The Cross - Part 6: Standing

The Cross - Part 6: Standing MATT CHANDLER, April 15, 2007 If you have your Bibles, let s go over to 1 Corinthians 15. On this past Friday, we loaded up everyone in the car because I think two things were happening. One, my wife needed a new pair of jeans, hers were finally gone, and apparently the Lord wanted to discipline me. So, we got in the car and headed to the mall, just an absolute nightmare. I m loading my four year old into the car, who had just gotten her first bloody nose the night before, and she says, Does God have blood like me? Then I said, No, God is spirit and the true worshipers will worship Him in spirit and in truth. I don t know why you guys think that s funny, that s what the text says. And so, I could tell she was confused by that, and she said, Well at church last week, they said that Jesus was God and that He bled on the cross. So, I was like, Let s do this! I ve been training 12 years for this. So, I start trying to unpack the Trinity on her. I m like, Well, we worship a triune God and they re three distinct yet one. It s God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And so she was like, Stinked? God stinked? So I m like, No, God doesn t stink, woman. If it wasn t for the cross, He might have just killed you right there. So I m trying to work through trinitarian doctrine with my four year old. I think in the future, I m just going to go, Why don t we talk about that one later? But I tried to wade through that with her. It was honestly, in her four years, the best question she s ever thrown at us. And I love it because it means she s listening. She s picking up on, Okay, God is spirit and doesn t bleed, but Jesus is God and He did bleed. Okay, how do I reconcile that? And that s a good thing. I had been praying for just a daughter or a son that s like, Whatever you say, dad. But apparently in this fallen world, that doesn t happen. So, we re just going to talk the Trinity. Let me tell you what I want to do this morning. I just want to ask you a question. And I want to be honest out of the gate that it s a difficult question and it s a question that the text is going to force us to, and it s weighty and uncomfortable. And I want to be straight with you before we even get started, but it s a question that, when answered, might just save your life. And it might help us because I think we have to swim upstream against Evangelical culture this morning, and I think I have to swim upstream against maybe what some of you have been taught. And so, I can promise you this. I m just going to go phrase by phrase through this text, and if I infuriate you this morning, I promise you you re not mad at me. You might be mad that I said it, but you anger does not belong towards me. It belongs towards the text that would force the issue on us like this one will. So now that everyone is excited, let s go, 1 Corinthians 15. I want to wrap up the series on the cross, and 1 Corinthians 15 is going to help us review. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received,... Now, I want to just stop there because that s review. I mean, that s all we ve done the last five weeks. He s saying, What s the gospel? The gospel is that there is this infinite, almighty, all knowing, all powerful creator God that created all things for His glory, and you and I have belittled that, belittled His name, belittled His glory. Every one of has at one time or another believed that our way is better than God s, we ve failed to acknowledge and give Him glory for the gifts He s given us, we question His rule and His authority, while at the same time, doing that with the brain He gave us and holds together and the lungs and the air that He gave us to breathe with. This is the great blasphemy of the universe. So we ve all belittled God, and God, being just, right and holy, is not going to allow the belittlement of His name. And so God responds to this belittlement. He responds with hell. And I know hell s wildly unpopular, but here s the good thing about hell, and I know that that s a weird sentence. The good thing about hell is, in the end, hell is insufficient to bring about what God is after although it is just and it is right and it is the correct response to the belittlement of God. God is that serious. I know that s not so much the case for most of us, but in the universe, God is that serious, He is that big, He is that weighty and the smallest amount of blasphemy is absolutely worthy of eternal torment. And we don t know anything on earth that is that grand, nothing. But this is the God of the universe. But here s where hell is insufficient. Hell is not going to produce worshipers. It s just not. No one who is guilty celebrates justice. If you re guilty,

then you celebrate mercy. If you re completely clean, only then do you celebrate justice, and we re some dirty fools. So God then, not being able to spare wrath, because if He doesn t spend His wrath, then He s unjust, sends Christ in the flesh and crushes Him. And in so doing, He pours out His wrath against the children of God, onto the son, killing Him. I contend over and over and over again, God killed Jesus. It s absolutely what the Scriptures teach. Then God raises Him from the dead, and that same power that raised Christ from the dead is now at work in those who would believe. This is the gospel, that you and I have right standing before God, not by our efforts, not by our works, not by our skill, not by whether we cuss or we don t cuss, drink or don t drink, watch this or don t watch this, do this don t do that, justified before God by the cross of Christ alone. That s the good news. The good news is not that we get to try to be good people. That s not the good news. If anything, that s horrible news, if you ve ever tried. Especially in the Bible Belt where the list of what it means to be a Christian goes well beyond the biblical list. So, this is the gospel, and this gospel leads us to the question that I think is so unbelievably difficult. Let s read 15:1 again. