Galatians: Live Free Real vs. Fake (Northwest)

Transcription

1 Transcript Matt Hessel Galatians 1 Well Traders Point, how are we? It s good to see you guys. Hey, if you re a guest, welcome to the Northwest campus. Maybe you are new to the Indy area and you re just checking things out, or maybe a friend has been inviting you for a while to just come and see. Maybe you were just trying to go to Cracker Barrel and you took a wrong turn off the interstate. However you got here this morning, let me just say we are really glad that you re here. Actually, you picked a great weekend to come because today we re starting a brand new series for the summer going through the book of Galatians. Let me just give you the theme for Galatians right out of the gate. There is an undercurrent throughout this book, and it s this grace. It s about the real gospel versus a counterfeit gospel. Depending on where you re at, when you hear this is about grace you might be tempted to check out already. Let me just try to beat you to the punch. C.S. Lewis was a professor at Oxford in the 20 th Century. He was the one who was famously asked, What s the difference between Christianity and every world religion? And Lewis said, That s easy. It s grace. Grace is at the heart of the gospel. And what I ve experienced in my own life and what I ve learned through my years as a pastor is that grace is a concept many people struggle with both Christians and people who wouldn t call themselves Christians. Grace is a hard concept to grab ahold of. Maybe when you heard this was about grace, your first thought was, Great. I just walked into the church that s going to yell at me for an hour about how I am going to hell unless I accept the grace of Jesus Christ right now. Or maybe you re thinking, Man, if you only knew what I ve done or where I ve been, I appreciate it, bro, but you would know grace isn t for somebody like me. Or maybe you re thinking, Let s just be honest. The real reason Christians talk about grace is because they can t handle their own guilty consciences. It s a coping mechanism. If that s what you need to do, cool, do your thing, but I don t really have anything I need to feel guilty about. The music was great. Thank you for the free cup of coffee, but I m good. Or maybe you re on the other end of spectrum and thinking, Grace, I get it. I am team grace. Let s do this. But can we move onto something a little bit deeper? Maybe like the three primary views of eschatology. Some of you are like, Escha-what? It s a real

2 thing. It s a different sermon. Maybe you re hearing grace and you re thinking, Hey, that s awesome. I love grace. I am in, but is it really that simple? Here s the thing. If we don t understand grace, we will never understand the gospel. I can think I don t need grace for whatever reason, or that I am beyond grace for whatever reason, but if we want to go deeper, there is nothing deeper in all of Scripture than the grace of Jesus Christ so we cannot skim over it. The truth is this. Grace is for all of us, whoever we are. It is needed by all of us, whoever we are. We don t get to add any qualifications to it, whoever we are. And we never outgrow it, whoever we are. So what is it? What actually is grace? You hear that word thrown out a lot. We re going to spend this entire series kind of unpacking that. Let me break it down to the most simplistic definition I can come up with. Grace is undeserved favor. Whenever Kelly and I are talking about grace with our kids, we ll tell them grace is getting what you don t deserve. This is what Galatians is trying to deconstruct. Because all of us, no matter where we re at, whether we realize it or not, at some point in our lives usually multiple times, we get this notion in our heads that, I have to deserve grace. Or, I have to earn it. And Galatians is going to try to deconstruct that entire thought process. Here is the back story, here s what s going on. Galatians is actually a letter. It is written by the Apostle Paul, who has an incredible story of transformation in his own life. He goes up to Galatia, which is now modern-day Turkey. He plants all these churches up there, then he leaves and he takes off to go plant more churches. Then he writes a letter back to the Christians in Galatia about what he hears is going on in their churches. And I ve got to tell you, there are times Paul gets pretty fired up in this letter. But know that he is writing specifically to Christians. So if you wouldn t call yourself a Christian, that s okay. I m so glad you re here. But know that Paul is specifically talking to a Christian audience. That s the lens he is using. This is actually going to be a great series and a great book for you to come and see. So if you ve got a Bible with you, go ahead and open it up to Galatians 1. We ll have these verses on the screen also. Let s jump right in on verse 1. Paul, an apostle not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead and all the brothers who are with me, To 2

