Luke: God’s Offensive Grace (4:14-30)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca.

A reading from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 4, starting at the 14th verse.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee.

And a report about him went out through all the surrounding country.

And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up.

And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.

He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant.

And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth.

And they said, Is not this Joseph's son?

And he said to them, Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb.

Physician, heal yourself.

What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.

And he said, Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.

In truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months.

And a great famine came over all the land.

And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Saraphaz in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow.

And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha.

And none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman, the Syriac.

When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.

And they rose up and drove him out of the town.

And brought him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built.

So that they could throw him down the cliff.

But passing through their midst, he went away.

And somewhere between like the ten seconds it takes for Rachel to sort of take her seat and for me to sort of take the pulpit, you know, it's the sort of weight of the moment sort of settles, right?

Like there's a lot that hangs on this moment.

And a thought crosses Rachel's mind that never crossed her mind up to that point.

And the thought was this what if he stinks?

Like, what if he gets up there and just stinks it up?

And she's thinking, like, can I spend the rest of my life with like just listening to really bad preaching?

You know, and that's that's a fair question to ask, I think.

Now, um, as as it went on, I Rachel tells me I did a good job.

I think I did an okay job, you know, because that's sort of the best I could aspire to at that point in my preaching career.

I truly think Matt is much further than I am, you know, at that point in the career.

So anyway, I went up and I preached the best sermon I could.

I don't think I stunk, but what I was more worried about than anything else was saying the wrong thing in the wrong way to the wrong person and causing the sort of offense that would get them to reconsider, is this a church I should be going to or not, right?

And just taking right off.

And the truth is, if you don't know this about me already, you should know this that I'm I'm something of a recovering people pleaser.

Like that's just an ongoing theme in my own life.

So to some degree, there's always that anxiety of what if I say the wrong thing in the wrong way and someone takes offense?

And I don't think I'm the only preacher to struggle with that, but I do know that uh that that is a certain degree of struggle, and maybe in our own ways we can we can kind of identify with that.

So, no, I mean, thankfully, in my very first sermon, I at least as far as I know, no one was offended enough to up and leave.

But what's fascinating about our gospel text this morning is it's a text about someone getting kicked, or it's someone leaving the church, but it's not someone taking offense who leaves, it's the preacher who gets kicked out of church.

Did you notice that?

The sermon was so offensive, they said this guy's gotta go.

And the wild part is, is it's Jesus doing the preaching.

You know, it makes me wonder, like, what would it take for me to get kicked out of the pulpit this morning?

I'm not saying I'm gonna try anything, but how it's like, where's where's that line where you go, you've gone too far, you gotta go.

You know, I wonder if it's got something to do with the fact that we're a community-serving, gospel-centered church.

It's like if I got up here and was just so rude and insulting and disparaging of this community that we're called to serve, you know, at a certain point I suspect someone would stand up and say, this is enough.

You gotta stop.

Like this is not what a loving your neighbor, community-serving kind of church looks like.

And likewise, I trust that if I got up here and and just started completely contradicting the gospel that that is at the center of our life together, right?

I kind of get up here and say, you know, Jesus is great, but he's no Confucius, pardon me.

Um, then I hope that someone would stand up and say, No, you gotta go.

Because we're a gospel-centered church and Jesus is the good news.

So the preacher gets kicked out of this congregation for an especially offensive sermon.

We've been tracking through the Gospel of Luke up to this point.

We're, I think, week three now in our tour through the Gospel of Luke this fall, and we'll follow that up by a tour of the book of Acts in the spring.

We want to come and see who Jesus is and who he is really.

And we saw from Luke's introduction to his gospel that the good news of Jesus is, in fact, intellectually credible and existentially satisfying.

This is indeed good news that is true good news, and it is true for us.

And Matt walked us through chapter 3, verses 1 and 22 last week, and we discover that following Jesus is it's the real deal.

It's a hard business.

It requires a life of repentance, of turning away from ourselves and towards Him.

We also see in Jesus' baptism that he steps into our place.

