Transcription:
What I’d like to talk to you about tonight is how the gospel ought to be operating in your life. How the gospel should be operating in your life. Let’s look at this very famous passage from the book of Galatians. Let’s notice first of all, “The Heart of the Gospel,” let’s just make sure we do identify what it is, “The Heart of the Gospel,” then “The Centrality of the Gospel,” the role it should have in your life and then finally a word or two about “The Power of the Gospel.” “The Heart of the Gospel,” “The Centrality of the Gospel,” “The Power of the Gospel.”
The Heart of the Gospel
Now the heart of the gospel, the gospel is in a sense in verse 15 and 16 where Paul says “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Now to be justified means to be right with God, made right with God and right away what you see is very counterintuitive, very different than what the ordinary religious approach is because the ordinary religious approach is, if you want to be right with God, you need to obey the divine law and you need to be doing the various ceremonial observances, and if you believe and if you obey then you’ll be saved, then you will connect to God, then you’ll be justified but that’s what Paul says here at all. He says, ““a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Now, there’s an order here, do you see that? Of course in the gospel, of course the gospel requires that we obey God. Notice down here in verse 17 where he says, “does this mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not!” So Paul is certainly going to say, “of course I want you to obey God, I’m not saying, “well, you don’t have to obey God, you can just go ahead and sin,” no, no, no!” But there’s an order to things and if you understand the order to things especially as you’re reading the book of Galatians, you realize that the two orders are Paul’s order, a gospel order, and then in this case, the order of what’s called here, “the circumcision group.” Now, if you read the entire book of Galatians you’ll find out that the circumcision group, it’s not what you might think it is, it was a group of Jewish teachers who did accept that Jesus was the Messiah. They didn’t reject faith in Jesus. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah, they believed that he was the son of God, okay, but, they said, you have to to obey the works of the law and in particular you need to obey the ceremonial laws, the dietary laws, you need to be circumcised, you need to do all of Mosaic laws. See, you believe in Jesus Christ but you also have to obey if you want to be saved and J. Greschen Machem who wrote a book on Galatians, his notes on Galatians, he was a New Testament scholar many years ago, he summarizes the book of Galatians like this: he says, “the central point at issue between Paul and these teachers concern the order of three steps. The teacher said, one, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and two, and keep the law of God as best you can, and then three, you will be saved.” Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ one, obey the law as best you can two, and then you’ll be saved. “But Paul, on the other hand said one, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and at moment you are saved and number three, then you immediately proceed to keep the law of God.” Therefore the argument was not “was Jesus the son of God, was Jesus the Messiah,” no, no,no, the circumcision group and Paul, they all believed in that. They all believed in Jesus but here was the difference: ordinary religious approach is, you obey in order to be saved, but the gospel says, you’re saved and then therefore you obey. Do you in your mind say, if I obey, I’ll be accepted by God or do you say, because I’m fully accepted by God in Jesus Christ, and loved, therefore I obey. Those are two radically different orders and what I’d like to show you, even though both of them have obedience, you obey God in order to be accepted or you are accepted in Jesus Christ and therefore you obey. You say, “well, they’re both obeying God, they’re both reading the bible, they’re both praying, they’re both obeying the Ten Commandments,” yes, but in radically different ways out of radically different motivations and two radically different effects because you see if your order is, obey in order to be accepted, then what happens is, your obedience is anxious and selfish. It’s anxious in that, you’re never quite sure, is this going to be enough, am I being good enough? And it’s selfish because actually even though you might be caring for the poor, obeying the Ten Commandments, doing all that stuff, who are you doing it for? You’re doing it in order to get something, you’re doing it because you want to get things from God and so yes you’re obeying God but you’re doing it anxiously and selfishly but what if you say, I obey because I’m saved. What if you believe that in Jesus Christ you already got everything. What if you believe you already got love, you got intimacy, you’ve got a guaranteed future, you got it all, then why would you obey God? Why? You’d obey him out of joy and you’d obey him out of love, you’d want to, “what can I do to delight the one who’s done this for me?” “What can I do to become like the one who’s done this for me?” Right? And so your obedience, you’re still doing the same things but you’re doing them out of joy and out of fullness of heart, not out of anxiety and of emptiness of heart. You’re doing them for, when you’re loving God and you’re loving other people, you’re serving God, you’re serving other people, you’re doing it for them. Whereas, if you obey in order to get accepted, you’re doing it for you. Now listen, I take no joy in this message. Most people that go to church have the order in their mind of the circumcision group; that is you say, most people who go to church say I believe and then I have to obey and then I’ll be saved and they know nothing of the radically different motivational structure of the heart that comes when you obey out of a full heart, out of joy, selflessly, out of a desire to please and know the one who saved you versus the kind of obedience that is anxious, you’re never sure you’re good enough, it’s a burden because you