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand,... So here s my question for us this morning. I ll have to unpack it a little bit. This great and glorious gospel that we ve just spent five weeks on, are we standing in it? Not, Do you believe it? I am not asking, nor do I want to talk at any level this morning about belief. I m not asking you if you believe it, because there is a belief that is absolutely in vain and we ll find out here in a minute. I don t want to know if you believe that God sent His Son to die for our sins and rose again on the third day. That s not the question for today. The question for today is are you standing in the gospel? Not do you believe, but are you standing? Jesus, over and over again, is going to attack this idea of simple belief. He s going to say, Hey, the demons believe what you believe and they shudder. They re not saved. You ve read the New Testament. Who could ever get away from that horrific passage in Matthew where He s saying, Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord and I will say, Depart from Me you cursed, for I do not know you. And they respond, Did we not cast out demons in Your name? Did we not prophesy in Your name? Did we not do all kinds of miracles in Your name? Now, there s an element of belief there, is there not? There has to be, but Jesus, in the end, says, Your belief is inadequate. So okay, here s the question: are you standing in it? Are you standing in the gospel? Like this rich, beautiful sacrifice of the Son, empowerment of the Holy Spirit to get us to God, are you standing in it or is this some kind of weird Bible Belt hobby for you? I can tell you, I m still trying to get used to this joint. This place weirds me out. I m talking about this little Bible Belt loop of our country. I can t comprehend church as a hobby. It doesn t make any sense to me. This is the lamest hobby ever. I mean, I don t know what you re doing here if you don t love Jesus or have this thing stirred up in your heart to want to. Get a boat. Seriously, get a boat, fish, make kites, train dogs. I mean, I don t understand this if you don t love Him or don t want to. I don t understand you just coming in here because this is what you re supposed to do on Sunday. Don t you get bored out of your mind? You ve got to be. Are you standing in it or is it just this kind of thing we do? Do you just believe it in your head but it has absolutely no carryover into any area in your life? You believe but it does not affect how you do marriage, it does not affect how you raise kids, it does not affect how you spend your money, it does not affect how you live your life, it does not affect, how you do your business, it does not affect how you engage your neighbors, it does not affect how you view the world, it does not affect how you view our nation. Are you standing in it or is it just belief? Alright, we ve got to be careful here now. And here s what I mean. We ve got to be careful because the Evangelical tendency is for us to kind of get a phrase and talk about it like we know what we re talking about. And so, the worst thing I could do is go, And that s all I wanted to do. Are you standing in it? and then have everybody go, We need to stand in it. And this week anytime anyone s struggling, we go, Well, let me ask you a question. Are you standing in the gospel or are you just believing in it? Hmm? What does that mean? I don t know. I was hoping that maybe you could unpack that for me when I said it to you. So, what does it mean to stand in the gospel? I want you to flip over to Romans 8 and it will give us a quick little picture of two different ways of living. One would be standing in the gospel and one would not. And so, we re going to look at these very quickly, define them and then get back to 1 Corinthians 15. We ll pick it up in verse 5.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Let s talk about it. Let me try to unpack this for you. The mind set on the flesh is the mind and the heart and the spirit and the body that is not standing on the gospel. It could be marked like this. The mind set on the flesh is an independent spirit that has very little love for God and instead pursues God s stuff rather than God. They have a suicidal love affair with self-reliance. That is the mind set on the flesh. Which means that you can intellectually, cognitively believe in God and in the cross and in the resurrection of Jesus but because of that independent spirit that cares little for God and instead likes God s stuff, you can continue to live exactly like what is wicked and only attach His name to it. This is the mind set on the flesh. This is, in here week after week, listening, reading the Scriptures, having the Scriptures read but when you walk out of this room, there s nothing else. That s the mind set on the flesh. It s independent, it s I ve got it, it s how it works in struggles. And listen, we could go outside of the Christian community here. I m attacking the Christian community. This also works itself out this way. The mind set on the flesh is this mindset that when we re struggling with sin and when we ve got sin working in our lives, we want to overcome it ourselves. And what happens in that moment is you absolutely 100% of the time will get caught in this kind of weird cycle of sin and quasi-repentance. And here s what it looks like, and you can pick the range. It can be a man or woman addicted to pornography. It can be a man or a woman in some other kind of sexual sin. It can be a man or a woman who is bitter angry and that bitter, unforgiving wickedness inside of them just eats them up and all their relationships dissolve and break down. It could be a person who lies all the time. They don t know even know why they lie. It could be a person that is wicked to their spouse, just says hateful things, says hurtful things, says wicked things. There are people who just have no patience with their kid and they just lash out in a second. And they re going, Something s wrong with me. And then, they ll come in and hear a sermon that will address a specific sin because of the nature of the heart, and we ll say, This needs to change, this needs to move, this needs to