The Christian and The Gospel

What we're going to do for the next three weeks is think together, just for three weeks, about God centeredness.

What does it look to be?

God centered as a Christian.

So we're going to talk today about Christianity and the gospel.

We're going to talk next week about Christianity and listening.

It's a little different, listening.

And the third week we're going to talk about Christianity and hope.

Christianity and hope.

Three weeks, kind of practical God centeredness.

Thank you so much to Dr. James Federly for this privilege and the elders.

I do appreciate it.

I'm thankful for him and I'm thankful for this opportunity.

So the Christian and the gospel or Christianity and the gospel, I think I've already given you two different titles.

So we're off to a rip roaring start this morning.

The point of this seriously, by the way, is just to take stock at the beginning of 2024 and get our bearings.

This is a good thing to do and just, you know, make sure the compass is pointed true north and get a good sense of where we're headed in the year to come.

Many Christians value the gospel.

All true Christians do in fact, but I think sometimes we are tempted to have a deficient understanding of the gospel.

And by this, I mean we might think of the gospel as an artifact of our past.

Once upon a time, the gospel got us saved and that's what the gospel is for.

The gospel is there for us to get saved by.

And I'm not here to say something different this morning.

That is what the gospel does and praise God that the gospel saves the good news that Jesus died for sinners and rose to give us eternal life.

That good news saves sinners as a message.

And that is primarily what the church exists to proclaim.

That is why we live.

We live literally for the gospel.

But there's a way of thinking about the gospel that sees it in the rear view mirror almost exclusively.

What do I mean?

I mean, if you grew up in a humble Baptist church like I did and you were a kid and you got a Bible at some point from the church as I did in Coastal, Maine about 30 plus years ago, when you flip to the first page, there was not actually Genesis 1.

But the first page that was set in that Bible, there was often a little dedication page and it said this commemorates when blank, blank, blank came to faith or these sorts of things.

And so you wrote the date as best you could remember.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about in terms of like writing down the day of your salvation in your Bible?

Can you be bold and raise your hand?

Who knows what I'm talking about?

Okay.

All right.

I covered more than I initially was able to there.

That's not in any way a bad understanding of Christianity and getting a Bible and writing your name in it.

That's a wonderful thing to try and do actually.

But if you're not careful, you can think that's all the gospel's for.

The gospel was for April 3rd, 1997 or January 10th, 2011 or July 23rd, 1941.

I'm just spitballing at this point.

And so the gospel was really important that day when you got saved, when you were conscious that God saved you, but I mean, doesn't really have that much practical effect today.

If you have ever stayed in a modern hotel, you will know that you get a keycard and you are always faced with a dilemma when you check in, how many keycards do we want?

Sometimes you think to yourself as a dad, you think we should probably get more than two key cards because we are going to lose these key cards.

The Strand family stayed at a hotel a few months ago in California.

I think we went through 11 key cards.

I don't, we're like, we were losing them as fast as we got them.

I don't know where they went.

It's like there's a little keycard monster somewhere underneath the bed who just gobbles up key cards.

Sounds like something Pixar would come up with, but it's true.

If we're not careful, we can think of the gospel like a defunct keycard.

Here's what I mean.

20 years ago, swipe.

You swiped it.

The door opened.

You walked through and you became a Christian, but you have that keycard today.

You try to go back to that door.

I very much hope this is the case at Hilton or Marriott or Hyatt or whatever it is.

You go back to that door.

You try to swipe that keycard right from 10, 20 years ago.

Does it work?

No, no, it better not.

That is a very bad situation.

If that works in this scenario, okay, I'm angling it.

Anyway, it doesn't work, right?

10 years ago, keycard doesn't work.

It might be valuable then, but it's not really valuable now.

That is not a right understanding of the gospel as a defunct but valuable keycard.

You swipe the gospel keycard every day of your life.

That's what Romans 1, 16, 17 points us to.

If you want to turn there with me this morning, the apostle Paul in these familiar and glorious word says this, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, for in it, in the gospel and the gospel alone," I think we can say by extension, "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written, 'The righteous shall live by faith.'" Habakkuk 2, 4 being cited there by Paul.

Okay, so what I'm at pains to say is this, the gospel is not only for our hass.

For our moment of conversion, the gospel is for all of life.

The gospel is for every day you live as a Christian.

The gospel counts you righteous through God-given faith.

And as verse 17 says, "How do the righteous live?" The righteous live by faith.

So what you exercise when God saves you, when God regenerates you, saving faith in Christ is what you exercise every day of your life, faith in Christ.

This isn't some weird theological rendering of the text that isn't really found in the Bible.

The Bible says to us Old and New Testament, "The righteous shall live by faith." So the instrument of our conversion, if you like technical language, is the instrument of our sanctification.

