Saved From Something, Saved For Something

Automatically transcribed — lightly cleaned for readability. Wording is the preacher’s own.

Okay, we're going to turn the microphone over to Pastor Luke this morning. I think all of the staff drank out of the same water fountain this week because we were all sick with the exact same thing. Pastor Luke, I think, got the worst of it. So we're going to pray for him, not just as he brings the word, but that his body and voice will hold up for us. So let's join in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for an opportunity to hear your word. Lord, we know brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world could be killed for doing just what we're doing right now. And so Lord, we pray for them this morning that the word would be strong in their midst as they worship you. We pray for us this morning, Lord, that even now you would remove or tear down or take away the familiar comfort that we have with being in a warm church on a nice day with all of our friends not really fearing anything outside these walls. Lord, remove our comfort that keeps us in a place of spiritual apathy and open our ears and open our hearts, Lord, and open

Our eyes to the truth of your word. We pray, Lord, for our brother Luke, Lord, we pray that you would strengthen his body, that you would give him even, Lord, the grace and strength that he needs just for the next 35 minutes. And Father, that you would give him clarity of speech, a pureness of heart and hands, Lord, as he brings your word in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Yeah, I've realized that I didn't know that being a pastor meant that you never got sick on a Monday, you always get sick on a Friday or a Saturday. So anyways, if I'm a little standoffish today, I'm not shaking your hand or talking too much. It's because I'm here to share the gospel and not my germs. So all right, let's get into it. So we're in our sermon series on our statement of faith, which you should have some copies floating around in your pews. If you've not had a copy of that yet, that is for you to take to keep to have. And you're welcome to use it. It has all the core doctrines of our church.

I won't say that this is necessarily exhaustive, but these are the things that are non-negotiable. We believe do not change and have not changed across Christian tradition. And this would be even an interesting way to do a little bit of a personal Bible study. If you wanted to do some like learning and growing on this, you could read through this and you could follow each of these Bible verses inside of here and do a little study on that. Why does that verse support this idea? And so we're doing this not because we want to be kind of like, you know, just plugging through this kind of document, but because we think it's really important to re-examine and make clear the basics. Sometimes, you know, we take things for granted and when we take things for granted, that's when things start to fall apart. That's when we start to drift. And so this is just an opportunity for us to re-examine the basics, to talk about some things that we've maybe not considered before or we've not considered so deeply. And so that's what this whole series is about. And I hope that this will be a resource for you in continuing to do that. Now, we're going through this in our sermon series. You'll

Notice that, like, we're not covering half of what's in here as far as our sermons are going because, you know, we can't preach for two hours. And so Pastor Cameron and I have actually been having some conversations in the middle of the week where we've been recording them and making a small podcast where we go through some things that we either left out of our sermons or we just did not have the time to get to. So you can find that on the Church Center app. So that app that you use to check in and sign up for events, Church Center app on that front page, you should have one. You should see all the most recent updated sermon series video and audio. And then also right below that, you'll see a little podcast with some episodes about some things that we get to talk about that we didn't get to talk about here. So we're just making that as a resource available for you who want to go deeper. We've been making kind of book recommendations on the topics we've been talking about. The big book we've been recommending is the You Are Theologian book in the back

There. It kind of covers all of these things that we're talking about. It's a good book. It's a great book to start on theology. It's why we got it here in the church for you. And then today I'm going to make two recommendations. The first book that I'm going to recommend, I don't have this up on the screen, but the first book I'm recommending is On The Holy Spirit, which I will not get to talk as much today about as I would like to. But that book I'm recommending is The Forgotten God by Frances Chan. It's a great little book that covers the basics of the Holy Spirit and also addresses some of the common misconceptions, some of the things that kind of get overlooked. It's like one in particular is we tend to think of the Holy Spirit as an it rather than a he. He is a he. So that is The Forgotten God by Frances Chan. It's a great little book. Now, the second book I'm going to recommend is going to kind of go along with my sermon today, but it is called The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. It's his reflection on the parable of the prodigal son and how it kind