happen. And they ll go, Alright, I m not going to do it anymore. They ll even kind of set some parameters around that. They ll go, I m getting rid of my computer. I m not going to do this anymore. And there s this kind of I m going to beat this. I m going to overcome this. Now, on a good sermon, a really good one, that commitment will last anywhere from two to three weeks. On a bad sermon, maybe a couple of days. And so, what ends up happening is they stumble and fall, and now they feel like they ve let down God, so they run from God. And then, somebody gives them a book or somebody invites them back to a place of worship or they go to some other place, and they do it again. I m not going to do it anymore. It s a suicidal reliance on self. I got it. I ll beat it. I ll do it I ll overcome it. I ll handle it. The other mindset of living in the flesh doesn t think it s got a porn problem at all because they think very little of God. They have very little affection for God. And then on the other side of things, they know they have issues, but they re trying to work through it themselves, they re going to fix it themselves. They don t even want anybody to know their junk, they ve got it, they ll fix it, they ll make it work, they ll handle it, they ll conquer it, they ll overcome it, they ll get it done. This is the mind set on the flesh. And in the end, it leads to one of two things. The first one is despair that you ll eventually think that Jesus doesn t work and all of this is fake and it s a big sham and you ll run. You ll just drop out and be done. Now, there are those type A people, the ultra-disciplined ones that go to bed at 6:30 at night so they can get up at 2:00AM and work out before they watch every piece of food that they put in their mouth. If you asked them what they were doing six years from now on February 17, they d be like, What time? That type A freak show, some of them, they really can overcome an outward manifestation of sin. They can t change their hearts, but they can, by discipline, overcome a sin. So, maybe they don t fall away; they just become pompous, judgmental, religious bigots. That s what happens to them. So, they question everybody s discipline. They say really dumb stuff like, Why don t you just quit? Oh, I haven t tried the just quit plan. Thank you. Thanks for speaking that into me. I feel empowered now. Thank you. This is the mind set on the flesh with

very little to do with God. Believe in God? Yeah, I believe in Him. I go to church. I believe in Jesus. I believe He rose from the grave. I believe I m His. But outside of that cognitive admission of fact, no heart change, no life change, no love for God, no desire for Him, no flex in how you live your life. It s just, I believe. It s the mind set on the flesh. Okay, but the other mindset here is the mind set on the spirit. Now, the mind set on the spirit is the absolute antithesis of the mind set on the flesh. The mind set on the spirit is constantly acknowledging its dependence on God for everything. The mind set on the spirit is not, I ll do it and I can and I ll overcome and I ll fix this, but more of a realization that I can maybe control actions, but I can never change my heart. God alone can change my heart. And it pushes into God and it claims the grace afforded to them in the cross and it clings to the power of the Holy Spirit and it presses in day after day after day saying, I need You. I need You. Help me. Heal me. I need You. It knows that their only hope when all is said and done is God. That s it. And that s the mind set on the spirit. It lives this way, What should I do with my money? I need to engage God with how I should live my life. What job should I take? I need to engage God. This is the person that s going, I need Him, I need Him, I need Him, I need Him... and is constantly pressing in. Are you standing in this? Okay, so I ve loved Venture. I ve loved it. These past two weeks on Wednesday night, packing this place out, everyone praying together, it s kind of got this Charismatic murmur thing going on. It s awesome. It s freaking the Baptists out. They re looking around. You ve got to talk them down, It s okay. It s okay. Just pray. And so, it s been amazing, and every night, I go home and I m so encouraged and I m so just excited that 750 of you want to cram in here just to pray. That s just been such a cool thing. But I go home every night going, Why isn t it always like this? And I m talking about you as individuals, not us as corporate. Like, why aren t we always fasting and praying? Why aren t we always fasting and asking for protection, fasting and asking for guidance, fasting and asking about the Lord s timing. Why isn t that the norm rather than the exception that shows its head when big issues come around? Why aren t we fasting and praying for our children? Why aren t we fasting and praying for our marriage? You know that Jesus said that when He would go, the bride would fast for His return. When is the last time you just fasted for the return of Christ? Well, the answer is we don t. Why? Well, if He comes back, that s cool, but there isn t some burning desire for that. Very few people have some burning desire. Everybody wants to qualify it with the same I want Him to return, but I sure would like to get married. I sure would love for Him to return, but I d really like to do this. I mean, in the scope of the universe, that s a little bit of madness, isn t it? Why does it take something like Venture to get us fasting, praying and seeking? Are you standing in it or is it just cognitive belief? Now, why is this so important? Why is this question so big and so important? Look with me back to 1 Corinthians 15. Let s pick it back up in verse 1. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you--unless you believed in vain.. Okay, when the Bible talks about salvation, it talks about it in three ways. One is past, one is present and one is future. I ll give you the seminary words. This cost me about $40,000, so pay attention. I m giving it to you for free. Past is that moment where we came alive, had the effectual call of the Holy Spirit in us and we were saved. That s called justification. And we are given right standing with God in an instant by no work of our own. And justification leads to the present tense of salvation which is sanctification. And sanctification is God s work in us to make us more and more like Jesus. And where justification has occurred, sanctification will always follow. And where there is no sanctification, I would be horrified that there might not be any justification. And then sanctification leads to glorification. That s the future, that s when either Christ returns or God kills us, whichever comes first. This is the present tense. This is sanctification, that by standing in the gospel, He is making us more and more and more like Jesus. Now, you ve got to pay attention to this. I can t be any more serious with you than I m being right now. Some of you are standing nowhere near the gospel. You are self-reliant, you are handling it yourself, you have no love for God, you have no desire for Him outside of these walls, you just simply do church and you re wondering why you re not growing, not healing, not getting stronger, not becoming more Christlike. Well in the end, you re not standing in it. It s by standing in it, by being reliant, by pursuing,

by humbling ourselves that we become more and more and more like Christ. And I m telling you, in this place you start feeling the weight of Jesus. I ll give you the example. I asked my wife for permission to use this and she said yes. Our first few years of marriage were difficult. I was a sinner and she was, and then we were living in the same house. And so, there were some thing that..i mean, we just didn t know. I m from a home that had a lot of trouble in it, and it was just a difficult few years. And I m not the guy that when you get engaged who s like, Good luck that first year. Because I know some people have a great first year, but we struggled for awhile. I mean, we had to go get help. We didn t just figure it out finally. We finally had to go get help. In that, that whole time we were struggling, I had Ephesians 5 memorized. I hated having that verse memorized. If you don t know Ephesians 5, this is what its command is of me, You will love your wife like I, Jesus, have loved the church and that I gave My life for her in the most brutal, horrific, sacrificial way. And I was like, I don t wanna! I don t want to. I ll tell you what, if she ll do this, that and this, then I ll do that. And so then God, in that real gentle way, would be like, Oh, you want fair? Because I can give you fair, but it ends in eternal damnation. I don t think you want fair. I think you want grace, I think you want mercy, and as I have shown it to you, you will most definitely show it to your girl. And I felt the weight of that because I didn t want to do it. And yet I think this is one of those objective evidences in my life that the Holy Spirit sealed me because what ended up happening is I didn t want to do it but I knew I had to and there was this constant conflict in me with my flesh wanting to do what is sinful and wrong and the spirit inside of me going, Uh uh, that s not where we re going. And listen, there are definitely days I did not hit it out of the park. There are days I didn t even swing the bat. There are days I didn t even show up at that park. There were days I didn t even know I was supposed to be playing. There are days I stayed in bed. There are days I failed, no doubt, but by standing and going, Okay, I need Your help. Okay, I need You to heal then. Okay, is there something in me that causes this? Is there something in her that causes this? Okay, where do we go? And when you re sealed and walking in accordance to the Spirit, you get this guidance from Him. Like, I went through something similar to Celebrate Recovery in Abilene. It was a great program where I got to sit down and go through my junk and unpack my soul. And I started going to counseling myself and then my wife and I went. And listen, even when the church hired me four years ago, the first thing we did when we got here is we had to find a counselor. We weren t done working through our stuff. I mean, if you want to know how we stumbled upon the Center for Christian Counseling, it was because we still needed some help. That s the Spirit going, Come on, let s get out of here. Let s leave this. And by standing in Him, He sanctified and He purifies and He grows and He chisels away and He hammers down, and it s this process of dying to self and it s miserably beautiful. I m not trying to lie to you. There s weren t pieces of that that weren t pleasant, dying to self. I mean, the whole makeup of our DNA is, I don t want to die! I mean, God has to chisel our grip off of that. But then after years and years of it, you ll be like, Oh, I can t wait to die. You ll start sounding like Paul. You know that, To me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. You know those kind of crazy texts that you kind of want to be able to say but you know you can t. For me, to live is Christ...I forgot the second half of that verse. So why is this so huge? Because if you don t hold fast and stand in this gospel, you might just believe in vain. So that part gave me fits in study, because here s what I was trying to figure out. Does he mean that belief in vain is that while I m here on earth, I don t get the fullness of Jesus and I don t get the of God, or does believe in vain mean that when I die, my cognitive belief is not enough and I m part of that crowd that s like, Wait a minute. Didn t I preach like six services a week for thirty years? and have the Lord say Depart from me, accursed, for I do not know you? Which is it? So, I spent a lot of time trying to break that one down and find loopholes. And I m afraid there are no loopholes and the answer is both. Are you standing in this gospel? That s my question to you, not Are you good people? Good people are overrated. It s not Do you tithe? God can t be bought. Are you standing in this gospel? Are you pursuing? Are you chasing? Are you surrendering? Are you pressing in? Are you being obedient?