He steps into the place of sinners, he steps into the place of those alienated from God.

And so he can become the faithful one that we never were.

And that's what we see in the passage that immediately precedes our text today: the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, right?

What we see in the temptation, we call the heading is the temptation of Jesus in most Bibles, but it should be the faithfulness of Jesus.

Because whatever temptation Satan throws at him is a temptation where Jesus remains faithful to his Father and to the Word of God.

Jesus is the faithful and true one in a way that we so keenly fall short.

And now here we are, chapter 4, verse 14, at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry.

This is the first recorded sermon in the Gospel of Luke.

This is his first sermon in a congregation, uh, at least in this congregation, it seems.

He's gone to his hometown, you know, so you'd sort of think he's got the home field advantage here.

But what happens next is not exactly a metric for a successful preacher, right?

Verses 29 and 30, they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their little town was built, so that they could throw him off the cliff.

But passing through their midst, he went away.

I mean, what would it take for you to grab me and toss me into the storm pond, you know, next door?

This is what, I mean, more than that, it's like this guy's this guy's gotta go.

We can't tolerate this guy being around.

We're literally gonna throw him off the cliff.

The thing is, we might start to wonder, what about what about this sermon makes this crowd, makes this congregation so furious that they say this guy's gotta go?

That they toss him out of church.

What is it that is so offensive that this tall that this congregation cannot tolerate it?

That this congregation cannot accept it.

Now bear in mind this is a sermon offensive enough to get Jesus thrown out of church.

So this is consider this your trigger warning, right?

Consider this, you know, fair warning, because what what I the main idea of this sermon that I might share might be something that's deeply, deeply offensive.

And I'm gonna risk deeply, deeply offending you this morning.

So just bear with me here, okay?

Here's the sermon that was so offensive, so scandalizing, that this congregation said, this guy's gotta go.

Here it is.

God's grace abounds not to those who know they deserve it, but rather to those who know that they don't.

Now I can tell you're livid right now.

Let me risk repeating that one more time.

God's grace abounds not to those who know they deserve it, but rather to those who know that they don't.

This is Jesus' first sermon at the beginning of his public ministry here.

This is what Jesus has as the heart of his ministry, the heart of his very person is God's grace abounds.

And yet we hear that main idea that is grace abounds, not to those who know they deserve it, but those who don't know that they don't.

We're not terribly scandalized by that, right?

Like that kind of resonates with the sort of preaching I hope that we're accustomed to here at Newsong.

We're accustomed to gospel-centered preaching.

And I trust that that resonates with that, right?

Or perhaps it just seems so familiar.

We use this word God's grace or this phrase God's grace so frequently, it's like, what does that even mean anymore, right?

Either way, this crowd sees something in this sermon that I wonder if we miss.

Because boy, they are animated by it and not in a good way.

What is it that they see in this sermon that we might miss?

I want to suggest that it's this.

If we concede that God's grace abounds not to those who know that they deserve it, but rather to those who know that they don't, then God's grace has to kill our self-righteousness.

God's grace has to put to death our desire, our entitlement to earn it before God, and therefore to sit on the throne of our own life, to say we're aspiring to God when really we're just sitting on the throne of our own life, right?

The God of grace, God's grace has to kill our own self-righteousness.

That's what this congregation understands, and that's what they cannot accept.

Because, friends, self-righteousness is a lot more insidious than we might think.

But there is good news for us today.

I'm convinced there's good news for us.

I want us to see the good news of God's abounding grace.

I want us to see it in what grace is, where grace is found, and what exactly grace does.

So I want us to ask these three questions this morning.

What is God's grace?

Where can I go to find God's grace?

And what does God's grace do?

What is God's grace?

Where can I go to find it and what does it do?

I think Jesus has God's grace at the very heart of his sermon.

I think he's got it at the very heart of who he is as our Redeemer.

We have to come to grips and be gripped by God's grace.

So, dear new song, let's dive in.

Um open your Bible to uh chapter 4, Luke chapter 4, verses 14 to 30, or your order of service, or your scripture journal.