Of demonstrates and illustrates different calls to the gospel and different calls of faith. And so both those books I would recommend well. So that's The Forgotten God by Frances Chan and The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. Now, I want to start off by telling you a bit of a story. So there was one night there was a young man who had just recently started in the German Coast Guard. And it was his first night. He'd never really been on watch before he was working the graveyard shift. And he was sitting down and his supervisor was explaining to him the radar and the and the communications and everything. He's like, okay, you're good to go. Just babysit this and walks away. And the young man he's watching and he's doing his job watching the radar. And pretty soon over the intercom, there was a call from a British ship. A British ship was off shore. And it comes over and says, Mayday Mayday. This is UK 78. We are sinking help. We are sinking. And the young German officer he turned on his microphone, and he leaned in and he said, Hello, what are you

Thinking about? Thank you for laughing at my bad joke. That was not a real story. That was a that was a European commercial making an advertisement for an English speaking program. It was a great, it was a great commercial. But misunderstandings misunderstandings happen all the time, right? They can be funny, they can be humorous. But they can also cause significant significant harm, right? If we don't have good understanding, we're gonna misunderstand something, we're gonna make a mistake. And if there is anything, there is nothing more important to be sure that we understand than the gospel. Right? There's we can misunderstand a lot of things. But there's one thing I want to make sure you don't misunderstand today. And that's the gospel. I don't want you to hear me say one thing and think I said another. This is the point of today's sermon is to articulate the gospel again, it's going to be very much in dovetail with pastor Cameron's sermon from last week, but coming at it from a slightly different angle. And I want to just put up here what my main point is, my main point is a singular Bible verse, I'm going to say it a lot today.

And so my prayer is that you will memorize this verse either by the end of the sermon or later this week as you take it to heart. So I want to look at Romans chapter six, verse 23. This important verse is just if I if I had to pick a verse, this might be it. Because it just succinctly explains the gospel in about a sentence says for the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. That's my main point is that the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life found only in Christ Jesus, our Lord. So let's walk through that. And let's just reiterate that. Let's make sure we understand that. First, by taking a moment and clarifying the misunderstanding, I want to kind of define and show you what I think is the way that our culture, our society, and I find that a lot of people tend to misunderstand the gospel tend to misunderstand Jesus, the Bible and the Christian faith. And so once we've clarified what the wrong conclusion

Is, then we can hopefully identify more clearly what the truth is. So now I'm going to give you a big word, or it's actually three big words, moralistic therapeutic deism. So moralistic therapeutic deism is this idea that some sociologists who were doing a study of young people several years ago, it's been a while now, but they were interviewing all of these young people in the United States and they were asking them about faith and religion and belief. And they kind of found out that there was these sort of default assumptions that all of these people kind of had. They wouldn't have said this, but this was kind of like when you kind of asked them and they kind of thought through like, who is God and what is God like and what our life is like, this was sort of the answers that they were given. So let's break this idea down. Moralistic is this idea that God wants you to be good. He wants you to be nice. And most people are nice and good. That's this kind of belief that, well, God just wants you to be good. And if you do more good, that's, you know,

That's good. I don't know how many more times I could say good. And then therapeutic, what is therapeutic kind of represent? Well, therapeutic means that like the goal of life is generally to just feel good and be happy. Like we should just feel good. We should try and fix our emotions, have a life where we're comfortable. We're not distressed. We're not anxious. Nothing is too hard. We just kind of are able to go through life with ease. And God is really only involved in our lives when we want him to be God's kind of this divine therapist. God kind of swoops in when I get too upset or stressed or worried or sad. And he sort of just makes me feel better. And then when things are going well, he's, he's, he's away, right? I don't have to deal with him. He doesn't have much to say in my life because I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I feel nice. I'm happy. So God doesn't need to be near me. And that's what that last word means deism. And deism is this idea that God sort of created the world and then he spun it kind of like on a top. And when he did that, he kind of stepped away, just like if you were to pick

A top and spin it and then walk away from it, you would, you're not touching it anymore. So that's that kind of idea. Going to pause a second. Please tell me you all hear that too. Right. Okay. Oh boy. Oh goodness. Are we good? No, not yet. You know what it is, is it set? My voice has dropped a couple of octaves and so it is probably throwing them for a whole loop. Cause they're like, Luke's voice is never this low. I guarantee you that's what's causing the problem. So do I need to grab a different mic or we good. Okay. All right. Let's continue on. So deism is this idea that God is separate from the world and he's uninvolved kind of spun the top and he stepped away. So moralistic, therapeutic deism just rolls off the tongue, I know. And what that is really at moralistic, therapeutic deism believes God is a cosmic therapist and cheerleader who wants you to generally do good and live a comfortable life. That's what moralistic therapeutic deism is. God's your cheerleader. He's your therapist. He wouldn't call you to do anything hard. He's like, he's

