Gospel Centered • How the Gospel Changes Me

And deliver me from every fear.

Father God, we thank you for this morning.

That we have a place that we can come and gather even when the weather outside is horrible and people have been up all night plowing.

We're thankful for them.

Even though they could have done a little bit of a better job, but that's alright.

We're thankful for them anyway.

We're thankful for everyone who has gathered with us this morning, God.

Come to hear your word proclaimed.

And I pray that you would use it, touch our hearts, convict us of our sin, and allow us the grace to repent of that sin.

It's in your name we pray, amen.

You guys can go and grab a seat.

Amen.

Good morning, everybody.

It's good to see you guys here.

My name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors of Mystio Day, and it's my pleasure to be able to preach for you this morning.

We're in the middle of or kind of the second part of a sermon series that we're calling Commissioned, the Role We Play in Gospel Advancement.

And one of the things that we talk about at Missio is uh in our membership class, we I asked the question.

Now, this was, I just realized this last membership class, this was before Twitter changed their character count.

But I asked the class, if you were to tweet what Mystio Day was all about, what would you say?

You had 144 characters or less, what was your options?

And it's always interesting, kind of the answers that I get back, right?

Um, like we're the hipster church, or we like really good coffee and reform theology or whatever it might be, right?

But uh ultimately what we want you to walk away knowing about who we are and our DNA is that we are a gospel-centered, city-focused church community.

And so this morning, as we look at what it means to be commissioned and the role that we play, we're gonna look at this aspect of being gospel-centered.

And so you're gonna be in uh the book of 1 Corinthians.

It's a letter in the New Testament after the book of Romans.

So if you are uh new to the Bible and you want to try and come along with us, we do have uh, by the way, we have Bibles at the welcome desk.

If you don't own a physical copy of the Bible, we'd love to put one in your hands for free.

You can pick one of those up.

It's a full uh uh Bible uh ESV version, which is what we use here uh at uh Myssio Day, but uh it's in the second half of the Bible after the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then smooth over just a few more books and you'll find it.

1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

Also, if you uh haven't yet, download our app.

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And on there, if you click on sermons and then uh find the north tab up top, you'll be able to have some fill-in notes that we use every week uh for your study tools.

Uh so you'll see some words on the screen that are in yellow.

You fill those out in the blanks.

There's even some spaces to type out your own notes, and you can archive those notes for your own personal study during the week as you review God's word and how he's continuing to speak to you and transform you into the image of Jesus.

And so we want to make those available to you.

But 1 Corinthians 15 is where we're gonna be, and we're gonna look at verses one through eight.

So hopefully you're there by now.

We're gonna get started by just reading God's word.

And it says this Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved.

If you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

So as we're looking at 2019, right, we planted a new church, we started a new year, and we're trying to understand what is some of our objectives and goals for this first year of ministry that Missio Day has as a new church plant in the north of Cincinnati.

And what we're looking at is that we want to have everyone who comes through our doors a fully integrated gospel life.

What we mean by that is we want the gospel to impact and affect every area of your life.

And so to have that gospel integrated, we saw that there were three important spaces that we could try to communicate this.

One is through the head, establishing a robust understanding and confident ability to explain the gospel.

This is the head, right?

We're gonna speak to the head and inform the head.

The gospel, as we talked about last week, is starts primarily as information being received.

It has to begin to transform our thoughts and our mind and our worldview.

We also talked about we want to speak to the heart.

The heart is the ability to foster a robust and deeper love for Jesus and to also foster gospel, spirit-powered transformation in our lives as we explore the gospel with one another.

And then lastly, so we have head, heart, we want to speak to the hands.

This means that we are going to seek to understand our giftedness, our place, and our passion to see the gospel expressed in the community around us.

And so this morning, as we look at the head, we're talking about being gospel-centered and specifically how the gospel changes me.

You see, to be able to accomplish this, we need to lay a foundation of what the gospel of Jesus truly is.

Because today in the church culture, the gospel is a really big buzzphrase, right?

Gospel-centered, uh, Christ-centered, uh, the gospel itself.

It's this word that people use, and what we've come to in the church culture is we have to do deeper investigation to see, one, what do they actually mean by using that word?

And two, what is its function inside the community of the church?

Because often what we're discovering is that those things don't actually mean what we think that they might mean.

And so, with us being gospel-centered, we want to make sure that we understand truly what the gospel is.

You see, it's a buzzword, and it can mean different things that really aren't the gospel.

However, the gospel itself is also something so simple that we can teach it to a small child.

And simultaneously, so infinitely complex that we will spend eternity examining its depths.

You see, imagine the gospel like a diamond.

With each turn, it reveals a previously hidden facet that unfolds new mysteries that both stun the Christian in beauty and compel the heart towards deeper transformation.

So for us to have the necessary tools to begin exploring the depths of the gospel, we need to lay a clear and concrete foundation of what that actually means.

And what's beautiful about this passage of scripture is that Paul lays out very clearly what the gospel is.

And so that's what we're gonna dive into.