Luke 4:14–30

Let's walk this through a little bit together.

We pick it up in verse 14, 15, just after the temptation here, and we're introduced to Jesus' ministry, and we see that he's becoming a bit of a he's gaining some notoriety, let's say.

His reputation is spreading from town to town as a really effective and compelling teacher.

And now he goes back to his home church.

So he's preaching to folks that he grew up with, right?

This is a small town.

We know what it's like to go to church in a small town.

It's like everybody's in your business.

And I had to get used to that moving here from Ottawa.

It's like everyone's in your business.

That's because everyone loves you, right?

It's like you they know you.

You grew up with these guys.

Here's your cousins, here's your extended family, right?

Here's the guys you built shelves and cabinets for with Joseph, right?

It's like everybody kind of knows you in this small town.

So up Jesus goes to give an expositional uh sermon from Isaiah.

Isaiah uh chapters 58 to 61.

Luke kind of gives us this uh this artistic kind of concision of the passage here.

Kind of here's Jesus' main passage gathered from this section of Isaiah.

Here we see the heart of God's grace, and God's grace is God's favor.

Let's look at verse 16 together here.

Jesus came to Nazareth where he'd been brought up, and as was his custom, he went to the synagogue to his local congregation on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.

And he enrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

And so here's a, like I say, sort of this uh artistic kind of uh uh condensation or whatever of a particular passage in Isaiah from chapters 58 to 61, zooming in maybe on Jesus' main text that he's preaching on.

We might want to ask, well, what's going on in this section of Isaiah?

And the answer would be something like this: Isaiah is addressing God's wayward people in exile, right?

God's disobedient people who've turned their backs on God's will and his word, said, we're gonna go our own way, thank you very much.

And they've reaped exile, they've reaped oppression, they've reaped alienation.

And so this passage is not just describing this experience of exile, it's also giving hope to God's people that God will in fact restore a wayward people.

And he will work restoration, ultimate and final and complete restoration of his people through the Messiah, through an anointed, an appointed saving one.

And so the proclamation here is the proclamation that God is favorable towards his people.

This is a proclamation of the Lord's favor.

We might say God's acceptance, his good pleasure, his blessing.

This word is in Hebrew is related to this word for blessing in Deuteronomy 33 and Psalm 5.

It's like this is this is God's desire for greatest flourishing.

That's the idea here.

So what we want to catch in this text from Isaiah is that God is doing for his people what they can't do for themselves, right?

He's restoring them in a way that they've led themselves into exile.

He's doing for them what they can't do for themselves.

So therefore, God's favor, God's grace, is his unearned, unmerited, and freely given favor to those who don't deserve it.

After all, they turn their back on God.

What does he owe them?

It's only because God loves his people that he works their restoration.

God's grace has to be unearned and unmerited for it to truly be grace.

Otherwise, we're talking about some kind of divine paycheck for good behavior and not grace.

So one of the most influential uh minds of and and pastors in the church was named Augustine.

And centuries ago he said that grace is given freely.

For if we're not free, it would not be grace.

Moreover, since it is grace freely given, nothing of yours preceded it in order for you to accept it.

For if any of your good works had preceded it, you would receive it as a reward, not something free.

So we're catching what I what Augustine's saying here, right?

I think it's what Isaiah is saying in this passage.

It's that God is generously supplying you with his favor, not because of your good behavior, not because, you know, he looked into the future and saw, wow, they're gonna do a good job.

So yeah, I'll give them a little bit of a bonus, a little bit of a boost right now.

Grace is given freely.

It's something that God, by his good pleasure, is pleased to offer.

And we might talk about certain, you know, ways of describing grace, the common grace that he shows to all people, just by being alive, just by having the things it requires to be alive, we are all recipients of grace.

And then, of course, there's that particular grace we receive in being called to Jesus.

But we're talking about grace, God is favorable towards his people.

And he's favorable not because they've earned it, but because he is generous and full of mercy.

