But some of us on that wider path that leads to destruction. And so Lord, this morning, as we think about the future that sits in front of us, let us choose wisely. Speak clearly. In Christ's name we pray, amen.

Matthew 16:24–26: Three Points for a Life Worth Living

I believe with all my heart that Jesus wants each and every one of you to live really full lives. When he promises us abundant life, I think he means it. When he promises us that this path, this narrow path, is one that leads to life, I think he means it. But it's narrow for a reason. And sometimes that narrowness gets so small, it feels like a tightrope, like you might fall off on one side or another.

And so with the shorter time that I have, Danny, I want to give you not the six strings of a guitar and not even the four. I'm going to go three. And I think they come straight from Jesus' word to us this morning. I'd ask that each of you open up to Matthew chapter 16. I want to show you what he says.

First of all, if we get to the end of the passage from today, which is verse 26, he offers a warning. And the warning is this. He says, what's the profit of a man if he gains the whole world, if he gets to the end of his life, and he has achieved everything. He is the king of it all. He's sitting on top of every throne, and he has all the money, and he has all the fame, and he's got whatever you've wanted in this life, but he has forfeited his soul. What does he profit? And of course, Jesus is saying nothing. And so what he's really talking about here is how do we live a life where we keep our souls intact? How do we live a life of integrity and character? How do we live a life that leads to life and fullness?

And I think he does give us a bit of a roadmap here. He gives us, we'll say, three things. Verse 24: "If anyone comes after me, let him" — and here's your three points — "deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." These are the three things. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.

Point One: Deny Yourself — What It Means and What It Doesn't Mean

We'll start with the deny yourself piece. For this, I want to tell you what it means and what it does not mean.

To deny yourself is to say that the world and human nature is such that the operational mode — like the mode you just start in — is selfishness. It's just how it works. We walk through the world in a way that is, I'm at the center of my own world, right? Wherever I go, there I am. I'm in the frame at all times, and there's no getting around that. And so it requires something of you to think about other people and to prioritize others and to put them ahead of yourself. And so when Jesus is saying to deny yourself, he's saying you need to find a way to love other people well and to think about others — whether it's your moms, and you're supposed to call them when you go off to college, whether it's your friends, whether it's your younger siblings or the people in your life that you meet that need you — you've got to find a way to bend outside of the frame that is our life, the selfish frame, and to think of others.

Here's, though, what deny yourself does not mean, and this one is very important to me, and I wanted to make sure I got it in here because I fell into this trap many, many times in my life. What deny yourself does not mean is to deny the passions of your life, the things that you love, the things that make you come alive, the things that God has rooted way deep down in you. God's put those there for a reason. And you don't need to deny those. You might need to train those and to make them proper loves, but you don't need to deny them. In fact, those might be the very gifts that God has given to you, that you are then supposed to give to the world.

Point Two: Take Up Your Cross — Doing Hard Things and the Hedonic Treadmill

The second thing that Jesus says is to take up your cross. Take up your cross. I've got two points on this one too.

There is the bigger sense of what this means. To take up a cross means to go to your death. It's a very sobering thought. Thankfully, as a preacher, I get to talk about sobering things, and so I want to take this moment to do so. I would encourage each of you to ask yourself in a very sincere way, maybe in a quiet moment: what would I be willing to actually die for? What would I die for in this life? Who would I die for? If you're entering into the military, you might really be asked this question. Your country, your family, your faith — what is it? For whom and for what would you be willing to take up your cross?

The second thing, though, is maybe lesser, but also very important, which is to say, Jesus is calling us to a life that costs something, that has some measure of pain to it, that has some measure of devotion. And you can do hard things. This is what I want you to know. You can do hard things. You need to do hard things in life. And there's something about the doing of the hard thing that actually makes you stronger and ready for the next harder thing until you've done that. And then you're at the next hard thing. And pretty soon, you're a whole lot stronger than you thought you were. And picking up your cross means doing the hard thing over and over and over again.

Jesus leads his disciples into some pretty hard places, and the Peter we meet in the Gospels and the Peter we meet in the letters of Peter are two very different people. The one is deeply immature. He's probably really young. He might be your age, and he does some really foolish things. But by the time he's at the end of his life and he's the fully mature Peter, he has done some very hard things in life. And if tradition has anything to say, he died a martyr's death just like his Savior did. You can do hard things, and you should do hard things.

I've got this whole bit about the hedonic treadmill, and you know what? I'm doing all right on time, so I'm going to say it. It goes like this. There's a way of living that seeks to just do the next pleasurable thing. Whether that thing is sitting on your phone, whether it's chasing some kind of fun thing out there, whether it's doing things you shouldn't be doing — maybe it's things that you think are harmless — but it's a life that seeks those pleasurable dopamine hits, okay?

The truth of your brain, and science has finally caught up to faith here, is that this is not sustainable. The hedonic treadmill goes like this. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure and pleasure and more pleasure and more pleasure. And to do so requires increasing amounts of pleasure, and that becomes unsustainable. And what really happens is you find the pleasure in the momentary hit of the dopamine, whatever that might be for you, and then the baseline of your life, the in-between spaces, gets lower, and then it gets lower again, and then it gets lower again. And this leads to things like depression and anxiety and just a general malaise.

The opposite of this is to do hard things. It's why when you work out, if you go to the gym and you push some weights around, in the moment you're doing the hard thing, and then what happens is there's this rush after the fact and you feel better about yourself, and your mind is clearer, and the world just seems like a better place. And it's because by doing the hard thing, you've actually pushed down the opposite way, but then the baseline of it all, the in-between places — it comes up. This is a very important lesson in life, because you can't just chase the pleasure and skip the pain. It's all one bundle together. And by doing the hard things of life, you actually make room for the more pleasurable experiences to even be received as such.

A couple weeks ago, I told a story or I had this illustration about a boy mowing the lawn with his dad. If you were here for it, it was awesome. And I forgot my prop again. The boy comes in from mowing the lawn with his dad. He did nothing — he had a plastic mower, if you weren't here for it. But he comes in, and he's sweating too. And the dad's sweating too. And they're both enjoying a glass of lemonade together. And they're both looking at that lawn, and the little boy is like, we did such a great job, dad. And there's something about the hard work of it all that makes that moment of the lemonade worth it completely.

Let me offer you two people. One person spends a lot of his life building a business — lots of late nights, lots of early mornings, lots of probably coffee involved, like sweat and no doubt some real tears in building this business and building this life. And then five and 10 and 15 years down the road, that business turns into something awesome. And he becomes a millionaire. And then there's this other person, and this person won the lottery. And they became a millionaire overnight. You tell me — those two people, the one who built the business and the one who won that million dollars overnight, which one appreciates that life that has been built for them? You know the answer, right? It's the one who worked for it. It's the one who put in the hours. It's the one who was doing the hard thing, was receiving some of the pain. But then the pleasure on the backside of it all — this was worth every minute because now this person has built a life. And so part of this is picking up your cross — being willing to do the hard thing.

Point Three: Follow Jesus — and Be Careful Who Else You Follow

But I'd be neglectful if we didn't say the third part, which is actually part of the cross bearing, which is the third thing that Jesus says here: to follow him. To follow him. I have two things I want to say about this.

One is to follow Jesus is exactly what he's talking. He's not just talking about following some divine source out there. He's talking about Jesus has a way for you. And the message that I've been trying to give to you for the last 18 years of your life is that the Jesus way is a way worth walking. It's a path that you are intended to walk down. And if you walk it well, then it will lead to life. It won't preclude all the hardness that I've talked about. The cross bearing is still real. All of that is still real. But the meaning of life will be abundant at that point.

And then the second thing goes along with following. And it, again, is a lesser point here, but it's really important. Because here's the truth. You're going to follow someone in life. You're actually going to follow many people in your life. And I need you to be very careful about who you trust. Who do you entrust yourself to? Who do you entrust your mind to? Walk in a discerning way. Follow discerningly. But you'll follow somebody. So find the right people to trust. I would encourage you to find people with character. People who love you. People who have a certain amount of humility about them. But people who have lived a life that you would want to actually live. That you would be proud of living. Follow those kinds of people.

A Word from a Dad Who Got Lucky

I've said my three points. And so there's just one more thing to say. I am proud to be your dad. And I'm proud to be your pastor. I don't know how I got this lucky in life. My life has been winding and it's been its own path. But to find myself here in the middle of my life, standing on a stage, getting to talk to 11 amazing seniors who have awesome lives waiting in their future — God has given me an amazing thing. And I want amazing things for each of you. I believe God has amazing things in store for each of you. And I would just encourage you to walk the path with integrity, to keep your souls intact, to follow his ways.

Let's pray together. Father in heaven, we thank you for these students, these young men and these young women. Lord, they are a gift from you. They are a gift to me. They are a gift to this church. They are a gift to these parents, their families. And Lord, I am looking forward to what you are going to do with these fresh young lives. They very well might change the world. There are 11 of them, just like the 11 disciples who were following you, and they changed the world. And so, Lord, my prayer is that each of these 11, these disciples of Christ, that they walk the way with a steadiness, that they choose you every time. And we ask that you prepare the way for them. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

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Anger is the one vice that almost always believes it's a virtue. We rage, we seethe, we simmer — and we're usually convinced we're completely justified. This Sunday we're taking a road trip through Scripture to look honestly at the fire inside us: what it's telling us, where it goes wrong, and what it looks like when it burns the way God intended.

Anger Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | May 10, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

This Sunday we’re exploring:

Why the object of our anger tells us more about ourselves than the thing we’re angry about
When anger is righteous and when it is not, and how to tell the difference
What the Bible actually says about God's anger, and why the God who is "slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love" is not the same God many of us grew up fearing
The “HOT” diagnostic — three questions to ask when the fire rises: is the Heat of my anger proportionate, is the Object of my anger right, and is the the Time I’ve held onto anger appropriate?
How social media has industrialized anger as a commodity to be bought and sold
We’re exploring the following passages: Mark 3:1–6 · Genesis 4:3–7 · Exodus 34:6 · Psalm 30:5 · Micah 7:18 · Jonah 4:1–9 · Nehemiah 5:6–7 · Proverbs 16:32 · Matthew 5:21–22 · 1 John 3:15 · Ephesians 4:26–27 · Psalm 4:4 · James 1:19–20 · Romans 12:19

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Mark 3:1–6; Matthew 5:21–22; Exodus 34:6–9; Jonah 4

May 10, 2026 — Mother's Day

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on anger and wrath as part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" transformation series on the seven deadly sins. Drawing from Mark 3, Genesis 4, Exodus 34, Jonah 4, and Matthew 5, this sermon takes the congregation on a biblical tour of what Scripture says about anger — the difference between righteous and unrighteous anger, what Jesus' own anger reveals about the nature of God, and how to keep the fire in the fireplace.

Announcements: Bridge Walkers and a Joint Service on May 31st

Good morning, friends. It's good to be with you. Before we get started, there's just a couple things I want to say. There's something that I haven't alerted you to yet, but this is as good a time as any. So a few weeks ago, right before Easter, I was invited into a group of pastors who met over the course of two days, and there was an evening together. We stayed at a hotel. There was a grant connected to it. And it was a group of white pastors and a group of black pastors in the area here, in the Virginia, D.C., Maryland area. And the hope of this — it's a group called Bridge Walkers, which gets its name from the walk from Selma to Montgomery back in the 60s. And as somebody who lived right outside of Selma in Marion, Alabama, I know the scene well. In fact, I was there at the 50th anniversary of it in 2013, and it was a really powerful event. And so the meeting was one that I definitely wanted to participate in. And as we gathered together, we had some really frank discussions about race in the United States and in the church, and how we can be, as a church, agents of reconciliation.

And so the fruit of this and the hope of where this all goes is for our churches of these pastors to do some things together over the coming year or two. And so the first of these is coming up May 31st, which happens to be the exact same day as the picnic. I did not get to pick this, it just kind of happened this way, which is in part why we are holding the picnic immediately after the service. And Jeff was right. I will be dressed for the part, and I need you to be dressed for the part too. The picnic will be fun. We'll have games. We'll drag stuff out. But then we wanted to give enough time for those of you who would like to attend this service to get home, maybe take a nap, or do whatever you do on your Sunday afternoons. And then at 6 p.m., it's up in Glen Arden, Maryland, we will have the first of these services together. I don't know what to expect, but I do expect that God will move, and I expect the Holy Spirit to be present, and I expect some of our preconceived notions to be challenged. I expect transformation is always beckoning us, and I am deeply hopeful for what might come out of this. So put that on your calendar. This is May 31st, just right around the corner, and it is 6 p.m. that evening.

Happy Mother's Day: A Childhood Binder and a Mom Who Saw All of You

Today is Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day to the mothers and the spiritual mothers in the room. I was trying to think of what to say at this point, and what came to mind was a collection of photos that I found from my childhood that my mom had gathered together. It was one of those binders that back in the 1998 time frame when I graduated from high school, that people would put photos into and they'd put words about what was happening at that time. And my mom was way into this. And so she chronicled my whole childhood from zero to 18 and then presented me with this big binder. And now as a father of an 18-year-old, I think about that a little differently.

And I think about what it means to be a dad, only because I can't think about what it means to be a mom, because I'm not one. But I know this much on the receiving end of it all. I had a wonderful mom who looked after me in ways that I don't think I'll ever be able to fully appreciate. She saw every last bit of me and who I was, and she was there every step of the way, even if I didn't realize it. And so for all the moms in the room, I am grateful. We are all grateful. And for those of us who have moms who are still alive, may we reach out to them today and give them the thanks that they deserve.

Let's begin with some prayer. Heavenly Father, I pray a special prayer of blessing over the mothers in this room today. Lord, the kind of love that you call us into, that agape love, a self-giving kind of love, I can think of no better human example than what mothers do on a day-to-day basis for their children. And so, God, may we all aspire to that. We give you thanks for them, and we give you praise for that kind of love, and may we be drawn into being those kinds of people too. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

The Jesus Way Series: Vanity, the Seven Deadly Sins, and Today's Stop — Anger

All right, we are — if you don't know — we are on a road together, a path, right? And this began a few weeks ago. Well, I mean, it kind of began a long time ago, but we're on this transformation kick. But then since Easter, we've been walking in these two ways. And I've been trying to show you that there is this narrow way, right? It's the way that Jesus is drawing us into. It's narrow because fewer people choose it. It's a little hard. There's more friction to it. It requires something of you to be on it. But it is the way to life and to fullness of life and to eternal life. And this is what Jesus is trying to get us to do. But then there is this other way. There's this broad way. It's bigger and wider, and it's much easier to find yourself on it. And it's marked by a number of things.

And so two weeks ago, we talked about vanity as one of the markers of this way. And it's easy to just kind of slide into vanity. And then today, we're talking about the broad way again. And I want to talk about anger. And I know it's Mother's Day. So apologies ahead of time for this. I do want you to know there was a toss-up between this and gluttony. And so I put gluttony on Father's Day. So, you know, you can get ready for that too. And I'll say, all of the analogies are aimed at the men in the room today. So all the stories — you know, like I'm looking at guys here — women, you get the day off. So you're welcome.

All right, so just clarify a couple things up front. I originally had the name wrath for this sermon, and I was afraid that it might draw up like the wrong image for you. But here's the truth of the matter. The word anger and the word wrath — actually, it's the same thing. The roots of these are the same, like the down deep parts of it. They're just two different words for the same thing.

The goal of what I want to accomplish in this sermon today is to really lean into the middle section of this rotten tree that stands before you. We've already touched on vanity, the far left, and we'll get to each of these branches at some point over the weeks here. And then just to remind you, at the base of all of this is your pride and your ego. It's kind of the thing that is the last thing that will die in this earth, right? Because if you could just simply root that part out, then it would take care of the rest. But pride is much trickier than simply just plucking it out like a weed. It has roots that go much deeper than you or I can really frankly imagine. So today we're just focusing on the middle one. We're talking about wrath or anger.

And I have thoroughly enjoyed this. Maybe I enjoy it too much. I'm realizing this right now as I said that. I have like a thousand things I want to tell you, and I will only tell you maybe ten of those. And so if you think to yourself, well, Pastor Eric, I wish you had talked about this — I probably could have and maybe should have. But I'm glad that you're leaning in and you're really digging into what you need to know about anger and wrath. Also, it's a pitch to come to Sunday morning Bible study where we do go deeper for a whole hour on this topic.

The goal of the sermon is, with the theme of roads and ways and all, to take you on a tour — like a driving tour of your Bible — and the things that it has to say about anger. Think of it this way. We've got a few key destinations I'm trying to get us to. And then as we go to those destinations, there's like bathroom stops I want to point us at, or maybe just a couple things that you should have in your view as we head to these main stops.

First Stop — Mark 3:1–6: Jesus Gets Angry in the Synagogue

The first stop is the one we read already, which is Mark chapter 3. And so I'd encourage you, please, open your scriptures, open your Bibles to Mark chapter 3 as we dig into what Jesus demonstrates for us about anger. Mark 3:1 to 6. Again, he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, come over here. And then he said to the Pharisees, he said, is it lawful? Does the law permit? Does your Bible tell me that it's okay to do good or harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill it? He's asking them, how do you read your Bible? What's the right thing to do here? But they were silent.

And then he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he said, I'm going to teach you how to read your Bible. And I'm going to teach you what it looks like to keep the Sabbath. And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. And the Pharisees went out and they immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him how to destroy him.

There are two angry parties here. Jesus gets angry and clearly the Pharisees do as well as they seek to destroy him by the end. There are just a few things that I want to point to in this passage that will become important. And the goal as we make these stops on this journey together is to maybe build up a case of the kinds of things we can say about anger based on what we find in our scriptures.

The first would be simply that Jesus does get angry. And it's actually okay for you to be angry too sometimes — with a huge caveat around it. Because anger is actually one — it's the only sin on the list of the seven deadly sins — that it's okay to, we'll say, participate in when it's not a sin. The sin looks a whole lot like the not-sin. It's the only one that looks like this. Knowing how to distinguish between the sinful version of anger and the righteous version of anger, it takes wisdom and it takes maturity. I don't recommend it to the littlest ones among us. It's a little bit like holding a knife. Like, you want to teach someone how to do this and to train them well, or they're going to do what? They're going to cut someone, maybe themselves. And anger is much the same way. And we need to learn how to use it in a controlled manner.

But Jesus does get angry. And then I'll say this about his anger. If you read closely, what is he angry at? It's actually remarkably precise here in Mark. He's angry at their hardness of heart. He's not precisely angry at them, just generally, as if Pharisees are awful people or something like this. No, he's angry at something specific. The object that he's directing his anger at is their hardness. There's something in them. And he says there's something really wrong with that. And it provokes some anger in him.

The other thing I'd say is that his anger is connected to justice, which is what anger is always connected to, by the way. Usually — well, actually both in the righteous form and the unrighteous form. When something's gone wrong in the world, righteous anger says, something's wrong with the world, and I want to fix it. When anger is unrighteous, usually you're saying, something's wrong with my world, and I want to fix that.

The last thing I'd say about this passage is maybe the most important of them all, which is that if you really look closely at verse 5 there, it says this: he looked around at them with anger, grieved. Two emotions are sitting together — anger and grief. Anger and grief. How does one have anger and grief sitting side by side? Well, the only way is if you manage to find empathy for the one you are angry with. It's when moms and dads say it — and I promise they mean it, kids — when they say, this is harder for me than for you. Well, they mostly mean it. I feel grief over having to discipline. I feel grief because I want your world to be right. And Jesus here is feeling grief for the Pharisees, saying, I wish your hearts were not so hard. I could teach you a better way. I could teach you a way to life.

Thumos and Orge: Two Greek Words for Anger in the New Testament

All right, let's keep going on our journey here. Actually, let me pause one more minute. This is a good opportunity to introduce two words that appear in our New Testament. Both of them are words for anger, and they are thumos and orge. It's a hard G. We're still talking about the sin of anger here. Thumos and orge.

I want you to think about anger as a fire. This is the metaphor for anger often. And fire, much like a knife, is something that can do damage or it can do good. Thumos is the damaging kind. It flames up quickly. It's the road rage. It's somebody getting upset, right? And it's named specifically in Galatians 5:20 and Ephesians 4:31, if you want to look those up. Galatians 5:20 is right next to the fruit of the Spirit. You know the fruit of the Spirit? These are the ones we love to talk about. But there's the fruit of the flesh right before it. And in this fruit of the flesh is thumos. It's that anger that rages up, right? This is what we're trying to avoid.

But the one next to it is orge. And orge — sometimes it is unrighteous anger, it's not always righteous — but it is a controlled anger. It has some measure of control around it, as I say, a controlled burn, right? There are times where if there's a fire in your fireplace, that's a great thing, and it's controlled. But if that fire jumps out of your fireplace and is uncontrolled and creeps up the walls, now we've got a different kind of problem. Our goal today is to learn how to keep that fire in the fireplace.

Pit Stop — Genesis 4:3–7: Cain's Anger and the Sin Crouching at the Door

All right, we'll move on. We need to take a quick pit stop, however, on this journey and look at Genesis chapter 4, verses 3 to 7. This is the famous story of Cain and Abel. You probably know what happens to Abel and then maybe to Cain. Cain murders his brother. But before he does, we read a little bit about how this gets set up.

In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering. But for Cain and his offering, he did not

And so what happens? Well, Cain was very angry, and here we see the burning starts, right? The fire begins to burn. And Cain's face fell, and the Lord said to Cain — the question you should be asking yourself this morning — which is, why are you angry? Why are you angry? When you get angry, why? What is under that for you? It's a very good question. And why has your face fallen? And then he says — God says to him — if you do well, won't you be accepted? And if you do not do well, and here's the key, "sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must master it."

And what is the sin here? The sin is anger, and it's burning in him. And he says, you must master it, you must keep this in the fireplace. And if you don't keep this in the fireplace, it's going to destroy everything. We know exactly what happens. The sin that was crouching does what? It leaps out of that fireplace, and Cain kills his brother. And we have the first murder in all of Scripture.

Murder is a terrible sin. It's actually not one of the deadly sins, is it? It's not one of the seven. Because underneath murder — and Jesus teaches us this in Matthew 5 — underneath murder sits the thing that's in our heart. We call that anger.

Second Stop — Exodus 34:6–9: God Reveals His Nature as Slow to Anger

All right, the next stop on our tour is Exodus chapter 34, verses 6 to 9. I would encourage you, go ahead and pull your Bibles there now. Exodus 34:6–9. This is where Moses is up on the mount, Mount Sinai. He's getting the Ten Commandments. But in this very important scene, God reveals his nature to him. And he tells us, and he reports to us, what kind of God he is.

And I'll say God is angry at times. God can have wrath. I do not deny this, and I don't want to even diminish this in any way. But I'd encourage you as we read through this to recognize a very important fact — that even for God, maybe especially for God, who is perfection and the thing that we are trying to strive for — God's wrath and anger flows from his love. Love is the primary, and out of that flows his anger. You might wonder, well, Eric, how in the world does that work? That doesn't seem obvious to me at all. But I would point us back to maybe Mother's Day or the fathers in the room. When you get angry as a parent, like in a good way, a good angry, when you see your child being hurt by somebody and that mama bear rage wells up — why? Because you want to protect your child. An injustice has happened or is about to happen and you want to protect them. God is not dissimilar. He knows what is good for us. He knows when the world is off kilter. He knows when you are off kilter. And he knows that when it is and when you are, that this is destructive to you. And he wants to save you from your destruction. And we call this anger. And it's him maybe punishing or reaching out and trying to fix the situation. And sometimes — and parents know this — the discipline requires something harsh.