We believe on Jesus Christ in faith as God works in our heart, and we keep believing on Jesus Christ by faith every day we live.

It's said differently.

We need the gospel every minute we breathe.

We didn't need it 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and now we don't need it.

We need it every day because the just shall live by faith.

But how do we do this?

How does the gospel impact us?

Four ways the gospel shapes our everyday life.

Four ways the gospel shapes our everyday life.

Ordinary, run of the mill, anonymous, grinded out, Christianity of the kind that you are living now in 2024, and I am living just one foot in front of another.

Four ways.

First, the gospel shapes how we think about our identity.

It shapes how we think about our identity.

I think here I'm just going to go to some different text under each of these four truths.

So this isn't an exposition, but more of kind of theological teaching.

I think of 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, where Paul tracks various forms of unrighteousness, sexually immoral, 1 Corinthians 6, 9, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality, thieves, greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers, all these will not inherit the kingdom of God.

What does he say then?

"To the Corinthian church, and such were some of you," verse 11, "but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified.

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit of our God." For our purposes, the key here is that we do not think of our identity in terms of our past.

Our identity today is found in Christ as the church.

That's where your identity is.

We still battle the flesh in a visceral way, and we have to take sin seriously every single day we live as a Christian.

We need nothing other than the power of God for it.

More on that in just a minute.

However, according to the word of God itself, we are no longer defined by any sin pattern.

No sin defines you as a Christian.

Nothing you got mixed up in, in your unbelieving life, whether that was 60 years in the rear view mirror, or whether that was six days ago and you've only just come to faith in Jesus.

None of that sin pattern or sin patterns that you engaged in defines you.

You are defined as a Christian by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You have literally taken on the name of Christ, Christian.

Christian.

So that's your identity.

This is a day and an age, I don't think I need to spell this out at length, when we are tempted to define our identity in anything but Christ.

And people all around us tell us that we are cruel and hateful to them even if we do not define them by, for example, their sexual preferences.

Yes?

Are you familiar with this?

And we are here to say in love, fundamentally, not anger, but in love, you are not defined.

You are not to be defined by your sin.

In Christ, you can have such a greater identity.

You can take on the name of Jesus.

In fact, Paul goes so far as to say in Colossians 3, 4, this, "When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." What's the key focus here for us?

When Christ who is your life for the Christian, the sum total of our very existence is Christ.

Paul equates, this is careful math that I'm doing here.

You ready for this equation?

Our life equals sin.

Christ.

That's it.

All the questions of identity then are settled.

You're not raging.

You're not scrambling, scrambling around trying to find your true identity.

As a Christian, your identity is Jesus.

There's no better name that could be given to you, applied to you than this.

So this is really the central battle of the Christian life, to remember who we are and whose we are.

That's the central battle of the Christian life, to remember who we are.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Okay, this is not my best day.

That was not my best hour.

That was not my best conversation.

But who am I?

Oh yes.

I've been washed.

I've been sanctified.

I've been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of the living God.

That is who I am.

Second truth about the gospel and Christianity.

And there, by the way, was a form of gospel centeredness that cropped up in some evangelical circles in the last 10 or so years ago that wasn't always applied, I would say, very well.

And there were some good intentions with that term, but the term got a little bit wonky and came to mean some different things.

I don't have time to talk about that in depth.

So there's a certain kind of skepticism that some folks might have towards even the term gospel centered or gospel centrality or something like this.

And I understand some of that, but I want to say just from the Bible itself, gospel matters to us, whatever term we specifically use.

The second way the gospel affects the Christian, I'm thinking about Christians here with you this morning.

The gospel shapes how we think about our sin.

The gospel shapes how we think about our sin.

We have to, as believers, very carefully define our relationship to sin.

It's actually a good bit more complex than we might initially think.

On the one hand, in theological circles, you have people who would emphasize that in sanctification, in becoming more godly, you can effectively pray a very powerful prayer in like a big service and you can kind of consecrate yourself once and for all to God.

And if you will just do that often in a very emotional setting, then you can basically achieve a state of it's called different things, but entire sanctification or the victorious life or other realities.

So if I'll just pray, I've got a sin pattern.

I've got to get out of this.

I consecrate everything.

If I'll just pray a prayer like that, I'll become basically functionally sinless.

Okay, so that's one way to approach sin in Christian circles.

The other end of the spectrum, the other extreme would be I am so sinful that I have no power over sin.

I have no control over it.

Literally, I can't make any progress in it.

In fact, there are some on the other side who will say repentance isn't even really a part of the Christian life.

That's become a viable form of theology that was associated sadly with Dallas Seminary some years ago, some decades ago, not that everybody at Dallas believed it and not that Dallas didn't do a bunch of good work because Dallas did, but that came to be associated with some at Dallas, the Free Grace Movement, it's sometimes called.