Going to confirm that thing that you really want, right? You're going to feel peace about that thing that you desire. Because God would never call you to deny yourself and pick up a cross or something like that. That'd be totally foreign. And, and so this idea that we kind of default into, it's kind of the belief that, well, if you do enough good and as long as that good outweighs the bad, you go to heaven. Maybe I go to church every so often. Maybe I, you know, I give, maybe I serve and I don't cuss too much. Like I'll go to heaven. That's kind of this idea. And it's, it's false. That's untrue. I cannot tell you how much of a lie that is. And the thing is, is that it's a lie that Satan is totally happy with you believing Satan would love everybody in this room to believe that lie. Satan's okay with people being generally good as long as they're not seeking and in relationship with Christ. And so let's see if that's the false, if that's the misunderstanding, let's identify what is, what is truth here. So I'm going to read for us out of our statement of faith. This is the salvation portion. It says we believe that salvation is a gift of

God's grace received through personal repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In salvation, the believer is justified, adopted into God's family, redeemed from the penalty of sin and reconciled to God. True and saving face will produce a life of obedience, perseverance and good works. That's a mouthful, but we're going to cover some of it. So first, let's go and look at that verse that I said is my main point, Romans six. I'm going to start in verse 19 says this, this Paul writing to the believers in Romans says I'm using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. So he's saying I'm using a metaphor and then this metaphor right now in this passage, he's using the metaphor of slavery, which was prolific throughout the ancient world. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever increasing wickedness. So now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves of sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things that you are now ashamed of those things resulted in death. But now that you have been set free from sin and it becomes slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness and the

Result is eternal life for the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. First is I want to make sure that we understand that sin is more than just bad action. What is this passage talking about? It's talking about being enslaved to sin. That's a condition. That's not just a thing we do or a thing we don't do. This was largely part of Cameron's message last week is that sin is more than our bad actions. It is a state of being that we are stuck in. It is a thing. It is part of our being. We're born with this idea of original sin. No one in this room had to be taught how to lie. None of us had to be taught how to be selfish. We figured that out pretty easy on our own, right? The sinful nature is inside of all of us. We all have it. And having and being in a sinful state, we don't fix that by doing good and trying to outweigh it. That's that's an idea that the world came up with. The model for this is really the

Idea of Exodus. Last summer we did the whole book of Exodus and the people of Israel were enslaved to Egypt and they could not get out. They were in a state of slavery and God came and rescued them out of Egypt. He was their salvation. He was redeeming them and he brought them into the new land and made them a new people. That is the model of the gospel for us. You find yourself not in slavery to Egypt, but in slavery to sin, death, and darkness. And Christ is pulling you out of it into a new life. Salvation is a free gift of God's face. This is, this is the part that you really, you really gotta hear. You don't save yourself. You don't save yourself. You cannot get out of it. God isn't trying to say you need to fix yourself. What does it say in Romans five, eight, just a few verses later, it says, but God demonstrates his own love for us while we were sinners. Christ died for us. Did Paul say when we got our act together, did Paul say when you finally were doing all the right

Things and you finally were living a life that was respectable enough? Did he say when you'd finally done X, Y, and Z, you'd gone to church, you've given so much that God then saved you? No. God, God saved us while we were still sinners, while we were still in slavery, unable to get out of it ourselves. God saved us. God isn't waiting for you to get your act together. He is waiting for you to admit that you cannot save yourself and surrender. God isn't waiting for you to get your act together. The church is not for perfect people. It's for broken people. If you're perfect, you don't belong here. You belong in heaven, right? This is for broken people. I am a broken person in need of grace every day. God isn't waiting for you to fix yourself. He's waiting for you to say, "I need help." We live in a world full of self-help books. I love going to bookstores. I read self-help books all the time. I listen to podcasts all the time. I have listened to and read enough things that you think I'd be a lot better than I actually am at this point. And if you took all of the huge sections of self-help and tons of podcasts and all the things that