So it goes like this in verse 6. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed. And this is what the Lord is saying about himself. "The Lord, Yahweh" — and he says it twice, Yahweh, Yahweh — "I am a God who is merciful and gracious, and I'm slow to anger." And there it is, right? I'm not quick to anger. I am slow to anger. I am gracious. I'm merciful. I'm slow to anger. I abound in this. The word here is hesed. It's a steadfast love. It is a love that never quits. It is like a mother's love — like, you can do all kinds of things, but your mom is just going to love you throughout and throughout and throughout. And this is what God is saying of his very self, that he has this kind of hesed love, a steadfast love, of faithfulness. And he keeps steadfast love for thousands. And more than that, he's forgiving. And he forgives all the kinds of words for sin that appear in your Old Testament. Sometimes we call it iniquity, sometimes transgression, and sometimes sin. And he says, I'm willing to forgive all of these things.

He then does go into the fact that he is a just God, and there needs to be justice. And so he says he doesn't clear the guilty just by virtue of wiping it away. And he, in fact — and this needs some explanation, and fortunately this is going to have to wait for another day — he visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children so that the third and the fourth generation, they sometimes feel the effects of the father's sin. I think you know this to be true just if you look through your family history and you think about your father and his father and his father and the ways in which their failures have a way of creeping through a family line. I think that's what God is teaching us here.

And so Moses quickly bows his head toward the earth and he worshiped and he said, "If now I have found favor in your sight, oh Lord, please let this God — let you, God, the one who is merciful and slow to anger — that is the God we need in our midst. Because we're a stiff-necked people and we need you to pardon our iniquity."

This is a remarkable passage in its historical context. There are lots of gods in the ancient world, if you don't know. There's a group that's praying to a God named Asherah at this point. And that God happens to be really good at fertility matters. Or there's the folks who are crying out to Baal. And Baal is one of these like really fickle gods who may get angry with you and then doesn't. And you never know who you're going to get with Baal. Or if you fast forward in time, you might get the God of Mars, who is the God of war. And that's the God you're going to meet in the pages of history.

But this God, Yahweh, is unlike all the other gods. There is no other God named in history, certainly at this point, who describes himself in the ways that our God describes himself. This description literally changes the course of history. Because we should look to our God, to this God, and say to ourselves, thanks be to God that you are the God who is all of these things, and especially the God who is slow to anger.

This passage is, again, as I said, one of the most important in all of the Old Testament, and we know this with certainty because — I've just got a couple here, Psalm 30 and Micah 7 — but you could do a Google search later on how many passages from the Bible as a whole, but especially our Old Testament, appeal to and quote from Exodus 34, and you'll be amazed. The Bible repeats this part of the Bible over and over and over again. Psalm 103, Nehemiah 9, Psalm 86, Joel 2 — or the next stop on our journey, Jonah chapter 4.

Third Stop — Jonah 4: HOT Anger and Everything Jonah Gets Wrong

Let's turn there together. Jonah chapter 4. Jonah is a troubled prophet. I would encourage you, whatever you do, do not look to Jonah as an exemplar. He will let you down. Jonah is one of these — actually he's the only prophet who I can really say that about. The whole book is an upside-down prophet. He's not doing what he should be doing, and he's doing what he should not be doing, and we see this ever so clearly in chapter 4 here.

We'll read it. For the sake of time, I'm not going to spend nearly as much time in it, but what we see is an angry prophet. Now, prophets are actually often angry. You should know this. The other prophets are too. They're just angry, typically in the righteous kind of way, because again, if justice is the name of the game for anger — the prophets are looking out and they're seeing injustice and unrighteousness everywhere. And they're shouting at their people, you got to fix this. And they're angry with them. And they say, the world's not right, and it should be. And you need to be doing something about it. Jonah is angry as well, much like the prophets. But he is, we'll say, more self-centered than he should be.

And so it goes like this. If you don't know the story of Jonah, the lead up to this point is that he has taken his word of disaster to the Ninevites, and he has said, you need to repent. And they said, okay, we will. And they did. And then God relents, and he does not destroy them. And Jonah is not pleased with this.

Chapter 4, starting in verse 1: "It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry." There you go. It's just kind of on the face of it. He's displeased. He's angry. What's he angry about? That God was the merciful God. He wanted the war God, the wrath God. He wanted Mars. He wanted Baal. But instead, he got Yahweh. And he prayed to the Lord. And he said, "Oh Yahweh, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish." If you don't know that part of the story, he didn't even want to go to Nineveh at all, and so he fled. And so he says, this is why I left. I didn't want to come here. And then he just says it outright. "I knew you were a gracious God. You were merciful. You are slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster." He said, this is why I didn't want to come. I was looking for Mars. I was looking for the God of war. I wanted you to come in and destroy this whole place. And I knew, I knew you wouldn't do it.

Jonah's upset. Does he have a righteous anger? Let's all say it together. No. No, he doesn't. He's showing us all the wrong ways. And he goes on: "Therefore now, Lord, please take my life from me." Twice he's going to ask for this — "for it's better for me to die than to live." And then God asks him the same question, or a similar question to the one Cain gets, right? Do you do well to be angry? Again, the question maybe you're being asked right now. Do you do well to be angry?

And Jonah went out of the city, and he sits east of the city, makes a booth for himself there. He sat under the shade till he should see what would become of the city. And the Lord God appointed a plant to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head to save him from the discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of this plant. But when dawn came the next day, God appoints a worm that attacks the plant and it withers. And when the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that again he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live. And God asks another time, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And Jonah says, yes. Wrong answer, Jonah. But he says, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

And the Lord said — and here's the convicting part — he says, you're angry about all the wrong things. Your anger is an unrighteous anger. You're targeting the wrong targets. You are not upset about what I get upset about. Your anger is self-serving. This is what he's saying when he says in verse 10: "You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. But shouldn't I have pity on Nineveh, a great city in which there are more than 120,000 souls? Shouldn't I care about that? Shouldn't I have pity on those people? And shouldn't you too, Jonah?"

And then the story ends very abruptly. It's kind of one of these where you feel like maybe there's a missing chapter somewhere and someday we'll uncover it. But for today, this is what we get.

Diagnosing Your Anger: The HOT Framework — Wrong Heat, Wrong Object, Wrong Timing

There's a few things from this that I want to kind of put into your cap to maybe help you remember something about anger that will help you diagnose it later on. I'm calling this HOT — H-O-T — hot, Jonah's hot anger.

So there's the wrong heat, which is to say the wrong heat level. He gets too angry about the wrong things. His anger is the wrong intensity — he gets so angry about this plant. But he's not angry about the right things with regard to the people. And then the wrong object, right? The wrong object of his anger. So he's angry not about what is just or unjust. He's instead angry at God. He's angry at God's mercy and ultimately at the loss of this plant. He's very interested in this plant. And then lastly, the timing of it all is wrong. He stays angry for too long and it burns for too long. He's still upset about leaving Tarshish. He brings that back up, right? That was sitting somewhere in his heart that he didn't even want to go at all. And so he's mad at God for taking him out of Tarshish and his own land and heading over to Nineveh. And he's holding this grudge.

But all of this speaks something to your anger and my anger, which is sometimes our anger is too hot for the situation. And when the kid spills the milk at the table and you blow up — is that the right heat level? No. No, it's not. The object of our anger — maybe you do blow up at the table, Dad. And you get angry with the kid in that moment. But that's not even the object of your anger. You're angry from work earlier that day where your boss said something to you that you didn't like. And now you're upset generally speaking, and then when the kid spills the milk, you yell at him. That is not the object of your anger. Don't take it out on him. Or the timing of it all — maybe you've been holding this grudge for years, and you've just been gathering it over time. This is why we need to forgive, and we need to reduce our resentments. And if we are going to walk this Jesus way, the way that leads to life, it is going to require some wisdom around all three of these things.

Final Stop — Matthew 5:21–22: Jesus on Anger, Murder, and What's Sitting in Your Heart

All right, one more stop on the way. This one's Matthew 5:21 and 22. This is Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is perhaps the passage maybe I should have preached from, so I am. "You have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry" — and there Jesus is just calling it out for us, even if you've got anger in your heart — "will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says you fool will be liable to the hell of fire."

There's a lot in this passage. A lot can be said, so I'll just keep it simple. If anger is sitting at the root of this and it's sitting in our hearts, there are any number of fruit that can come out of that anger. Sometimes it's murder. I hope that's not the case for any of us. But sometimes it's just calling someone, you fool, you idiot. Or maybe it's just the rolling of your eyes at that person you think is an idiot. Or maybe it's you online. Maybe it's what you're saying in the comment box, right? To say, you don't know what you're talking about. And it's a self-righteous kind of anger. And it sits there and it burns.

And here's what I'd say about all this. There is a destruction that is happening. Jesus calls this the way of destruction for a reason. Because you are aiming at God, believe it or not, when your anger is unrighteous. Because you are saying, the world is not as it should be, and I don't trust God to fix it. So I am going to fix it myself. And then the damage you're doing is all around you too. This one's a little more obvious — if you walk through the world and you're an angry person, constantly throwing barbs at other people, you are affecting them. You are changing the climate of the room when you just simply walk into it. But then also, what may be missed is that you — you are destroying yourself from the inside out.

And it may actually feel good to be angry. I learned this. I didn't realize. I am a non-confrontational person by nature. I don't like conflict. But I have learned over the years some people love conflict. They actually like the fight. To them, it feels good. It feels like you're alive. But what's happening in that situation, and really any situation where anger is burning within you, is that from the inside out, you are being hollowed out.

Three Antidotes to Anger: Soft Answers, Lament, and Hope

There are some antidotes to anger, and I will keep these brief, and three. One, Proverbs 15:1 tells us that a soft answer turns away wrath. Jesus teaches us the gentle way, the gentleness, gentle startups. This is always the first step forward. Anger might come way down the road, right? But you need to be slow to it.

Number two, lament. Learn to grieve like Jesus grieves in Mark 3. Learn to grieve even alongside your anger. And I would encourage us mere mortals — unlike Jesus, us mere mortals — we should probably start with grief and allow the anger to follow, because it's going to be a much more trustworthy form of anger if we do.

And the last thing is hope. Hope. You see, the angry person, as they rage at God — Jonah, as he rages at God — ultimately is saying, I don't trust you, God. I don't trust your way to be the right way. But we need to be people of hope and people of faith who trust that even though it seems like the world is all cattywampus — and it is, like it's all upside down — we hope and we trust that the God of the universe is fixing all the things. And we play our part. And we live as people who expect the unrighteous to receive their due reward and for the wrongs to be made right again. And that we only have control over ourselves and our hearts. And so we better take control of them, lest that fire jump out of the fireplace and begin to burn the house down all around us.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, you are a passionate God. We are to be passionate people. And some of the angriest among us can show us something about what it means to have passion. But God, it can be dangerous to hold that fire. And so, Lord, we ask for your wisdom. We ask for people who will gather around us and be honest with us about the nature of our anger — whether it's the slow-burning anger that leaps out of the fireplace eventually, or whether it's the kind that just flares up all the time. God, you are teaching us a better way, a narrow way, a way that leads to life. May we walk with you down that. Lord, we pray this in your holy name. Amen.

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Bartimaeus was blind, broke, and sitting on the side of the road. His desperation led him to shout past the crowd—who were telling him to shut up—and to get the attention of the one who could do something. This Sunday we're talking about the kind of bold, persistent, holy-hustle faith that refuses to stay seated and discovers that Jesus is already waiting, already asking, already wanting to hear all about how he can answer your deepest needs.

What Do You Want? Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest | May 3, 2026 Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

This Sunday we’re exploring:

Why faith is not passive and what bold, persistent faith actually looks like in practice
The question Jesus asks twice in Mark 10, and why he answers it differently each time — What do you want?
Why the version of Christianity that tells you to want nothing and need nothing is unbiblical and antithetical to the Jesus way
How sacred striving and holy hustle are not opposed to grace but the key that unlocks the grace that awaits you
How the mature follower of Jesus knows who they are, knows what they need, and is satisfied with the God’s answers to their requests

Listening online? Let us know. * Sermon Transcript What Do You Want? — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Mark 10:46–52

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on the healing of blind Bartimaeus from Mark 10:46–52. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" transformation series and addresses the question Jesus asks Bartimaeus — "What do you want me to do for you?" — exploring what it means to bring our deepest desires to God, why active faith matters, and how to pursue the abundant life with what Pastor Eric calls "holy hustle."

Opening Prayer: The Hope and Possibility That Children Represent

Heavenly Father, I thank you for these children, for the life that they represent, the energy, the possibility, the hope of their future. They are a reminder to us all, the adults in the room, of just what is possible when we give our lives over to you. And so, Lord, today we do so again, and we ask that you speak to us right here, right now. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

What Do You Desire from God? A Question That Broke a Pastor's Brain

A few years ago, I was part of a small group of pastors. We met about once a month, and it was over Zoom, and in the first meeting that we had together, it was in person, and it was for a full day. And during this full day session, we really got to know each other well. We hadn't really met each other prior to this, and so there was just a lot of sharing, a lot of honesty, and then periodically in the meeting, we would be given a prompt that we would then have to go journal about for about 30 minutes or so.

The very first prompt that we were given and we were supposed to go journal about was really quite simple. And it's a question, which is: what do you desire from God? What do you desire from God? And I remember I took the question, and I still have the journal, and I went off to my own little place, and I wrote the question at the top of the journal, and I sat there, and I felt like my brain was breaking, because despite 40 years of living on this earth at that point, I had never really asked that question. Like, I was always tuned to ask, what does God want, right? What does God desire from me? And I think this is a very good question, too, but they were asking me to think about, what do I desire? Like, what do I want in this life?

And this is the question Jesus asks to Bartimaeus today — what do you want from me, is what he asks him. And it's the question I think you should be asking of yourself. And the truth is this, right? Even if you say, well, I don't have a desire, or I'm not supposed to have one — it's always there. It's lurking underneath. You're just kind of squashing it down. There are things sitting in your heart right now. You just simply need to be honest about them, and you need to bring them to God, and you need to see, like, God, is this what you desire? And then we tune our desires with the desires of God. And God may say, as he said to Bartimaeus, a big yes, be healed. And he may say no. And we must learn what it means to receive both of these answers.

But with this sermon, my hope for you today is that as we continue down this path together of the Jesus way, the abundant life way, we get serious about what it is that we actually want ourselves in this life, but then we do something about it — that we don't just sit still and we don't wait for the thing to happen and we sit on our hands and do nothing. We actually then pursue and we proceed to go somewhere.

Mark 10:46–52: Blind Bartimaeus on the Road to Jericho

Jesus is asking Bartimaeus today, what is it that you want me to do for you? And I actually think God is asking this same question of each of us. What do you want me to do for you? The truth is this: it's obvious that only you can live your life. No one's going to live it for you. God's not even going to live your life for you. And so part of being a follower of Jesus and finding our way down that path toward abundance is walking with an active kind of faith — moving and doing, pursuing, working in the world. And as we do so, coming back to God regularly, daily, asking God, is this what I should be doing in the world? Use me today for your ends.

Let's go ahead and pick up Mark. If you've got your scriptures, we're in Mark 10:46 to 52. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's definitely one in the pew back, and I would encourage you to pull that out right now.

Jesus is nearing the end of his life. He's heading out of Jericho and actually into Jerusalem for the very last time, and this is where we pick him up. It says:

"They came to Jericho, and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside."

I really want you to envision this scene. I want you to put yourself into it. I want you to be Bartimaeus. I want you to sit there blinded for decades. I want you to be the beggar on the side of the road who is desperate. And then you know who Jesus is, and he's walking by. I want you to ask yourself what you would do in this situation.

We continue in verse 47: "When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Have mercy on me." And he cries out. Oh, you might do this too, right? You might cry out and you know this is your one shot. You're going to shoot your shot and you are going to find that man that can actually do something.

But then there's probably some of you in the room who might think, well, he's a very important person and he's got other big things that he needs to do. He's on his way to save the world, in fact, and probably doesn't want to be bothered by my petty needs. And so maybe I'll just continue to sit here and do nothing. But this is not what Bartimaeus does, right? Bartimaeus shouts out, and he says, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Help me out. I'm in a desperate place.

And he goes on. "Many rebuked him, and they told him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me." Second time around, he is told by the crowds, be silent. Stop speaking up. And what does he do? Does he listen to the crowds and say, yeah, they're right, I probably should just sit here and be quiet? No, he shouts out all the more. And he says, Jesus, help me.

Bartimaeus as the Opposite of Vanity: Seeking Jesus Above the Crowd's Opinion

Now, if you were here last week, we talked about vanity, right? And if you remember what vanity is, it's being more worried about the crowds and what they think than about the one audience you should be seeking. Bartimaeus is a beautiful example of the opposite of vanity. He cares nothing about what the crowds think. He is not worried at all if they think he is immoral, if they think he is not worthy of Jesus' attention, if they think whatever they might think of him. He's a nuisance on the side of the road. He does not care about them. He cares about the only one in the room who needs to care for him. And so he shouts out all the more. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

Jesus hears him and stops, says, call him to me. And they called the blind man, and they said to him, take heart, get up, he's calling you. And what does he do? He throws off his cloak, he sprang up, and he came to Jesus. And Jesus says the question of the day: "What do you want me to do for you?" And the blind man said, "Rabbi, teacher, let me recover my sight." And Jesus says, "Go your way. Your faith has made you well." And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him on the way.

Holy Hustle: The Active, Pursuing Faith of Bartimaeus

A couple key pieces of this that I want to draw out — really just one big one — is the nature of his faith, Bartimaeus. It is an active faith. He is pursuing Jesus. He is shouting out, not once but twice. He is not allowing the crowds to stop him. He is not allowing people to say, no, no, no, go over here and do this other thing. He is going to pursue Jesus actively, and he's going to go after the one who can indeed help him. And then when he gets the call, what does he do? He doesn't sit there in the dust. He throws it all off. The cloak, by the way, is everything he owns. And he leaves it all behind, unlike the rich man who appears just prior to this. He gives it all up, and he begins to follow Jesus in this moment.

This is what Bartimaeus does, and he represents what I'm calling this morning holy hustle. Holy hustle. He is somebody who in a holy kind of way is hustling and doing something to reach the ends that not only he desires, but it turns out God desires these ends for him as well.

The Persistent Widow of Luke 18: Another Portrait of Holy Hustle

Luke tells the same story about Bartimaeus. Luke tells it slightly differently. This will appear, if you want to look it up at some other point, in Luke chapter 18. But what Luke does in 18 is he pairs it with what happens in Luke 1 to, I want to say, 6 or 8. And in that little passage, Jesus tells a parable. And this parable is about a widow. And it's a widow who has been treated unjustly — something has been done to her that is unjust. And if you recall this parable, what does she do? Middle of the night, she goes and she finds the judge, the one who is supposed to mete out justice in the world, and she goes and she knocks on his door.

It turns out he is an unjust judge. He doesn't really care about her at all. But what does she do? She knocks again, and then she goes again, and then she goes again, and she is persistent. She doesn't stop. She too has this holy hustle. And then finally, what happens in this parable? Well, this unjust judge who the passage says is evil and unrighteous, well, he finally relents and he gives her what she wants because he's just tired of her asking.

And then it says, but if that's an unjust person, if that's somebody who is evil, imagine what a good God does when he hears our needs, our desires, and our prayers. What does that God do? Well, he looks upon us, as Bartimaeus asks for, with mercy.

The Plastic Lawnmower: What Grace Actually Looks Like in Practice

There is a holy hustle about the persistent widow. There is a holy hustle about Bartimaeus this morning. Now, all of this, by the way, gets at the nature of maybe one of the Bible's biggest topics, which is grace and how grace works. And I'm going to guess that at this point, some of you might be a little uncomfortable with the notion that you are somehow doing something to affect God's grace in your life. Because many of us have grown up in a Protestant tradition where we recite good Protestant phrases like sola gratia, by grace alone, and it's all God's doing and it's none of our doing. I'm not going to necessarily take aim directly at that, just close to it.

Because what I think about how grace works is there is a part that you and I must play in it. Bartimaeus, for example, he could have sat there and said nothing, done nothing, waited, watched Jesus walk by, and then he would have remained blind for the rest of his life. But this is not what he does, is it? He shouts out. He is active. His faith pushes him to do something.

I want you to think of it this way. I meant to bring a prop, by the way. I don't bring props often, and I was really happy about this one, and now I'm very sad that I didn't. So I want you to imagine, up on this stage is one of those plastic lawnmowers that kids have. Do you know these? We have one at our house still. A child who is five years old says to his dad, I want to help you mow the lawn. Now the dad chooses to give him the fake plastic lawnmower that does very little real good, but the fake plastic lawnmower is still something. And then the dad goes out and grabs his real metal lawnmower, one that is quite dangerous, but very effective. And he begins to mow. Well, alongside him is this five-year-old with the plastic mower, thinking that he is mowing the grass very well alongside his father.

This is not a perfect analogy, but that little boy is doing something — something very important. He is showing up. He is engaging with the father. He is participating alongside of him. It looks like he's mowing, even though he's clearly not. If someone walked by to see this scene, they would know immediately that the father is doing all of the mowing out there. But when the grass is finally cut, and the father and the son walk inside, sweating profusely, and grab a drink, both of them have had a hard day's work together, and no doubt, the five-year-old son will look at the dad and be proud of what they did together. Did the son do anything? Yes, he did. Did the father do everything? Yes, he did.

But you can also imagine a very different scene in which the five-year-old does not ask to mow with the dad. He just stayed inside and he watched. He wasn't part of it at all. He didn't ask the father for a mower, and he didn't walk alongside the father every step of the way. When the grass is cut and the father is inside getting the long drink, will that son look at the yard and say to the dad, look what we've done together, dad? No, he will not.

This is what grace looks like. It is God who is doing it all. Obviously, it is Jesus who heals Bartimaeus. Jesus effectuates the grace. Jesus does the work of healing that blind man. Jesus does what Bartimaeus cannot. Bartimaeus sat there for decades, blind, begging, and could do nothing about it. And Jesus comes along, and he does what Bartimaeus simply cannot do — much like the five-year-old cannot do anything about really mowing that lawn. But he can show up. And he can be with his dad. And he can choose not to stay indoors, but to go outdoors and to mow with the father.

I think the showing up is what Jesus rewards here. It's not that Bartimaeus has done anything, and yet he's done something — something very important. He has opened himself to the grace that God offers. That is what Jesus is asking of you right now. He is walking by and he wants you to call out. Maybe to be obnoxious and to forget about what the crowds are saying and to seek his grace.

Two Traps to Avoid: The Genie Lamp and the Bootstraps Trap

Now I will warn you, there are two traps that we should talk about. I don't want you to be confused. The first has to do with the play that I saw last night, Aladdin, in which there is a genie that pops out, and you rub the lamp, and you simply ask for your wish, and the genie says, your wish is my command, and he gives it to you. This is not how God works. Not at all, in fact. And we know this with certainty, because if you turn with me back to Mark chapter 10, I'll show you something that would be easily missed.

You see, if you go to the passage right before this one, it's a passage about two men, James and John, the brothers, and they come to Jesus, and they have a request themselves. And so in verse 35, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came up to him and they said to him, teacher, we want you to do something for us, whatever we ask of you. We want to rub the lamp, right? And we want our wish to be your command. And so he says to them, interestingly, what do you want me to do for you? This is the precise question — like word for word — what he says to Bartimaeus, right? What do you want me to do for you? And they proceed to say, well, we want to sit at your right hand and your left hand in glory, right? We are self-seeking in this moment, they may as well say out loud. And Jesus says, you don't know what you're asking. Sometimes this is God's answer to us. We might be in prayer and rubbing what we think is the God lamp and saying, God, we want you to give me this thing. And sometimes God says back to us, you don't know what you're asking for.

But sometimes it's actually a little deeper than that. I don't know if you caught the 60 Minutes this week, but there's a former senator from Nebraska named Ben Sasse. He's in his mid-50s. And in December of last year, he was given a cancer diagnosis, and he should not and probably will not make it to the end of this year. He is an honorable man. He is, in terms of politicians, we'll say he's one of the good ones. And he is a man of deep faith. And it is interesting to watch him because he has certainly asked God to take this cancer away from me. And God's answer has been to this point, no. No, I am not going to take that away from you. And this is sometimes the answer we get from God. Our desire, our will, our hopes, our dreams are much like Bartimaeus' — and we want to be healed of the blindness or whatever it is that's besetting us. But sometimes God says, no, I have other plans.