have to do it even though you don’t want to, you’re touchy because if anybody criticizes you, you get very upset because it’s important for you to think of yourself as a good person, you’ve got to think of yourself as a good person or otherwise God’s not going to bless me. Look, two people can sit in the same church service next to each other, they’re both reading their Bible every morning, they’re both trying to pray, saying their prayers, they’re both trying to live a good life, they’re both trying to imitate Jesus because they believe Jesus is the Messiah, they’re doing all of those things right, they look like they’re doing the same thing but they’re doing it from radically different reasons out of radically different motives and with radically different results in their lives because if you obey in order to be accepted the result will be self-righteousness or self-loathing, grumpiness, anger, always fighting over who’s doing things right versus love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. For most people live in the old order not the new order of the gospel even though they think, “Oh yeah, I go to church.” For most people is like a coin that’s gone into a machine that hasn’t dropped down yet. So, what’s the gospel? Well, we just saw it and I don’t want to rehash what we’ve been talking about for several weeks. When it says you’re justified, that means you’re put right not by your good works, you’re saved not by your obedience. It’s exactly the opposite of what this other order. It’s not you believe and you obey and you’re saved. You believe, you’re saved and then you obey and when you understand that you understand what happens when you believe. Note down here, it goes by so quickly but it’s something that Paul says over and over and over again through all of his epistles, it says here, “I have been crucified with Christ,” down here in verse 20. What does that mean? What does it mean, I’ve been crucified with Christ, other places says that I’ve been raised with Christ, what does that mean? Means that when you become a Christian, the moment you believe you’re united with Christ in his death and his resurrection, what’s that mean? Well first of all it means in a sense you died on the cross, that means that God treats you as free from penalty as if you had already paid for your sins by dying but on the other hand you’re raised with Christ which means God honors you as if you had done all the great things that Jesus Christ has done and you get the same vindication and honor, we talked about this one week not that long ago. When you become a Christian, the moment you believe, your sins are put on Jesus, his righteousness is put in you; He is treated as if he’d done everything you’ve done and at the same moment, you are treated as if you have done everything that he’s done - all the things he deserves, all the honors he deserves, all the glory he deserves, it’s like all of his medals are pinned to your chest and now God honors you and sees you in Jesus. So here’s the question - which order are you living in? I believe and I develop a record of righteousness, you know for trying to live a good life and then I’m saved? Or I believe and I get a record of righteousness given to me and then I obey? I believe and I’m saved and then I obey. You see, Martin Luther struggled with this. He was a monk, means he was a very religious person, he was a very good person but he had a terrible bad conscience because the more he studied the bible, the more he saw the kind of life that he ought to live, he knew he didn’t love God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, he knew he didn’t love his neighbor as himself and he knew that if God demanded righteousness of him, he was dead. And as he was a monk, he was also a teacher of the Bible and a reader of the Bible, when he got to the gospel, I mean when he got to the epistle to the Romans, he struggled mightily especially with Romans chapter 1 verses 16 and 17 and there it says, “in the gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed, in the gospel a righteousness is revealed from faith to faith,” and he struggled with that because what he thought what that meant was that in the gospel it was very clear that God was demanding righteousness and he was going to judge us if we didn’t give him righteousness but this is what actually happened to him, this is Martin Luther’s own words, he said, “I tried to understand Paul’s epistles to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the righteousness of God because I took it to mean that that just is whereby God punishes the unjust and my situation was that I had no confidence that my merit would have swage him.” See when Luther saw it’s saying in the gospel a righteousness of God is revealed he said I thought that was the righteousness that I owed God and that he was going to judge me because I didn’t give it to him. “Night and day I pondered and then I saw that the righteousness in the gospel is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God gives us.” He suddenly realized, “wait a minute, no, no, I don’t give God a righteousness and then he blesses me, God gives me a perfect righteousness in Jesus Christ and then I live for Him.” He says the moment he understood that “thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.” When I discovered the distinction namely that the law’s one thing and the gospel is another, I broke through. When I understood the difference between the two orders, I broke through. Now my question to you is, have you broken through? Because I have to say in all my years of talking to people about this, it is very rare that anyone actually grows up, understanding from the time they can hardly speak all the way into adulthood they understand the gospel order, that I get a, not that obey and therefore I am accepted, I am accepted in Jesus Christ therefore I obey. Not believe, save, and obey but believe, obey, and saved. That’s the order that we all grew up in and at some point we have to break out from one to the other, has that happened to you? When did it happen to you? It makes all the difference, radical difference. So there’s the heart of the gospel but now let’s talk about the centrality of the gospel.