3 the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. So Paul starts right out of the gate with grace. He starts right with the gospel. That s pretty interesting because he is talking to Christians, people who have already accepted the gospel. It s really easy for us at times to think the gospel is only the starting point that it s for non-believers. That we, as Christians, need something more advanced. But the truth is there is nothing more advanced than the gospel. Yes, it is the starting line, but it is also the finish line. The gospel not only initially saves us the Bible calls that justification but it also continues to grow and transform us. The Bible calls that sanctification. It would be really easy for us as a church to say, Yeah, the gospel. That is awesome. We are in on the gospel, but can we move onto something else. The answer to that is no. No, we can never move on from the gospel. We have to stay immersed in it. Maybe you re heard this before. The gospel is not the ABC s of Christianity. It is the A to Z of Christianity. There s a lot of truth in that. It is the message of salvation, but it s also the source of our growth. It s also the foundation of our mission. That s why Paul is starting off with it. So what is it? What is actually the gospel? Let s be clear on what that is. Here it is in its simplest form. There is a God. He created all of us, and He created all of us in His image. He created us to be in relationship with Him in perfection. That was the purpose. But all that s been broken. Sin entered into the world, and it fractured everything. The reason why we have brokenness in this world, the reason why we have natural disasters and sickness, war, racism, abuse, and violence is all because way back in Genesis 3 sin came into the picture and broke everything. You and I, all of us, we re all guilty of sin. That s rebellion, betrayal of the God who created us. And because of our own sin, we separated ourselves from the relationship we were designed to have with God. Now, because of our sin, we deserve an eternal separation from God in a real place called hell. That s the bad news. We ve got to know the bad news before we know the good news. The good news is way back in Genesis 3, right after everything went south when we fractured that relationship with God, when we deserved something God never designed for us, God said, No, no, no, no, no. I love you too much for that. I have a plan to redeem you and make all of this right. I m going to send my Son Jesus and He is going to live the life you were supposed to live, a perfect life. He s going to live it for you. Then He is going to die for you, paying the price your sin requires, a price you yourself cannot 3

4 pay. So Jesus comes and He lives the life we were designed to live. He lives it for us, He gives us that righteousness. Then He is betrayed, beaten, spit on, and crucified on a cross. His death paid the price our sin requires. It wiped our debt clean. The punishment is now gone, and that relationship with God has been restored. Then three days later, there s more. There s more good news. Three days later He rose from the dead, by Himself, conquering death so that one day you and I, we can walk out of our grave also. Now we ve said this before. At the cross Jesus wrote a check for you, and then at the resurrection the check cleared so redemption, forgiveness, grace, salvation has been bought, paid for, and given to us as a free gift. We just have to receive it in faith. Ephesians 2:8 says that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works faith. Faith that Jesus is who He says He is. And Jesus says He is Lord, God, and Savior. Faith that Jesus did what the Bible says He did that He was crucified on a cross and rose from the dead. And faith that Jesus will do what He said He would do save us from the penalty of sin by His grace and His mercy alone. That should never, ever get old to us. That should never stop humbling us. That should never be less exciting, and that should never stop growing us. But if we re not careful, if we re not careful with the gospel we can get sideways pretty easily. Look at verse 6, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. Paul s a little fired up here. Here s why. Soon after he left Galatia, these people called the Judaizers went up to the churches in Galatia and said to all the Christians there, Yes, faith in Christ resurrected and crucified, absolutely. Amen. But there s more to it. Paul left some stuff out. He didn t give you the full gospel. In addition to faith in Christ, you also need to follow the Jewish customs. Mainly, you need to keep the dietary laws and you need to be circumcised. So let me make sure I heard you correctly. It s faith in Jesus, plus you want me to eat or not eat certain things, and you want me to do what? To what part of my body? Paul says, And you believe that? I can t believe you gave up pulled pork sandwiches, let 4