And he is he is inclined towards his people, even in a way that they're inclined away from him.

So this has to push against our religious instincts, right?

Because I think if we're honest, our religious instincts always tell us that if we want God to do something good for us, we better do something good for him, right?

I mean, I probably told the story about uh the fella who saved up all his money all year long to go down to Vegas and then just spend a week, you know, working the slots, waiting for his big payoff, right?

But before he went to the casino every morning from morning till midnight, he stopped at the local parish to receive mass because he figured if I'm gonna hit my jackpot, it's gonna be because God is pleasantly disposed towards me, right?

So I'm gonna do this thing that he wants me to do.

And what that is, is just a transaction, right?

That's not grace, that's that's something like karma.

That's like, I've done something positive and put it out in the universe, so I expect something positive in return.

And that's not what we're talking about.

Grace is unearned, unmerited.

We haven't prepared ourselves for it, but God is simply favorable towards us, so we receive it in all humility as a gift.

When it's karma, we focus on ourselves, my behavior, my actions, my story.

When it's grace, we focus on God, his promises, his character, his story.

And we rest assured that God is favorable towards us.

So, what is God's grace?

God's grace is his unearned, unmerited, freely given favor to those who don't deserve it.

And we might want to ask, well, if God's grace is his favor, where do I go to find his favor?

And Jesus has an answer for us, verse 20.

Jesus rolls up this scroll from Isaiah and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth.

So today, Jesus says, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

Congregation makes no mistake here.

Jesus is saying the promises communicated to God's people of their restoration, of their renewal, these are promises that are being fulfilled presently.

In fact, you're hearing them be fulfilled right now, because I'm the one fulfilling them.

The congregation makes no mistake here because they marvel at the gracious words that Jesus is saying here.

And you could just as well translate this phrase, gracious words, as words of grace.

Grace is the content of Jesus' sermon.

And grace is something located in the one who fulfills God's word, and that is Jesus Himself.

So if we want to know where do I go to find God's grace, we go to find it in Jesus Himself.

Paul David Trepp puts it better than I could.

He says, Grace is a person, and his name is Jesus.

Does that surprise us?

Because sometimes I wonder if if, at least this is kind of the default setting of my own brain.

Grace seems less like a person, less like a personal reality, and more like an impersonal sort of divine currency.

Right?

Again, maybe I feel like I've done a good job and God's like, well, yeah, I'm going to boost his grace bank account a little bit.

You know, toss him a little bit of this grace.

And maybe sometimes we feel like, yeah, grace is something that God, you know, sort of gives us or sort of hands over into our lives.

But, you know, it's something distinct from God Himself, right?

God is giving us something other than himself.

And Jesus would have us know that's not the case.

God's grace is not an impersonal reality other than God, like a like a gaseous cloud he sort of sends towards us.

No, grace is God's favor towards us in Christ.

It is his own self-giving to us.

Grace is found in Jesus because Jesus is grace incarnate.

So receiving God's grace is receiving Jesus.

And if we want to go to find God's grace, we have to go to Jesus.

It matters that grace is personal and not impersonal.

You know, I was thinking about Matt and Amy who moved into town recently, right?

And as you know, part of working out the details of them moving down, you know, we as a congregation agreed, yeah, we're going to pay for their moving expenses, right?

And so Matt and Amy booked their U-Haul and spent the time it takes to put everything in boxes, and down they came.

And eventually I got uh my the receipts on my desk, right?

And so, you know, we square that all up.

And and we in, you know, Matt and Amy might say to us, well, that was very gracious of you guys.

Thank you for that.

And and we'd say, Well, you're welcome for that.

But we'd also say, uh, I'm not, that's not grace in the same sense that God supplies grace, right?

That's uh, you know, we're gonna do the things we need to do, and and and God's pleased with what we do, so he's gonna top up our account, so to speak, right?

What something closer to the vision of God's grace that's being described here would be like Amy and Matt are completely incapable, for whatever reason, of packing their boxes, right?