Verses two and three, Paul says this now would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and which you stand, and by which you are being saved if you hold fast to the word that I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

Paul here is doing what he does in many of his letters.

He's reminding the believers of the gospel.

We said last week that if you study the letters that Paul wrote to the church, you'll find two very common things.

In just about every letter, Paul reminds the saints of the gospel, and then he promotes or he encourages them to fight or contend for sound doctrine.

He had such a huge emphasis on these two points.

And here in 1 Corinthians, we're seeing again where Paul is telling them that he's wanting to remind them of the gospel of which he preached them.

And so we have to ask the question why the need to remind?

If this was an emphasis of Paul's ministry as he was writing to the churches that he had planted, that he was overseeing, why is this constant reminder of the gospel primary in his writing?

I think there's a few reasons why.

One of them is this that many of us view the gospel as simply something that gets us saved, and then we move on.

It's just something that gets us saved, and then we move on from it.

You see, the gospel, as we will see in a moment, is not simply what saves us.

The gospel saves, the gospel matures, it holds fast, it nourishes, and it strengthens the believer.

We don't move beyond the gospel.

We move beyond sin in our life as the gospel champions us on toward holiness.

You see, we kind of think that sometimes we can get saved at maybe some high-pressure church service that we went to, where there was this altar call, or maybe some of you went to a church camp when you were young and there was a situation where it's like, well, I don't want to go to hell, right?

Like the normal human being would communicate, no, I don't want to go to hell, so what do I have to do?

Oh, I just have to raise my hand and say this prayer, right?

Then I can be saved.

Or sometimes even we try to move beyond the gospel onto deeper truths or deeper doctrines, and we start swimming in an ocean of uncertainty.

We don't move beyond the gospel.

The gospel begins our Christian faith, it sustains our Christian faith, and surely it will see us to the finish in glory.

Secondly, we need the gospel daily in our lives.

The gospel shapes and informs our new identity that we have in Jesus.

You see, the goal of the Christian is not to simply escape the flames of hell, but to have their hellish character become transformed into the image of Jesus.

We continually need the gospel to accomplish such a goal.

You see, when we look at the reasons why Jesus saves us, an aspect of that purpose, and I would put one of the primary ones, is that this image that was marred because of our sin.

You see, when God created man, in Genesis chapter 2, it says that he made man in his own image.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And we had a responsibility to reflect that image throughout all of the earth.

And in our sin and in our rebellion, what did we do?

We marred that image.

It wasn't destroyed, it wasn't removed from us, it's still intact, but it is broken.

It's hard to make out or understand what it is we're trying to reflect, because usually what we try to reflect is our own glory rather than his.

And so one of the primary purposes of salvation is that that image that was marred because of our sin is restored back to a visible reality of Jesus.

Also, I think the reason why we need to remind ourselves of the gospel is that we tend to lose sight of Jesus.

It's so easy to get distracted, both in mission and in doctrine.

Everything around us is vying for our attention, vying for our conviction.

Without being reminded of the gospel, we can lose both our purpose and mission and be led away to false teachings.

You see, we are so easily distracted.

Everything around us, your phone, how many times a day does your phone buzz or beep or something to try and get your attention?

It does so much that my phone cannot be in my pocket and I get phantom ticks on my thigh.

Anybody else get that?

That's how many times somebody's trying to get your attention, whether it's a new podcast that dropped, a new Facebook comment that was on your post, a new whatever, somebody wants your attention and they want to inform and shape your worldview.

In this day and age, to lose sight of Jesus is so, so incredibly easy.

We need constantly reminded of the gospel that we can keep our eyes fixed on Him.

Paul says in this passage of scripture, the gospel I preach.

See, this is where we have to focus.

The gospel message is about to be explained in three simple parts.

Now, while there are many implications of the gospel rightly believed and rightly applied, we'll miss the mark if we try to make those things the gospel.

And this is something that continually happens in our world today.

We try to make the implications of the gospel rightly believed and rightly applied the gospel itself.

Let me give you three examples.

Number one, the helping of the poor.

The helping of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, is not the gospel.

It is, though, the right place of the church.

I would say the proper place of the church of the gospel rightly believed and rightly lived out.

But it itself is not the gospel.

Contending against racism, contending against racism is a is a big push of our culture.

It's a big church of many uh push of many churches today, but it itself is not the gospel.

However, if we understand the gospel rightly and we apply the gospel properly to our lives, we will contend against racism.

Because what we see throughout the scriptures is Jesus in his earthly ministry constantly, if you look at the gospels of Jesus, see how many times he uses the Samaritans as an example of the kingdom of heaven in the way that we should respond and interact with one another.

You see, the Samaritan people were hated by the Jews.

That's an understatement.

They were seen as dogs, less than human.

The Jews were the chosen ones, the Jews were the ones who had the promises and the covenant.

The Jews were the ones who God favored, and these Samaritans were subhuman.

But Jesus consistently combats their perspective of race and the beauty of the gospel, uh expanding to all people in the way that he uses them as examples in his teaching.

But again, our contending against racism is not the gospel.

Fostering adoption.

We can look at the gospel and grow a giant conviction for fostering adoption.