5 alone the fact that you were willingly circumcised as grown men, without anesthetic. There are so many jokes I could make right now, but none of them are appropriate. He s like, I can t believe you did all that, you thought you had to do that in addition to faith in order to be saved. And they re like, Well Paul, these people came up here and told us you were watering down the gospel. That s what Paul was being accused of. That he was trying to make the gospel more appealing to people by removing things that still had to be done. But here s the truth: The real gospel is not about what you do, it s about what has already been done for you. The argument that Paul has this was 2,000 years ago but the same struggle still exists today is that there are so many false gospels out there, just fakes. You ve got to believe this, or you ve got to believe that, or you ve got to believe a concoction of all these different things. But here s what s more common among Christians. You have to do something in addition to faith. How do I know if I m hearing the real gospel, or a fake? That is a great question. And I love it when you guys ask questions that are in my notes. Here it is. Let me give you a really simple filter, a really simple filter to put things through. There are books written on this. It s simply this. Jesus + anything = nothing Faith in Jesus + do a bunch of things, or make a bunch of things, or mark off this checklist, or believe something else faith in Jesus + anything else is a fake. It equals nothing. Jesus + nothing = everything Faith in Christ alone, crucified and resurrected for you: Grace + nothing else. That s the real gospel. Every June or July I get s from people asking the same thing, and it happened in the lobby just before this service, Hey, I m moving to a different part of the country. Can you give me any church recommendations? If you re ever at a different church, put that church through that filter. It will tell you whether or not you should stay or not. What do they really say about Jesus? If you ve never really heard about Jesus before, put Him through that filter. Adding anything to the gospel makes it fake. Faith in Jesus plus do a bunch of good works: fake gospel. Faith in Jesus plus give all of your stuff to the poor: fake gospel. Faith in Jesus plus do some ritual: fake gospel. 5

6 Adding anything to the gospel makes it fake. All of those things can be great things in and of themselves, but we have to get the order right. They have their place. Obedience to Christ, doing good works, and things we value as a church like generosity, service, and discipleship, all of those are great. They have their place, and we have to get things in the right order. But those things, as great as they are, they do not result in the gospel, they are a result of the gospel. They re not the reason for it, they are the natural response. Adding anything to the gospel makes it fake. And we could talk about doing good works all day long and how we need that for salvation. We could talk all day long about it. But let s just get to the core of it. When we talk about that the root of all that goes back to the fact that we would much rather try to earn grace for ourselves than to trust somebody else to earn it for us. It s a trust issue. It s always been a trust issue because whenever we add requirements to the gospel that can be our tangible way of tracking whether or not we have earned it and that is a very subjective, slippery slope. How do I know if I earned it? Whose standard do I follow? Is it this person or that person? And that is a quick downward spiral. This is the endless cycle religion offers. Here is religion at its core. Religion is you-have-to-earn-grace. Jesus is Iearned-it-for-you. But here s where we have to watch ourselves as Christians. We are quick to point out things that have been removed from the gospel, like the need for repentance or the need to identify sin. We re very quick to jump on those things, and we should. We should defend and guard against that. But adding something to the gospel is just as dangerous as taking something away from it. And we can do that very easily whenever we say, Jesus plus anything, no matter how good that anything is. And Paul will spend all of Galatians trying to deconstruct that, because the greatest threat to the church is not the anti-gospel movement outside, the greatest threat to the church is a counterfeit gospel inside. And we ve got to guard against that, because oftentimes the counterfeit gospel looks pretty good. It s never a flat out lie. You can detect that pretty easily. Usually the counterfeit gospel is truth twisted ever so slightly, Okay, I can buy that. That makes sense to me. How about a real $20 bill and a fake, a counterfeit $20 right now? I thought about asking some of our law enforcement officers if they could give me a counterfeit $20 as an example, but then I thought that was really weird to talk to the law about it. Hey, can I have some counterfeit money? so I didn t want to do that. But if I had a real $20 with me, and I had a counterfeit one, me personally, I couldn t tell 6