People try and do in the classes and the courses and the coaches, you think we would have figured it out. We've been at this thing for a couple thousand years now at this point, and humanity is still pretty messed up. Huh. We have supercomputers in our pockets. We have little computers that can pretend to be human. And none of that's actually made us better. We haven't solved our problems. We've just found more ways to be sinful. You would think that simply knowledge of doing all of this, that fixing ourselves would have done it, and it has not. It simply has not. We need to admit that we cannot save ourselves. Here's something that was important. I was reminded of this. I was a Boy Scout as a kid, and one of the things I learned when I was trying to get my swimming merit badge was that if you're doing a water rescue and someone's drowning, if they're in the water and they're flailing, they're like, "Help, I'm drowning!" They're panicked. Because being in the water and not being able to swim is pretty stressful. And if someone's just panicking like that, the worst thing you could do is get in the water and try and grab them and save them, because that will kill you.

Because if someone is panicked, they're not thinking rationally. They're as likely to push you who's trying to save them down underneath the water to push themselves up. I was looking online, and this isn't some sort of myth I remembered from my childhood. Apparently, this happens all too often. In order for someone to be saved from drowning, they have to surrender. They have to give up. They have to allow the person who is rescuing them to carry them. They have to calm down. They have to allow the life raft or the rescue buoy to grab hold of them. And so, us too, we have to admit, we're not fixing ourselves. We can't do it, and we need to surrender. We need to surrender and say, "God, you're going to have to save me. You're going to have to pull me to shore. You're going to have to pull me out of this slavery to sin." This is a famous quote, generally attributed to Jonathan Edwards. It says, "The only thing that you contribute to your salvation is a sin that makes it necessary." You don't save yourself. You're not making yourself more acceptable to God. God loves

You anyways. God saves you anyways. We are saved by God's love, not by our actions, not by the state of our life. We are saved by God's grace and love. God demonstrates His love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Second thing that I think is really important for us to understand, to be very crystal clear about, is that salvation, the gospel, is not about this kind of distant transactional cosmic thing. Let's turn to Galatians chapter 4. Galatians chapter 4, and I want to see how this passage, notice how this passage talks about salvation. Galatians 4, chapter 4, verse 4 says this, "But when the set time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive what? Adoption to sonship. Because you are His sons, God set the spirit of His Son into our hearts, the spirit who cries out, 'Abba, Father!' So you are no longer a slave, but God's child. And since you are His child, God has also made you an heir."

Notice what this passage is talking about. What did we receive? We didn't receive like a fire insurance salvation card. We received sonship. We received an identity. We need to have this understanding that we're not saved into this kind of like Christians-only club. We're saved into a relationship. We're saved into God Himself. Sometimes I think we have an idea of thinking, "Well, I go to church and I'm a Christian. That means I'm part of the club. That means when I die, I get to go to heaven and live in an all-inclusive resort for the rest of eternity." And there's a book that I read a while, a long while ago. And it put this idea really crystal clear in my head for me. It was God is the Gospel by John Piper. And he had this opening challenge in the beginning of his book. And he said it somewhat like this. He said, "Heaven will not be full of people who are only casually interested that God is also there." Heaven's not going to be filled with a whole bunch of people who are like, "Oh, Jesus is here? Oh, that's neat, I guess. Oh, God's here

In heaven? I'll get around to saying hi to Him eventually, I guess." That's not what the Gospel is. We're not saved into this nebulous thing that involves God. We're saved into a relationship with Him. He has loved us in a way that is beyond comprehension, invited us into relationship, and has invited us to grow in love for Him as well. And so this is the Gospel. God is in that kind of way. He is the Gospel. I want you to notice here too this passage. What is it talks about? It talks about the Holy Spirit and the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation. Verse 6 says, "Because you are His Son, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts." This is talking about this Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who cries out, "Abba, Father." You've received the Holy Spirit as a believer, and it inwardly testifies that you are a daughter, you are a son, you belong to God the Father, and it cries out inside of us saying, "Yes, I am, and I belong to the Lords." We are in a relationship