In fact, that is the message in an aspect of the gospel.

We who were not a part of the family of God because of our sin and rebellion have been adopted by the Father through the perfect righteous works of the Son and been brought into an eternal, everlasting family.

That is the message of the gospel in some.

However, if we try to make the work of foster and adoption the gospel, we have lost the gospel itself.

But I will argue and will contend that a presence in foster and adoption is an aspect of the gospel rightly believed and rightly applied.

You see, often what we have in the church is this reductionistic approach to the gospel.

We reduce it to something that it's not.

And this creates minimum, if any, distinct in the culture.

Listen, church, we cannot have the same message as the world.

The world, by far and large, is not against either of the three things that I just mentioned.

They're not against the helping of the poor and the needy.

They're not against contending and fighting against racism.

They're not against helping the orphan and through foster adoption, they're not against these things.

You don't have to be a regenerate, saved Christian to participate in these things.

And see what happens is when we make these things the gospel, then we just have the same message as the world, which is ultimately just be nice and do good to others.

And this message of be nice and do good, it's insufficient and it has no power to save.

Jesus hanging on the cross doesn't look down at the crowd who is murdering him and say, hey, hey, time out.

Did I mention you guys just got to be nice to each other?

I didn't?

Alright, God, get me down.

Get me down.

Alright, guys, if you can just be nice, I don't have to go through this whole thing, right?

I can just not be crucified.

I cannot suffer under the wrath of my father.

I cannot be killed in your place.

We can just be nice, right?

And we can do good.

The cross declares, in fact, screams to us that we can't be nice and that we can't do good.

He then says, which you received.

So this gospel which he preached, which you received, if he then explains to the church at Corinth that he was faithful to have already preached this message to them and that they had received it.

This speaks to the fact that this message wasn't rejected or simply entertained, but that it was embraced by the church at Corinth.

You see, it's not just simply something received, though, as we'll see, there's these multifaceted steps of the gospel.

It establishes us and it places our roots in the soil of the kingdom, and it perpetually brings to realization our new identity of who we are in Jesus.

So the gospel, like I said, it starts in the head.

It is information received.

It starts to transform our way of thinking, it starts to transform our worldview.

And so as we receive this information, then we see that uh we are being able to equip to embrace the gospel.

And so he says, you have received it, and then he says, you stand.

The gospel calls us to build our lives on the foundation of Jesus, who is the rock of our salvation.

In a culture that is constantly swaying back and forth, we need a stable and sure place to stand.

We need to not be moved by the message of our culture like these crashing waves trying to push us back and push us back.

But we need to have our feet on the foundation of the gospel of Jesus.

And it's so funny how we can get caught up in this, right?

Because guess what?

Tomorrow, there's gonna be some new hot thing on social media that you're supposed to care a lot about.

Right?

You're supposed to care a lot about it.

You're supposed to change your profile picture about it, you're supposed to say that you're praying, but you really don't about it.

Am I wrong?

You're gonna care a lot about what happens tomorrow.

And then three days later, you're gonna have to care a lot about something else.

And we're constantly being tossed to and fro instead of standing on the rock that is the gospel.

And then Paul goes on to say this very kind of peculiar statement.

He says, You receive the gospel, he says you stand upon the gospel, and he says that this gospel creates something of us being saved.

This statement, you are being saved.

We as believers live in what I would call a progressive, transcendent reality.

A progressive, transcendent reality.

We have, because of the gospel and finished work of Jesus, we have a new identity.

We are made sons and daughters of the King.

We are declared perfectly righteous and without sin because of Jesus.

We don't have to fear the consequences of our sin any longer because Jesus completely took the punishment for us.

You see, one of the primary things that the gospel does for us is it puts the old man to death of whom sin and rebellion reigned in our bodies, and it makes us now alive in Christ Jesus, where we stand before the Father no longer to blame or guilty of the sin that separates us, but we stand before Him holy, perfect, and righteous, because when God looks at us, He does not see a broken image anymore.

He sees Christ standing in front of us.

And so Christ gives us this righteousness of his accomplishment.

See, when we talk about the gospel, some of the language that we use at Missio is that He lived the life we could have never lived.

He died the death all of us should have died.

He was buried and rose again three days later.

And when we say that he lived the life we could not have lived, what we mean is that Jesus lived perfectly in perfect obedience, in perfect submission to the Father.

That's what we were supposed to do.

To have relationship and communion with the Father, He demands perfection.

And in our sin, that communion was torn.

But Christ, the one who stands in the gap, he perfectly lived so that we could have communion again with the Father.

You see, church, we are given a new identity in Jesus.

We don't have to fear the consequence of our sin any longer.

Our fear of God, which the Bible says is the beginning of all wisdom, is brought about by reverence of his holiness, not out of fear of his punishment.

Yet we find ourselves with the remnants of our old self.

We still find ourselves sinning.

You and I can both relate to this very well.

Many of us are sitting in this room because struggling with the fact that there are sins in our lives that we are well aware of that we just can't seem to have put to death.

We struggle daily, weekly, hourly, monthly, whatever it might be, with sin in our lives.