So you've got two ends.

One you effectively don't sin as a Christian.

The other you don't really have to repent or different forms of this.

You're so broken, you can't make any progress.

You're just kind of trapped.

You're saved, but you're trapped.

Here's what I want to give you as best I can, the biblical perspective.

Sin is a problem for all of us.

It's a problem for every single person in here, all of us, but sin has met its match in the blood of Jesus.

Jesus has cleansed our sins as Christians.

So we go to God and we freely confess our sins, not in fear, not thinking that we're about to lose our salvation, not something like this.

We hear the witness of 1 John 1, 7 through 9, 1 John 1, 7 through 9.

"If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Now the point here is not that you and I would now become perfectionists of confession.

None of us confess a sin as we should.

Let that be said.

We won't.

Even in our confession of sin, we will sin is what I'm saying.

However, the focus in the text is on being cleansed from our sin, confessing our sin honestly and God being faithful.

Look at how John points us to the character of God, doesn't he?

Verse 9, "He is faithful and just to forgive and cleanse." Over and over and over again, God's character never changes.

God never stops being faithful and just to forgive and cleanse.

You don't run out of grace.

You don't run out of mercy.

You don't run out of love.

It's an ever flowing fountain from the cross of Christ into your life.

You never run dry.

That's not a license to sin.

That's not at all a license to sin.

That's the wrong way to think about sin.

Christians want to please their heavenly Father.

That's the right way to think about sin.

And yet you never run out of grace.

And so that means, friends, that this week, Monday to Saturday, when you get into some stuff, whether in your own individual mind or through a device or through a family member or through a coworker, a friend or a roommate or whatever it may be, when sin shows up in your life, you bring the gospel to that and you bring confession of sin with you and you recognize that God is faithful and just to forgive you.

And so you recognize that you are not defined by your sin.

You are defined by Christ.

Third truth, the gospel shapes how we think about our growth.

The gospel shapes how we think about our growth as believers, I'm saying.

Sometimes Christians think that the primary way they grow is by drenching themselves in law.

Let this be said, the word of God instructs, convicts, corrects, edifies, and builds up in righteousness, the whole counsel of God, the whole Bible.

We need to consider and even confront the moral imperatives and moral priorities of God's word.

Every Christian does.

Doing so teaches us and exposes sin to be very sure and we all need that in an ongoing basis.

Not once every six months.

Let's take a little peek at God's moral priorities.

Am I living up to these?

Nope.

Well, sorry, I'll be back in six months to see that.

No, this is part of why we do things like Bible reading plans.

You don't have to do a Bible reading plan.

You're not justified by your Bible reading plan.

However, Bible reading plans are good.

We've started them in our household.

It's been good.

I had a nudge from my wife to do the Bible reading plan.

We're reading some big sections of scripture.

It's so good.

It's so good for us.

It's part of what happens when you're reading chunks of scripture.

There's different styles and speeds you can read the Bible, of course.

But when you are in different places of the Bible on a daily or regular basis, whatever your specific reading plan is of scripture, isn't it amazing how random texts will convict you and expose sin?

You're not even looking for it.

This is what the Word of God does.

But that's only the first part.

That's only the first part.

The primary instrument of growth in the Christian life in the New Covenant is gospel grace mediated through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Gospel grace.

That's the primary means of growth for the Christian.

You think of numerous texts, I think, that teach this in different forms.

Connecting New Covenant to gospel to Christ theologically here.

Ezekiel 36, 27.

This is the promise of the New Covenant.

I will put my spirit within you, God says to his people, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Did you hear that strong sovereign language?

Cause you to walk in my statutes.

That is tremendously encouraging.

I will cause you.

Do we love the sovereignty of God?

Do we want the sovereignty of God?

Yes, we do.

We want a God who causes us through his spirit to walk in his ways.

Philippians 2 in the New Testament 12 and 13.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

There it is again.

It's God who is working in you to make you want to read that Bible day after day after day who is making you want to confess your sin over and over again and on it goes.

Colossians 1, 29.

It's almost like this is a theme.

For this I toil struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

Is that how you think about your sanctification?

God is powerfully working within you.

God is.

It's not driven by your effort.

It's not jump started by you.

It's not even dependent on you.

It's dependent on God.

God is powerfully working within Christians.

This is what the Bible says.

Second Timothy 2 verse 1.

2 Timothy 2:1

Finally, "You then my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

Be strengthened by grace." It's there.

It's in Christ Jesus for you.

It's available.

It's not kept behind lock and key in a vault.

And you have to know a guy who knows a guy who knows the combination and once in a while he'll venture to open the vault and take out a little vial and drop a little drop of grace in your life.