7 the difference. They both look good to me. But I know there are people in our church who could immediately tell which one was the fake. Now I could take that counterfeit $20 home with me today. I could go spend it right now, it would be fine. I could even save it at home, and collect a bunch of counterfeit $20 s. Until one day when I go to spend all that somewhere, or I try to take it to the bank, the bank or the government comes to me and says, No, no, no, no, no that s all fake. All the money you ve accumulated, it s useless. That s a bad day for me. And the counterfeit gospel is the exact same way. Galatians is trying to point out what the real one is, and how to identify the fakes because we have to know. Our hope, salvation, mission, and church are attached to the gospel. So are we attached to the real one, or a fake? When we know the difference between the real one and the fakes, why would we ever choose a fake? When I was in sixth grade I went on a mission trip to Mexico with my dad. On the way back to San Diego at the end of the week, we stopped in Tijuana to do some shopping. Talk about an eye opening experience for a 12-year-old. If you ve ever been to the market there, you know you can buy any name-brand article you can think of that is a complete knock off. I bought two different things. I bought four pairs of fake Oakley s, and I see some people nodding their heads right now. Okay, you ve done it too. And I bought a fake Rolex, because what sixth grader doesn t want a fake Rolex? It looked awesome. I thought it looked great. The gold was shiny, at least what I thought was gold was really shiny. It had the classic Rolex logo on it. It looked real to me. I was going to be the coolest sixth grader in my school. Ninja Turtle watch or Rolex? Which kid are you inviting to your birthday party? The kid with the Rolex, you re going to get some sweet gifts. This was my invitation to every birthday party that summer. It looked real to me. What sixth grader is going to argue with you as to whether it is real? They can t tell the difference. The only reason I knew it was a fake was because the guy sold it to me for $7. But you can believe I wore that thing with pride for about a week. Then it literally turned my wrist green, stopped telling time, and the band fell apart. A fake gospel is like buying a fake Rolex, why would you ever spend your money on a fake when a real one has already been bought specifically for you with your name engraved on it, and it s been given to you for free as a gift? But if we don t know the difference between the real and the fakes bailing on the real gospel to buy the fake Rolex can happen pretty easily. Look back at verse 6 at what Paul said. I am astonished that you are so quickly 7

8 deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. So why are the Galatians bailing on the gospel so quickly? Why do we do that? Why do we bail out on it so quickly? Why does the 20-year-old who goes off to college and seems strong in her faith all of the sudden come back home and she s questioning her faith altogether. Why does that happen? Or your family member or friend, who has always been so solid in their faith, just abandons the gospel. Why does that happen? I can t tell you why that happens, because I don t know what s going on in someone s heart. But Paul hits on maybe the two biggest themes as to why someone would run from the gospel. He says, Trouble, and twisted truth. So trouble is going to happen in all of our lives, that s a promise. And trouble could be anything. It could be any kind of crisis, job loss, cancer, divorce, betrayal from a friend. It could be any kind of tragedy. You lose a spouse or a child, or another family member. Maybe it s another miscarriage. Trouble can be any kind of pain, any kind of hardship, and it can be mild or extreme. But the reality is, usually trouble alone is not the reason we turn and run from the gospel, not by itself. It s usually whenever trouble is coupled with twisted truth because whenever there s pain and hardship in our lives, we re vulnerable to twisted truth Jesus + this, Okay, I guess that makes sense. I guess I can see that, given the way things are now. Whenever we re scared, hurting, discouraged, or even disillusioned, we re much more open, even more than we realize, to grabbing something in addition to the gospel we first received because, Hey, you know what? Jesus was sufficient up until this point, but given the way things are now maybe I should start looking somewhere else. Or maybe I missed something altogether in the beginning. At that moment we re tempted to go after what will soothe us instead of what will actually save us. Trouble unchecked coupled together with any kind of twisted truth, that s a dangerous combination. That s why we need to know the difference between the real gospel and any fake because the fake Rolex looks pretty good at times. That s why we need to be connected to each other, not isolated. Because when, not if, when trouble hits you not only will you have people in your life who can walk with you through it and help you, but you also have people who can guard you from deserting for a fake gospel. Matt, no, that s a fake Rolex. You ve got the real one over here. That s counterfeit money, you know that. You ve got the real one over here. There s one more reason Paul talks about that people can bail. It s in verse 10. Listen to 8