Yet we have a new identity.

We are a new creation in Christ Jesus.

How do we reconcile these two things?

Martin Luther, who started the Reformation in 1517, and he was a preacher, author, Bible translator, the list would go on.

He had this statement that he used to try and help explain this tension.

And he called it this.

He called it simul justice et pecatory.

Simul justice et pecatory.

What Luther was trying to communicate in this statement is that we are simultaneously a sinner who cannot keep the law, who fails to the temptations of our flesh, who would demand God's wrath-filled punishment, but yet at the same time, and I would argue most importantly, we are declared fully righteous and perfect before God the Father.

We are saints, we are children, we are holy, and we are blameless before God.

There is nothing that we can do because of the finished work of Jesus that could ever, ever make God love us less or make God love us more.

There's nothing that we can do in our own lives to cause God to love us less.

No, he's declared how much he loves us by uh by giving us his son Jesus.

And there's no merit of work or earning that we can bring to the table to cause him to love us more.

You see, God's love for us is equally in spite of us.

The tension of these two natures is what we find ourselves contending in every day.

Our confession and remembrance of the gospel will equip us in the fight to remember and function from what I would declare is a true and better identity, that because of Jesus, we are a child of God.

And we see this, even physically seen, of this grace of remembrance of our sin.

And this is something that I will place in mystery.

I'm not going to pretend to know the fullness of or act like I have the complete understanding of this, but this is something that I would say, again, is suspended in mystery, that the risen, resurrected, glorified Lord who did raise from the dead still presents in his body the wounds of his crucifixion.

And even in heaven, even in glory, when sin has been wiped away, when sickness is not remembered, when suffering has ceased to exist, we, the saints, will look upon the Lamb who was slain.

We'll see the holes in his hands and his feet, we'll see the hole in his side, and we'll say, Glory to the Lamb who is slain.

For all of eternity, we will see before us both a remembrance of what our sin caused and a conquering king who put death in its grave.

And so when I talk about this being saved as a progressive, transcendent reality for us, this is what I mean.

In the fact that it's progressive, we have to understand this biblical principle of sanctification.

We are being saved.

This image of God that is in us is being renewed.

And so this is a daily progressive pursuit of us that the image of God that was marred and broken because of our sin is being renewed.

Now, we will not see the whole image restored this side of heaven.

No, we will still see the effects of sin.

We will still see aspects of the brokenness of the image of God in our lives, but be assured that the power of the Holy Spirit and the truth of God's word is transforming that image progressively more and more to look like Jesus.

As we pray most of the times before our gatherings, we pray before our gatherings, but most of the times I'll make this statement, and this is part of my prayer request, that God, for those of us who have already trusted in the gospel of your son, my prayer is that we would walk out of these doors more transformed to the image of Him.

That we would reflect the image of Christ and not the image of ourselves to the world around us.

You see, it's being made new.

It's being made new.

It already is made new, and we live in this tension of that already, not yet, but that for us and our reality, it is a progressive understanding of holiness and transformation.

So I say that this, that this being saved is a progressive transcendent reality.

What do I mean by transcendent?

I mean that it is beyond our earthly experience.

You might experience sin today.

Well, it's no might, you will.

You'll experience sin today, you'll experience sin tomorrow, you'll experience the sin after that, uh, the day after that.

But for us, our identity, who we are as children of God, is not known or fully understood by our earthly experience.

No, it transcends our earthly experience to where we look on Christ, where we have already been made blameless, we have already been made holy, we have already been made righteous, and we have already been brought into the family of God because of Him.

And so, as we as Paul says, you are being saved, my best effort at this point in time and my ministry and understanding to communicate that to you is that we live as Christians in a progressive, transcendent reality.

Paul goes on, verse 3, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

There is so much packed into this statement alone.

We're gonna try to break it down here in a couple of different ways.

Number one, he says, Christ.

He says, Christ.

Jesus is the Messiah of whom the prophets spoke of.

He is the anointed servant of God who would come to save his people.

This name is recognition of Jesus as the Son of God who comes to take away the sins of the world.

When Paul says Christ, he's saying he's separating Jesus apart from other prophets, other teachers, other false messiahs who said that they would come.

No, Paul is fully recognizing and declaring that Jesus is the Son of God who has come to take away the sins of the world.

So he's speaking to his person and position.

And then secondly, Paul says that Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins.

This is what we call in the church substitutionary atonement.

We're gonna break that down.

Substitutionary atonement.

You see, in dying for our sins, Jesus becomes our sacrifice.

Jesus becomes what the Bible calls our propitiation for sin.

This is a crux of the gospel.

This part of the gospel, so many churches and so many pulpits are trying to remove from their preaching.

And this is what I mean.

Propitiation.

What does that mean?

What does it mean that Christ becomes our propitiation?

Here's what it means.

God's wrath was meant for us.

Because of our sin and because of our rebellion, God's wrath was meant and deserved to be poured out on us.

But when Christ becomes our propitiation, it's as if, not even as if, it is, it is as is, Christ stood between God the Father and us, and he took the punishment for us.