The Centrality of the Gospel
What role, once you grasp this once, once you grasp the right order, what difference should it make in your life? Of course the answer is all the difference in the world but let’s take a look at verses 11 to 14. Crucial verses and it’s going to require some backstory but here’s what it says. “When Cephas,” that’s Pete, that’s the old Greek, that’s the Greek form of the word Peter, that’s Peter, Simon Peter, “when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.” Okay, what’s the backstory here, well, it’s considerable in some ways. Of course Peter was Jewish and the Jews for centuries had abided by what you might call the mosaic ceremonial law. Now the ceremonial law, the Jews abide by all kinds of of dietary rules of course, lots and lots of dietary rules but they also there was not only things they couldn’t eat, there’s also things they couldn’t wear and there were things that they couldn’t touch, they couldn’t actually, if you come in contact with mildew, if you came in contact with a dead body, you were considered ceremonially unclean and you couldn’t go to worship, you couldn’t go in to the presence of God that Sabbath, couldn’t go to the tabernacle, couldn’t go to the temple. See if you touched any of those things, you’ve ate any of those things, if you worse any of those things you were unclean and you couldn’t go into God. And of course the Jews worked incredibly hard at being clean, ceremonially clean, but of course the Gentiles around them were not. The Gentiles around them ate all the wrong things, they wore unclean things, they touched unclean things, and so it’s almost impossible for Jews not to feel like, “we are clean, we are good, and the Gentiles are unclean and profane,” and it became a kind of racial, a sense of racial superiority but when Jesus Christ came along, he said something very profound about not only the ceremonial laws but the other parts of the Old Testament worship. See the Old Testament worship in a sense had two parts, there was the clean laws and there were the sacrifices and the clean laws were by the way extraordinarily hard to keep, I mean you had to watch everything, you touched and everything, you were eating and everything like that. It was extraordinarily difficult to stay ceremonially clean and be able to go to worship on the Sabbath but what’s interesting about the sacrifices, the animal sacrifices, the blood atonement for their sins, the sacrifices proved that no matter how hard they tried to make themselves clean, they never could. Nobody could keep themselves perfectly clean, nobody could keep themselves perfectly clean, it was a Holy God and you were flawed and unclean and to go in before a Holy God was a problem but no matter how hard you tried, you would never keep yourself perfectly clean, you needed to sacrifices and when Jesus Christ came along, he said two radically things. One is of course, he said that he was the sacrifice, he was the passover lamb whose blood was put on the doors. He was the sacrifice to which all the other sacrifices pointed which meant that when you believed in Him, he fulfilled the sacrifices, he atoned for sins and so believers don’t have to do sacrifices anymore but the same thing was true for the clean laws. Only in Jesus Christ are you clean. Only in Jesus Christ are you accepted and therefore in a sense, he fulfills all the ceremonial laws, all the clean laws too and therefore his disciples and believers don’t have to follow those either. But that was a tough thing for Jewish Christians to grasp but in Christ everybody is equally unclean but in Christ, whether you are Jew or Gentile, you’re equally sinful but in Christ you’re equally saved and uncondemned. You are equally condemned and equally saved. That was a tough thing though emotionally and culturally for Jews to grasp that you know, “now these things, if I’m eating with this person here and he’s eating something unclean, that’s all right,” that was a very difficult thing. And even though Jesus told his disciples that the clean laws were no longer enforced, God had to come to Peter. If you know the book of Acts, in Acts chapter 10 and 11, God had to come to Peter and give him a vivid vision to pound into his head that now Jew and Gentile are equal in Christ and now everybody was always unclean and now everybody in Jesus Christ is clean and there’s no reason why you can’t eat with the Gentiles. And because you are justified by faith not by works, not by obeying the law therefore you shouldn’t be separating the Gentiles as if they’ve somehow you feel like you’re racially more pure or you’re spiritually superior to them and because God had gotten through to Peter, it says right here in verse 12, “before certain men came from James, he [did used to eat] with the Gentiles.” I mean Peter had changed, God had spoken to him but then it says when they arrived, these circumcision groups people, they despised any Jewish Christians who did not eat with the Gentiles and of course what