I don't know, they've had massive accident or something, and they're all like uh in casts or something, so they're completely unable to pack their boxes, and they're completely unable to book the U-Haul or travel down.

So we as a congregation just say, fine, we're all going up to Ottawa together, we're packing your house, we're putting it all in our cars, we're driving it down, we're setting up your house, and we're bringing you guys with us.

And that's the personal reality, right?

It's it's us entering into their lives in such a way that we supplied their need.

Now, you know, we would have done that if we could.

I want you guys to know that, but um things worked out eventually.

But you can maybe kind of catch the difference.

I know it's not a perfect illustration, but you can see the difference between like, you know, an impersonal, yeah, I'll send you a divine check, you know, versus, yeah, I'm gonna enter into your story and do for you what you can't do for yourself.

That's grace located in Jesus.

God's grace is his favor, and we go to Jesus to find it.

But if you're feeling a little skeptical at this point, I think you're not alone.

Because Jesus' own home congregation feels incredulous as well.

Look at the last half of verse 22 here.

The crowd start saying, Isn't this Joseph's son?

Like, we know this guy, and he built cabinets for us.

And he thinks he's the Messiah?

He thinks he's the one fulfilling God's promises.

So Jesus says to them, You'll say to me, uh, physician, heal yourself.

Do what you know, what we've heard you do elsewhere, do here, and maybe we'll give you some credit.

You know, the fact is, from one generation to another, we've all objected to this reality of grace.

It's like we we can resist it.

We can push against it, or we can just be repulsed by it.

And here's a congregation that hears this wonderful news that scripture is being fulfilled, but they're boy, they're just thinking, I don't know about this guy.

So we might want to ask the next question here: well, what does God's grace do?

Because Jesus wants this congregation, this incredulous congregation, to have a clear sense of what God's grace does.

And I want to suggest that it does two things.

In fact, we see it doing two things right here.

God's grace renews, but it can also repulse.

Verses 25 to 28 here.

In truth, Jesus says to them, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years, six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarepath, to the land of Sidon, to a widow, to a woman who was a widow.

There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha.

None of them were cleansed, but only naman the Syrian.

We're kind of left scratching our heads like, what is Jesus talking about there?

And the fact is, Jesus is referring to uh scripture passages, to Bible stories that will be very, very well known to his home congregation.

In fact, I wonder if he's heard sermons preached on these passages in the very synagogue he's standing right now.

So he he references Elijah and this widow of Zarepath.

God does this miraculous thing in the midst of famine.

He provides for uh for this widow in a way she could not provide for herself.

You can read about it in 1 Kings 17, and likewise, Elisha with this leper named Naaman, in 2 Kings chapter 5, God heals him from leprosy in a way that lepers were just powerless to heal themselves.

2 Kings 5 · chapter mention

God does for them what they can't do for themselves, and he does it personally and favorably towards them.

But there's a surprise here.

Neither of these folks are Israelites.

Neither of these folks belong to what's understood to be the covenant people of God who have it in with God.

Right?

They're the in crowd, and those are the outside crowd, and so we're entitled to God's grace in a way that they're not entitled to God's grace.

And what Jesus is saying, look, there were many widows, there were many lepers, but God went to these ones.

Why?

Not because they merited it, right?

Not because they deserve it, but because they knew that they didn't deserve it.

They came to God in humility and cried out for mercy, and so God was pleased to do for them what they could not do for themselves.

God's grace doesn't go to those who know they deserve it, like Israel.

Self-righteously we know we deserve it, but he goes to those who know that they don't.

See, there's only one great sin that can condemn us, only one great sin that can separate us from God, and that is self-righteousness.

Self-righteousness takes any number of different forms, but self-righteousness says, I'm gonna do it on my terms.

When we do that, we put up a barrier between us and the God of grace, who invites us to receive Himself like a gift.

See, for this widow and for Naaman, grace renewed their lives.

It did for them what they couldn't do for themselves, it restored them, it renewed them.

But for this congregation whose heart is hardened against grace, it repulses them.

This congregation is full of wrath, we read in verse 28.