The wrath of God that was meant to be poured out on us because of our sin and rebellion was instead poured out on Jesus.

Jesus is our propitiation.

He takes the wrath that we deserve instead.

And this substitutionary atonement means that where Christ stood in our place to bear the not just the effects of our sin or the consequences of our sin, but Christ stood in our place to bear our sin itself.

You see, the Bible says that he who knew no sin became sin for us.

So not only did he bear the consequence of our sin, but he bore our sin itself.

This means that he was our divine substitute.

It was us who should have been on the cross, not just simply of an earthly uh execution process, but it was us who should have been stomped out under the heel of God's boot.

But Christ was our substitute.

And in him being the substitute, he made atonement.

He made our relationship with God right.

You see, he was the Lamb, the final Lamb of sacrifice.

So Jesus died for our sins.

This is what we mean by a glimpse into substitutionary atonement.

It's an absolute crux of the gospel message.

If we lose substitutionary atonement, I believe in Wicked Tend, we lose the whole gospel.

But the beauty of this gospel, this good news message is that Christ didn't stay dead.

In verse 4, Paul declares that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

You see, in Jesus' burial, on the cross, he's our propitiation for sin, but in his burial, he becomes our expiation of sin.

Here's what I mean by that.

In the Old Testament, on this day of atonement, they would take two beasts, typically two lambs or two goats.

One goat, one beast would be the beast of propitiation, the other would be the beast of expiation.

One goat they would slaughter, they'd slit its throat, let it bleed out, and it would experience the wrath of sin.

The other, they would lay their hands on, transposing the sins of the entire community onto that beast and let it go free and send it away from them.

So Christ not only is our propitiation lamb, but Christ also in his burial becomes our expiation lamb.

He takes our sins and he removes them from us and he buries them in the ground.

But then Jesus' resurrection is his conquering of death, hell, and the grave.

It is because Jesus rose from the day of the grave that we also are able to be made alive.

We're able to have our dead bones resurrected to new life, a new name, a new identity that can never be taken from us because Jesus has purchased it with his own blood.

In his taking on flesh and dying on the cross, Jesus gave up his throne in heaven and willingly became our sin.

But in his resurrection, the Lamb of God displays for us the lion of Judah, whose conquering victory reclaims for him a name and a throne that is above every power and authority.

Then Paul goes on, verses five through nine, and he talks about Jesus' appearance after his resurrection to many, right?

And I love how Paul is just calling people to the table.

If you doubt this, if you doubt this, let me just give you a list of who you can go talk to that saw him in a resurrected form.

He says, he starts naming people like Cephas, who is Peter, James, Jesus' brother.

He talks about 500 men at one time saw him, some who are even still alive to this day that you can go and ask them if they saw him.

If you want names, I'll give them to you.

Addresses, phone numbers.

Paul's calling them out.

Jesus rose from the dead, and there are many who witnessed him.

What kind of great historical assurance does that give us as the church today?

Almost 2,000 years removed from this resurrection.

We see not only Paul saying, Hey, if you if you want to see, if you want a testimony of someone who saw Christ risen from the dead, I'll give you names.

And then all we have to do as the church is look at the death of these men, the followers and apostles of Jesus, Paul himself being one who gave their life for this truth of the resurrection.

What man would give his life for a conspiracy?

The revolutionary reality of not just these men, but hundreds upon thousands of men and women who gave their lives for the gospel, who was beheaded, burned at stakes, crucified upside down, been given over to be devoured by beasts and animals.

What kind of evidence more do we need that people were willing to give themselves for this truth?

All they ever had to do was say, We made this up.

We made it up.

We're sorry, we recant.

But compelled by both evidence and the Spirit of God indwelling in them, they gladly accepted their fate.

So, what's our main idea for today?

It's this.

It's super simple.

Ready?

To live a gospel-centered life, we need to know the gospel.

To live a gospel-centered life, we need to know the gospel.

We cannot live a gospel-centered life if we're ignorant or unaware of the gospel.

It sounds really too simple, doesn't it?

Then why do we have so many churches, so many pulpits, and so many Christians either not willing or unable to proclaim it?

You see, we live in a culture that is gospel anemic and it's making a sick world sicker.

As we cultivate a robust understanding of the gospel, we'll be able to declare and apply it to all of life.

We will see how the gospel truly changes everything.

The gospel not simply changes you, the gospel changes your view and perspective of marriage.

It changes your view and perspective of parenting, of your finances, of your work, of the way we engage our city.

The gospel has no bounds of our life that goes untouched.

Not just touched, but transformed.

If we understand it and we declare it over it.

The gospel completely revolutionizes everything about us.

But for many of us, we fail for I think two primary reasons.

Number one is this some of us we outright change the gospel.

Some of us change the gospel.

This change, I would argue, can either be intentional or it can be incidental.

So we can change it one of two ways.

Either we intentionally and purposely change it, or by incident it changes.

We might change the gospel intentionally because we disagree or don't like what it says.

People work to change the gospel often to try and make it more palatable.

We remove things like substitutionary atonement.

We remove things like sin.

We remove things like hell.