happened was Peter and even Barnabas and everybody starting to pull back, the Jewish Christians would not eat with the Gentiles; they were unclean, see. So what does Paul do? Verse 14, the critical verse in this passage. Verse 14 says, “But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”” You know the gospel! You know that all the ceremonial stuff has been abrogated! You know that Jew and Gentiles are equally sinful and in Christ they’re equally clean. You know that you’re not saved by living a particularly ceremonially pure life but only through faith in Jesus Christ. So how do you hold on to this idea of your racial superiority and exclusivity? So he says, “you are not walking in the line with the truth of the gospel.” Now when Paul says that, it’s striking because by the way, there’s plenty of places in the Bible that says racism is wrong and Paul could’ve gone there but Paul does not say to Peter, “Peter you’re breaking the no racism rule,” he could have. He doesn’t say, “Peter, just stop being a racist. Oh course, he does want Peter to stop being a racist,” but instead he says, “you’re not walking in line with the truth of the gospel,” and I want you to know that the implications of what Paul does here, there’s two major implications that were a paradigm shift for me and I hope that it would be a paradigm shift for you. They prove both the incredible breadth and incredible depth of the gospel. First is the incredible breadth - what do I mean by the breadth. First of all, notice that he says, “you’re not walking in line with the truth of the gospel.” Many people think that the gospel is basically baby stuff. “Yeah, the gospel,” you say, “those are the elementary doctrines of Christianity. Yeah, Jesus died for your sins you have to believe in him okay got it.” “So who's the gospel for?” “Gospels for non-christians who want to become Christians, sure and the gospel maybe for new Christians who don't know the basics but not a seasoned mature Christian, you know. We know the basics and come on, you know, Jesus died for your sins believe in him okay okay got that I got it down let's go on to something else, let's go into more meat. You know show me more how I should live my life you know let's get into deeper theology, let's get into deeper teaching, let's not go back to the gospel. But look, let's get something more advanced, right.” But look here's what, here's Paul talking to Peter, Peter's an apostle that's pretty advanced, I don't think anybody in this room will ever make it to that rank, I know I won't. I think nobody here is as advanced as Peter and yet Paul brings them back to the gospel and here's what he's saying, “Peter, there are implications to the gospel for every area of life and you are not thinking out the implications of the gospel for your attitude toward people of other races.” Wow, that means the gospel is not just the baby steps, it's not just something that you learn and then you move on to something else, in fact, to be a Christian, to be shaped into Christ-likeness is simply to draw out, the implications of the gospel for every area of life. You might say the gospel sends out lines. You're not walking in line - the gospel. The implications of the gospel: Paul is saying Peter you haven't thought out the implications of the gospel for your attitude toward people of other races but let me ask you a few other questions - is your attitude toward work, is your career, are you conducting it in line with the gospel? Have you thought out the implications of the gospel for how you're conducting your career? In our “Center for Faith and Work” helps with that question. But is your, the way you spend money in line with the gospel? Are your family relationships in line with the gospel? Is your sexuality in line with the gospel? Is your attitude to the poor and needy in line with the gospel? We have “Hope for New York” to help us with that. What about your past? How do you deal with your past? How do you regard your past? How do you think about your past is the way in which you deal with your past in line with the gospel? We've got a counseling center to help you with that. It's an election year. Is the way you think of the people on the other side of the political spectrum from you - is that in line with the gospel? You see the gospel is not just the ABCs, it's not just the baby steps, it's not the first steps the gospel is, sends out lines, it's infinitely broad. It's like a worldview. It's a worldview beliefs are not just beliefs - their beliefs through which you see all of the things and the gospel sends out lines and implications. Every area of your life and to become a Christian and then to live a Christian life and to go through the rest of your life is to think out the implications of the gospel. Make sure every part of your life is in line with the gospel but secondly the Gospels not just infinitely broad it's infinitely deep because when Paul says to Peter, not “stop being a racist,” “don't you see where the Bible