9 this, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Forget the Galatians for just a second. Look at our culture. Today, do you think we have a culture of people-pleasing? Yeah, I d say so. You were just as nervous about that as the other two services. So I bought this Bible about seven years ago. I m a big fan of I like to write in my Bible. I like to highlight things. It s just full of stuff over the past seven years, notes that I ve taken. As I was going through this chapter this week, I remembered something and have no idea why I can remember this. Do you want to know what the first verse I highlighted in this particular Bible was? It wasn t John 3:16. It wasn t some visionary inspirational verse. It wasn t Romans 5:8. It wasn t Exodus 14:14, which is one of my favorites. The very first verse I highlighted in this Bible was Galatians 1:10, For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. I don t remember why and I don t know the reason behind why this verse hit me at this time other than this. I know me personally, I m vulnerable to this. I m vulnerable to seeking the approval of man. Paul s like, Matt, that s not going to work, bro. You can t seek man s approval and be a servant of Jesus. We could do an entire series on this verse alone, but let s just get to the core of it. People pleasing can be a form of idolatry. People pleasing can be a form of idolatry. And it might sound a little weird at first like, Say that again? but really, let s think about it. What s the goal of constantly trying to please other people? It s usually trying to gain their approval and affirmation. And why would we so diligently seek other people s approval and affirmation? It s because we ve set up an idol in our hearts, and that idol is ourselves. So other people s approval, and other people s admiration, those in and of themselves are really good things. But when they become fuel to worship the idol we ve set up, it becomes validation of our idol. So if I m in any kind of situation that would compromise the chance for me to get other people s approval and affirmation, I m much more willing to bail on the gospel maybe than I even realize. This is what I m vulnerable to. And this is what I bet a lot of you are vulnerable to also. Again, those things are great in and of themselves, being affirmed by others, approved by others, they re great in and of themselves but the eternal question we ve got to ask 9

10 ourselves is, Am I seeking that more than I am seeking, Well done, good and faithful servant? So write this question in the margin of your Bible next to verse 10. Here it is. Whose approval am I seeking? Is it God s or man s? Am I trying to please Jesus or am I more worried about choosing and pleasing other people? Trying to please other people and seeking their approval and affirmation, let me just tell you, it s a prison. It s like a drug because the more you seek it the harder it is to be satisfied. You see, you have to seek more of it, more of it, and more of it to get that high. It gets harder and harder and harder, and it s a spiral downward quickly to where you just become depressed. You re never going to get enough. But God s approval and pleasing Him, it s absolute freedom. And part of the good news of the gospel is you ve already been approved. You ve already been approved by Him. He s already pleased with you. How do I know that? The cross. If you re ever wondering, Hey, am I approved by God? Is God pleased with me? Of course God does not like sin, but is God pleased with me? Does God love me? The answer is: Always look at the cross. Why would Jesus willingly die for someone He doesn t approve of, who He s not pleased with, or who He doesn t care about, who he doesn t love? He wouldn t. Every time you question, Does God love me? look at the cross. That s your answer. People pleasers will run from the gospel if it will upset people they know. People pleasers will run from the gospel if they think it s going to bring ridicule on them. People pleasers will run from the gospel if it compromises any opportunity for them to get approval and affirmation. If seeking mans approval is more important to you that God s, then you will either knowingly, or even unknowingly manipulate the gospel in order to get that approval you re seeking. You ll add to the gospel, or you ll take away from it. You ll compromise what can t be compromised. Almost every time you see somebody compromise Scripture now, almost every single time, the reason why they re doing it is they re seeking someone else s approval. That s why they re doing it. If seeking man s approval is more important to you than God s, if you are buying a fake gospel, well that becomes an easy means to that end. If seeking man s approval is more important to you than God s, then at some point you ll bail on the gospel because the gospel and man s approval, they can never co-exist. This is what Paul is getting at. 10