You can look back over the last hundred years and study the church, and there has been a giant push to remove things like sin, hell, substitutionary atonement from the language of which the church speaks.

It doesn't want to get in the way of people coming to Jesus.

It doesn't want to be an unnecessary offense or stumbling block.

But I would argue what you win them with, you win them to.

Usually, church, if we put any word in front of the gospel, we begin pursuing the implication over the actual gospel.

Let's look at social justice gospel.

Many times what we do is we start pursuing that rather than a faithful proclamation and understanding of the gospel itself.

Health and wealth gospel.

Our pursuit starts coming into finances and physical health rather than the gospel.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, poverty gospel, we start pursuing how poor we can be, rather than understanding the beauty of the gospel.

Now, all of these things I would argue can be understood and seen in aspects of the gospel truth and its implications.

When we look at social justice, which I understand is a loaded phrase, but we do see this that the gospel speaks to our society as a whole.

It declares that it will establish a new society, a new heavens, and a new earth.

And one of the anthems of that new culture and new world is perfect justice.

Christ will expedite perfect justice.

And all of us will either be judged justly by what we did or by what Christ did for us.

Health and wealth.

In the Gospels, Jesus declares that for us in glory, that all of our sickness and disease will be gone, will be removed from us.

That he goes and builds a home for us with many rooms, that we will have this beautiful treasure of heaven with gates of per uh pearly gates and streets of gold.

Think of the health and the wealth that will become to us because it's been promised to us in the gospel.

And poverty, where do we get this?

Well, Jesus, who became poor, who had no place to lay his head, who emptied himself of everything that he could hold to as a right, so that many might be made sons and daughters of God.

You see, a lot of times what we confuse is these promises of the gospel, these promises of God that are for us but won't be.

Fully realize until glory.

And next week, when we talk about city focus, we're going to talk about Jesus' prayer of on earth as it is in heaven.

Hear me truthfully, church, and clearly.

I am not saying you can have none of these promises here on earth.

That is a lie, and that is a false gospel message.

What I'm saying is you cannot have all of its promises here on earth.

But the glory and goodness of God will allow us to taste and see what heaven is like here on earth.

I believe that.

I believe in healing.

I believe in prosperity.

I believe in justice.

I believe in God's reconciling work in all aspects of our life, restored marriages, restored families, restored children.

I believe in all of these things.

The sufferings that you have does not mean that that is all God wants to give you or that all God will give you.

We hold a position that I like to take a lot from the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

As they're approaching the fiery furnace of their destruction, they make this brave yet peculiar claim.

They say this our God can save us, our God will save us, but even if he doesn't, our knee won't bow to another.

And so my job is to grow you in faith and preach the word rightly that you stand in the midst of extreme sickness, extreme suffering, extreme heartache, and declare unwaveringly, my God can bring healing, my God will bring healing, but even if he allows this cancer to destroy my body, my knee won't bow to another God.

I want us to be a reformed church that has great and extravagant faith that God actually wants us to taste and see heaven now.

Maybe in morsels, maybe in drops on our tongue, but oh how sweet those will be.

So often, if we put a word in front of the gospel, we begin pursuing those implications rather than the gospel itself.

If we aren't constantly reminding ourselves of the gospel, then we can very easily drift into an incidental false gospel.

While some of us change the gospel, others of us displace the gospel.

We try to put the gospel behind us.

This happens in two forms.

One is pursuit of hyper-spirituality.

We're going beyond the gospel onto bigger and better things.

And this can often take us into weird and extra-biblical spaces.

There's danger in chasing down the next experience, the next high.

I come from that kind of background and culture where it wasn't what necessarily the word declared or what Jesus had promised us in the scriptures, but it was what was the next experience that we could have.

And oftentimes those experiences took us way beyond the bounds of biblical order and correction into pursuits of just straight goofiness.

Right?

I don't know if you came from a revival-chasing background like I did, but the church that I got saved in was very much a pursuer of uh experience.

And I tell this story often, I can tell you all kinds of stories, but one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me was in a self-proclaimed prophet from Australia came to our church and he was playing this magical Native American wind flute that apparently uh this certain tribe used for consummating their marriages, and uh he was giving some prophetic utterances, and all of a sudden I find myself with a grown man blowing on my belly button, yelling, uh whispering fire.

When you chase down experience, you might have an Australian blowing on your belly button.

There's a danger though.

There's a danger in pursuing the next experience.

There's a danger in pursuing the next high.

Not that God is not an experiential God.

It's not that he doesn't make his presence manifest among his people, but praise God for the Bible who gives us clear and sufficient order and correction on what that should look like in our lives.

But then other of us, it's not that we're chasing down these extra-biblical spaces or these hyper-spiritual pursuits.

Some of us simply responded to a pressure, uh, a pressured call to the gospel.

We responded to a pressured call to the gospel, but never had any major transformation in our lives.

Right?

You were the kid who said it at Sunday school, the prayer.

You were the one at church camp, you were the one that raised your hand when the pastor gave the altar call for the hundredth time.

Anyone else?

And they made up the hands that they actually saw.