says it's wrong now,” of course he could have gone there to the where the Bible said it's wrong and of course he wants them to stop being a racist. Of course, he does but he doesn't do it that way. Here's what he says – “Have you thought out the implications of the gospel?” Which is another way of saying, “Peter, the reason why you have the attitude you have is not just that you don't know what God wants,” I mean God, God gave him a vision! He knows the will of God – “it's that the gospel hasn't penetrated to the depths of your heart,” What do I mean by that? Last year some time a man wrote an article in “The New York Times” and the article in “The New York Times” the title of it was “The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value.” And the theme sentence of the article was, “our shared core hunger is for value. We desperately want to matter and to feel a sense of worthiness.” We have a desperate need to feel we matter, to feel we have value, to feel like we you know, a need for worthiness but why would we have a desperate need, why would we have this perpetual desperate hunt for value? Why would we have this need to feel like we matter and that we have value and that we have worthiness? The only answer to that is because we’re afraid we don’t. We wouldn’t be desperately hunting for it unless we were afraid we don’t. Okay, so we’re all afraid we don’t, how do we go about assuring ourselves that we matter, that we value, we have worth. Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of them is you can look down on other classes, other races, other cultures, other groups of people. You can say, “I’m not like them. My life is worthy, I have value because I’m not like one of those people,” or your career. You could say, “I matter, I have value, I have value because look how successful I am,” or romance! You could say, “I need to feel needed, I need to feel desired and when I feel desired, when I feel I’m desirable to somebody romantically or sexually then it’s like the breath of life, then I feel like I have value, I have worth.” Well what are you doing in all those instances? You know what you’re doing? You’re justifying yourself. You’re justifying your existence. You’re getting a sense of value, you’re getting a sense of worth, you’re assuring yourself that you matter but don’t you see now, if you say to somebody, “stop overworking!” or “get out of those romantic relationships” you ought to get out of but you can’t because you’re kind of addicted to them or “stop looking down at people, stop having those racial attitudes!” The reason why people can't just stop it, if you just beat on their will and say stop it you might shame them briefly temporarily into not doing that behavior but they'll go right back to it or they'll find some other way of dealing with what? The enduring hunt for value. The desperate need to be sure we matter, we have value, we have worth. We're gonna have to find it somewhere and therefore, if Paul had just said to Peter, “Peter just stop it!” He could have shamed him, he didn't do that, he says, “what you need is a change of heart. And what does, what is it that the heart needs? Here's what the heart needs - it needs the gospel because the gospel is the only, gives you the only form of personal identity that's based not on a value or a worth that is earned or achieved, it's received. It's not achieved, it's received and therefore it is not up and down depending on your performance - it's not based on your record, it's based on his record. It's to know that you're beautiful to the only pair of eyes in the universe whose opinion counts and therefore the gospel should be the end of the enduring hunt for value and worthiness. See he says, “ we all, this is a human being,” in fact that’s the point of the article, he says, “the enduring hunt, we’re always looking for personal value, we’re never…” No, that’s wrong. If you’re Christian the hunts over. It’s over. But, some of you are out there saying, “now, wait a minute, okay, here’s a problem: I’ve been coming to Redeemer, I have heard this before and I really think that if you gave a gospel quiz and asked me, “what is justification,” “what is substitution,” “what is atonement,” I really think if you gave me a gospel quiz I think I’d get a hundred percent. I think I actually do believe the gospel that you’re justified not by works but by faith in Jesus Christ, but guess what? I do struggle with these things, I struggle with my career, I struggle with romance and sex, I struggle with all these things, I’m actually struggling with all these things, why?” I’ll tell you why. If you would have the misfortune of having a personal meeting with the Apostle Paul, if instead of Peter, what if his appointment was with you? He would look at you and he would say, “you believe up here in the gospel, he’d say the same thing he said to Peter, you believe the gospel up here that you’re justified by faith not by works but down to here, your heart is actually seeking value and