And why is that?

Because they understand Jesus' implication here.

That God's grace requires that our self-righteousness get killed.

It has to die.

It's got to be crucified so that we can receive the grace freely given to us in Christ.

Whatever it is we think earns it before God is the exact thing that has to get burned away.

And instead we can only cling to Jesus, who is the source of grace.

So I hope you'll permit me with one more illustration here, because boy, this is just my favorite, one of my favorite pieces of writing here.

This is from a story called Revelation by an author named Flannery O'Connor, who wrote in the Deep South in the early part of this last century and sets her stories in the deep south in the early part of the last century.

Flannery O'Connor was known for just rich images of grace in really unlikely places.

She was a very devout Roman Catholic, and that was that was that was her thing.

And she writes in this story, Revelation, about one character named Mrs.

Turpin.

Mrs.

Turpin has been a longtime church member, churchgoer.

You know, she's a model of all Christian virtue, and wherever she goes, she pontificates.

But how thankful she is that she is who she is and not anyone else.

Because she goes around measuring everyone else up and she finds them wanting, right?

Thank goodness Christians don't do that anymore, right?

But eventually, as she's pontificating about her own merits, this uh this young college girl who just has read her mail, she knows exactly the just the fakeness of Mrs.

Turpin, the self-righteousness that she's putting on.

At a certain point, she gets sick of this pontification, she just hucks a book at her, and it hits her square in the face.

And and, you know, understandably she's unsettled by this, and she she comes back to her home farm and she's just kind of reckoning with, you know, why could the good Lord, who knows how good I am, allow this thing to happen?

Right?

And so what was unsettling for her becomes just like a just fuels really deep anger.

So towards the end of the story, Mrs.

Turpin is just screaming at the Lord, you know, why would you allow this to happen?

Here's what's happened next.

She has a heavenly vision.

I love this.

So a final surge of fury shook her, and Miss Turpin roared, Who do you think you are?

The question carried over the pasture across the highway in the cotton field, and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

Who do you think you are?

There was only a purple streak across the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading like an extension of the highway into the descending dusk.

A visionary light settled in her eyes.

She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.

Upon it, a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.

Those f there were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black folks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and dancing like frogs.

I mean, these are all the people that she's looked down on all through the story, and they are eagerly rushing towards heaven.

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people she recognized at once as those who, like herself, had always had a little of everything, and the God-given wit to use it right.

She leaned forward to observe them closer.

They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they'd always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.

They alone were on key.

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

What she heard were the voices of souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting, Hallelujah.

What's happening here?

Flannery Connor is imagining the scene where God invites all people, lunatics and freaks and everyone we think doesn't deserve God's grace, to come into his heavenly presence, and they're eager to get there because they get that they don't deserve it.

And yet it's all these folks bringing up the rear who know for a fact that they deserve God's grace.

And yet all the reasons they think we deserve it, we've earned it, are all the things that are getting burned up.

All their virtues are getting burned up, their self-righteous virtues, and they themselves begin to shout, hallelujah.

Friends, we don't have to wait for our self-righteous virtues to get burned up.

We can shout hallelujah together.

Because our God's grace abounds not to those who know that they deserve it, but rather to those who know that they don't.

New song, if we're going to be a gospel-centered church, we have to know that we don't deserve God's grace, and yet we have a God who is so eager, so favorable towards us that he supplies us everything we require in Christ.

In fact, in Christ, through his cross, he has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

He has taken our death, our penalty, our sin, our condemnation, and put it to death, so that in his resurrection we can have newness of life.

We can be renewed by his grace.

And that is what God does for us, not because we've earned it, not because we've merited it, not because we've been good enough good boys and girls, but because God is favorable towards us in Christ.

Friends, let's come to the cross once again.

Let's cling to that cross because it is for us, the grace of God in Christ.

Today, friends, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

We worship a generous God who calls us to follow Him in giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Newsong Church's mission and ministry is 100% funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.

If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit NewsongCorperi.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.

May God bless you and keep you today and every day.