And then Ben Sasse shows us a way forward. Because he will stand there and he will say, I trust the God of the universe to have a plan that is in all of our best interests. And so I am going to use the rest of my life, the life that I have left, that God has given me, and I am going to pour life into this world as long as I have breath in my lungs. And so this is what he has set out to do for however many months he has left.

The second trap we might fall into — I was struggling to find a name for it — it might be like the bootstraps trap or the entitlement trap or the ownership trap, which is to say that that little boy that goes out there and mows the lawn with his father might turn around and then tell one of his friends, hey, look what I did, right? I am the keeper of this lawn. This is my domain. I own all of this. Look at how great I am. The holy hustle only remains holy if you don't fall into the bootstraps trap, which is to say that when the success comes, if the success comes, you always recognize that it's grace. From top to bottom, it's grace. And so you always point back to the one giving the grace, and you give him thanks for the successes that you have in life.

Three More Traps: Suppressing Desire, Dying to the Wrong Things, and the Trap of Inactivity

But there are some traps that this whole sermon has been trying to keep you out of, and I want to make sure you catch those as well. One of those traps says that we have or are supposed to have no desires or wants or needs. But as I started with, this is just silly. Of course, you will always have desires, so I think it's better to simply name them and to start working on them and to try to figure out if they are holy or not, if they are God's desires or not.

Another trap says something along the lines of, we're supposed to die to ourselves, right? And this is true. The scriptures talk about this all the time. But sometimes we end up dying to the wrong things. We are supposed to die to that which makes us unholy, that which works against the grace of God working in us and through us. But instead, some in this room, and myself included, have fallen into the trap where we die to noble things and good things, things that actually give us life — maybe even desires that God himself has planted deep in your soul. And we say, we're not allowed to have those desires. I'm supposed to die to that old self. And to you, I would simply say, it's quite possible God has planted that seed in you and is really trying to grow it and is trying to nourish it and wants you to nourish it because that part of you might be the very thing that is going to change the world that is all around you. But this requires wisdom, knowing what parts of yourself to die to and what parts of yourself to live into — this is a life's journey. And it requires wise guides and people in your life, being discipled by someone else or others, coming to church on Sundays.

Finally, there is this other trap. And this other trap is the trap of inactivity. It's just sitting there, waiting for God to move or to do something. It's as if Bartimaeus had not called out to Jesus, or the persistent widow had not walked next door to the judge's home and knocked on it ten times. The trap of inactivity says, well, God will do what God will do when God wants to do it. And I would encourage you, maybe the right thing to do is to get up, and to shout out, and to be a little obnoxious, and to go knock on somebody's door, and to do something about what God is trying to do in your life.

This walking with Jesus on the narrow road to life requires a tremendous amount of wisdom. And here's why. The scriptures tell us routinely to wait on God. And so one might mistake what Bartimaeus is doing as not waiting on God. Bartimaeus is maybe being too active. And so it requires wisdom to know when I lean in and when I wait. This again requires good friends and wise counsel and people who are helping you discern what to do with your life.

Easter Morning, the Amphitheater, and the Shout That Surprised a Pastor

On Easter morning this year, in that early service, many of us gathered outside at the amphitheater down there, and something remarkable happened, for me at least. I don't know if you remember this, but for me it was a moment. You see, I didn't think it was going to work, and then it did work. I said to the congregation, I want you to be thinking of something that you're hoping for this year, something that you're dreaming about, something that you want, a desire that's deep down in you, and I'm going to ask you to shout it out. We're not doing this again this morning, by the way. And then I thought, well, no one's gonna do it, or they're just gonna whisper it. And so I kind of prompted it, and then we got to the point where I asked, okay, shout it out now — and like everybody shouted at the same time. And I was shocked because you clearly had some strong desires deep down in your hearts that you want, that you hope for.

And I want you this morning to name those again. Not out loud this time. But I want you to name them in your heart and in your head. Because the first step toward living a faithful life is to name what we desire, to start walking toward it, and then allowing God to course correct along the way. To hustle, but to make sure it's a holy hustle.

What Is Your Deep Desire? God Is Asking You the Same Question He Asked Bartimaeus

And so this morning, just to kind of prompt you and pump the well a little bit, you might be hoping or longing or desiring for one of these things. To be a present, engaged father. To find a spouse. To leave the job that is killing you and find the courage to do what you were made for. You might be desiring to find freedom from that thing that you've never told anyone about. To get sober. To get into the right school or the right grad program. To experience the real and living God rather than just study about him. To find a community where you actually belong, where someone knows you and you know them. To have one real friend. To eat right and to lose weight. To see a family member come to faith. To leave something behind that outlasts you.

I don't know what your deep desire is. But God wants to know. And God is coming to you this morning and asking you the same question he asked Bartimaeus. What do you want? It starts with honesty. And God's answer may be no. But God's answer may be yes. And he's just waiting for you to say it out loud and to start walking toward him.

Because there's this other part of the story that would be easily missed again, but I don't want us to miss it. Because right at the end of all of this, Bartimaeus comes forward, and he tells Jesus what he wants, and Jesus heals him. And then it says he followed him on the way. Which is everything that Jesus is trying to get us to do this morning — to follow him along the road. And our hopes and our dreams and our desires, it should all be aiming for that road of life, for that way of Jesus that he wants to walk us down.

But God is not going to live this life for you. And yet, paradoxically, he is the one who will enable all the work you are supposed to be doing. He's got his mower out and he's ready. You just have to pick up your plastic mower, head outside, and walk where Jesus walks the path ahead of you, following where he has prepared a way. A path that is intended for your good and for the good of all around you.

Let us pray together. Jesus, we come this morning and we hear echoing in our ears, what do you want me to do for you? What do you want me to do for you? God, sometimes we don't answer that question out of fear. Fear that we actually don't have faith, that we don't trust you enough to give it over, that you might disappoint us, that maybe you're not even really there. And so God, this morning, give us that faith to trust you enough, to hand over our life's deepest desires to you. And God, whatever answer that is that comes back, whether it's that resounding yes or a quiet no or a I want to make you holy — God, I pray this morning that we trust you, that we have the faith of Bartimaeus to leap up and to ask you for exactly what we want and then to follow you along the way. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

South Run Baptist Church | 8712 Selger Drive, Springfield, VA 22153 | Sunday Worship at 11am

Serving Springfield, Burke, West Springfield, Lorton, Alexandria, Fort Belvoir, and Franconia, Virginia.

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Your phone is deliberately engineered to exploit your need to be seen, known, and approved of . . . and it's working. This Sunday we're talking about vanity. It’s an ancient vice that Silicon Valley has perfected. We want lives of deep meaning and abundance, but this path only leads to destruction.

Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify.

Pastor Eric Gilchrest | April 26, 2026 Vanity -- Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 What We’re Exploring:

Why the desire underneath vanity is more human and more legitimate than you might think, its just that vanity warps that desire
What vanity looks like in real life, from your Instagram to your friends
Why your phone is jet fuel for this particular vice, and what Silicon Valley knows about your need for approval that you may not know about yourself
What Jesus says about vanity in Matthew 6, and why he targets the most religious people in the room
The cure Jesus offers — and why it has everything to do with learning to live before an audience of one
Sermon Transcript Vanity — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on vanity from Matthew 6:1-6 and 16-18. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" series on the seven deadly sins and addresses what vanity looks like in everyday life and on social media, how technology platforms deliberately exploit our need for approval, what Jesus teaches about practicing righteousness in secret, and how to find freedom from vanity by seeking the applause of God rather than the crowd.

We are in a year of transformation. If you're new, the bracelets are in the narthex back there, and we have been thinking about the nature of what Jesus is calling us into, a life that is filled with growth and movement in which we are allowing God to do the work in our hearts and in our lives that he so desperately wants to do. For the last few weeks, we've been specifically aimed at this notion that there are these two ways that Jesus offers us. There's this one way, and he calls it the narrow way, and it's the way that leads to life, though, and this is the Jesus way. The premise of it all is actually quite simple, is that if Jesus is who he says he is. And if he is indeed the Son of God incarnate, well, then he can teach us a lot about how to live a life. And we should probably listen to that.

And so as we talk about the narrow way and the way that leads to life, we're simply letting Jesus teach us how to live our lives. But he does speak of this other way, the broad way, the big way, the one that has the most trucks and traffic going down it. And this is the way that he says leads away from life and into destruction and even death, he says.

And so the way this is working, in case you haven't been picking up on it, is one week we're going to talk about the narrow way. And we did that last week. We talked about the gravel underneath our feet. We said, okay, Jesus, if you're going to teach us how to live a life, what do you do? And we looked at the towel in the basin. He's washing his disciples' feet just days before he is going to be crucified for us. And he lives this life of a servant, right? This is who he is. This is the way that he teaches. And so he's calling us into this same narrow way. And he's saying, look, if you want to live lives that are full of life, be a servant, a servant leader, right?

Well, then today, we're going to kind of flip over to the bigger way, the broader way, and the way that we can end up finding ourselves leading lives that lead to destruction. And to do this, we're going to talk through what are called the seven deadly sins.

The Seven Deadly Sins

We've got one up here, back a slide just a second. It's called vanity, right? Vanity is the name of this first one that we're going to deal with. Actually, let's show that second slide now that you've got it up. So this is the rotten tree that I hope looks nothing like your soul right now, right? At the root of it sits pride, and pride is indeed the root of all sin. This is what's sitting underneath it all, and pride is really the opposite of what we talked about last week. So if last week is about serving others, it's about showing up for the world and looking to God for our answers, well, pride is all about self, and it's turning in on self.

And then when we do this, it has other offshoots that begin to pop up. And there's a whole history here, and if you join us at the 945 Sunday morning Bible study, we kind of go in depth with some of these. But there's a whole history of these seven deadly sins or vices. And so these are the ways in which pride manifests itself. And today we're going to talk about vanity, but we'll also talk about all the others. We'll envy, sloth, wrath, greed, lust, and gluttony over the coming weeks. And then these have their own produce, this rotten fruit that comes out, and we call this sin. And so vanity produces certain kinds of sin and envy certain kinds of sin, etc., etc.

But the goal is to not go down that path, that broad road. And the goal is to not grow this kind of plant in your soul. Instead, it is to chop all these things off and to put a bunch of roundup around it and instead find our way on the narrow road, the one that leads to life. Because this leads to death.

Opening Prayer

As we get started here, let's start with some prayer and we'll jump right in. Heavenly Father, we come this morning and I echo Clint's prayer, which is a prayer for unity for this nation. Lord, I am concerned about the soul of the nation. Lord, we can look at this list that was on the screen, these seven deadly sins, and it feels like an indictment of our culture. And so, Lord, may we be people of the way, the way that leads to life, the Jesus way, a way that brings people back to life. And Lord, we ask over these coming weeks, but especially here, especially now in this moment, that you invade this space, that you teach us what it means to live that kind of life. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

What Vanity Looks Like

All right, so we're starting with vanity rather than pride. We've talked about pride actually a number of times before. So I thought, well, we'll just jump straight in to what vanity looks like. And I'm just going to tell you a few examples. I'll let you fill in the blank for your own life. But vanity looks something kind of like this. It's when you're telling a story to somebody. You're like relaying something. Pastors never do this. But like you like beef it up a little bit, you know, you're telling a story about maybe how you rescued something, but you want to make sure you look like extra brave, and so you add to it, right? And you're trying to do what in that moment? You're trying to project your strength and your bravery, and you're trying to convince somebody else that you indeed are this really great guy.

Or maybe like you're in a meeting at work or if you're in school, it's a classroom and your teacher calls on you and you speak up and you're kind of sharing your opinion. But when you do so, you like look around the room and then you notice somebody grimaces, right? Or somebody else that has like this angry look on their face or somebody chuckles. This is the worst one. Somebody kind of chuckles and you're like, oh, what were they thinking? Oh no. And you begin then like the rest of the day, you're kind of like replaying that scene and you're wondering what was going on in their mind, right? This is vanity. You're concerned with the outward appearance of it all and what others are thinking.

Or maybe you did a good deed. You helped a homeless man or you rescued a cat from a tree and no one saw you do it. And now you got to get the credit. And so what do you do? It just kind of happens to come up in a conversation where you want to make sure, you know, everyone knows that you're the guy who feeds the man, or you're the guy that rescues cats from trees, right? And this is what? This is vanity. This is putting out an image for the world to see, even if it doesn't like fully reflect the reality that's underneath the image.

This is, of course, the biggest difference. This is what makes vanity vanity, is the disconnect between this outward and the inward. Jesus is very concerned inward. He's constantly saying it's not enough to like not murder. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't even hate, right? So you got to go one layer deeper. And he's worried what's happening in your soul and in your heart. And so he's coming after not just the outward sins, but he's coming after what's sitting underneath it all.

Vanity can also show up very clearly online. You can imagine what this looks like right, it looks like you post something to Facebook or to Instagram and what do you post? Well maybe you post a picture of yourself that you've taken like six different angles, you know, and then you're trying to find the perfect one that makes you look the best. Or maybe you're like out and about and you're thinking, oh, I'm somebody because I'm in the room with so-and-so over here. And you just kind of take the photo to catch, you know, the both of you in the room together, right? This is vanity because you're projecting this image of who you maybe want to be or you at least want other people to think you're that person, right? This is vanity.

Technology and the Seven Deadly Sins

Throughout this series on these seven deadly sins as we hit them, I really want to draw your attention to the way our technologies are actually shaping. They're like jet fueling all of these sins. And my guess is we're asleep at the wheel to it. We aren't realizing just how much our technologies, our social medias, or what we're like viewing online, the way we use our phones and our computers and our TVs, that they are corrosive if you are not watching out for it. And so I want to pay special attention to this.

There's a guy named Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is the founder of LinkedIn, and he says this. He says, social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Just let that sink in for a second, folks. This is a man who understands you. And that they are creating technologies that are preying upon our deepest weaknesses. That they know where to tap into if they're really going to get down to something here. And they intentionally play on this.

And so, for example, if we can put it on the screen, I've offered a few options for you here, right? Vanity. Like, you just got to get on Instagram, right? And you got to see what they're doing on Instagram. And then you find yourself like, and it's all about the image. Envy, right? You're on Facebook and you're looking at this other person's vacation and you're thinking, I need a vacation too. Why am I not on that vacation? Why are they always on vacation, but I'm not on that vacation? This is envy. It is intentional on Facebook's part. Anger. Anger. If you've ever been on X, it's an anger stew. They have figured out that anger is the best way to drive your attention. You want to come back because you're angry, and there's something really nice about that anger, the feeling of it. You come to actually enjoy. But this is a problem. This is not a good thing. And this is shaping and warping who we are supposed to be.

Sloth. I could have put a lot of them up there for this one, right? Netflix? Yeah. YouTube? Yeah. All social media? Yeah. How much time do we spend on our devices? And we're just sitting there watching. You might add other television stations to it. What has you doing nothing instead of doing something? All these technology companies are aiming for our attention. They're trying to steal our time. Greed. Amazon is like a lovely example of this, and it's tapping into this, I just want more mentality. And when I have a thought and I think, you know what? I should have this product. Well, thank you, Amazon. You've made it very easy for me to get that product. I just pull you up on my phone and I click buy now. They've made it doubly easy. You used to have to go through all the steps, but now they've got the buy now button and you hit that and within a day, they're moving to hours now, you've got the product at your door.

Gluttony. DoorDash. This is the Sunday I really look forward to. We will be sure to sync up Gluttony Sunday with a meal after the fact. That should be fun. And then the one you're all waiting for, which is lust. I've got Tinder here, but if we're being honest, most of these actually, they're fueled by lust, right? Instagram, you certainly find it on there. Facebook, X, Netflix, Amazon-ish. DoorDash is safe, though. It's a safe place for lust. Unless the driver's cute. Thank you. Thank you, indeed.

But today we're talking about vanity, okay? See, I told you last week we were all going to enjoy these. And I got looks like, I don't know, but I think we're going to enjoy talking about sin during these seven deadly sins. But I will say underneath that should be a very, very serious look at what's happening inside of here, because it is warping you if you're not careful.

Jesus on Vanity: Matthew 6

Jesus did not know what Instagram was, so he didn't know what that kind of vanity looked like, but he definitely knew vanity. So if you'll turn with me, we'll take a look at Matthew chapter six, and I'll show you how Jesus paves the way for us. Starting in verse one, he says the following, beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

And here's the kind of the preamble to the section that follows. And he's worried about practicing righteousness, not for righteousness sake. Like, he wants us to be righteous people. He wants us to be disciplined people. He wants us to be shaped into the image of Christ. He wants all of these things. But he's worried that by practicing them before other people, what you're really cultivating is the image of a righteous person, and then underneath it is still that rotten, awful person that he's trying to transform. And so in the end, he's worried that you're going to settle for an image of a Christ-bearer, but underneath you are not at all. I am worried about this for you too. I am worried about this for me. And part of this series is to try to get us connected between our image and what's happening underneath it all.

He goes on, verse 2, thus when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward, but when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Here he begins his warnings with something that he wants all of us doing, right? He wants to give to the needy. We should be people who show up for the needy. Jesus, countless times, wants us to be practicing this discipline. He wants us, as I used earlier, to be the person who actually feeds the homeless man, who needs help when we pass by. What he's worried about, though, is that we do it for all the wrong reasons. And that the reasons that we're doing it is not to actually be a transformed person in our heart, but is to be seen as the kind of person who does that. And to carry with that a high religiosity.

It turns out that the vanity of Instagram and the vanity that shows up in our day-to-day lives, well, it gets mirrored and is frankly probably more dangerous within the church than outside the church. Because in the church, we can sit here and wear masks and pretend like we are upstanding righteous people. And we can play all the right parts. But man, if that exterior does not match what's happening under the surface, Jesus has some very clear warnings.

He goes on. He says, verse 5 and 6, when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. And there it is. It's all about what? It's the applause of the others. It's the person who's always looking out for, how does this make me look in the eyes of the others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. And then he says, here's the answer, is when you pray, don't pray for the reward of the others. Don't try to get the recognition. Don't use King James English when you pray. It's not about, you know, like looking a certain kind of way. Instead, pray and go into your room. Shut the door. Pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, well, he will reward you.

Multiple times, Jesus talks about the hypocrites. And in the ancient world, a hypocrite is very simply a stage actor. It's somebody who puts on a mask, they walk up on a stage, they play a part, but they are not that part in real life. They play the part, but they're not that part. And Jesus says, look, if you're doing all these things for all the wrong reasons, then you're just an actor on a stage. This isn't who you really are. And Jesus is far more interested in who you really are than you playing some kind of part.

Vanity, vanity is all about playing the part and getting the applause of all the people around you, managing your image. But Jesus is saying, this is not the way. This is the way that leads to destruction. I want you on this path that leads to life. This is the reward. The reward is a life that leads to life. And Jesus is saying, if you go down that vanity path, that is empty and hollow and shallow.

To finish up what he has to say here, we look at verse 16, 17, and 18. When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces, that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say, they've received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head, wash your face, that your fasting may be seen by others, not by others, but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret again. He rewards you.

To Be Rather Than to Seem

A while back, Scott Yao, he's a pillar of this church, he's from the great state of North Carolina. He taught me that his state's motto is esse quam videri. He did not tell me that those were the words because he didn't know the Latin. But I looked it up, and that is indeed true. And the words mean to be rather than to seem. Which is precisely this really nice definition of what vanity is. Or maybe the opposite of vanity, really. It is better to be someone rather than to seem to be someone. We want to be people. We don't just want to seem like or someone. We want to be. Vanity, however, is satisfied with seeming to be good, but we want to be good. Vanity is satisfied with seeming to be a good cello player or actor or whatever job you do when you go off to work, but we want you to be that person.

Vanity is indeed one of the roads to destruction. And it's worth naming what that destruction looks like in this life. Because I think what Jesus is teaching us is not just that this road that leads to life is like eternal life somewhere way out there. I think he's teaching us that the road to life is actually the fullness of life here and now. And in the same way, the road to destruction is actually a road that destroys you in the here and now.

And so what does that look like? Well, it looks like a study that Facebook did in 2025, just last year. It had 35,000 people in this study, and they, for six weeks, said, if you will just simply cut off your Facebook and Instagram usage, we want to see what happens to you over those six weeks. You can imagine what happens to the people over six weeks. Happiness spikes up and symptoms of depression and anxiety plummet. By deactivating your Facebook account, again, a study that they put together, by deactivating your Facebook account, this is at 22% as effective as actually getting professional therapy. When we stop feeding the monster of vanity, we find that nature, our souls, actually begin to heal themselves.

Vanity is this wide road to destruction. And the destruction can look like the following. Vanity isolates us. Real intimacy requires being known. It requires interacting with real people in real life. But vanity settles for projecting an image. And it's hard to keep that image up, isn't it? And so we end up feeling isolated. Like people kind of know us, but they don't know the real us. Vanity is exhausting. And it exhausts you. The performance, it never stops. Every interaction is like an audition, and social media made the audience permanent, as you're constantly having to get the praise of whoever is on the other side of that social media account. Vanity, it turns out, makes you thin-skinned. If your identity is built on what others think of you, well then even helpful feedback sounds threatening, and you struggle when people give you advice. You can't admit failure. You can't laugh at yourself because you're so worried about what other people think. And then worst of all, vanity severs you from God. You seek the glory that comes from others, and in so doing, you choose something above God. And Jesus says very directly in John 5, 44, how can you be a believer? You accept glory from one another, but you don't seek the glory that only comes from God.

The name of vanity in its most ancient phraseology is vain glory, vain glory. It is a fleeting kind of glory, an ephemeral, like the mist, right? And so in the moment, you are glorious and everybody's clapping. But then the next day, the audience is gone, and there's no more clapping, and you're left feeling hollow and empty and isolated.

The Cure for Vanity

Vanity instead should drive us toward that road of life. Because on the road of life, we seek not the applause of the congregation or the crowd or the many. We seek the applause of just the one. We seek God's affirmation. The cure to vanity is twofold. One, it turns out Facebook taught us the cure to parts of vanity, which is to simply unplug. Like if there's something that's causing you to be a more vain person, well then, you know, snap it off. Just kind of deactivate. If Facebook's study is right, you will see happiness spiking and depression and anxiety lowering. So that maybe is what you need to do. Or maybe you'll take the Jesus route. And Jesus tells us what? Well, to go into the hidden place. And to get away from the crowds, the ones who are applauding us, and instead to seek God's approval. We just need the approval of one.

And so this, it turns out, is a wonderful cure to our vanity. But we wear these masks that we wear, we play the role of the hypocrite for a reason. It's a fear that if people saw us for who we really are, that they wouldn't love us. So we hide. And we project strength or beauty or whatever it is you're projecting. And we pretend we're smarter than we are. We make ourselves as pretty as possible. But underneath the masks, something is rotting and dying. And we are whitewashed tombs. That is the road that leads to death and destruction.

But here is where Jesus sets us free. Because God loves you for who you are. He created you that way after all. And that is a good thing. Be that person, the one that God created you to be. If someone does not love you for who you are, that's their problem. They can take it up with your maker someday. Besides, the people you want in your life are the people who love the real you, the you that's underneath, the you that's in process, the you that is being transformed. And they are the people who will usher you forward into the fully transformed life that we're all aiming at.

Closing: Why Were You Not You?

Rabbi Zusha of Hannibal lived in the 18th century, and he was a Hasidic teacher. And he had the following to say up here on the screen. When I die and stand before the heavenly court, they will not ask me, Zusha, why were you not Moses? They will ask, Zusha, why were you not Zusha? Eric, why were you not Eric? John, why weren't you John? Susan, why were you not Susan? And you, each of you. Why didn't you live this life as you?