worth, you’re trying to still justify yourself, you’re still trying to earn it and as a result, even though up here you believe the gospel, down here you don’t, that’s the reason you have all the problems you’ve got.” I don’t know what he’d say to you but my guess is this is what he would have said, what he did say to Peter. You know he said, “Peter, think of the gospel, you’re having problems with the Gentiles, you’re having problems with people of other races, don’t you understand? Not only if the gospel is true, if you’re a sinner saved by sheer grace, costly grace, not only is it true that you don’t have the right to feel superior to anybody else, but you don’t have the need to! You’ve got the love of the King! The King and His beauty! You not only don’t have the right to feel superior to anybody else if you understand the gospel, you don’t need to! So rejoice in what you have in Jesus Christ! You know, rejoice, pray, sing until it’s so real to you and until you have that joy that’s so strong, you don’t need to feel superior to anybody else.” And whatever the issue is, Paul would have to say, he would look at you and he would say that you have the same issue. See, it’s verse 14 where Paul says your problem is you think you believe the gospel, you don’t, you haven’t thought out the implications, you haven’t driven them into your heart, you haven’t thought out the implications of your life and this is the reason why Martin Luther based on Galatians 2:14, he comments, he wrote a commentary on Galatians and when he gets to verse 14, this is what he says about chapter 2, verse14, he says, “the truth of the gospel is the principal article of all Christian doctrine, most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others and beat it into their heads continually,” which also means to beat it into your own head continually. Listen, moral reformation will not change your life. Learning bible principals and taking them home and trying to apply them to your life will not change your life. This will change your life: taking the gospel, yeah, the basics of Christian doctrine and driving them into your life through prayer, singing, through fellowship, through counseling with each other until it makes you a new person. You see this last, look right just look here, it says, “I no longer live,” verse 20 and 21, verse 20, “I no longer live but Christ 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.” See the paradox? First of all, “I no longer live but Christ lives within me,” but then you know it’s a certain sense in which when you become a Christian you go into Christ, God looks at you in Jesus Christ and sees you as a beautiful thing. There’s a certain sense in which you disappear. You find your value in Christ. You don’t have to put yourself into anything else in order to find your value and your worth, you find it in Christ but there’s another sense in which though on the one hand, I don’t live but Christ live in me but on the other hand, the life I now live, I live in the body. So on the one hand, I am living a life, I’m living out of gratitude for the one who saved me. I never forget years ago talking to a woman who was changed by the gospel and I’d never thought she would ever be and she always was going into one abusive relationship after another with men and she utterly changed and she told me at one point, she was meditating on these passages that said your life is hid with Christ in God. Or you know, I am no longer my own but I’m now in Christ and she would say, she says, “you know, the reason I’m able to date guys again, the reason why I’m able to even consider getting married again is because in my heart, I’m looking at that and I’m saying, “you know, wow, it’d be nice to be your girlfriend, wow, it must be nice to be your wife, but here’s one thing, you will never be my life. Christ is my life. You will never be my justification, my sanctification, my redemption, my wisdom, you will never be my value, you will never be my worth.” I used to do that, I used to make my romantic partner into my value and worth but then I was using them but now, since Christ is my worth and my value, I am free to love them.” Do you see how the gospel changes everything? It changes your motivational structure of the heart, it changes your personal identity, it changes your social identity, everything. You know why “Redeemer” wants not just to get people to be more moral, not just to get people to live nicer lives somehow, but what “Redeemer” wants to do is it wants to take the gospel into the city and see thousands more people know the liberation of this? Charles Wesley when he was changed by the gospel wrote a hymn: “Long my imprisoned spirit lay Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.” That’s the background music of people who broken through from the old order to the new order and had their lives completely changed. That could be the background music to your life, it could make you a brand new person. Let’s pray.
Comments
Post a Comment