11 So who right now are you trying to get approval from? Paul himself is being accused of being a people pleaser. He s like, How can I be that? I m serving Jesus. How can I be obsessed with the approval of man? And then he goes on to kind of give his credibility for that. Look at verse 11: For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, remember that, that s important, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. Why would a guy who was so willing to kill as many Christians as he possibly could, why would that guy all of the sudden be so concerned with being approved by them and pleasing them? He wouldn t be, because something else is going on here. Before Paul accepted the gospel himself, he did everything in his power to destroy it. Paul was one of the religious leaders in Jerusalem, and he would literally hunt down as many Christians as he could possibly find and either throw them in prison or, more often than not, he would just kill them. Paul is the one who approved the very first murder of a Christian for their faith in Acts 7. Stephen is on his knees in front of Paul, and Paul says, Thumbs up, guys. Let s kill him. Paul was a terrorist. He killed as many Christians as he could because he hated this Jesus who he thought was a lunatic, and he hated anybody who followed Him. To the Christians at this time, Paul was very similar to the leader of ISIS. But that s not what he sounds like in Galatians, or when he s writing Romans, or Philippians, or Ephesians. That doesn t sound like the guy we hear preaching in the back half of Acts. What happened? Paul met the real Jesus, he encountered the real gospel, and it transformed him. The real gospel that we have faith in, Jesus crucified and resurrected for grace alone, not only saves us, but it will continue to grow us and transform us. That s what happened to Paul. And he spends the rest of this chapter kind of telling his story about why this happened, what he s been doing since, and really kind of his credibility. And he ends with this, and I want us to see this in verse 22, And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only were hearing it said, He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy. And they glorified God because of me. Here s what I want us to see. Paul ends up writing about half of the New Testament. He is still, to this day, the model for church planting. Traders Point was planted in 1834 and I bet we could trace our roots all the way back to a church Paul planted. The guy goes on 11

12 an absolute terror, all throughout the Roman Empire, preaching the gospel. But nobody is talking about that. They re not talking about his preaching style, they re not talking about his church plants, they don t care that he wrote almost half the New Testament. They re not impressed with that at all. They re not focused on that at all. But what they are talking about is his transformed life. They re blown away by that. He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy. How awesome is that? I think that is one of the absolute best proofs of the gospel Paul s transformed life, because it is so drastic. It s so drastic because this couldn t have happened because somebody convinced him of Jesus. This couldn t have happened because he was seeking people s approval. No. Why would a guy go from ruthlessly killing as many people as he possibly could, to all the of a sudden on the spot sell out as a servant to Jesus and preach Him crucified and resurrected, not for his own gain ultimately it would lead to his own death. Paul got killed in Rome for preaching the gospel. Why would that happen? The only way that happens, the only way Paul s life was transformed the way it was, is if the resurrection is true and that he met the real Jesus and encountered the real gospel and it transformed his life. Here s what that means for us. If you follow Jesus and you want other people to know Him too, I can make you this promise. You will be confronted, challenged, and even criticized over proof of the gospel, So the gospel is grace by faith, not by works? That seems too simple. That can t be true. Or, So the gospel was Jesus was crucified, and then what s this whole resurrection thing? So you believe Jesus rose from the dead? Really? Prove it. There are so many great apologetics for the resurrection, the gospel, and the authenticity of the Bible, but I think one of the absolute best proofs for it is what verse 23 is trying to reveal: Our life changed by the gospel is our best argument for the truth of the gospel. We are our best argument. We, Christians anyone who follows Christ we are our best argument. The single best argument for or against Christianity has always been the same. It s Christians. Paul s transformed life gave glory to God, and that s what people took notice of. They didn t care about his preaching, they didn t care about his church planting, and they didn t care about him writing half the New Testament. What they did care about was his transformed life. They took notice of that. And the same thing is true of us. The change in our lives because of the gospel and the 12