Alright, so what s the move? I don t know that I can coach you all the way through this, but I ll do my best. When the Holy Spirit s been sealed inside of us by God, we ll start to hear from Him. Like there will be these thoughts that we don t want to do, and that s how I always know it s Him. And here s how I think it works out in this environment. Like, I ll be up here or Patterson or Ben Stuart or Afshin or one of the guys that preaches here will be up here and they ll say something like, This is an issue of the heart. We gotta do this. And one of the ways we ve got for you is you can work that through Celebrate Recovery and they ve got this deal and you can go on Thursday night at 7:00, and something in your spirit s goes, I need to do that. That s the move I need to make. Now come on, seriously, what part of your flesh is saying that? What part of your flesh is saying, Let s be vulnerable and finally surrender. Okay, let me give you the answer. No part of it, because the flesh never surrenders. It has to be killed. Or I ll mention, like this morning, Hey, my marriage was not getting better; it was getting worse. Things were struggling. And so we went to the Center for Christian Counseling and we sat down... And you re going, Oh, my marriage is not getting better. I need to do something. Do you think that might just be the still small voice of the Spirit going, Come on. Let s get out of this. Aren t you tired of this? Or listen, those are just two examples I could give you. I don t know where He s leading you. Like, we talk about confession all the time, and some of you are like, I need to confess. We talk about obedience all the time, and some of you are like, I need to be obedient. That s the Spirit in you going, This is how you stand in this, in obedience. And where you feel like you can be obedient, then you throw yourself on God all the more. So that s my question. And I can t answer it for you. Are you standing in this gospel or do you just believe it? Alright, would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me? I want you to do me a favor for the this morning, so with your head bowed and your eyes closed, the best that you can, will you quiet your heart a little bit here? Just kind of quiet your spirit and search your heart for that voice. This isn t Voodoo or anything like that. Would you just search your heart for that voice? Some of you won t need to search long. What s the voice commanding? What s it calling you to? Is it confession? Have you been battling a sin for a long, long time, have you been living a lie or have you been pretending? Is it finally coming clean about some of that to your wife, to your husband, to your friends, to your small group, to the group of men or women you do life with? Is it an act of obedience? Have you been kicking against the commands of God? Has He been saying, This is what s next for you and you just refuse? You either don t trust because of resource questions or you don t want to move or you don t want to do this or you don t know how this would work and so you just haven t walked in the obedience. Is it finally getting help? One of the things I m trying to do with you week after week after week is try to, by my own life, show you that there are times we have got to get help. There are times that it is well beyond us. There is no shame in that, only celebration. Is it finally getting help? Maybe it s finally letting go. You ve been angry at someone for hurting you. I know you think if you let that go then you re letting them off the hook, but I promise you, the only one you re hurting is yourself. Maybe you need to give that over to the Lord. Maybe you re even angry at God. So where are you being led today. My hope is that you would listen, that you would follow, that you would stand in it and that by standing in it, you would be saved, that you would hold fast through the difficult parts of the process, unless you believe in vain. The most difficult part of being a preacher and teacher is all I can do is read the text and talk about it. I can t make you take steps. So, I promise you, you ve been prayed for all week. I know some of you are going to have to confess things that are difficult. I know some of you are going to have to swallow pride and make moves. I understand these things. We ve prayed all week for your courage and for God s grace towards you in that. Father, we love You. I think, on a whole, we want to love Your more than we do. I pray, if there be any confusion or doubts about salvation and what it is, then that be a good question to wrestle through. Help us. It s for Your beautiful name I pray. Amen. 2007 The Village Church