At the end of the day and at the end of life, you will not stand before the masses to see what everyone thinks of you. You will stand before the audience of just one, your maker, the one who breathed this life into you and who called it good, the one who has redeemed you, the one who calls you by name, the one who says, you are mine. Seek his applause. That is the only review that matters.

Closing Prayer

Father of all life, Creator of all things. Lord Jesus, through whom life came into this world. Holy Spirit, the one who continues to breathe new life into the people in this room. We ask for your life here and now. Show us this way that leads to abundant life. And that leads to eternal life. Jesus, you walked this path before us. And you gave us warnings about the other way. And how not to lead those lives. Because Lord, those lives lead not to life, but to death and to destruction. And so God, now, we're sitting at a fork at a crossroad. And we're asking you to point the way. And we're saying one more time, God, we choose to follow you. Jesus, we follow you onto that narrow way, a way that sometimes is unclear exactly where we might be going, but because you're walking down it, we're walking down it. And God, that other way, well, that is not a way of life at all. That is a half-life at best, a way to destruction at the end of it all. So God, today, may we be people who choose life. I pray this in your holy name. Amen.

View Details

 What if the secret to a fulfilling life is the exact opposite of what you’ve been told? In this message, Pastor Eric walks through one of Jesus’ most surprising moments — getting on his knees to wash his disciples’ feet — and what it reveals about how to actually live a good life.

This Sunday we're exploring:

The surprising paradox at the heart of the Jesus way: the secret to finding fulfillment, purpose, and abundant life is to stop looking for it and start looking for someone who needs it
An ancient Jewish blessing, "May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi," and what it means to follow Jesus so closely that his life becomes yours
John 13 and the night Jesus picked up a towel and washed his disciples' feet, including the feet of Judas
Why the Bible — from Genesis to Revelation — returns to the same theme over and over again: a life bent toward serving others is the only life worth living

Check out the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify.

Pastor Eric Gilchrest • April 19, 2026 The Dust of the Rabbi — John 13:1–17 * Sermon Transcript The Dust of the Rabbi: Servant Leadership and the Foot Washing of John 13 — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

John 13:1–17

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on the foot washing of John 13 and the call to servant leadership. This sermon is part of the ongoing "The Jesus Way" transformation series and addresses what it means to follow Jesus so closely that his dust gets on you, how servant leadership is the gravel of the narrow road, and why a life bent toward others is the path to abundant life.

Good morning. It is really good to be with you this morning. We are today talking about — well, I had one of those moments this week where everything seemed to align, and the stars came together. Have you had one of these moments? And it was like everything felt right. It was the title to the sermon. I just kind of had one of these moments on, I think it was on Tuesday, where I knew the direction I wanted to go, and then I was driving to get my daughter from school, and it was like, oh yeah, the dust of the rabbi.

It's this phrase that comes to us from the Mishnah, actually, which is kind of the extension of the Hebrew texts, and the Jewish folks would read out of this. And the idea is quite simple, actually. It's a blessing that they would pray over one another. And it says, may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. The idea being, you should be following your teacher so closely that whatever dust he's kicking up, that it's getting onto you, and you are being transformed by that person.

Now for us, our rabbi is Jesus. And the hope is that over the coming months, and as we continue on in this series on transformation, that we learn to walk so closely to the person of Jesus that his dust gets all over us, right? But why this worked for me and why I was just so excited is because it worked on a few levels. Because today we're talking about Jesus and the foot washing and the need to wipe off some of that old dust, right? And the dust that maybe the disciples had been in some of the wrong places — and Jesus is coming along and purifying them, cleaning them from that, and then showing them a better way.

The Jesus Way Series: Alternating Between the Narrow Road and the Seven Deadly Sins

We're talking ever since Easter about these two ways. Jesus tells us that there is a way that leads to life and there is a way that leads to death. And if we follow him, the rabbi, ever so closely on that way to life, I believe that abundant life is waiting for each and every one of us in this life, and eternal life is waiting for us on the other side. But Jesus makes it very clear that this road is a narrow road, and that it seems few choose this road. And that the few who do live truly alive in this life, well, he's going to lead them in that right direction. But for the many, there is this other road. There's a broad road. And the broad road, of course, leads to death or to half-lives or away from life, away from God.

So the way this is going to work over the foreseeable future here — I've actually mapped out some terrain for us to journey together, and we're going to be kind of alternating back and forth between the broad road and the narrow road and what it means to, and what it feels like to walk on that way that leads to life, the way that Jesus is showing us, and we're going to read Jesus' teachings and look at the sort of model he models for us. And then we're going to talk about the broad road and what that road looks like and feels like. And to do that, I am going to dust off my own expertise in the seven deadly sins. I have a lot of personal anecdotes from my life that I plan to share with you about envy and sloth and gluttony and the like. No, I actually won't do that much, but we are going to talk about the seven deadly sins and how they can entrap us and how easy it is to actually fall into that road unwittingly and to find ourselves in some of those places.

The premise of the whole next leg of this transformation journey that we're on together is really quite simple. It's so simple, it almost feels too simple. But it goes like this: Jesus wants to teach us how to live a life. He lived a life. He taught us many things. And now he wants to teach us how it is to live that life. And I think that that life that he's trying to teach us to live is indeed an abundant one, and a good one, and a fulfilled one, and all the things we all want in life. And it's sitting there waiting for us if we just follow the rabbi close enough and get a little bit of his dust on us.

Let's start with prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank you for those who have gathered here, and I ask a prayer of blessing on them. May they be covered in the dust of the Rabbi Jesus, who teaches us what it means to live abundant lives. We pray this in your holy name, Jesus. Amen.

Steve Jobs' Last Words and Jesus' Last Night with His Disciples

This week, I was listening to a podcast. I do this a lot. And the person who was doing the speaking offered up a tale of the end of Steve Jobs' life in which she said the very last words he spoke — she thinks like he had set this up, there was like maybe a camera crew — but his very last words were, "Oh my," and then he died. Oh my. And it was one of these like, oh, well, what did Steve Jobs see in the last moment? And so the woman who was doing the talking then asked the others who were part of this, what would you want to say as your last words?

And it got me thinking about this sermon, which is in some ways about Jesus' last words to his disciples. Now, it's not him on the cross, but it's like one of his last nights with them. Now, some of the Bible folks in here who have been in the church for a very long time may not know a really important fact that I'm about to tell all of you, and it goes like this.

What John's Gospel Has Instead of the Last Supper: The Towel and the Basin

Last week, we took a pretty hard look at the importance of communion. And on the night before Jesus was betrayed — right, this is, you know where this is going — like, we take communion, and then he has this meal, and when we take communion, we quote from either Luke or Matthew, and we talk about the Lord's Supper. And we talk about two symbols, the bread and the cup, right? Well, here's what some of you Bible people may not know. That only appears in Matthew and Mark and Luke. John actually does not have a Last Supper scene. Instead, he has what we read today. He has a foot-washing ceremony.

Now, I've been told if I were to bring a foot-washing ceremony into this church, no one would attend because it's gross and kind of awkward and a little too intimate. And yet this is what Jesus says, and he even says in it, like, go and do likewise, right? I mean, so he says this with the table, right? "This do in remembrance of me," right? And so he's telling the disciples, go do this. Well, John 13 is the same thing. He says, like, go and do this. But somewhere along the way, the church has got a little uncomfortable with this one, and so we don't.

I think these two things, communion and the foot washing, there's a really big Venn diagram where they overlap a lot. And he's saying something very similar in both. And the similar thing is that we are to be people who serve one another to the point of being willing to lay down our lives. This is what love means. And this is what it means to love one another. And this is what it means to follow Jesus.

John 13: Jesus Washes the Feet of Peter and Judas

John describes an intimate scene with his disciples just before his death and resurrection. But rather than the bread and the cup, we instead have the symbols of a towel and a basin. And Jesus is washing the feet of the disciples. There's no doubt that the disciples and Jesus had been walking a dusty road together. And they were ready to kick back and enjoy a nice evening. But before they do, Jesus says, let's clean up. And he puts the towel around his waist. And he says, I am going to wash your feet.

John, to just quote him here, says, "Jesus laid aside his outer garment and taking a towel, tied it around his waist and poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him."

And there's a feature to this scene that might go unnoticed, but since I preached on it very recently, you might be able to draw this back to your memory. Do you remember the woman who came into the Pharisee's house while Jesus was in there, and she's a prostitute? And she begins to wash his feet with her tears. Do you remember this? Right? And the Pharisee watches this happen and is scandalized by it and says, look, if you knew who she was, like, you wouldn't be allowing this. If you were a prophet, like you say, you would not be doing this. Of course, Jesus is there and he is relishing the opportunity to cleanse this woman's soul. And he says to her, your sins are forgiven.

Well, in John 13, I think Jesus is doing much the same thing. If we were to use the image of the sermon title as the starting point, we might say Jesus is cleansing the disciples of the dust that has gathered on their feet from following the broad path that leads to destruction. He is wiping them clean and showing them the path that leads to life.

But it's a good thing the Pharisees aren't there that evening because the foot washing scene is doubly scandalous. It is not a sinner that is washing Jesus' feet this time. It is Jesus playing the role of a servant, stooping down, grabbing the dirty, smelly, road-worn feet of the sinners in that room, and starting with Peter, who Jesus knows will deny him. And worse yet, Jesus touches the sinful feet of Judas, who Jesus knows will betray him. And if the Pharisees had seen this, what would they say? If he were a prophet, how could he possibly touch the feet of such sinners? But this, of course, is the whole point. Jesus is there for the sinners, like you and me, to wash them clean of the dust of the broad road, and to touch them, and to bring them back to the road that leads to life, even if one of those sinners is going to stab him in the back.

John 13:12–17: The Explicit Command to Wash One Another's Feet

If you look ahead to verse 12 in this passage, Jesus goes on. He says, "Do you understand what I have done for you? You call me teacher" — you call me rabbi, is what it is — "and lord, and you're right, I am. If I then, your teacher and your lord, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet." And then he says, ever so explicitly, "I have given you an example that you should do just as I have done to you." You should do just like I've done to you.

"Truly, truly, I say, a servant is not greater than the master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him," by which he simply means Jesus is greater than us, and if he's doing it, well then we better be doing it as well.

Servant Leadership: Invented in 1970, Modeled by Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 Years Earlier

The phrase servant leadership that we're all probably familiar with by this point was invented in 1970, which is not long ago in the span of history. But the idea of servant leadership — it was given to us by Jesus of Nazareth. It is a critical part of the narrow way. When Jesus picked up the towel and the basin that evening, and he washed the disciples' feet, and he said, I am your example, he was showing us everything I'm trying to say, which is how to live a life. He's showing us how to live a life when he does that for his disciples. And if he were in the room right now, he would look at you in the eyes, and he would say, I am your leader, and this is what I do for those who follow me. Now go and do likewise.

The paradoxical wisdom of Jesus is, of course, on display here for all to see. Is Jesus the servant? Is Jesus the leader? Yes and yes. He is both. He is master. He is servant. He is lord and slave. He is the servant leader, and he shows us that this is the narrow way. It's the paradox that shows up when Jesus says to those who wish to hold tightly to their lives, well, they will lose it. But those who die to themselves and live the Jesus way, well, they will find life.

Jesus' Entire Life Was a Life of Service: From the Lepers to the Wedding at Cana

When Jesus washes the disciples' feet in the upper room, you can rest assured that this was not a one-off sermon. This wasn't the only time he talked about this. In fact, if you pan out on his life, you'll see he's doing this and he's teaching it and he is modeling it throughout his entire life. Every step of the way. It was always about others. The lepers, the sinful woman, Zacchaeus, the blind, the father of the daughter who died, the woman who had been bleeding for years. There are so many examples. It's really unnecessary to name them all. His whole life was spent in service to others.

Even the one scene in John 2 where he's at a party and the wine runs out. And he says, look mom, my time hasn't come yet. But instead he does what? He serves the party by turning water into wine. He is a man who is on the lookout for the needs of others, and then he serves them.

Jesus Was the Most Fully Alive Person Who Ever Lived — Not Somber, Not Bore-Ville

If you were to ask me, who is the most joyful and alive person to ever live on this planet? I wouldn't hesitate to say Jesus. Jesus was. He had to be, right? In fact, if your picture of Jesus is somber and downcast, repressed or depressed, unfun, or what my mom would call bore-ville, then you've got the wrong guy. You've been worshiping the wrong Savior all along. Remember, this is the guy that the sinners loved. This is the guy who brings the wine to the party. This is the one who John tells us in the prologue of his gospel, he says, "In him was life. And this life is the light of man." Jesus, in the most literal way I can say this, is the life of the party.

And here's the important part. He is trying to teach us how we too can be the life of the party. How we can be fully alive and bring life to others. How we can find happiness and fulfillment and meaning and all these other things that everybody seems to want. And the answer starts with, again, a paradox. Stop trying to serve yourself and start trying to serve other people. Because in doing so, you'll find the life you were always meant to live. Or as Jesus says it, if anyone would follow me and be covered by my dust, let him deny himself. Because in trying to save your life, you're going to lose it. But by losing your life and giving it over and giving it away to me and to all those around you, you will find life.

The Gravel Under Your Feet: Is Your Life Others-Centered or Self-Centered?

Living a life of service is the very path to the abundant life. It is the gravel upon which we walk when we walk this path. It is there every step of the way. It's not a fork in the road. It's not a waypoint that you get past and move beyond at some point. It is an ever-present part of the path. To be covered by the dust of the rabbi is to walk the path that he walks. And the gravel under his feet is a gravel that is others-centered. It is a life of service, looking out for those in need and meeting those needs to the best of your ability.

And so if you're walking a path, the path that is your life, whether this is today or like 25 years from now, and you happen to take a moment and you look down and you're looking at the gravel that's under your feet, I would encourage you to stop and take notice. Is your life and the way you're walking and the path you're on — well, is it primarily others-centered and God-centered? Or is it self-centered? What does the gravel under your feet look like right now as you think about the life you're in?

Are you seeking to gain the world but will forfeit your soul? If so, there is only one thing you should do right now, which is to stop. Stop everything you're doing. Get on your knees. Repent and find the quickest way back to that narrow path. Because rest assured, you're on the broad way that only leads to death and destruction. But if you stop and you look beneath your feet, and the gravel that is there tells you that your path is God-centered and others-centered, and the dust that has gathered on you looks a whole lot like the kind of dust that Jesus wore, then my friend, congratulations. You are on the path of righteousness and to life. And keep going. Even when the terrain gets tough and rough, keep going.

Application: Get Your Towel and Basin Ready — Someone Needs You

An application to a message like this is quite simple. And so I will keep it very brief. It begins with a towel and a basin. I shouldn't need to say it. But in case you need me saying it to you, here's what you are to do.

After I finish this sermon, I will pray, and then we will sing a song together, the final song, and then you are going to stand up and start heading for that door. But before each of you hits that door, you will see a room filled with people who have deep needs in their life. And it is quite possible that you are the person who can meet one or two of those needs. You don't need to meet them all. You can't. And not even Jesus would try to do such a thing. But you can meet one of those needs.

But then you'll walk out that back door, out of the church building, and onto a mission field where you'll bump into lots of people, maybe while shopping at Giant or walking through your neighborhood. Or if you hit up the slug lot on Monday mornings, you'll be in a car with some people. Or you'll sit next to people at school. Or there's any number of ways you will run into hundreds, if not thousands, of people in this area. Every last one of them has a deep need. Many of them are on a wide path that leads to death and destruction. And they need to be brought back to life. You happen to know a man who brings people to life. Abundant life in this life. Eternal life in the next.

The Jesus way, the narrow way, the one that has the right gravel under your feet, is one in which you are looking out for the needs of others and taking the God-given abilities and the passions that are sitting within you. You're serving others in the same way that Jesus served his disciples. The life well lived is a life bent toward other people. Serving others, showing up for others, turning outward when everything in your DNA and everything in our culture is telling you to turn inward.

It is going to take time, but if you let Jesus do this kind of work in you for a while, you'll begin to know you're on the right path when service itself stops feeling like a detour and it stops feeling like a burden and it starts feeling natural, life-giving, and it becomes part of who you are. So today, get your towel and basin ready. Someone needs you to wash their feet.

Let's pray together. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we sang a song earlier that said that you were working in this place. I know that to be true. You are always working. Sometimes we don't feel it, like the song said. Sometimes we do. And sometimes we know exactly what you are calling us into. We know exactly where you are putting your finger in our heart. And you are saying, I want this from you. I need this part of you. I want you to do this thing. And God, I have no doubt this morning that you are doing that with people in this room. People who are listening to this message. And you are saying to them, you are calling to them: I have a bigger vision for you. I am calling you into an abundant life. And I want to use you as my servant in this world to bring people back to life. And so God, I ask, may we be people who are not only open to your message, we aren't resisting it, but we are following. That we follow you, Jesus, the master, the rabbi, ever so closely, that your dust is getting all over us. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Amen.

South Run Baptist Church | 8712 Selger Drive, Springfield, VA 22153 | Sunday Worship at 11am

Serving Springfield, Burke, West Springfield, Lorton, Alexandria, Fort Belvoir, and Franconia, Virginia.

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The earliest followers of Jesus weren't called Christians. They were called people of the Way because following Jesus wasn't a belief system or a religion, it was a road you walked. But before you ever step foot on the road that follows Jesus, he is the first to tell you that the commitment is all-encompassing.

What We'll Cover:

Why the earliest followers of Jesus were called people of the Way and what that means for us today
The culture of non-commitment all around us, and why it's costing us more than we realize
What Jesus said about the cost of following
What real commitment looks like when it's lived out
How coming to the communion table is a renewal of the most important vow you'll ever make

Catch the weekly sermon here or on our SRBC podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Dr. Eric Gilchrest | April 12, 2026 No Looking Back -- Luke 9:57-62 * Sermon Transcript No Looking Back — Sermon Transcript

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

Luke 9:57–62; 1 Kings 19:19–21

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on the cost of discipleship from Luke 9:57–62 and 1 Kings 19:19–21. This sermon launches the "The Jesus Way" series and addresses the decline of commitment in modern life, what it truly means to follow Jesus on the narrow road, and why communion is a renewal of the covenant vow of baptism.

Getting Lost Without a Map

Good morning. Good morning. I was trying to pinpoint when this story took place. I think it was like 1996 or 1997, because I hadn't yet moved to Kentucky, which took place summer of 1997, but I was driving, which means it had to be at least 1996 or thereafter. I was about 16 or 17 years old. Google had not yet been invented, nor had your iPhone. We did not have maps on our phones, but we didn't even have the GPS systems. If you were old enough, you sat the GPS in your car, the Garmin, before there was the Google Maps on your phone. And so the old school way was to get a map out and to kind of route your route ahead of time, right? And so you know where you're going.

Well, as a 16-year-old, I still didn't know street names. My parents had been driving me everywhere. I'm sure it's not too dissimilar still. You kind of know your way. You more feel around than you do actually like know the streets. So I was trying to impress a girl. She invited me to a dance event. I don't even remember what the event was. But she invited me and I wanted to be there. And so I had not done the proper thing in 1996 or 7, where you look ahead of time at the map and you find where to go. And I did what I do so many times in life to this very day, which is I just jumped in the car and I went.

And I was probably 30 minutes in and I'm just kind of driving around at this point. And I was lost. It's somewhat miraculous that I actually made it back to my home, but I kept driving. I probably drove around for a good hour and a half, and I finally looked at the clock, and I said, well, I'm not gonna make it in time. The punchline of this is, of course, that the girl was not impressed. And I was lost. And I wished I had a guide, right? A GPS or a Google Maps to show me the way. And I did not.

Launching "The Jesus Way" Series: The Narrow Road and the Broad Road

This morning, we're launching something new. We're talking about the Jesus way. And if you were here last week for Easter, I brought up the mental models of like there's the immediate path and there's the long-term walking of the path. But there's two paths, right? There's the narrow and there's the broad. And my hope for these next weeks that are coming here is for me to be a guide, to show you how to read your guide and in order to walk the path that is meant to be walked by Jesus going before us. And then also, like, how to stay off that other path that we are not to be on. And so we will alternate back and forth and back and forth, again, hoping for me to be something of a guide to you in walking the narrow Jesus way.

Before we get started today, though, I do want us to pray together, and we'll launch in.

Heavenly Father, we come this morning, and we do need a guide. And as much as I'd love to be one, I need a guide. We need Jesus. We need the Holy Spirit directing us here and now. Heavenly Father, we need you. And so we ask in this moment, Lord, that you pierce the veil that sits on all of our hearts, that you tear it away, and that you be moving in clear and mighty ways in each and every one of us. Lord, each of us is here for a reason. We are in this room for a reason. We are listening to this for a reason. And God, we ask that you move in a mighty way to reveal that to us. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

America's Commitment Problem: College Sports, Marriage, and the Rise of the "Nones"

So we are indeed talking about the two paths. We are for a while, and this week we are starting the journey together, so to speak, and any good journey starts with the first steps. And if you know your Bible well enough, then you know that Jesus actually multiple times comes to people and he says to them, follow me, right? I want to take you on a journey. And we see this with the disciples, and we see this in today's passage as well. And so, in today's passage, I decided to go ahead and start with some of the harder things that Jesus wants to say.

I think we live in a world that has a commitment problem. I'm going to guess that you could come up with your own examples of this commitment problem. I feel like it's getting worse. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older. But I do feel we are less and less committed to certain things in life. The trivial example I came up with was college sports. If you watch college sports, then you know that there was a day and age in which somebody enrolled in college, and then they were there for four years, and you watched that player as a freshman, and then as a sophomore, as a junior, and then their senior year was really special because they had matured into this wonderful athlete who was going to lead their football team or their basketball team to victory, and it was a fun thing to watch. And then you know where this is going. No one is committed to a team anymore or a school. Like if the right donor comes along, well, freshman year might be spent at the University of Miami, and then a year later, you're over at Florida. God forbid.

Another example. There was a day and age, not that long ago, where you were committed to the place you were born into, the town. You grew up there. And there was a loyalty to the people in that town. And you knew it well. And they knew you well. And it came with its own traps, of course. But you were committed to it, right?

Or let's get real here. Religion. If you know anything about the state of religion in the world, but especially here in America, it's not looking good. For every six people that leave the Christian faith, only one comes into it. Six people leave, one comes in. You just, you know, you chart that out over enough years, and what happens? Well, along with that comes the rise of this sociological group called the nones, which is to say, N-O-N-E-S, nones. The nones are people who, well, they're not committed to any kind of faith. They believe in God probably. Not all of them do actually, but they believe in kind of something. They just don't want to commit to a certain brand. There's no brand loyalty. And so they're not so sure about the Christian God or the Muslim God or any other God that's out there. And they're just going to kind of feel their way through life. And I feel like this is a wonderfully kind of great example of the state of the nation where we don't commit to much of anything and we're just going to feel our way through life.

The Waning of Commitment in Church Life and Marriage

If I'm honest, I have noticed the lack of commitment — or maybe I should say just waning commitment — in church life generally. And I've been here eight years, and this church, for 40-some-odd years now, was built on a model of commitment and service and people who jump in and do the ministry of the church, right? Because you only pay one minister, that happens to be me, but the assumption is that there are all these other ministers out there doing the ministry as well. And there was a day and age in 1985 or 6 or 95 and 96 when that could be assumed — that everybody is committed. If you live in the United States, you're probably a Christian and you're probably going to church. And that assumption is slowly being eroded, maybe quickly now. And even over the last eight years, I'll say, I've noticed there's kind of a waning of commitment, even in our own pews. And I say this not as judgment, I'm just describing the reality that is the United States and how it makes it into our walls as well. Nobody is immune.