I see that hand.

No, you didn't.

No one no one's even raised their hand.

You're you're just you're just you're just trying to persuade other people to like raise their hand.

Right?

We respond to this because again, like what human being wants to go to hell?

You're like, nah, I want to go to hell.

Okay.

No, some of us out of fear and trembling, we lifted our hands, we said a prayer, we rubbed a magic rabbit's foot, but we've never seen actual gospel transformation in our lives.

It didn't take root, it wasn't received.

But praise be to God this.

This is our gospel conviction this morning.

And it's simply from the text.

Not going to try and make anything new or fresh or creative, it's just simply this Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures.

He was buried, and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

Praise God.

This is our hope.

In the midst of our brokenness, in the midst of our sin, in the midst of not believing God is good or good to us, Christ died for us.

And he didn't simply die, but three days later he rose.

And now, Mew and I, we can live a transformed life.

We can have the image of Christ Jesus restored in us.

We can be given a new name and declared holy and righteous before the Father.

Because He rose, we can begin seeing the expanses of life and life more abundantly take hold of ourselves in the world around us.

That's what we can see.

And so, how do we put this into practice?

I have three ways that we can put this into practice as we begin wrapping up this morning.

Number one is this we can meditate on the gospel and declare it over yourself.

Meditate on the gospel and declare it over yourself.

Look for Jesus in all of Scripture as you're reading the Bible, as you're diving into God's word, understand that Jesus Himself can be seen from Genesis to Revelation.

Look for him in all of Scripture.

Think and ponder upon the deep love and grace of Jesus.

Man, God loves you so much that he gave us his only son.

Right?

Think of the weight.

We've heard John 3.16 a thousand times probably if you've grown up in church or you've been a part of any China church community.

God so loved the world that he gave his son.

God so loved you, Christian, that he gave his son for you.

What more could you ask?

What more do you think you need to earn of his affections, of his favor?

Nothing.

He's already demonstrated to you that he's given us Jesus himself.

Church, in the midst of your shortcoming, preach the gospel.

When you sin, when you've fallen short, when you know that you have missed the mark, instead of allowing guilt and shame and condemnation to wash over you, stand up and say, Jesus has already taken care of it.

Jesus has already taken care of it.

And that doesn't give me an excuse or an apathy to remain in that sin.

But it gives me freedom and power to see it put to death in my life.

So meditate on the gospel and declare it over yourself.

Number two, process places in your life where you have neglected gospel impact.

Process places in your life where you have neglected gospel impact.

What era of your life can you think of right now that you know is suffering from gospel impact?

All of you know something.

Take a second, think.

Is it your parenting?

Is it your work?

Is it your social life?

What area of your life can you think of right now that you know is suffering from gospel impact?

Let's make changes.

Like let's not act like there's aspects of our lives that are contained in these silos or these buckets that the gospel can't touch and permeate and transform.

It can it can completely revolutionize every single aspect of your life.

And then lastly, practice speaking the gospel in comfort and care for others.

Practice speaking the gospel in comfort and care for others.

Not only do we ourselves need to remember the gospel, but we, like Paul, need to remind others of the gospel.

In the midst of suffering, hardships, and defeat, it's often we try to offer false comfort rather than real comfort and hope of the gospel.

And I get it.

Like when you're in those uncomfortable situations, when you're in those places where somebody is really opening up to you or they're trying to communicate the hardships of their life, it's time to just, it's times it's so easy to just kind of give them this false hope, hey, it's gonna be all right, man.

Oh, I feel you.

Oh that that stinks, doesn't it?

And we have presence, and there's beauty of community in being like Jesus with skin on you, right?

We can be that to one another.

We can be present, and there's comfort in our presence.

There's comfort in and in us being with one another and sharing those burdens, but how often do we neglect the ability to preach the gospel to one another?

In the midst of sin that someone confesses to you, do you just sit there and say, Well, you should you should not do that anymore, right?

Like, stop.

You ever seen that uh SNL skit?

Stop it.

Just stop it.

Sometimes we do that, right?

We just like, ah man, you should you should stop doing that.

Instead of saying, No, look, brother, Jesus loves you.

Jesus took that sin, he put it to death, he buried it, and now he's giving you new life and a new identity and a new uh um passion for holiness.

We have to practice this.

This doesn't come naturally for us.

And as we work through this year, we're hoping to equip you to be able to speak the gospel in comfort and care to one another.

How do we become so integrated in the gospel and have it so integrated into our lives that we're able to easily and with comfort and precision tell each other about the beautiful promises of the gospel, remind one another when we've forgotten because of what's right in front of our eyes.

I want to lead us now into a time of responding to this word.

I hope that this has been encouraging to you.

It's been like not preaching last week, I felt like I had even more to say this week.

So I tried to keep it contained and short, and uh, but I hope that you were encouraged by hearing what Jesus has done for us.

Uh at Mystio, we really try to uh work from this position of what we call uh revelation and response.

So what we believe is that what we see throughout the scriptures is that God speaks and then his people respond to what was said.

And so we're gonna give you a time to respond in multiple different ways through singing and confessions and prayers.