13 transformation that happens, are tangible effects that people can grab ahold of and see. This is why the number one reason anyone would reject or deny Jesus goes back to the hypocrisy they see in the lives of people who claim to follow Christ. But the opposite is true also. Somebody could think I m nuts and not believe anything I m saying. Matt, you re crazy. There might even be somebody here thinking that. And that s okay. I m really glad you re here. They could think what I m saying is crazy, but they still might be drawn to the gospel because of the transformation in my life. You can question content. You can question content all day long, but you cannot question change. Jesus says in Matthew 5:16: let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. And notice how light comes before good works. Jesus is saying, Hey, let the gospel transform you. Let Me transform you, and good works should come from that. Let other people see that not to give you glory, not to pat your back, but to give God glory. And they will see the change. They will see the tangible effect of the gospel. So here is the question I want you to ask yourself. This is what I m asking myself, and I want us to end with this today: What does my life say about the truth of the gospel? Matt Hessel, what does your life say about the truth of the gospel? Does it authenticate the gospel, or does your life represent a fake one? Our church, our campus, do we point to the true gospel, or do we point to a fake? Which one is it? When we know the difference between the real gospel and a fake, and we grab hold of the real one, it will transform us, it will grow us, and we will start to bear fruit. We ll get to that in chapter 5. When we as individuals pursue Jesus, let ourselves be transformed and grown by the gospel when we do that as individuals and then come together as a campus and a church, now we are an orchard of transformation that people cannot deny. You cannot deny life change. They ll want to experience it for themselves. Or, at the very least, they ll be curious. And I m good with curious. I ll take curious all day long. Guys, that s our opportunity to make an incredible impact for Jesus around Indianapolis. That s what we re called to do. You don t have to go preach a great sermon like Paul did in Acts 17. You don t have to 13

14 write the next great book on the resurrection to make an impact. All you have to do is know the difference between the real gospel and a fake. Grab hold of the real one, let it transform you, let other people see the transformation. Then invite them in and say, Hey, you want to know why? Let me tell you why. If we do that as individuals, I can t imagine what God will do with that. There are a lot of people here. Think about it. If all of us are doing that as individuals, and then we come together here s what I do know. Indianapolis won t be the same. What happens if Indianapolis changes? Maybe that spreads to Chicago. And there re some good things going on in Chicago with the church right now. What happens if that spread to New York, Boston, or L.A., or San Francisco, Dallas, or Miami? What happens to our country? Change for the gospel, does it become a beacon of light we re supposed to be as Christians? Our mission is not to save America, don t hear me say that. Our mission is to go save Americans. That s what the gospel has called us to do. But we ve got an opportunity as a church and we ve got an opportunity as the Northwest campus. All we have to do is know the difference between the real and the fake and grab it. It s hard at times. You re going to get ridiculed. You re going to get isolated. The world is going to hate us. They hated Jesus, we can expect it. But to me, all that does is authenticate the truth even more. If the world hated Me, it s going to hate you, Jesus promised that. So when that happens to the church, when that happens to the Christian it s fulfilling prophecy that Jesus laid out. We can be encouraged by that. We don t have to be afraid because, in the end, we know God wins. We know redemption is coming. We know reconciliation is coming. We know it is coming. So grab hold of the real one. Hold onto it, let it transform you. I m holding on to it with you. Let s pray. Father, thank You for Your truth, and Your grace. It s so easy for us to want to earn this and deserve it, to reach up to You. But we can t. But You are a God of mercy, grace, and justice, and You ve reached down to us. Thank You for sending Your Son. Thank You for the good news of Your Son Jesus Christ, that He died for us. He resurrected for us. We can be redeemed because of our sin and that You re going to make us new. And that relationship we were meant to have with You? We can have it right now. 14

15 Father, there are so many fake gospels out there. The enemy takes Your truth and twists it ever so slightly. As a church give us the wisdom and discernment to know which one is the real one and which one is the fake, to call out the fakes and to grab hold of the real one. I pray that would transform us as individuals, that would transform our campus, that would grow our church for Your glory, for others to see the change, redemption, grace, and salvation that is right here offered to everyone. It doesn t matter who they are, what their background has been, what they ve done. If You can save a guy like Paul, there s hope for all of us. That just shows how great You are. Thank You for time we can reflect every week, where we take communion the bread that represents the broken body of Jesus and the juice that represents His spilled blood. Communion is a representation of the grace that You give us and put in front of us every week saying, Remember this. I ve already done this for you. You re already approved. I m pleased. I love you. Don t forget that. Make that true of us. Give us the faith to trust You in salvation, trust You in grace, that You will do what You say You will do, that You are who You say You are because You ve not come up short yet. And You won t. We worship You. We give You praise. It s in Jesus precious name we pray. Amen. 15