And lastly, my example of the waning commitment is with marriage. Marriages are increasingly non-committal. But what's interesting to me is actually divorce rates have — I don't know if you know this, I didn't know this — they've slowly tapered off. Divorce is not actually up. I remember when I was young and my preacher would always say, you know, Christian divorces are at the same rate as secular divorces, which is, I think, largely true, and it's like 50%. And that's actually tapered some. But that's not the problem. That's a good thing, obviously. The problem is the people just aren't getting married at all. People are waiting really long to get married. And there again is the commitment issue, right? It's, well, I'm gonna bide my time here and I'm gonna wait it out and I'm gonna do my own thing. I'm gonna get my career going and I'm gonna take care of me and I'm not going to commit to another person. And so even in marriages, we see this lack of commitment.

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, and the Four Commitments of a Good Life

A few years ago, a gentleman named David Brooks wrote a book called The Second Mountain in which he describes the need for four commitments in life. If you want to live a good and fulfilled life and get to the end of it all and look back and say, I lived a good life — he says, and I happen to agree — you should make at least four commitments. One is to family, another to friends, another to your vocation, what you're called to do in this life, and then of course some kind of faith community and a faith. I'm here to talk to you about the faith piece.

I actually want to launch back into marriage for a second because I think the two are tied. This is the commitment to your family or to your marriage. When I got married, or maybe right before, we did some premarital counseling, and I don't remember a lot of it, but I do remember this one analogy that whoever was doing the speaking offered, and it's just kind of stuck with me all these years. And I offer it to you, especially the younger people in our congregation, but maybe some of you old folks who need this as well.

A marriage, you might think, is the gift, like you are given a car when you say your vows, and then you are not supposed to drive this car into the ditch at some point, right? That's what marriage is, or maybe some people think so anyway. And then over time, that car maybe gets beat up, and you got to put a new tire on it, or you back it into a clump of snow by our house, and now we need a new bumper. And then you slap that on. But that's not marriage. Marriage is you come down the aisle, and there's a pastor there, and he makes you take some vows. You say, I do, and then you start something. You start a journey, like we're starting right here. And when you start that journey, you're not given a new car. You're given car parts, and you're given maybe a little bit of a map, probably a picture of what that thing's supposed to look like, and then you spend the rest of your lives building the car. This is marriage. You're building something together. You're not just handed it.

I think faith is a lot like this. Faith is a lot like marriage. When you get married, you say, till death do us part. You say, I do, and then it takes a whole lot of work the rest of your life to make and build a good marriage. And faith, it's a lifelong process of a whole lot of work saying till death do us part, and you're building something, building something in your soul. And that's what a good faith journey is. And this is the journey I'm inviting you into this morning. Many of you have already started, and I'm hoping after — well, we'll say weeks, but frankly years and decades of this — you will have built something that is good and beautiful. This is what Jesus is inviting each of us into this morning.

Luke 9:57–62: Three Would-Be Followers and the High Cost of Discipleship

But here's where it starts. Open your Bibles to Luke chapter 9, and we'll read what Jesus has to say to these three people who come to him. Starting in verse 57, he says this:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go."

And that might be you this morning. That might be you right now. And you're saying, all right, Eric, you know what? I'm already in. I am ready to follow Jesus on this narrow road. Let me show you the way. Well, I'm showing you what Jesus says to this gentleman who says to him, I will follow you. And Jesus says to him:

"Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

Which is to say, buckle up, get ready. This journey might not be exactly what you think it is. The commitment is high, and the expectations are high, and there will be challenges along the way.

It doesn't stop there, though. Second person comes, and Jesus this time says, follow me. Same word, right? Follow. Follow me. But he says, well, Lord, let me first go and bury my father. And Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." That one is pretty harsh. It sounds harsh to me, and it should sound harsh to you too.

Let's jump into the third one, and then we'll come back and grab them all together. Yet another says, I will, here again, follow you, Lord, down this narrow road — I am in. But let me first say farewell to those at my home. And Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

All three of these, once again, is Jesus saying, I want you to follow me, but I want you to know the commitment level is as high as it gets, right? You should be committed to your family. David Brooks says as much in The Second Mountain. It's one of his four, right? But Jesus says there's a higher loyalty yet. And Jesus is calling us into this way, and he's saying, you know, get ready, buckle up. It's not going to be easy.

1 Kings 19: The Calling of Elisha — a Blueprint for Radical Commitment

Now, what you might miss in here is that this is actually a reference to a passage from your Old Testament. I'll just read it. It's not going to take too long. This is the calling of Elisha. Elijah and Elisha, you might remember, these two great prophets, right? And Elijah is going along and he sees Elisha, it seems, for the first time, and he's calling him to follow Elijah. It's not dissimilar at all to what Jesus is doing with these three people who come to him wanting to follow. It goes like this, in 1 Kings 19 and following:

He departed from there, Elijah did, and found Elisha, who was plowing, he's plowing with 12 yoke of oxen in front of him. And he was with the 12th. Elijah passed by him and cast his cloak upon him.

And he left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, let me kiss my father and my mother and then I will follow you. Sound familiar? So Elijah comes. The cloak-throwing thing is kind of his way of saying, you should follow me. You're going to become a disciple. You're going to be like me. We're going to do this. I will apprentice you. The very things Jesus is trying to do with disciples too. And then Elisha says, well, let me go kiss my mom and dad real quick because I'm probably not going to see them for a while.

And he said to him — Elijah did — "Go back again. What have I done to you?" And here Elijah's questioning Elisha's loyalty, right? Why would you go? What have I done to you? Why would you do this? But Elisha does return. He does the following. So Elisha returns from following him, and he took the yoke of oxen — these 12 oxen, think of these enormous animals, his whole livelihood, by the way, this is what he does for a living — he takes the 12 oxen and he sacrificed them. And he boiled their flesh with the yokes of the oxen and gave it to everybody. And they all ate. And then he arose and went after Elijah and assisted him.

What's happening in this scenario is Elisha goes back. Okay, maybe kiss mom and dad goodbye — but to burn down his whole old lifestyle and then to follow Elijah. This is what Jesus is calling for. He's saying, don't look back. There is no looking back.

Burning the Boats: What It Looks Like to Leave Everything and Follow Jesus

If you are going to follow me, and if we're going to do this together, then I need you to know, I need all of us to know this morning, that doing so is a radical act. It is not something you enter into lightly. It is not a decision you just kind of willy-nilly make. This is not a Las Vegas marriage. This is something you've thought through. You're ready to do.

To be honest with you — a little inside-my-head moment here — when we have baptisms in this church, I would be all for a spontaneous baptism. You know, if that ever happens, like don't be entirely surprised. But I actually don't prefer that. When we do the baptisms, I like to meet with the candidates a number of times. Because I like to convey to them the importance of what they are doing, and the high calling of what they are being called into. And that this is not something you enter into lightly, as the pastor says before the two couples who are getting married. This is a vow you're making for a lifetime. This is a covenant you're entering into, something deadly serious.

In Luke 5, earlier in this book that we've been reading from today — we read Luke 9 — and there were these three people who come and say, we want to follow you, and Jesus kind of pumps the brake a little bit and he's like, are you sure? In Luke 5, just a few chapters prior, he comes to the people who are his disciples and who become his disciples. He comes to Peter. And you might recall the story. This is where the miraculous catch of fish happens, and Jesus sends them out. And they've got these two boats, and there's so much fish that are coming into the boats that the boats are actually like sinking under the water, and they barely get to drag them in, and there's just fish everywhere. And this is what these men do for a living. It's the best day of their lives, right? This is like they have just had their best day in the office ever.

And in that moment, Jesus says, it's time to burn the boats. It's time to sacrifice the yoke and the oxen, and I need you to follow me. And then here's how that text ends in Luke 5:11:

So they pulled their boats up on shore, and they left everything, and they followed him.

And they followed him. This is what Jesus is asking from them, and he's asking in chapter 9 once again.

The Early Church, Martyrs, and Confessors: When the Cost of Faith Was Literal

One of the other things I say in the baptism class is that there's this strange thing that happens in the ancient world, in the early church from the first few centuries, where someone will come to a priest or the leader of the church and say, I want to be baptized. And sometimes the priest would say, I don't think you're ready. No, is the answer. Come see me in a year. Let's talk again later. Which you can't really imagine happening in a church today.

But here's why it happened. In the early church, there were martyrs, right? There were people who were literally dying for their faith. You know about martyrs, I'm sure. But what you might not know is there's another group called confessors. Confessors. And these are the people who almost died at the persecution of the state coming after them and persecuting them for their faith. And maybe they got thrown to the lions, and maybe they were maimed in some fashion, but they lived to tell the tale. And they would show up at church and they knew how serious it was to be a Christian in a place where it was not okay to be a Christian — something you and I know nothing about. I assure you, you know nothing about this. You might read about martyrs and the persecuted church in some far-off land, but I assure you, you know nothing about persecution like this.

And so when someone comes in the door and they say, we'd like to be part of the church — well, when that church needs to stay secret, and when that place that they're meeting in needs to be a secret so that that church can survive, and there are people inside of those walls who have been maimed by the oppressors who are outside of the walls — well, you better be ready to hold that secret. You better be ready to walk the walk of faith. You better be ready to die for your faith. And so the priest would say to the person, I don't know that you're ready for baptism just yet because the cost is really high, and I'm not sure you're ready to pay that cost just yet.

Choose Your Hard: The Cost of Following and the Cost of Not Following Jesus

Now, praise be to God, we live in the 21st century in the United States of America where religion is free and it's very easy to be Christians. But there is a crutch there. There is a crutch there. Because with that freedom and with that ease, I think there's a temptation to just float down that broad road. Because the narrow road, well, it requires some will and some discipline on your part. And so today is a day where I'm asking for more commitment. From you personally, for your faith. A commitment not unlike those who were committed in the first and second and third centuries in the oppressed church, the persecuted church. That kind of commitment.

The cost of following Jesus is high. That is clear from today's passage. But I would quickly add that the cost of not following Jesus is much, much higher. The way that leads to life is indeed narrow, and it can be hard. But the way that leads to death is not any better. It is just frictionless. It is coasting. And I assure you, the coasting costs you — in this life, and in the next.

The unvarnished truth that someone here needs to hear this morning is that life is hard one way or another. The narrow path is hard, yes, but the broad path is hard too. It is hard on your soul, and it leads away from life. So today you are being asked to choose your hard.

Communion as a Covenant Renewal: The New Covenant in Jesus's Blood

In just a minute or two we're going to take communion together. When Jesus met with the disciples in the upper room, he said to them, "This is my body broken for you, and this is my blood of the" — and here's the phrase — the new covenant. The new covenant. Do we all know what a covenant is? It is a promise. It is a binding vow. It is not at all dissimilar — in fact, it is very similar — to the kind of vow one makes when two spouses walk down the aisle together and they bind their hearts together and they say, till death do us part.

Coming forward to take communion this morning, I want it to be a renewal of the vow of your baptism. When you came forward, or when you come forward, and receive the body and the blood of Jesus, you are saying, I am on this narrow road with Jesus. I am not looking back. Jesus tells us that this is the new covenant in my blood. Those are his exact words. A covenant involves two partners. Jesus is one, and he is inviting you to be the other. When you take communion, you are making or renewing a vow or a promise — till death do us part. It is a commitment to follow the Jesus way, whether that way is hard or easy in the moment.

If you have been attending our church and have never made that commitment, I encourage you this morning — let today be the day. But do not do this alone. Do not make this commitment alone. Please tell a friend, tell someone who is trusted. Tell me — I would love to know that you are on this path for the very first time. I want to pray with you. I want to help guide you. Or if it has been a long time since you've thought of your faith as an active, deliberate yes, rather than a background assumption — right now is the time. So come ready to be challenged toward greater commitment. When you take communion, I encourage you, renew your vows.

Let's pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this morning there are people doing work in their hearts that is deep work. It is necessary work. And so God, we ask that you be very present with them, speaking to them, whispering to them in the deep recesses of their soul, reminding them that this narrow path — it is high commitment, but God, it is a good path. And it leads to springs of life. It is the good way. It leads to abundant life, here and now, and eternal life in the life to come. And so God, as people are preparing their hearts to take this vow one more time, may they do so with sincerity and with seriousness, with sober minds, knowing what it is they are entering into. I pray this in Christ's name, amen. Amen.

South Run Baptist Church | 8712 Selger Drive, Springfield, VA 22153 | Sunday Worship at 11am Serving Springfield, Burke, West Springfield, Lorton, Alexandria, Fort Belvoir, and Franconia, Virginia. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

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Coming Back To Life * Sermon Transcript Coming Back to Life

South Run Baptist Church | Springfield, VA

Pastor Eric Gilchrest

2 Corinthians 5:17–20

Easter Sunday

This is a full sermon transcript from South Run Baptist Church in Springfield, Virginia. In this message, Pastor Eric Gilchrest preaches on new creation and the ministry of reconciliation from 2 Corinthians 5:17–20. This sermon was delivered on Easter Sunday and addresses what it truly means to be a new creation in Christ, the two mental models of transformation — instantaneous and lifelong — and the mission God gives every believer to be an ambassador of reconciliation in the world.

Opening: G.K. Chesterton, the Poet-Priest, and the Reminder That You Are Not Dead Yet

What a morning. Can I get an amen? Amen. Ah. There's a writer from the early 1900s that I quite like, and I quote from time to time. And there's a book he wrote called Man Alive. It's one of his lesser-known works. The guy is G.K. Chesterton, and in it he says this:

"I don't deny that there should be priests or pastors to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that in certain strange epics — or maybe certain strange days — it is necessary to have another kind of priest, a poet, actually remind us that they are not dead yet."

I come to you this morning not as a pastor, but as a poet, reminding you that you are not dead yet, and that you too can come back to life.

Let's begin with prayer. Heavenly Father, I come, we come into this sanctuary, and we want your presence. We feel your presence. We want your spirit. We want the spirit of life that hovered over the waters in the ancient deeps at the creation of this world when all things had not yet been made but were made through you, the giver of all life. Lord, that spirit is the one we are seeking right now. It is the spirit that rose Jesus from the dead, and it is the one that has been promised to us to dwell in our hearts and to bring us back to life as well. God, give us your spirit. In Christ's name we pray, amen.

The Two Roads: The Narrow Path to Life and the Broad Road to Death

The scriptures talk about two roads with great frequency — a road that leads to death and one that leads to life. Jesus talks about it as the broad road and the narrow road, and he reminds us that many go on the broad road and quite a few, for some reason, choose the narrow road. I take these two roads to be much more important than they are often made of, because I think if we can grasp these two roads and that they are on offer before us at every single moment, we actually can grasp quite a lot about some of life's biggest questions. Life's questions like: Who is God? Who am I? And perhaps most importantly today, how do I live a good life?

Who is God? Well, he's the author of all living things. The one who creates the world, all that is alive, and he says all is good. And so where you have experienced life and goodness in this world, in this life, you have experienced God. And who am I? Well, you are a child of God. You are created in God's image to bear his image, the image of the life-giving one. And well then, what do we do? And how do I live the good life? Well, by choosing the path that leads to life, by choosing the Jesus way.

The question still remains a conundrum. Why would so many choose the narrow path — the one that leads toward death? Why not choose life? And I don't believe it's because they love evil, though some do, but it's because the broad road is the easy road. It is the frictionless path. It is the path of least resistance. It requires nothing of you but to simply coast. The narrow road, well, it requires discipline and adeptness. It looks more treacherous than the broad road does. The narrow road has fewer people on it, naturally, and so it causes you to wonder, is this actually the way at all? Why do I feel so alone out here? The broad road has company, and there are many joining with you. It feels safe. There's safety in numbers, after all, right?

The narrow road leads to life, the broad to death. The narrow leads to God, and the broad road, well, it leads to separation from God. The narrow is rightly called righteous — or if you need a less churchy term, just simply good living. Living in accordance with the grain of God's image within you. And the broad road, we call that sin. Or again, if you want something less churchy, wrong living. A way of being that is ultimately self-destructive. It is settling for a lesser life, something that might be good, but not great. But too often, it's not even good. It's not a good life at all. We often choose paths of hurt or hate, addiction or division.

What It Looks Like to Be Fully Alive: The Blue Flame vs. the Red Flame

And so it is that living a life that is filled with life is indeed the narrow way. It's harder than we might think. And you know this to be true, even as I say it now, because how many of you and me, we live a life that is truly and fully alive? How many of you would look at your neighbor as they walk to get their mail and say, well, Jane, now Jane, she is fully alive. She is living her best life.

I encourage you right now to think of someone who is actually this kind of life liver. To help you, you should probably consider the fire analogy. You're not necessarily thinking of the person who burns the brightest. You're trying to think of the person who burns hottest and most consistent. We're thinking of the blue flames, not the red flames. It's easy to throw a few pieces of kindling onto a fire and make it flare up, but it's a whole other thing to build a big burning bonfire that burns long and large with thick pieces of wood, making it near impossible to extinguish. These are the people I want you to think about. How rare is this person in your experience? The one with a bonfire in their heart that burns bright and clear and strong.

Romans 12:2 and the Year-Long Theme of Transformation at South Run Baptist Church

If you're visiting today or just started attending our church, then you might not know that since January we've had one theme going on here. We've got a verse, Romans 12:2 — "Be transformed by the renewing of your minds." We've got bracelets to boot, and they're in the back if you'd like one on the way out. We've been teaching about it. We've had a marriage workshop on this, and I've been doing everything I can to get you to think about one thing: transformation. And so if you're new here, and you're looking around the room, and you're thinking, boy, these folks are supposed to be transformed — I'd encourage you not to judge too hastily, because you should have seen them three months ago.

2 Corinthians 5:17: If Anyone Is in Christ, He Is a New Creation

In 2 Corinthians 5:17, our scripture for the day, Paul says that if you are in Christ, we are a new creation. And then he says, "The old is gone, the new has come." And this has everything to do with Easter, when the new creation has begun with the resurrection of Jesus, and death is defeated, and Jesus comes back to life, and he opens the door to the rest of us to follow him in this new creation living.

What new creation means for me and for you is nothing short of miraculous, and yet it is filled with misunderstanding. I think there are two mental models for what is happening in new creation and transformation, both of which are true, but you've got to carry both of them together at the same time.

Mental Model One: The Instantaneous New Creation — Baptism and the Miracle of the Moment

The first is that the new creation, the new that has come into your life, is instantaneous. When your head goes below the waterline of the baptismal pool and the pastor proclaims, you are baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — you are instantaneously changed from old creation to new creation. It's a miracle. I want to affirm this and say that there is something deeply true about this. A miracle has happened. It's a mystery, and it is immediate and it is unexplainable what happens when you call Lord Jesus, Lord and Savior of your life.

But my son Asher was baptized today, and I am so proud of him, and he is indeed a new creation. But should I expect this new creation will never talk back to me again, and that he will always choose to listen to every word I say and obey with perfect humility and grace and honor his father and his mother, will he never again need forgiveness because he is this new creation? I suppose that is yet unwritten, but I'm not counting on it. Which gets me to the second mental model.

Mental Model Two: The Lifelong New Creation — Growing Up Into the Image of God Over Time

One of growth and maturity. This last week, my wife sat down for many hours — and she would want me to emphasize many, many hours — pulling together photos of our eldest son, Ezra, as we prepare for Senior Sunday, when we all get the joy of watching our kids grow from infancy into the age of 18. The maturing happens over this 18 years, and it is nothing short of miraculous. There is a true change in body and mind and even spirit. Ezra too was baptized about the same age as Asher, around age 9 or 10. And the 18-year-old Ezra standing here today — well, you would be a fool if you thought he was the same person as the 10-year-old version of Ezra. He is not. He is indeed a new creation. He's just eight years older, though, of this new creation. They are the same person. They're just eight years apart. A new creation of the old creation.

There is a mental model I'm offering you of growth and maturity that happens over time that is also part of the new creation that we are all called into. This is, in fact, the model I've leaned into all year to this point. It turns out the bonfire of your heart is not built in an instant. It is built over a lifetime. Coming fully alive is not something that happens in the twinkling of an eye, though it starts there. It does happen with deliberate practice and intentionality. Moving from the old to the new is the project of a lifetime, and if you're not careful, there are detours and broad roads that can sweep you up for long stretches of life's journey.

Staying on that narrow road is in fact tough, but getting back on the narrow road takes a mere instant — a decision, a decision point that some of you might need to make today. The choice is always in front of you, and there you have it. The two mental models of becoming the transformed you, the new creation you. One is immediate and in the twinkling of an eye, a choice, a prayer to which God always answers yes and amen. Welcome home, my prodigal son, my prodigal daughter. And the other model, it takes all the time in the world to transform. And it must be managed and maintained. It is a road that is walked.

The road to life can be chosen today, but it must be chosen again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And the journey is never done until it is done. And so it must be carefully guarded and walked intentionally with discipline and with care. You can think of the road of life just as the road the prodigal son walked in returning to the Father. The road was leading back to life, back to the Father, and back home. It is where our lives are indeed heading right now for those of us who remain on the road of life. We will one day find ourselves welcomed home by the Father.

Reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5: God Brings Us Home Through Christ

Paul is more or less saying this same thing in our passage today. He says that in this new creation, God reconciled us to himself through Christ. He reconciled us to himself through Christ, which is kind of a mouthful, but it simply means this: God wants us to come home to him. He loves us, and he wants to be with us, and Christ walks the way home for us, and he takes us with him. He shows us the way that leads to life for all who walk with him. To be reconciled, then, is simply to be in God's presence, to the source of all life, the one who in the beginning spoke life into being. New creation then is a homecoming, a coming back to life.

It is interesting to me, and I think it should be to you, that when Paul talks about new creation — and he does so in a few places in his letters — every time he does, he reminds us that we are made in the image of God. This is the language he uses. And he's of course pulling that from Genesis 1. And so in Colossians 3, for example, he'll say that we are to put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator. We're being renewed into this image. Or again, Ephesians 4, put on the new self created after the likeness of God.

The goal of the new self is becoming a lot like the oldest self that you actually have — the self that got buried way down deep and crusted over with sin and the hardship of life. The brokenness of a half-lived life. But Christ wants to bring you back to the source of life and reunite you with God, the author of life. And he shows us this way home.

The Mission of Reconciliation: You Are an Ambassador for Christ — 2 Corinthians 5:18–20

But there is one more really important piece of what Paul is saying this morning to every last one of you. Perhaps you've been persuaded that the path to God is indeed the path to life. And you have entered this path, both in the immediate sense, in the decision you're making in this moment, and a lifelong maturing over time. And you're gearing up for a life of abundant life and looking forward to eternal life, just like the four who were baptized this morning. But there's more.

Because God is not so self-centered as you and me. You see, this is not really about us. It's actually about the world. And God so loving the world. The second half of verse 14 in our passage today says that not only has Christ brought us back to God, but he has then dropped a mission on us. We've got things to do. A ministry. A purpose. A task. Something that we are compelled to do if we are indeed those people who have access to life. It says, He gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

The ministry of reconciliation. If you'd rather, we'll just call it a mission of reconciliation. A mission of going out to the people who need to come home, who need life breathed back into them. And that is the mission. This is your job and it is my job — to bring people back to life. Paul's command here is to be reconcilers, to be the wayfarers walking behind Jesus and then bringing as many people on this same path with us back to the source of life.

He says it here not once, not twice, but three times in a row that this is your mission. "All of this is from God," verse 19. All of this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and — first time — gave us the ministry of reconciliation. But he starts again. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and — second time — entrusting to us and to you this ministry of reconciliation, bringing people home. And therefore — third time — we are ambassadors. We go out into the world as life givers alongside the one who gave his life for us and gives life to us. We are ambassadors for Christ. God making his appeal through — of all people — you and me. He makes his appeal through us. And so we implore you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled. And I would then add, and be a reconciler.

The Good News and the Hard Truth: Bringing Life or Bringing Death Into the World

As with many things in the Bible, there's good news and bad news here. I'll start with the bad. If your life doesn't look like one that breathes life into the world around you, but instead brings judgment, division, hate, and the fruit of bitterness wherever you go, then you're not living as an ambassador to the God of the living. You may not even be on the path of life. You're just bringing more death into the world.