Um, but we want to lead you in three very uh tangible and concrete ways that you can respond this morning here at the gathering.

Number one is through prayer.

Man, I know I'm trying to be a lot more reliant upon God through prayer.

I'm a guy that tries to just pull himself up by his boots, get his hands dirty, and work hard.

Like that's what I do.

And I'm trying to rely a lot more on God's strength and power and sovereignty through prayer.

And so it's been a joy.

Every Monday morning, uh, we have a half hour of staff prayer here at the building where we we actually pray for you.

We pray for God to move through us.

We pray for the connect cards that come in, and we pray for one another.

And it's been a great uh uh time with the Lord and with one another in the morning.

So we'd love to encourage you to pray this morning.

Maybe you just want to pray where you're at.

Be silent before the Lord, listen for his voice and pray.

Petition him for help and to intervene in your life.

Maybe you want to pray with somebody you came with and you can have them pray with you and for you.

If you'd like to, me and my wife, we'll be at the sound booth during at least the first song of response, and we'd love to pray with you.

Sometimes we don't have the words to pray ourselves, and we need others to just pray for us.

If you have a prayer request that's maybe sensitive or private in nature, and you just want the elders to uh to know and be aware and pray over those prayer requests, you can use that connect card, write it down and mark for pastors only, and then there's little boxes at the exits and up here up front.

You can drop those off, and we promise only pastors will pray and respond to those prayer requests.

The second way is through giving.

We'd love for you to take this opportunity to give.

Uh the Bible says that we should be uh generous, we should be known as Christians by our generosity.

And so we want to make it very easy for you to give.

There's a giving guide in the back of your chair, it's light blue, and that's four really easy ways that you can begin giving at Mystio.

Uh, if you're a first-time guest with us, we just want to thank you for being a part of what we're doing here.

We want to thank you for coming this morning.

Um, this is primarily a reminder for our regular attenders and members to give sacrificially and worshipfully this morning.

Excuse me.

But lastly, and the kind of primary, central way that we want you to respond is through taking of communion.

Up front, we have these tables here where there is bread that reflects and resembles the broken body of Christ that was broken for us as a substitute.

We ask that you would come and take and eat of that bread.

And we have wine in both the bowl and the cup that represents the promises of Christ as his blood was poured out for us.

We ask that you come and take and drink and remember those promises.

The Bible says that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, that we proclaim the Lord's death.

And so this is a this is a practice of gospel proclamation.

This is a practice of the church coming forward and saying, I believe that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, but that he also rose again.

And this isn't just a memorial of some grave site.

No, that this is a place where we can come and interact with the risen, resurrected Lord.

And this cup of death and destruction, this bread of brokenness will one day be placed on a wedding table where we'll be with God forever.

And it'll be a cup of celebration and a feast of remembrance of the Lion of Judah and the conquering of our sin.

And so if you are sitting in your seat this morning and you say maybe you don't believe in Jesus or you don't you're having troubles really be believing in this gospel message, we want you to know two things.

Number one is I personally believe you're in one of the best places you could be.

Uh, we welcome people who are questioning, who are trying to seek answers, who are trying to understand truth.

We would love to connect with you as pastors.

If you could just write on the connect card that you'd like to know more about Jesus and drop it off, one of the pastors will pray for you and reach out to you, see if you want to grab coffee or lunch.

Number two, though, is that we ask that you would not come forward and take communion.

The Bible very clearly says that if you take communion in an unworthy manner, you will eat and drink condemnation on yourself.

Out of a love and care for you, we ask that you don't do that.

Be seated.

You can participate in every other aspect of this gathering, but this is for those, and here's the only qualification, that say, I need Jesus.

If you're sitting in your seat this morning, and maybe this is even the first time your heart has awakened to that statement and that need, man, come forward, eat and drink with us.

But if not, let's just talk first and let's get together, have coffee, have lunch, and I want to walk with you side by side through the way that you're trying to understand who Jesus is and what he's done for us.

Sorry, laryngitis will get you.

Uh I want to lead us now in a time of corporate confession.

At Missio, we're called a liturgical church.

That means that we really have a lot of value in the way that we worship and ultimately the way that we worship with one another.

And so this is a time where I'm gonna confess the way I've really fallen short to believe this and to practice this in my life.

And if you'd like to repeat it with me, you can just read the underlying portions.

They'll be on the screen uh here up front.

It says this How important, suitable, encouraging are the doctrines, promises, and invitations of the gospel of peace.

We are lost, but in it thou hast presented to us a full, free, and eternal salvation.

We are weak, but here we learn that help is found in one that is mighty.

We are poor, but in him we discover unsearchable riches.

We are blind, but we find he has treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

We thank thee for thy unspeakable gift.

Thy son is our only refuge, foundation, hope, confidence.

We depend upon his death, rest in his righteousness, desire to bear his image.

May his glory fill our minds, his love reign in our affections, and his cross inflame us with ardor.

Take a moment, be still before the Lord.

Ask the Spirit just to speak to you and listen, and the band will give us instructions to come forward and take communion in just a moment.