So it's a rushing torrential fountain of grace in your life and it strengthens you.

And that is how you can honor God.

That is how you can obey God.

That is how 2024 can be a year.

Whatever comes in terms of trials and challenges and they've already started to come haven't they?

They've already started to knock on the door for you and for me in different forms.

And yet grace is strengthening all who are in Christ Jesus.

Fourth the gospel shapes how we think about our future.

The gospel shapes how we think about our future.

Colossians 1 23 a text I've referenced a few times in recent months from this very pulpit.

The gospel is not a burdensome message.

It's not a burden laid on your shoulders.

It's the relief of a burden.

The gospel gives hope as Paul tells the Colossians if indeed you continue in the faith stable and steadfast not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I Paul became a minister much there as with all these texts leaving much fruit on the vine so to speak and yet what's the focus for us this morning that we would not shift from the condemnation of the gospel from the burden of the gospel from the sadness of the gospel from the soap the gospel gives you unending hope circumstances don't you look to your circumstances sometimes they may feel hopeful sometimes they may not I'm doing some youth basketball coaching for example and I'm reminding myself or getting reminded I should say I should use the passive voice there just how up and down the coaching and sporting life can be I am plunged back into the world of 12 year old boys basketball and suffering defeats for example on occasion and being reminded just how my emotions can be up and down with a 12 year old boys basketball game you know let alone much bigger things in life honestly I've had moments with a boys basketball season where I've needed to preach the gospel to myself and say I need the hope of the gospel the hope of my life is not this team and its record I can make it that functionally we all can do this we all find our hope and something circumstantial something shifting something fading something temporary something small or something medium or something even that feels big but none of these things is as big as the gospel that is where Paul an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ says to find your hope and there is ever flowing hope in this gospel we need to conclude a few closing applications first relentlessly make the gospel your focus just over and over again talk about it as a couple talk about it in your family talk about it with your friends fellow church members roommates as a single person whatever it may be whatever your station in life is strategize together strategize together is the gospel our focus right now how are we doing with keeping God's grace these things again are kind of synonymous how are we keeping how are we doing with keeping Christ the center how are we doing is gospel grace looming large in our family we're all going to dip but how are we doing okay let's go back to this let's relentlessly make the gospel our focus not ourselves not our sin not the law gospel grace it's the banner over the Christian line for every believer second in families in families now point of application here specifically men must lead in applying the gospel we men and we all falter in this too we men need to lead in carving out and fighting for and championing a gospel focus and we need to lead in applying the gospel and here's one practical application if we are talking a big game about confession and repentance to the next generation our kids need need to know the gospel and repent based on it we need to be modeling repentance we need to model confession of sin I don't mean every 15 minutes we gather the family for a huddle and say well dad in the last 11 minutes you know I wasn't I wasn't focused we can't do that that that won't be productive okay so I'm not talking about some kind of crazy wild-eyed focus in this sense but I am talking about a regular rhythm of confession and repentance of sin and we we don't just lead in family worship on the nights or days we're able to do that some days are better than others we lead in confessing it's easier to teach this from here to say this in public than it is to do it and yet we've got to lead in applying the gospel as men third we've got to remember we can't force people to embrace Christ we can't force people can't force our kids to embrace Christ can't make them embrace Christ we can't do it we can't make our neighbors we can't make our co-workers embrace Christ you know what's going to be really appealing to our kids to our co-workers to people in Conway or surrounding environs a gospel saturated life with a whole lot of God's grace in our testimony that will have an effect that will have just a natural organic effect it's not so much program it's icing out your witness and how you're gonna do this and a 29 step process it's more just living as a Christian and showing people the joy of the genuine Christian life that will have an effect it will be attractive to people and appealing to them and finally finally watch your heart carefully watch your heart carefully so you live in gospel hope watch your heart carefully so you live in gospel hope it's 2024 it's an election year it's gonna get hot out there okay we're all gonna be tempted to cast about for political solutions we're gonna get tempted to ramp things up I'm not saying there's not a place for a conviction witness and taking a stand and voting and getting involved in the public square because there definitely is but I am saying our hope is not in politics our hope isn't even in this country our hope isn't in any earthly thing our hope isn't in overtaking the culture our hope isn't in Christianizing the nation our hope is in the gospel that is where our hope is found our hope is in Christ and here's some good news Christ is undefeated Christ is going to win this whatever comes in these wild days in a ribbon civilization like America and and we pray for this to endure we pray for common grace put all your hope in Jesus that's what happened in the moment of your conversion and that's what you do every single day of your life let's pray father please help us to live out these things it's easier to say these things it's easier to sit here and listen to these things than it is to live out these things and apply these things we need your spirit for that please father strengthen us through your spirit we pray in the name of Jesus amen.

Amen.

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