But the good news is this. It doesn't have to be this way. If Christ is in you, then you have access to the source of all life, the same life that brought Jesus back from the grave. And so if you are looking for a life purpose, well, look no further. If you are wandering about, trying to figure out what to do with your life, look no further. Be someone who brings people to the source of all life, who teaches them how to walk the narrow road of life, how to have discipline, how to love like God loves, how to live like Jesus lived, how to lay one's life down for the other, that all might experience the abundant life that God desires now and the eternal life that God has in store in the life to come.

Closing: The Poet's Reminder — You Are Not Dead Yet

To end with G.K. Chesterton: I don't deny that there should be priests and pastors to remind you that one day you will die. I only say that at certain strange days, it is necessary to remind you that you are not dead yet and that you too can come back to life.

Let us pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, do a work in the hearts of these people. Lord, you look upon them with love and desire. You want them back home. You want them on that road to life. It is not necessarily the easiest road, but Lord it is a fulfilling road. It is the road that leads to life, and the decision before us is always before us — every minute, every second of every day. We can choose one path or the other path. And Lord, today, may we choose life. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen.

South Run Baptist Church | 8712 Selger Drive, Springfield, VA 22153 | Sunday Worship at 11am

Serving Springfield, Burke, West Springfield, Lorton, Alexandria, Fort Belvoir, and Franconia, Virginia.

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Trent was called to the ministry during his time at South Run Baptist Church and has served the past 25 years as an Air Force Chaplain. He currently serves as Command Chaplain, Headquarters, Air Combat Command, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia and is responsible for establishing spiritual fitness programs that meet the diverse religious needs of 156,739 combat-ready air, space, cyber, and intelligence Total Force Airmen. He holds master’s degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Air Command and Staff College, and National War College. Prior to joining the Air Force, Trent served as a senior pastor at churches in Texas and North Dakota. Trent credits his decision to rededicate his life to Christ and ultimately surrender to full-time ministry to the discipleship and mentoring of South Run’s first pastor, Dr. Tom McMillan. God used South Run during these early pivotal years to disciple, license him to the ministry, and hone his ministry skills as a Youth Intern. Arguably the greatest gift South Run gave him was introducing him to Lisa. Trent and Lisa were married at South Run in 1993 and celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary in August.

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Continuing the Elijah narrative from last week, this week we see him fulfilling one of God’s charges—namely, Elijah finds Elisha and calls him into ministry with him. In the New Testament passage for this week, we see Jesus doing this exact thing with his own disciples. Jesus even alludes to the calling of Elisha in his response to a would-be disciple. “Calling” is a word that we use often in the church, but there is also a lot of misunderstanding around the topic. Today we will look at what Scripture says about what it means to be called.

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If we simply turn the page from last week’s passage where Elijah was calling down fire from heaven, we arrive at today’s passage in which Elijah is on the run. He fears for his life. The once mighty and confident Elijah is suddenly weakened and afraid. It is in this state of mind that he cries out to God because, according to Elijah, he is all alone. But the truth is otherwise. He is not alone, and neither are you. Elijah has people in his life he could lean on. And more than that, God’s presence is there with him. May we find God’s presence and allow that to be enough.

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In today’s passage we read about Elijah, the prophet of Israel, who stood against the false prophets of Baal and called down fire from heaven to demonstrate the power and presence of God. Like CS Lewis said of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, the presence of God in Elijah's fire is not safe, but we can know that it is good. Fire, in fact, is a symbol used throughout the Bible—from the flaming swords guarding Eden to the lake of fire in Revelation 20 and any number of places in between. The fire represents many things, but today, on this day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church, I want to focus on the fire as purification leading to revival. Let’s dive in!

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This is our final week in our Easter series on hope. Scripture, in a few places, gives us a vision of the redeemed world when all things are made new. A word of warning: one should be reminded of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” What we know from Scripture is still only partial knowledge of what’s to come, but even partial knowledge is enough. In fact, it is more than enough to sustain a lifetime of hope.

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In our sixth installment of a series on hope we turn our attention to the story of hope as it unfolds in the Old Testament. The hope that is fulfilled in Jesus and will one day be fully realized in the new creation has its roots in the Old Testament. The story of the Old Testament is a story awaiting an ending because it is a story of hope deferred. Next week we plan to talk more about the ending of this story, but this week we talk about the promises of hope that are raised on the pages of the Bible’s first half. Let us turn there together.

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An important life lesson is to surround oneself with people you want to be like. If you are going to be a person of hope, you need to surround yourself with people of hope. The church should be such a place, and I desire that our congregation be a community of hope. If we are to fully embrace what it means to be the church on a hill, we must cultivate hope as a collective virtue. We must embody it and shine its light as brightly as we possibly can.

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As we continue to think about the hope that we find in Christ’s death and resurrection, we turn today to an important topic for many of us, the topic of suffering. It is in our hardship that our hope is most challenged. We begin to ask why God would allow such difficulty. We sometimes begin to allow doubt to creep in. We might even lose hope and begin to despair that life will never be the same. Today we must address this issue head on and ask what we are to do when suffering strikes and how we can allow our hope to guide us through our hardest times. Let’s dig in.

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For our third lesson on hope, we turn to the topic of desire. Scripture teaches us that one thing is necessary and one thing alone is the fountain out of which all desires must spring. The psalmist says it this way: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” Jesus says it this way, "Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added.” What do you desire? For what do you seek? And from what does your hope spring?

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We are in the second week of an Easter series on hope. The Easter season is a time filled with hope. We can look around and see the promises of springtime and the length of daylight, and we are given a kind of hope. But Easter is far more than nice weather and longer days. We have a resurrection hope that fits us into a larger narrative of the redemption of all things. And so, this week, we continue talking about hope and what we can do to cultivate hope in our lives.

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Christ Is Risen! Christ Is Risen Indeed! Easter is a day filled with hope and promise. It is the day on which the future hopes that we all await, resurrection and (more importantly) union with God, are made possible. It is the day when death is defeated and sin has been dealt with. It is the day on which history turns because we know how the story ends. Our faith in God’s future is a faith in a future that brings goodness and redemption out of that which is evil and fallen. Christ is risen! Let us rejoice!

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This is a Palm Sunday service in which we sing praises to the king. A king who rides a donkey into battle. Who wields his body and blood as the weapon of choice. Who takes the form of a servant though Lord of all. Who sides with the powerless though all-powerful himself. This is king Jesus. The king no one asked for. The king everyone needed. Let us worship the King of kings and Lord of lords.

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In the second half of Galatians 4, Paul writes an allegory of the Sarah and Hagar story in which he contrasts competing visions of righteousness. Are we righteous because of what we do? Or are we righteous because of what Jesus has done? Paul reminds us that righteous union with God is already available through Christ’s atoning death, and there is nothing we can do to achieve it other than embracing the gift, the grace, that is being offered.

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Continuing our series through the book of Galatians, we now turn to chapter 4. Here Paul continues to beat the drum of “grace" without ever using the word. Righteousness, that is, right relationship with God, is not something earned or deserved. It is not possible through keeping the works of the law or doing enough right things. Right relationship, Paul argues, is only possible because God sent his Son that we might be sons of God too. We are not slaves or outcasts, we are sons and daughters of our “Abba” Father, with all the rights and privileges that come along with that. That is quite a gift, or as we usually call it: Grace.

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Dee Whitten retired as Executive Director of NorthStar at the end of 2022. He is a visionary leader who often recognizes trends before others do. He strives to initiate new and innovative ministries to help the local church and reach the unchurched in our communities. Dee's strengths are in coaching, mentoring and relationship building, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Prior to coming to NorthStar, Dee served as the Sr Pastor of Fairview at River Club as well as Director of Missions of Hermon Baptist Association in Caroline County, VA. Dee has also served as the Northern Region Field Strategist for the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and as pastor of numerous other churches, including Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Stafford, VA, and Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria, VA. Dee and his wife, Jane, have two grown children and six grandchildren.

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We are steadily working our way through the entire book of Galatians. In the third chapter, Paul finally turns his attention to a pressing question, one that has been hanging in the air this whole time. Why then did the law exist at all? Paul’s answer to this, in its simplest form, is that it is our instructor or teacher. But what does it teach us? Again, simply put, Paul uses the metaphor of slavery and freedom at this point, and he says that the law teaches us that we are—whether we realize it or not—enslaved. But the good news of the gospel is that we are no longer slaves but free. Through our purchase on Calvary, we have been set free from the law of sin and death! Amen!

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We continue with our in-depth study of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Today we discuss Gal. 3:1-18 where Paul connects the dots between the pouring out of the Holy Spirit onto the Galatian people with the promises of God to Abraham. The thread that ties it all together is the cross of Christ where an outpouring of God's grace. It is the faith of Jesus at the cross that unlocks the promises of God, and we enter into these promises through faith in Christ.

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Everybody faces pressure in life--time pressure, and financial pressure, and work pressure, and maybe most of all, people pressure, the pressure that results from our interactions and relationships with other people. It’s been noted that the story we find in Mark 6:14-29 can be read as a case study in people pressure. Perhaps it can give us some insight today into the way that people pressure works in our lives and how we can live in a world of pressure.

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This week, let us take a second pass at Galatians 2:15-21, especially 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Today we must take a close look at three interrelated questions that flow directly out of this passage: Why must the messiah die in the first place? What is it that Jesus loves about us that would cause him to give himself for us? And why must we be “crucified with Christ”?

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Galatians 2 concludes with a story about Paul confronting Peter in his hypocrisy followed by a dense explanation of a core tenet of Paul’s theology: justification by faith. Galatians 2 and Romans 3 are the clearest and most compact explanations of justification by faith in all of Scripture. We will spend at least two weeks on this because it is such an important doctrine, not only for understanding Paul but for understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus, its implications, and what that means for us today.

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Galatians 2 continues with Paul’s biographical recollection of a time he took Barnabas and Titus to Jerusalem. This wasn’t just a bro-trip to see the sights and do all the touristy things. Paul was on a mission. After fourteen years of Jesus following, he went down to Jerusalem to meet the leaders there, to exchange ideas, to test his gospel message against theirs, and to walk away with the assurance that the whole Jesus mission was all on the same page. Today we discuss the importance of this event, what it meant for the Galatians, and what it means for us today.

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As we continue our journey through the book of Galatians, today we finish chapter 1. In it, we discover quite a lot about the man writing the letter. Paul’s biography is a remarkable one. Not only do we know of his life through his letters, but we also have the book of Acts to fill in some gaps. Perhaps no event is more consequential in his life than his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Today, let us remember Paul and the work done in him and through him. And let that spur in us a remembrance of the way God has worked in our lives too.

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As we turn again to Galatians to continue our series on the book, you might notice something. Paul is angry! Not just a little frustrated, he is upset and calling down curses upon anyone who distorts the gospel. What has Paul most upset is that outside teachers have convinced the Galatians that the death of Jesus is a minor part of the gospel story and that the law still in effect. Paul will say that, not only is the crucifixion central to the gospel, but through it, the world is being redeemed, that the old age is passing away and the new has come.

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This week we are beginning a weeks-long study into the book of Galatians. It is one of Paul’s most fiery letters, filled with passion, frustration, and a careful explanation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We will go verse-by-verse through this six-chapter book until we finish it. In the opening verses we are reading today, Paul clearly states that Jesus “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.” We will conclude our service with communion to remember the goodness of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Dr. Carey Froelich has served churches in many roles, primarily in discipleship and administration. He moved to Northern Virginia in April 2021 from near Houston, TX. He has just completed a term as Interim Pastor of Emmanuel Baptist in Alexandria, and he helped them develop a successful partnership with a group who were starting a new church. A widower, Carey has a daughter and two sons, who with their spouses have given him 7 grandchildren.

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As we prepare for Christmas, we prepare for the incarnation of God—God putting on human flesh and dwelling in our midst. It is easy to overlook the radical nature of such a claim. Behind such a claim, however, sits three important truths. 1. God comes into this world because there is good in it worth saving. 2. God loves this world deeply like a father loves a child. 2. Sin is real and redemption is necessary, but praise be to Christ with whom salvation has come!

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The third Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of “Joy,” and because of our shared devotional, we approach joy in terms of “anticipation”. Anticipations is a version of joy that makes promises, even if they are yet unfulfilled. It is a joy before the joy of fulfillment. Children experience this kind of joy every December in the days leading to Christmas, and adults would do well to watch and learn. The anticipation and joy experienced in Christ’s first coming is only heightened and fulfilled in the second coming when Christ sets the world right and establishes joy and peace as a way of daily life.

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On this second Sunday of Advent, we read about John the Baptist shouting in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Advent is a season of preparation in more ways than one. We are all preparing for Christmas morning, whether that is through buying presents, decorating the house, or as my kids do, creating a “paper countdown chain” where they daily tear off one link in the chain until Christmas finally arrives. How do you prepare? And, more importantly, what should we be doing with our spirit and soul to prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ? It is these questions that we turn ourselves to today.

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The season of advent is upon us! Today is the first of four weeks preparing ourselves for the coming of Jesus. That’s what advent means: “coming” or “arrival". We prepare in retrospect, for the king who we know was born in a manger in a few short weeks. This is an act of remembrance, not all that different from eating the bread and drinking the cup at communion. We remember the birth of the savior, and we prepare our hearts for his advent into the world. But there is a second advent or second “coming” that we await too. The return of the king. When all things shall be put right in their finality. When all hearts shall be judged. When Christ will open the gates to the city of the New Jerusalem and people of all tongues and tribes in every nation shall enter in.

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It is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and, therefore, it is only appropriate to talk about giving thanks. To possess a posture of thankfulness on a daily basis is many things. To be thankful is to be (gratefully) looking at what one already has rather than what one longs for or desires. To be thankful is to be thinking about others first rather than thinking about oneself. To be thankful in the context of your relationship to God means adopting a posture of praise and adoration for the goodness of God and the many and varied gifts he so often gives. Today, let us give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love endures forever.

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Jeremiah 29 is one of those passages that many point to as an inspiring passage about the way God is at work for our well-being. However, it’s also one of those passages that is often misunderstood. It is indeed inspiring and encouraging, just maybe not in the way you think it is. God promises a “future and a hope”, but it needs to be said that it is not exactly the future that Judah was hoping for. This is a stark reminder that our future and hope is best placed in God’s hands, not our own, and come what may, the peace of being part of God’s plan far outweighs whatever future we might try to make of our own accord.

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The series that we have been walking through has been wonderful for my soul and I hope for yours too. The source of encouragement and inspiration over these weeks has been twofold: the Word of God and the witness of God's church. Hebrews 12 encapsulates well what has been happening over these months. In it, the author writes about the “great cloud of witnesses” that encourage us to run with endurance the race that is set before us. May you continue to be encouraged by remembering God’s goodness in your life and in the lives of all who bear witness to God’s goodness.

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When push comes to shove, what is it that you trust in? Who do you rely on? Yourself? A parent? A friend? Proverbs 3:5 reminds us that, above all else, our trust should be in the Lord. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” The outcome of a life led in full-hearted trust of God is not necessarily an easy life, but it is a good life. May you learn today what it means to truly trust in God.

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The inspiring hymn, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, was written as a reflection on Lamentations 3:22-23, where the author writes, "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” While this passage and the song inspired by it are relatively well-known, what is perhaps less appreciated is the dark canvas on which this beacon of light is found. The whole of Lamentations is, as its name suggests, a lament. It is a dark and desperate work because of the destruction and desolation that Judah has faced. But in the sadness of Lamentation the author finds hope and possibility as he recognizes God’s faithfulness, even in the darkest of times. Let us look to God with that same hope.

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James 3 is most known for its call to tame the tongue and its remarkable insight on all the various ways that our mouths and words can get us into trouble. The chapter ends, perhaps appropriately, with a call to wisdom and to peace. Neither wisdom nor peace, it seems, are possible with an untamed tongue. Today, as we study the final verses of James 3, may we seek a wisdom that is not of this world but is from on high, a wisdom that is, in the words of James, "pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, fully of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.”

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There is so much to love about this passage from Isaiah 43. In it we find that though Israel is in a place of exile, God is still for them; and if God is for them, who can be against them? These same truths hold for us today. We should not fear because we have been redeemed by God through Christ. He has called us by name. And even though we may walk through fire and water, God will be with us. What, then, is left to fear?

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Throughout this encouraging word series, we have discussed passages that you, South Run Baptist Church, turn to when you need encouragement. It has been beautiful to dig into the promises of Scripture that we can hold to as we weather the storms of life. Today’s passage from Romans 12 is walking map, of sorts. Rather than focus on what we should “think,” Romans 12 reminds us of what we should “do.” When the terrain of life gets difficult, Romans 12 offers a series of steps to take as we walk our way out of it.

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As we continue to hear encouraging words from the Word, this week we turn our attention to the last verses of Isaiah 40. It is another popular passage, this time because of the imagery supplied by the verse—namely, that of an eagle soaring over the heights, escaping whatever trouble and storm that may lay below, and flying effortlessly to its destination. Oh that God may renew our strength that we too may mount up with wings like eagles.

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“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” This is one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture, in part because of the hope that it holds out. Paul says that it is Christ’s strength that gets him through the lows and the highs of life, through plenty and hunger, abundance and need. This morning we fix our eyes on the truth of Christ’s strength for any and all circumstances.

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What is a passage of Scripture that encourages you and lights your way forward? A week or so ago, a friend passed along today’s passage, Psalm 20, as a form of encouragement. I found it deeply meaningful, and I hope you do too. In the weeks to come, I plan to preach through passages that inspire us and guide us. Whether in times of peace or in times of difficulty, these are passages that you have found fill your soul and act as a compass. As you feel comfortable, please share such passages with me that I might be able to encourage others as you have been encouraged.

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Dee Whitten began serving as the Executive Director of the NorthStar Church Network in November 2013. This is an association of over 170 Baptist churches in northern Virginia. The primary purpose of NorthStar is to energize churches to carry out their God-given mission.

Prior to beginning his ministry with NorthStar, Dee launched a new church in Fredericksburg called River Club Church. Dee also served for five years as the Team Leader for the Empowering Leaders Team of the Baptist General Association of Virginia, and he served for sixteen years as the pastor of Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Stafford, Virginia.

Dee’s wife is Jane and they have two married daughters with five grandsons and one granddaughter.

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Dee’s wife is Jane and they have two married daughters with five grandsons and one granddaughter.

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Dee’s wife is Jane and they have two married daughters with five grandsons and one granddaughter.

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Dr. Ken Pruitt serves as President of The John Leland Center for Theological Studies.

Prior to Leland, Dr. Pruitt served in full time pastoral ministry for over 30 years, with fruitful ministries in South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

Ken earned his Doctor of Ministry (D. Min.) at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary in Waco, Texas, specializing in Preaching and Theology. His M.Div. with Biblical Languages was earned at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth Texas. He also studied for one year in the School of Religious Education at Southwestern Seminary with a concentration in Marriage and Family Counseling.

Ken has also ministered extensively in India, where he regularly serves as a keynote speaker in conferences and graduations for the RUSA Theological Seminary and Research Center.

Ken is married to his high school sweetheart Terry, and they have three beautiful daughters, Nichole (25) - married last week; Bethany (22), and Sarah Joy (10). Each daughter is adopted, and each adoption expresses a unique story of God’s grace and love for a broken and hurting world.

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Today’s message is about the edges of hope. Not the hope we have when all is well, but the hope we cling to with white knuckles when life is not going how we think it should. Paul certainly shows us the way when he describes his own life as a frail, clay jar. He says that he is afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, but in all of this, the imperishable life of Christ shines forth all the more. Christ’s presence and life sustains Paul in his dark hours. Let us cling together to the hope we have in Christ our Lord.

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Integrity involves honesty and truthfulness, but the concept of integrity is much broader than this. "Integrity" comes from a root word that means "whole," or "intact," or "complete." Integrity means that what a person believes, and says, and does all come together in a whole. Ananias and Sapphira weren't people of integrity; and the truth is, it's possible for us to be like Ananias and Sapphira, maybe more than we would like to admit. But God is always full of grace.

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Our Summer Intern, Riley Fernandez, gives us a message on The Great Commission and what we need to be doing as believers with spreading the Word and becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.

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It is indisputable that we live in a hurried world, and it is easy to be swept up in it. We are frequently rewarded for keeping up with the hurry, though often with more tasks and requests and needs that cause even more hurry. Such a life, however, is at odds with the pace of life Jesus seemed to live at. His pace was of a walking sort. It lacked the anxiety and pressure that seem to mark our age. So if Jesus, God-incarnate, was able to live at a slow pace and trust that what will get done will be enough, what’s our rush?

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Prayer is perhaps the most essential of spiritual disciplines. In Scripture, Jesus is said to pray regularly. He goes off to pray alone. Some of his prayers are even captured by the gospel authors (e.g. John 17). In today’s passage he is even asked to teach the disciples how to pray. The result is a rendition of the Lord’s prayer, a reflection on why we pray, and perhaps most importantly, it is a reminder of the goodness of the God to whom we pray. God is the Father who loves to give good gifts.

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Christian Roth is husband to Stephanie and father to Jeremiah, Haven, Lars and Eben. He is the lead platner of New Song Church in Copenhagen ( www.newsongkirken.com) and working with the IMB. He is also the leader of The Gospel Coalition Nordic (www.tgcnordic.org)

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This week we'll be discussing Psalm 139, God's great knowledge of us, and that while that can be initially terrifying, ends up being a great comfort.

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This week we return to the story from two weeks ago, the story of the man possessed by a legion of demons in Luke 8. The passage is not done with us yet as there is still gold to be mined. In it, a man is enslaved in mind, body, and spirit, and Jesus is there to set him free. The freedom Jesus offers, however, is not exactly the surprising part of the story. What is surprising is the man’s response. Initially, he pushes Jesus away. He tells Jesus, “Do not torment me,” when in reality it is not Jesus who torments, it is our sin, our anxiety, our fears, our doubts. These are the instruments of evil, and Jesus is here to set us free.

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In today’s gospel reading Jesus meets a man who is enslaved within his own mind. He is trapped by an army, a legion, who will not release him nor allow him to be fully human. The man is an outsider in his home town. He lives not in a house but among the tombs. He is not in his right mind. But his encounter with Jesus changes everything. In a word, he is given freedom.

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Today is Trinity Sunday on the church calendar. The day is less celebrated than other days of the church year, perhaps because it feels too “theological.” You might even be asking, Does the Trinity matter anymore? I believe it does, and here’s why. God’s triune nature tells us a host of things about God, our world, and about our very selves. As Timothy Keller says, “if this world was made by a triune God, relationships of love are what life is really all about.” So today we talk about what “life is really all about.”

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Today is the day of Pentecost. It is a day where the Holy Spirit shows up in mighty and powerful ways in the lives of the first church members. It is a day of excitement and mystery. It is a day with tongues of fire and the rushing of wind. On this day we celebrate that not only is Jesus our Lord sitting at the right hand of God, but today the Spirit of God dwells in us through the outpouring of the Spirit. The Spirit is calling out to you. What will you say?

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We have reached the final week of Easter and the end of 1 Corinthians 15. The chapter has been a slow crescendo to the declaration of the death of death, the truest and most important meaning of Jesus’ resurrection and Easter Sunday. Death is indeed swallowed up in victory. Its stinger has been removed. And thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!

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Today we talk about a passage in which Paul explains the resurrection body. He walks right up to the place where angels dare not tread and puts his foot on the line. Paul, just chapters before, reminds us that he is looking into a dim mirror as he talks about that which is to come. However, here, he speaks about what he is able to glimpse and what we are able to know about the resurrection. As we continue our exploration of 1 Corinthians 15, let us be mindful that there are many things we still do not know, and yet there is much hope to be found in what we do know.