That changes our identity, and we are in a relationship that causes us to live differently. We're in a relationship that's going to cause us to live differently. When you go from being single to being married, that relationship causes you to live differently. You're going to do things differently than you did them before. Your relationship changes. Your identity has changed. Here, when we become part of God's family, the way we live also to changes. There's a meme or a phrase floating around on the internet somewhere, and it's like, "If I won the lottery, I wouldn't tell anybody, but there would be signs." Then it's like, I don't know, some fancy coffee machine and stuff, driving around in fancy cars. There would be signs, right? I wouldn't necessarily broadcast it, but there would be signs. Something would have changed so significantly that I couldn't help but live differently. When you come out of slavery to sin, something significant has changed. You're not slave to sin anymore. You're not under the power of darkness. Your identity has changed so radically. You've become a son, a daughter of the Most High God, who loves you, who loved you so much that he gave his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but

Have eternal life. This is the good news, and that should change the way we live. I want to read again, Romans 6, 22-23. It says this, "But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness." The benefit that reaps, the change in your life, leads to holiness and will result in eternal life. "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." I want you to hear this really clear, because this is a part of the gospel that until I didn't get, I was a mess until I didn't get this. The new life that is started with the gospel is sustained by the gospel. You don't start over here saying, "I'm saved by grace." That's great. Now I'm a son and a daughter, and now I have to live the rest of my life under sheer willpower, and I have to live a perfect life, because if I don't, God's going to kick me out of the family again. That's where I was as a young believer. I

Thought, okay, God had forgiven me for all these things. Now I have to just figure out how to be this perfect person. And I couldn't. I was so absolutely crushed underneath the weight that I could not be a perfect person. And it wasn't until God told me, Luke, I forgave you knowing your future sin, knowing your future imperfections. My grace is big enough to forgive both your past mistakes and your future mistakes. You're your son. I'm not kicking you out. And so how do we lead a life of holiness? By returning to the gospel, by reminding ourselves, "Who am I? I'm not a slave to sin. I am Christ's. I am a son. I am a daughter. I am now a slave to righteousness. This is now my new identity. As stuck, as entrapped as I may be felt over in slavery to sin, I am now stuck entrapped in an absolutely wonderful and good way in my sonship, in my childhood of being Christ's." Maybe the best way to articulate this is through the picture of the prodigal son. This famous parable where the prodigal son takes his inheritance from God and he runs out. He runs out and he lives

A reckless life. He spends all of his inheritance, lives a sinful life in the city, and he just comes to the absolute end of himself. And he's a wreck. And then he decides, "You know what? Maybe, just maybe, if I come back home, God will let me not be a son, but he'll let me be a servant." And so the prodigal son returns home, not hoping for a warm reception. All he hopes for, all he wants, is just for his dad to let him have a cot in the barn. But what's he greeted with? As he's still a ways off, as he's still walking down the long driveway home. Dad's out on the porch and he sees his son coming home. What does dad do? Does dad sit down, cross his arms, say, "Well, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind when he gets here." No. God gets up and he runs. He runs out to meet the son while he's on his way back. And he embraces him. He throws a feast. He says, "This is my son." He puts his cloak and robe over top of him, puts his ring on his son's finger,

Saying, "You are still my son." That's the gospel. Not because the son did anything. Not because the son lived a good life. Not because the son went to church. But because the son said, "God, forgive me, please save me." Let's pray. Father, Lord, we know that we've earned death, that the wages of our sin, of our condition, place where we're stuck is death. But Lord, we also know that the free gift that you offer us is yourself, is eternal life. And Lord, that we can do nothing to earn that. And so, Lord, it is my prayer today that we in this room would clearly understand that gospel truth. Lord, that we do not contribute to our salvation. Lord, you're not looking for us to fix ourselves. Lord, you are looking for us to admit and to surrender, to say, "I confess I have sinned and I repent." Lord, I'm turning around and I'm just following you by grace. I'm not going to do it perfectly, Lord, but I'm going to trust you. And Lord, we're going to trust and Lord, we ask that your Holy Spirit would seal us, that we would

Be new people, that it would inside of us testify that we are yours, we are a son, we are a daughter of God. Lord, I pray that for those who maybe have lost sight of this truth, that it would be renewed inside of their hearts as a pure and endless flame. And Lord, for those who have never heard this before, or maybe are hearing it in a way that they've not heard it before, Lord, I pray that you would use your Holy Spirit, that your Holy Spirit would be drawing them to you right now. I pray for you out there who are seeking God. I invite you to know the Father and His love. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.