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In our reading today from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul situates the gospel in the larger story of the whole of Scripture—and even more importantly—in the whole span of history. The resurrection is an event that the world has been longing for since the day the Garden of Eden was closed. Christ’s death and resurrection is an answer to the most fundamental problems of the world. The problem of evil, sin, destruction, abuse of power, illness, and so much more, the rotten fruit of which is death. As Paul puts it, this is the last enemy to be destroyed.

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Today we are continuing our Easter resurrection series on 1 Corinthians 15. In verses 12-20, Paul asks the Corinthians why some of them are doubting the general resurrection of the dead if they believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead. It appears that they believe in the gospel basics—Christ’s death and resurrection—but they have not understood the implications of it. Today we explore the implications.

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Today we begin a five-week trip through 1 Corinthians 15, a critical chapter with 58 verses dedicated to the topic of resurrection. This is easily Paul’s lengthiest defense of Christ’s resurrection and our future resurrection in all his epistles. It’s an appropriate chapter to study during the season of Easter as we continue to give glory to God for the death and resurrection of Christ, through whom we are saved and in whom we find our very being.

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Dee’s wife is Jane and they have two married daughters with five grandsons and one granddaughter.

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Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Today is a day filled with joy and hope, awe and wonder, promise and possibility. It is Easter Sunday! The resurrection means that all things are now possible because the greatest enemies of this world, sin and death, have been defeated. There is nothing that is not possible through Jesus Christ who has been victorious and invites us into his victory. The church is made up of resurrection people, and today we explore what that means for us in the here and now.

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David was born in Ft. Worth, TX and moved to Va. Beach when he was very young. He came to Northern Virginia in 1990 to attend George Mason University from which he graduated with a degree in English in ‘94. That same year he married his Australian sweetheart whom he met a few years earlier through an on-campus Christian ministry (The Baptist Student Union). They have since had four kids: India, Elissa, Shayna, and Kieran.

David has served as an associate pastor, led a “church within a church” at FBC Clarendon, led a couple of church plants, and is now leading a small neighborhood based “Zoom” church. David has a Masters of Theological Studies from the John Leland Center.

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The Psalmist tells us that unity is “good and pleasant,” but the experience of unity and harmony and peace seems so elusive, maybe even an illusion or fantasy. In a world like ours, should we just give up on the vision of unity? Not if we are followers of Jesus Christ! The Gospel of John records that on the night before he gave his life for us on the cross Jesus prayed that we might be one, not just for his sake, or for our sake, but for the sake of the world.

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Psalm 129 is about the wounds of our enemies and the Lord’s desire and ability to defeat our foes. But who is my enemy and what is the victory? The New Testament answers this clearly when Paul says that our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the powers of darkness in this world, the very thing God comes to destroy through the cross. As we journey toward the cross during the Lenten season, let us remind ourselves of the victory found in it.

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The journey continues. The psalmist is reflecting on his future. On Israel’s future. As he does so, he reminds himself and those singing this song of an important fact: All of our strivings and efforts in this life are temporary and fleeting unless God is in them. This is not just spiritualized mumbo jumbo, it’s a hard fact of life. We are mortal and God is immortal. Whether it is 100 years from now or 1000 years from now, the earth will forget us. However, the immortal one to whom we look for life and purpose is able to give our strivings immortal worth and value. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.”

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Today, our journey continues with Psalm 124. It’s a psalm about answered prayers, which is important because answered prayer is often too quickly overlooked and under-celebrated. Sure, we might find some relief or even short-lived joy at the news of an answered prayer. But how quickly are we back to, “God, what have you done for me lately?” Today, the psalmist teaches us how to celebrate the answered prayers of life. We all have much to learn.

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The season of Lent is many things. It is a season of preparation, preparing our hearts for Easter. It is a season of repentance, bringing to the cross our sin and shame. It is a season of introspection, searching the depths of our hearts that we might root out all that keeps us from union with God. And while there are many ways to talk about these 40 days on the church calendar, we know that they are a journey that leads us to kneel before the cross of Christ on Good Friday, it leads us to an empty tomb on Easter Sunday, and it leads us into a world where resurrections are routine and the death of death is a reality and where all things are possible. Let us walk this journey together.

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In our final week of “Better Together,” we are talking about “Our Service.” In my years at South Run Baptist Church, the servant’s heart of this congregation has gripped me more than just about anything else I have experienced here. In this congregation, I have met some of the most amazing people who are willing to do just about anything in service of God and in service of one another. So as we approach this topic today, I come humbly. I come as someone who has not only learned much from the Word of God, but also as someone who has learned from the Word made flesh through you.

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Fellowship is a good church word. We don’t hear it in other parts of the world, but in church we use it routinely. We have a fellowship ministry. We have a fellowship hall. We talk about the fellowship of the body. But what does it mean? And why is it significant to the life and practice of the church and the believers in the church? It is these questions and more that we turn to today as we hear the Word of the Lord about “Our Fellowship.”

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We’re on the sixth week of Better Together, and today we’re talking about Worship. Worship is an essential part of every life, Christian and non-Christian. We all worship something, whether we realize it or not. If it is not God that we worship, then it’s probably self, or money, or power, or some other object in the universe. And this is one of the reasons why Sunday morning is vital to the Christian life. Weekly, corporate worship reorients our heart’s desires. It trains us. It reminds us that the true object of our worship is God, Let us worship together this morning.

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We are now in week five of our Better Together series, and our topic is Our Sanctuary. In my estimation, this value is one of the more “colorful” values that has the potential not only to tell us what is important to us, but to give direction and focus to our efforts. May we be a place of sanctuary and a sanctuary people, may we create a sanctuary in time, and may we be ever restless for the rest that is only found in our Creator.

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We are heading into week four of our series, Better Together, and there is nothing that says “Together” quite like “Family.” As a church, one of our core values is “Our Family: We are part of one vine with many branches.” Today, we explore this theme and recognize both the joys and struggles of family life. It takes work to make a family happen. And it requires a loyalty that is often missing in our individualistic world, especially when the family is one you have chosen and are not born into. But family also should come with a sense of belonging that is essential for life.

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Today is the third week of our series, Better Together. We are looking at our church’s core values, and today we will be exploring “Our Mission.” The three values of “Grounding”, “Discipleship”, and “Mission” are inextricably tied together, one growing out of the next, much like the soil and tree analogy we have been using. Our Grounding in Christ leads to the need for Discipleship which produces the fruit of the Mission. The mission we participate in is the same mission God has been on throughout history — the redemption and reconciliation of the world. God has called us and sends us to participate in that mission with Him.

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Continuing our series on regathering and reconnecting as a church, we turn our focus to the second of our core values: Our Discipleship. If Christianity begins with being rooted in Christ, the next step is to cultivate that which Christ is growing within us. We believe that the best context for such cultivation, perhaps the only context, is within and among a body of believers who offer space for pruning and training and flourishing. Discipleship is not just “better together,” it requires togetherness, and we at South Run believe this sits at the heart of why we exist.

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Today begins a new series titled Better Together where we will explore the importance of gathering as a church body. The first five weeks will cover our church’s core values. The core values represent those things that we hold dear and the things that define us. They represent both who we are and what we strive to be. They are descriptive and aspirational. Today we begin with the primary value, the one that we hold nearest to our core: that all we do and all we are is rooted in the person and work of Christ.

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Maybe there is something theologically appropriate about the way Christmas and New Year’s Day are linked together as bookends for the week in which the calendar turns. What happened at Christmas needs to make all of the difference in what we do with every day God gives us in every new year. Paul tells us we need to live carefully, and he gives us some guidance about the way for us to live in light of the fact that Jesus has come into our world.

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The story of Anna in Luke 2 is the second half of the story we read last week about Simeon. We learned that Simeon’s name means “He has heard,” and Simeon indeed heard God and listened to God’s call on his life. And through Simeon’s faithfulness, he encountered the baby Jesus in the temple and witnessed the one who would bring salvation to the world. Anna’s name, on the other hand, means “grace or favor.” Or more simply yet, “gift.” Anna, because of her patience and willingness to wait on God, was able to see what others were not able to see. Where everyone else at the temple saw a baby, Anna, like Simeon, saw the one who would bring redemption to Jerusalem and beyond.

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Today’s passage from Luke 2 contains a litany of themes in a very short passage. Here, Simeon has been awaiting the Messiah. He speaks of the consolation of Israel. He recognizes in Jesus the fulfillment of Old Testament promises. He talks of salvation, revelation, and glory. And as we have been talking about for weeks now, he requests peace. This beautiful passage that tells of the very beginning of Jesus’ life is like a symphony of themes about what we can expect from Jesus’ life. And if you know your gospel, you know that Jesus delivers.

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Just prior to Jesus’ birth, a mass of angels appeared over the fields of Bethlehem, giving the shepherds a concert they would never forget. The angels, in unison, offer glory to God and promise peace on earth. But what kind of peace? And how does God’s glory fit into that promise? And what does all of this mean for us?

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Today is the second Sunday of Advent. In our New Testament reading for today, John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, offers a word of hope and a promise of redemption that surely resonates as much today as it did way back when. The conclusion of the proclamation is that the road lit with the light of heaven is a road that leads to peace. As Jesus himself teaches us to pray, may it be on earth as it is in heaven.

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As we approach Christmas, we might be tempted to believe that Christ’s birth took place in a perfectly preserved state of peace, because that’s what we all hope our Christmas’s will look like. This, however, is a fiction. The chaos surrounding Jesus’ birth is almost unspeakable. Every last person near to him was affected by the chaos. It seemed to follow him wherever he went. No, Jesus was not born into a world of peace. If was going to embody the Prince of Peace promised in Isaiah, he had a lot of work to do.

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This week we celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. It is an appropriate time of year to focus on gratitude and giving thanks. The benefits of being grateful are many. Thankfulness is connected to joy, peace, awe, and wonder, and so there is good reason to be thankful people. More important than the benefits, however, is that the proper response to the gospel is gratitude. Grace and gratitude are interwoven, and in the face of the overwhelming grace of Christ, are hearts are to be full of thanks.

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If you’re like 48% of families in the United States, then you say grace before meals. And if you do, it might include a thanksgiving or a blessing of some kind. You might be surprised to find that Jesus and Paul said prayers before their meals too. There is almost a rhythm to it in Scripture. Taking bread, giving thanks, breaking it, and sharing. Today I want to stop and think about the humble practice of praying before meals. And, more importantly, I want to reflect on giving thanks.

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Today we conclude our series on Jonah. The book is just four short chapters but is chock full of biblical themes. Salvation stands at the center of it all and is flanked by themes of grace, mercy, repentance, calling, abundance, and so much more. But if you thought that Jonah had repented of his ways and began to follow God whole-heartedly, the final chapter of the book comes as a surprise. But even at the end, God is not finished with him. God does not give up on him. And God is not done with you either.

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The book of Jonah is about the abounding grace of God. Grace is, of course, not deserved. It is a gift that is not earned or demanded but is freely given by God to those in need of it. And we are all in need of it. Though Jonah’s job is to tell the Ninevites of their desperate estate, salvation belongs to our God.

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Dr. William H. Smith is President of the John Leland Center for Theological Studies. He taught—as an adjunct professor of Old Testament—the first class at Leland. He has been a pastor in San Francisco, Wash., D. C. and Arlington, Virginia.

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Guest Preacher Daniel Cotter

Dan and his wife Laura enjoy serving the Lord together in church planting in Arlington, VA and in Clarksburg, MD, through missions work with students and professionals in Chiapas and Puebla, Mexico for a number of years, and currently with in a unique kind of outreach small groups ministry for the spiritually curious. Dan was ordained by First Baptist Church of Alexandria.

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Listen as we dove even deeper into Jonah for week 3 in our Jonah Series!

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Today we continue with the second week in the book of Jonah. There is a theme that arises in the first chapter that might be easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: FEAR. The fear comes in different forms. Fear of the storm. Fear of the situation that Jonah has created. And, most importantly, fear of God. Scripture says quite a lot about the fear of God. It is typically encouraged as a path to wisdom, but why and what that looks like is not always clear. There are certainly healthy and unhealthy fears. Let’s spend some time today thinking about how to cultivate a healthy fear of God.

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The story of Jonah is perplexing. He is a prophet, but he does not act like a prophet. He hears the Word of the Lord, but he is reluctant to share it. He experiences God, but at every turn he is pushing away from this experience. After his famous near-death-experience, he gets himself back “on track.” But when he watches God demonstrate mercy on the city of Nineveh after the people repent, instead of rejoicing, he complains. The story of Jonah is indeed perplexing, but it is also compelling, and what it can teach us about God is illuminating. Let’s dive in.

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In our reading from Matthew today, we see two stories that are clearly connected. The first is what looks to be a simple, one-verse, narration of Matthew’s own call to discipleship. The second is the Pharisees’ questioning of Jesus over who he chooses to surround himself with. By choosing Matthew, a tax collector and therefore a sellout to the Romans, Jesus demonstrates that he can see what others cannot see. When Jesus looks at Matthew, he does not see a sellout. His eyes of mercy allow him to see beyond the faults and the failures into the heart of someone who needs healing. But even beyond that, he sees a heart that—once healed—will write the story of Jesus that will bring untold healing in Jesus’ name.

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Our guest speaker, ulia (Wallace) Butler, is a current missionary in Beirut, Lebanon. She and her husband, Michael, are volunteers supported through BGAV Venturer program, and work with the LSESD (Lebanese Society for Educational and Social Development) - a faith-based non-profit that seeks to equip the local church and serve the community. Julia helps with grants and project management while Michael will be teaching English, Bible and Philosophy at their K-12 Christian School. Julia considers South Run one of her church homes and served as summer intern for 2 years (2015 and 2016).

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It’s Labor Day weekend, and I want to spend a little time thinking about labor. Not so much the labor you do at your job. Or that other kind of labor. I’m talking about kingdom work. This summer we spent a good deal of time on “sanctuary” and what that means for our church. One theme that arose again and again, for me, was the relationship between resting and working. It’s something I’ve continued to wrestle with, and as we head into a new church year, I want to return to it one more time.

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Jesus tells Martha that she’s doing many things, and it is causing anxiety and worry. But he praises Mary for doing one thing, because she has chosen the one necessary thing. One necessary thing. What is it? What has Mary figured out that Martha has not? It is the same thing that the psalmist has figured out when he says, “One thing have I asked of the Lord . . . that I may dwell in the house of the Lord."

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Life can be hard. For many of us, this week has been hard. News from Afghanistan and the increased spread of the Delta variant has many of us saddened about our past, confused about the present, and worried about the future. Add to this, we all have personal trials and fears that are too deep to mention aloud. Keeping faith in the middle of life’s storms can be difficult, but we are not left to our own devices. When belief and unbelief rise up side-by-side within us as the storm clouds surround us, let us continue to walk step-by-step together in the grace God has given us, trusting that our affliction is momentary and God’s goodness is infinite.

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As we wrap up the summer, we'll be taking a look at Joshua's final speech to the Israelites, how it presents the question "Who is your King?", and how our response matters.

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Last week, through the story of the fish and the loaves, we encountered God’s abundant provision, the hurdles of faith experienced by Philip and Andrew, and the deeper rhythms of faith that God is calling us into as followers of Christ. This week, Jesus builds upon this same story and continues the conversation. Jesus takes the opportunity to clarify what might have been missed in the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. He proclaims one of his famous one-liners saying, “I am the bread of life.” Let us not miss the deeper significance at work here.

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The story of Jesus turning five loaves and two fish into a feast for 5000 people is a story that most Christians learn early on in their spiritual training. Sunday school lessons and children’s Bibles inevitably have this story in them. Thank God! Because the earlier we embrace that there is an abundance in God’s economy that we have no human measure for, the sooner we can begin to live into the fullness of life available to us through Jesus. This is no children’s story. It is a roadmap to a new reality.

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It’s not often that we get a living, breathing object lesson standing before us. So I wanted to take today – a special day where we baptize two sisters into the family of God – and talk about the topic. What does it mean to be baptized? What is happening in our baptism? And why have Christians, since the dawn of Christianity, insisted on practicing this rite? Let’s dig in!

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Somewhere along the way we may have gotten the notion that changing our minds is always a bad thing. But it’s not. In fact, being a follower of Jesus Christ revolves around changing our minds. The word “repentance” means “to change the mind.” Repentance happens when we first become Christians, but repentance really is the journey of a lifetime. Let’s consider how we may need to change our minds.

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Let’s talk about forgiveness. I have a hunch that I’m not the only one who needs to hear what God has to say about this topic. We can pick back up with the sanctuary series in a few weeks, but, for now, this is important. This year has been filled with opportunities for hurt and pain. Political strife, racial strife, and strife from being in a pandemic have collided into the most unlikely of years. Navigating it all has undoubtedly left us with wounds that need to heal. And if we’re honest, we have likely wounded others too. Forgiveness isn’t a minor topic in Scripture. It stands at the very heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us today remind ourselves of where we came from, who we are, and where we are going, all because of the love of God.

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We have spent considerable time digging deep into the scriptural vision for sanctuary. There is a temptation, however, to make sanctuary a self-centered, inward-focused ideal, whether that focus is on the individual self or the broader church. We think: it is MY sanctuary or OUR church’s sanctuary. But to do this limits God’s intentions. As we will see in Solomon’s prayer for the consecration of the temple, the nations have a role to play too. They will be drawn to the glory of the temple. Likewise, Jesus, who embodies all the attributes of sanctuary, calls all people unto himself. Therefore, as we attempt to embody what it means to be a sanctuary, let us be reminded that our church sanctuary is not for us alone but that we might share it with the world around us drawing them to the very presence of God.

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The word “sanctuary” in the Hebrew language is a derivation on the word “holy.” This should not come as a surprise really. The tabernacle, or sanctuary, is a holy place. In it is contained the Holy of Holies. It is holy ground in the holy land. It is where the holy people of Israel go to meet the Holy One of Israel. Holiness is everywhere in the Old Testament! So as we continue thinking about what it means to live into our value of sanctuary, we must consider what it means to live into holiness. That is our task today. Let’s dig in!

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Continuing our series on “Sanctuary,” today we dig down deep into the building of the tabernacle. From our text for today, Exodus 25 and continuing into the last chapters of the book of Exodus, we find clear and explicit instructions for the building of the tabernacle. We find these instructions not just once but twice. It is clear that this building is of utmost importance. It is the very dwelling place of God. The creation of this sanctuary space requires intentionality, artistry, and labor. It requires listening and obeying the will of God. And, not to be missed, it requires the willing hearts of the people of God who must offer their contributions to this sanctuary space.

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We continue to think about the sanctuaries of Scripture. The places where heaven and earth come together. Where God and humanity commune. And where rest and refuge happens. In the Exodus 3 passage for today, we find that it is God reaching out to his people through the person Moses as God desires this kind of sanctuary. He desires that Israel, who is in bondage in Egypt, not only be freed from it, but that they find their way to a land that promises God’s very presence and peace. God was, and is, and will always be in the business of sanctuary building.

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In our Scripture reading today from Revelation, we find a large group gathered around the throne of God in heaven worshiping. Heaven is the domain of God, and because of this, heaven should be understood as the sanctuary of all sanctuaries—the place where God is most fully present. To find that worship goes hand-in-hand with sanctuary comes as an important revelation. Today we continue our sanctuary series with a sermon titled, “Made to Worship.” It is my contention that we are designed for worship, but worship means far more than we often think. Let’s dive in.

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We will spend the coming weeks drilling deep down into what it means for our church to value sanctuary. In Scripture a sanctuary is a place where one meets God. The tabernacle and the temple are examples of sanctuaries where Israel experienced the presence of God. However, sanctuary is more than a place. In the New Testament, it is a person—Jesus Christ. Jesus is the new temple in whom the full presence of God dwells. And yet there’s still more! Paul doesn’t stop there. He says that you and I are temples too! That God dwells in us and others can find God when they're with us. There’s a lot to unpack here, which is why we will take some time with this topic. Today we will start at the bookends of the Bible, Eden and The New Jerusalem, two places where God and humanity live together in perfect peace.

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It is our seventh and final week of our “Jesus Is” series, and we conclude today with a passage that brings us full circle. Back to the cross. Back to the resurrection. Back to the identity of Jesus, the one who gave himself for us that we might be redeemed. “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.” Jesus draws us into himself when we renounce the ways of the world and seek the face of Christ. In so doing, he uncovers our lost humanity and shows us God’s design for who we were meant to be—both in this life and the life to come.

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The theme of the image of God found throughout Scripture has tremendous theological significance. It should inform the way we think about both God and humanity. Page 1 of the Bible tells us that humans are made in God’s image, and this is good news for us! Furthermore, when Paul says that Christ is the “image of the invisible God,” he is saying something both similar to and different from what is stated in Genesis. As we explore Christ as the image-bearer of God, we are simultaneously exploring our own identity and meaning in this world. All of this should point us back to the eternal God who created all things and through whom all things find their true meaning. Let’s dive in!

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This Sunday we continue our ongoing series entitled Jesus Is _____. Perhaps one of the most significant themes in Scripture is that of salvation. “Salvation by grace through faith” is a bedrock component to most protestant teachings about the person and work of Jesus. To get at its significance, we must answer a few questions. What are we saved from? And for what are we saved? How does the Old Testament speak of salvation? And how does Jesus tie together the promises of salvation in the Old Testament to the promises in the New Testament? We will tackle these and many more questions in this week’s sermon: Jesus is the Savior.

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As we continue to think about the person and work of Jesus, we turn to one of the most important titles given to him. Together we confess that Jesus is the Son of God. As with the titles we have explored in previous weeks—Lord, Christ, Risen One—we find that there is a lot to unpack. There are lots of assumptions about what the Son of God means. There is hidden significance that we never knew was there. And so today we examine just what it means to call Jesus the Son of God.

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We are now in the third week of Eastertide, and we continue our study of the person and work of Jesus. It’s possible that you mentally tripped over “the” in the title of today’s sermon, “Jesus is the Christ.” Christ is not originally a name, and certainly not a last name for Jesus, but a title. Like “the CEO” or “the janitor” or “the principal.” It implies a job description and tells us much about his actions, goals, and the work he was sent to accomplish. Perhaps you’ve not given it much thought, but today we dig into what it means for Jesus to be “the Christ.” Let’s go!

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The phrase, “Jesus is Lord,” is most likely the oldest Christian creed ever used. Long before the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed, people would say, “Jesus is Lord,” as a short-hand faith statement. It was often used at the moment of baptism as one is dying to the world and being raised with Christ. It is a declaration of service to Jesus. You are willingly becoming a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. And while all of this might, from the outside, look overly serious or inhibiting to one’s freedom, for those of us who confess Jesus as Lord, we know it is actually filled with joy unspeakable, and it is the most freeing thing a person can do.

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It is Easter and new life is around every corner! Quite literally. The trees with their blossoms and buds tells us that life will not be stopped. The daffodils have broken through the soil and are singing the first song of spring. But just the first. There are more songs yet to be sung. Each flower, in its turn, joins the symphony of life that has been unleashed upon the world in this season. And as the chorus grows, the power of God’s life-giving Spirit grows increasingly loud. Can you hear it? … But we do not gather today because of a season of the year. We gather because we remember a day that forever changed history. A day in which Christ was risen, death was defeated, life won out, and you and I were invited into the banquet of eternal life.

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Our Guest Preacher Steven Able is a Northern Virginia native. He was led to salvation & discipleship in Christ by South Run from 1990-1996. He has worked in youth ministry, and currently is the local Director for Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He has been married to Heather for 17 years and they have 3 kids, Micah (15), Caleb (11), and India (8).

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As Jesus turns the corner on his journey to Jerusalem, he meets a blind man begging for help on the outskirts of Jericho. But is he begging, or is he seeking, and is there a difference? Is he blind, or is he one of the few that can see Jesus clearly? There is, no doubt, a deep irony at play in this encounter. How the blind beggar knows he can trust Jesus, we do not know. Why he trusts Jesus, we do not know. But that he has faith is plain to see in his insistence, and his shouting, and his passionate pursuit of Jesus. Jesus tells him that it is his faith that saves him. He is not, however, the only one changed by this encounter. The whole town ends up praising God, their faith in the Almighty renewed.

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Let us continue on our journey toward the cross. The moment is getting close, but we have a few more weeks to go. In today’s passage from Luke 18, we find that the disciples, who have now been traveling with Jesus for three years or more, have managed to misunderstand the nature of Jesus’ kingship and kingdom. For one reason or another, they cannot grasp that Jesus must die and be raised from the dead. They misunderstand and yet they still follow. For Jesus, this appears to be enough. Understanding will come. Eventually.

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As we continue on this road toward Holy Week, Jesus meets a most interesting man. He is a ruler and, so, has much power. He is rich and, so, has resources that could help Jesus. Jesus, however, does not see fit to capitalize on the man's power or money but instead asks him to leave all of that behind, to give everything to the poor, and to follow Jesus. You could certainly say that it is a test of the man’s loyalties and loves. What does he love more, his money and power, or Jesus? Unlike most of us, the man is forced to choose one or the other. He is not offered an “all of the above." What would you choose?

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In these weeks leading up to Palm Sunday, I want to turn our attention to the Gospel of Luke as it leads us into Holy Week, specifically Luke 18. What is Jesus teaching during this time? Where is his heart set before entering the city of Jerusalem one last time? Today his heart is set on the children that are all around him. He welcomes them. He embraces them. And he even says that if we do not receive the Kingdom of God as a child does, we will not enter it. There is a lot to unpack in this short scene. Let’s get going!

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Today we conclude our series on Philippians 4:8 which finishes with two words: Excellent and Praiseworthy. Today we dive headlong into what it means to do things with excellence. This is what Paul is calling us to - not to mediocrity or even to what is good but to that which is great, that which is excellent and praiseworthy. And though we may be praised for the excellence produced through us, our hearts must always return that praise to God, the giver of all good gifts, the one deserving all praise and glory and honor.

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As we continue to think about our thought life, based upon Paul’s encouragement in Philippians 4:8, we tackle two today: whatever is lovely and whatever is commendable. If you were to stop someone on the street and ask them about the Bible, he or she might argue that what it promotes is either prudish or primitive and that it stifles fun or is just plain boring. But today’s advice, from Paul, is quite the opposite. Paul encourages us to think upon the beautiful things of life, that which is lovely, friendly, enjoyable, and just maybe even “fun.” This is something we could all use a little more of in our lives today. Let’s jump in!

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Deen Salami, Guest Preacher

Deen gives us a wonderful message on Confronting our Fears using 1 Samuel 17:32-40.

Understanding the truth of scriptures and applying it is an affective way to confronting our fears. Simply knowing the scriptures does nothing to deal with fears we experience. We must confront our fears with the TRUTH of scripture.

The answer to fear is not courage. Deen tells us that the real answer to fear is faith because trusting in God is what gives us the courage to act in accordance to His will. But fear and faith have one thing in common but it looks different for each: focus. When you are fearful, you are focusing on SOMETHING. When you have faith you are focusing on GOD.

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The Bible has quite a lot to say about purity. If you were to do a word search on “pure”, you would find that it is often connected to the quality of something; for example, the pure gold of the Temple, or the pure nard used to anoint Jesus. But more often than not, Scripture is most concerned with the quality of one’s heart. In the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us that it is the “pure in heart” who see God. As with this whole series, it is not just our character, however, that we are concerned with. It is also our conduct. May our pure hearts bring about pure actions dedicated to furthering the Kingdom of God.

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As we continue to examine our thought life in a series called, Dwell on These Things, we move now to “Whatever Is Just.” Paul admonishes us to think about “just” things. As we explore this theme, we are reminded of the importance of rooting our sense of what is just and right in the character of God. Whatever is just is so because God is just. But as the prophet Micah reminds us, it is not enough to merely think about justice, we must DO justice. "What does the Lord require of you," he asks, “but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

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As we continue with our series, Dwell on These Things, today we dwell on “Whatever is Honorable.” Honor makes its way into our culture in a few distinct ways, but all in all, it’s not something we talk much about anymore. We still call court judges, “Your Honor.” The military uses language of honor to speak of those who serve our nation—for example, one might win the Medal of Honor or be "honorably discharged." A student might make the “honor roll” or receive “honorable mention” in a competition. But on the whole, the use of the word “honorable” has been on the decline since the early 1900’s. Perhaps it is time to dust off this word, to clarify what it means to act honorably, and to dwell on and practice these things.

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Happy New Year! As we enter this new year, we begin a new sermon series based upon Paul’s admonition in Philippians 4:8. In a world that is vying for our attention and is literally getting paid to find ways to keep us distracted, Paul’s list of things to dwell upon are more appropriate now than ever before. He says this: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” For the next two months we will walk step-by-step through Paul’s list of things we should be setting our minds to. Our goal is to be shaped, as Paul was shaped, by the ideals he points us toward, ideals lived out by Christ and empowered in us by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Today, we meditate on the following wisdom: Whatever is true, think upon these things. Let’s dive in.

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What does James say about the many trials we will go through? “Consider it a great joy, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” Listen to our guest preacher, Bryan Jones, as he gives us a wonderful message on enduring trials and how to change our way of thinking as we go through them.

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The cast of Christmas characters is typically filled with the people you hear about every year. Mary and Joseph. Zechariah and Elizabeth. The shepherds. The wise men. Angels. King Herod. And, of course, the shining star of the show, the baby Jesus. But hovering in the background is another character. One who rarely, if ever, gets mentioned—mostly because he was long dead by the time of Jesus’ birth. But our New Testament passage mentions him explicitly. He plays an oversized role throughout the Old Testament and on into the New. It’s King David. And today, I want to consider David in light of the Christmas Story. Let’s dig in.

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No story is a good story without a twist in the plot. In a good murder mystery, you shouldn’t know the killer’s identity until the big reveal at the end. In a sci-fi thriller you should, at some point, say, “I didn’t see that coming!” Likewise, in the narrative of Scripture, there are specific points at which the plot twists, and God does the unexpected. For those of us who have been reading Scripture for many years, there is a trap that we must take care to avoid, the trap of losing the “shock value” of the story. We forget just how unexpected God’s ways can be.

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As we continue to tell the Christmas story, we turn this week to the topic of “plot”. If you had to tell someone the plot of the Christmas story, what would you say? Today’s Scripture reading is not from the birth narrative of Jesus but is the opening to Mark’s gospel where John the Baptist is “preparing the way.” It turns out that John’s message has much to say about the plot of Christmas.

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Today is the first Sunday of Advent, a season on the church calendar that begins our collective journey that ends at Christmas morning with the birth of Christ. As we take this long walk together, we will spend the next few Sundays telling and retelling the Christmas story. The story should sound familiar as, no doubt, you’ve heard it many times before. But after such a difficult year, a year unlike any other, my prayer is that the story takes on new meaning and offers a renewed hope. All good stories have a plot, plot twists, unexpected characters and a hero. Today, however, we start simply by setting the stage. It turns out that our 2020 experience gets us closer to the setting of Christmas than you might realize.

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Deen Salami, Guest Preacher

“Gratitude, at its essence, is trusting in God and appreciating what He decides to give us.” Gratitude is a barometer that tells us where we are in our relationship with God and the faith that we put in Him.

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Though we are still a few weeks from Thanksgiving, it is good to spend time reflecting on gratitude. Rather than dedicate one day to giving thanks, let us spend time in a season of gratitude. Let us train our eyes see the goodness of God where we once saw nothing. Let us train our hands to give back because of the gifts that have been given to us. And let us train our hearts to praise God with joy for ways small and large that we have been blessed. If we can do this, we might just find a bounce in our step, a smile on our face, and a nearness to the heart of God.

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To live a life of character requires making certain commitments. Commitments are bonds that we refuse to yield upon. Paul gives us an example of a committed life in Acts 14 as he faces persecution and near death for the sake of the gospel. This is a literal hill he was willing to die on, and he nearly did. He was committed: committed to the gospel, committed to the truth of Jesus Christ, committed to carrying out a call upon his life to take that gospel as far and wide as he could even if it meant risking his own life. For what are you willing to die? And what do your commitments say about your character?

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What would I need to offer you to convince you to give up everything in your life? A big enough pile of cash? A life of ease? Fame? Is there anything that could possibly cause you to give up everything you have built in this life? To answer these, you would need to evaluate what is most important to you, what gives your life meaning and purpose, and what you’re willing to leave behind. The New Testament is filled with examples of Jesus asking us to examine our deepest loyalties, to consider our pursuits, and to seek the kingdom above all these.

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John’s gospel opens up with two key words about Jesus’ character. It says he was “filled with grace and truth.” The grace of Jesus is the favor that he bestows upon all people irrespective of status or position, whether sinner or saint. We all need Jesus’ grace, and this is a hallmark of Christian doctrine and teaching. But Jesus’ “truth” is an important corollary to his grace. Jesus’ grace is not “cheap grace,” to use Bonhoeffer’s term. The grace of Jesus stands in the penetrating light of truth, and it is this truth that exposes just how costly it is.

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Today, we begin a series on character. The old maxim, "Character is who you are when no one is looking, certainly applies," but the character I want to begin with is not ours but God’s. God's character is revealed throughout Scripture and serves as an important starting point for understanding the ways our own character has been misshapen. As creatures created in the image of God, God’s image reveals something deep and true about who we were created to be. So this morning we begin with what I believe to be at the center of God’s very character: Holy Love.

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Join us today as we return to the gospel of Matthew, chapter 21, and dig into another of Jesus’ parables. There, we will discover what Jesus has to say about the leadership of his day that we might better understand how we should lead today.

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Ezekiel challenges his readers to turn from their ways and to seek to live just and righteous lives. He encourages them to make for themselves a “new heart” and a “new spirit.” But we know, because the New Testament teaches it over and over again, that the fulness of this is only possible through the one who offers new life by laying down his own. It is only possible through an act of mercy and forgiveness through Christ’s atoning death. Nevertheless, when Ezekiel concludes this passage with the injunction to “turn and live,” it is a magnificent foreshadowing of the grace to come through Jesus who enjoins us to “repent and be forgiven.”

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What connects today’s two Scripture passages is something we all do: complain. The Israelites are “grumbling” that they do not have enough food for their journey out of Egypt, and the vineyard workers in Jesus’ parable are “grumbling” that they have had to work longer and harder than others for equal pay. Arguably, both complaints are legitimate . . . if insufficient. God does not mind our questions and, perhaps, even a little complaining. But complaint is not the end of the road, it is a marker along the way toward gratitude and faith. Complaint takes the form of honesty, but it is often an honesty that is too small. It is an honesty that does not recognize the rightful place of thanksgiving, gratitude, humility, and trust. It is there that we wish to find ourselves.

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Forgiveness is one of those topics that shows up throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. It appears all over the Hebrew Bible in the form of sacrificial offerings, the Day of Atonement, and any number of passages that tell us that we serve a God who is slow to anger and quick to forgive. In the New Testament, forgiveness is a theme of Jesus’ ministry and teachings, and it shows up in the parable for today. It is at the cross, however, where Jesus embodies forgiveness by taking the sin and brokenness of the world upon his own shoulders, and he bids us to go and do likewise.

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Romans 13 may appear to be about politics and power because it begins with a call to obey governing authorities, but by bookending a brief statement about “the authorities” with two clarion calls to the transformed life, Paul is effectively dwarfing the importance of Roman power and prestige in favor of offering a “wake up call” to the Roman church to that which matters most. He wishes to remind them that light is breaking through, the world that is filled with darkness is passing away, and as the author of Revelation puts it, “the kingdom of the world is becoming the kingdom of the Lord” (Rev. 11:15). It’s time to wake up!

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At the beginning of Romans 12, Paul calls us into the flames of sacrificial living. That is, he calls us to be a “living sacrifice.” The image is stark and evocative, and it plays with the themes of life and death. After all, sacrifices aren’t supposed to live, are they? But, then again, someone who dies a torturous death isn’t supposed to live either, and yet that’s the fundamental claim of Christianity. Of course, Paul doesn’t stop there. He connects being a “living sacrifice” with being transformed, and it is Romans 12:9-21 where he describes, very clearly, what the transformed life looks like. Let’s dig in!

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Today we talk about the gifts of grace we’ve all been given. In Romans 12, Paul talks about these gifts as necessary parts of being in community with one another. Our giftedness is an essential part of what it means to be the body of Christ. Sinclair Ferguson says that these gifts are not for us, but for others. “They are gifts of service, not self-advancement.” As a congregation, we need to talk about what it means to use our gifts, especially during this difficult time.

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This past Sunday, our 8 week Summer Series, The Armor of God, was wrapped up with a sermon on Prayer from Deen Salami titled, “Praying and the Battle.”

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Though we will conclude the Armor of God series next Sunday with a sermon on prayer, which is how Paul concludes this section of Ephesians 6, today we talk about the final piece of armor: the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” The two key elements here are that the sword is both “Spirit” and “word of God.” This is not our sword but is the sword God gives us through the giving of the Spirit and the Word of God. The interplay between Spirit and Word of God is of critical importance because both of these are necessary to wield the sword well. Let’s dig in!

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“Have you been saved?” This question would certainly sound one way if there was a burning building behind you, and it was asked by a television news reporter to you, with lights flashing all around you, and a group of firefighters standing close by. And the same question would sound completely different if you were at a church camp meeting, and a camp counselor was asking you the same words. The word salvation is a buzz word used throughout the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, and it’s usage varies depending upon the context. This morning, let us dive deep into what “the Helmet of Salvation” might mean, and why it is of vital importance to us.

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Today we talk about the shield of faith. Faith, like the other words we have looked at in the armor of God, has been shrunken down to mean less than it does when it appears in Scripture. For the authors of scripture, faith is an action word. It is not just a belief that sits in the head, as if Scripture is merely asking you to believe that God, Jesus, and the stories of Scripture are real. Faith is trust and allegiance that leads you to live your life according to the fact that God, Jesus, and the stories of Scripture are real.

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“Peace” is one of those words we hear around Christmastime, like Joy, and Love, and Hope. It’s an ideal that we’re all seeking and hoping for. It’s something that we want in our personal lives, and it’s something we want for our world. I mean, who’s against peace? No one. But when God calls us to put on the armor of God, God doesn’t only want us to desire peace, God wants us to go out and make peace. To be peacemakers in our world.

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Some of you might be a little confused by today’s title. If you are passionate about Scripture and have read about and studied the armor of God before, then you might be thinking: “I thought it was the breastplate of righteousness, not justice.” And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But you’re not entirely right either. And that’s what we need to talk about today. Justice is a primary theme that runs from the front of the Bible to the back, and those of us who follow Jesus are called to do justice. Unfortunately, this call to justice can be obscured by the language we use. So today, let’s talk about the breastplate of justice/righteousness and what it means for our lives.

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Today we begin our deep dive into the pieces of armor that make up the “armor of God” from Ephesians 6. The first piece is the “belt of truth.” Truth is desperately needed in our world, but now more than ever it seems inaccessible. There is a deep irony here. On the one hand, the internet has given us access to more knowledge than any other time in human history. At our fingertips we have “truth” within seconds. But the inundation of knowledge has proven to complicate truth rather than clarify it. Truth has been mixed with half-truth and downright lies, and it is difficult to know the difference. If we are going to navigate this post-truth world wisely, we must understand what it means to be a people of God who wear the belt of truth around us.

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This week we kick off our first week in an 8-week series here at SRBC! We are centering these next weeks around "Common Conversations" that we will be having at all age levels of our church. Our children, youth, young adults, and older adults will all have opportunities to discuss the various facets of Ephesians 6 and the armor of God. We hope that these conversations bleed into your daily conversations as families as well as with your coworkers and friends in the community. We will be talking about things like truth, justice, peace, faith, salvation, and more. Today, we begin the series with an overarching sermon about the strength of the Lord and where we find our own strength.

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I am afraid, as a culture, we have forgotten how to listen. We are so busy making our own voices heard that we have stopped listening to what the other voices have to teach us. In particular, with the increased polarization of society, it is increasingly difficult for us to listen to the “other,” to the one who is not like us and does not think like us. Our tribes keep us comfortably sheltered in the echo-chambers of our minds, listening to the thoughts that reaffirm what we already believe and dismissing that which is challenging and different. The Scriptural narrative, however, teaches us a different way. A way in which the outsider gets a voice to challenge the insiders. When this happens in our own lives, are we prepared to listen?

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They say we live in a tribal culture, and I tend to agree. What I think they mean is that our so-called tribes have sharp divides that mark boundaries of what we do and do not believe, what we do and do not value, and what we do and do not do. Our tribes have clear-cut ways of keeping people in or kicking people out of the tribe. But let’s not kid ourselves, our so-called tribal cultural is only so metaphorically. In contrast, some of the Old Testament is written in a tribal time. Literally tribal; no metaphors needed. It turns out that their tribal culture has much to teach our tribal culture about where to find God. In what must be one of the most underrated and underreported aspects of Scripture, we find that the Hebrews often found God in the face of the stranger, the one who is not part of the tribe. Can you imagine?

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Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday, which follows on the heels of Pentecost, which follows on the heels Easter. On Trinity Sunday, we have the opportunity to wrap together the lessons of Easter and Pentecost into a single doctrine. On Easter we discover that Jesus is Lord and to be worshiped. On Pentecost we discover that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit flows from the Father and the Son. And on Trinity Sunday, we discover that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live in an eternal unity. What this means for us, as creatures made in the image of God, is that we are communal to the core. We are created for community. To live otherwise is to live apart from our design.

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Fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples are still sitting and waiting for something to happen. Jesus has ascended to heaven, and they’re just waiting. Surely they want to know, “What’s next? Where do we go from here?” And then, without notice or forewarning, the building is filled with wind and fire, and the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit. I think most of us are in a place of waiting right now. Waiting on what’s next. Wondering where we go from here. On this Pentecost Sunday, may we follow the spirit’s prompting and discover what God has in store for us.

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As we saw last Sunday, at the beginning of Acts 8 Philip makes it to Samaria, and they received him with joy. But Philip hasn't yet completed his training. He has more to learn from crisis he survived. By going to Samaria, Philip continues fulfilling the calling of Jesus back in Acts 1:8: to go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth. This week, staying in Acts 8, we find that the ends of the earth are coming to Philip! On the road to Gaza he meets an Ethiopian Eunuch. He learns that the harvest is ready, that the world is open to God in a way we should not underestimate, and it is our job to continue to share the good news in good times and bad.

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Chapter 8 is a turning point in the book of Acts. To this point, the apostles and disciples have been hanging around Jerusalem and Judea. They have been teaching at the temple, making more disciples, and creating the bonds of community. Important stuff! But something needed to happen. Jesus had given them clear instruction before leaving. An unmistakable calling. They were to go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth (1:8). They hadn’t left Judea. But with the death of Stephen at the end of chapter 7, crisis hits, and everyone is scattered. It was no longer safe to remain near Jerusalem, and so the first thing we read about is Philip preaching to Samaria. That’s right, the next stop on Jesus’ list. It is a crisis that drives the disciples back to their calling, and just like that they are back on track to fulfilling the mission that God has set before them.

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In Acts chapter 7, we read about the last moments of Stephen’s life. He is standing before a council that is prepared to stone him to death for blasphemy. In the midst of this assembly Stephen has a moment of clarity where I would argue he see three things. First, he looks up to heaven and is able to see Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father. Second, he sees through the actions of the council, stones in hand, and utters words nearly identical to Jesus at his death. He offers forgiveness. He pleads with the Father and Son on behalf of those who are about to kill him and asks that they not hold their sins against them. But why? That gets to the third thing. I have to imagine that he sees himself with clarity too. As one in need of forgiveness standing before the Father and the Son, he therefore offers it to any and all he encounters, even to his death.

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The phrase, “further up and further in,” comes from C. S. Lewis’ final book of his Narnia series in which the storyline heads toward a grand conclusion and a heavenly habitation. The phrase itself should be understood as a summons. It is a call to keep one’s eyes ever on goal that awaits us: union with God. It is God who stands up on the mountain and calls us to himself. And until we arrive at that place, we will always be “sojourners and exiles”, as 1 Peter puts it. We are midway through a journey that will take us past death and into life. We are called to higher things. And so as we journey on, there is always further up and further in.

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Peter contrasts two kinds of life, and he reminds us that we have been given both. The first is a perishable life that we all know quite well. It is the life that is filled with good and beautiful things, much like the grass and the flowers of the field are good and beautiful for a time; but as the author says, one day they will wither and fall. As he puts it, this is the life made from “perishable seed.” But there is a second kind for those in Christ, a life made from “imperishable seed,” a life formed from the enduring word of God. The questions we must ask are, which of these lives will we invest in? Which will dictate our larger life choices? Are we living for that which perishes, or are we living for the eternal and the enduring?

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We are in a season that has traditionally been called “Eastertide.” The resurrection has left behind it a “wake” that has altered reality. Let us not live as if nothing ever happened. The Kingdom of God has already broken into our world! And yet . . . not yet. Or at least not completely. The kingdom is already, but not yet, here. Jesus has defeated death and sin, but we await death’s death blow. We live between the times. The question is, how ought we to live in such a time as this?

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Easter and Christmas are the two pillars of the Christian calendar. They root the church in two grand realities that tell us about the God we serve and shape what we believe and how we are to live. Today we celebrate Easter. We remind ourselves that no matter how dark the story gets, it isn’t over until resurrection happens. The resurrection of Christ is the first fruit of the redemption of the world. It is God’s down payment to us, where he says, I’m going to redeem this place, believe me. When we shout, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”, we are remembering that the redemption of the world has begun in the resurrection of one man. Surely we need this message today.

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Palm Sunday, in a vacuum, is a glorious day. The entrance of a king! It is the celebration of the one who brings peace, humbly riding on a donkey to take the throne that has long awaited him. But we know that the days that follow are anything but glorious. The days that follow are filled with anguish and death and even betrayal. As Holy Week processes, Palm Sunday looks like a distant memory in the rear-view mirror. The disconnect between it and Good Friday is difficult to square. And yet, this year of all years, we feel the disconnect. We do not celebrate in a vacuum but in reality just as Jesus’ celebration did not exist in a vacuum. And so, on this Palm Sunday we open our palms and stand with hands and hearts open to where God is leading us. We may not understand it, and it is not a road we would choose, but rest assured in this: all of the roads that God leads us to and through ultimately lead to resurrection.

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Resurrection is a common thing to talk about this time of year. Spring has begun and the world is waking from its winter slumber. We are in the middle of Lent, preparing for the power of the resurrection on Easter morning. But this year is different. As I’ve seen stated in one meme going around the internet: “I didn’t expect to give up so much for Lent!” We’ve given up closeness and touch; many have given up going too far from home; some have, unwillingly, given up jobs and the security of a regular income. Ezekiel 37 speaks of a promised return from exile, something we might better appreciate in the middle of this virus. Or as Jesus says about Lazarus, in John 11, we “will rise again." But the exile of Israel and the death of Lazarus have important lessons to teach us, and we must learn them while we still can. The questions we need to be asking are: What will we rise to when all is said and done? Who will we be on the other side of all of this? And what lessons must be learned from this time of exile?

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Psalm 23 is a passage that has made its way out of Christian and Jewish circles and into the popular culture at large. Its beauty and simplicity speak to the heart in metaphor and symbol. It is a poem, of course, and in an age that has little time for poetry, it is much needed. It speaks of shepherds and sheep, waters and paths, tables and cups. It is not despite the ordinary nature of the images but because they are ordinary that this poem speaks to the depths of souls. But in these troubled times, it is the line about the “valley of the shadow of death” that stands out most. David speaks not as one pontificating about the valley, but as one who writes the poem while walking through the valley. As we read God’s word this morning, may we find the green pastures and the still waters that the Lord desires to lead us toward.

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Pastor Eric’s Sermon from Sunday, March 15th.

South Run Baptist Church: Recent Episodes

South Run Baptist Church