Culture Formed By The Gospel | Romans 1:16 | Coleton Segars

We are in a series right now, pausing our Gospel of Mark series to take a couple of weeks, just to look at the vision and direction that we want to see the church move into, which realistically is not that different than the way the church has been framed up and run for the last 10, 11 years.

It's just a moment in time for the next two months just to add some language around, hey, here, when you see the church moving in this direction, this isn't by accident.

We're actually moving in this direction on purpose, and we're trying to do some of these things.

And so last week we talked about that we want to be a church that forms disciples who practice the way of Jesus so that we experience the fame and deeds of God in our time.

We get that from the scriptures.

We believe that's Jesus' vision for the church itself to form not just converts.

We don't just want converts, those are great.

But he wants followers, he wants disciples, he wants students, and so we're seeking to do that as well.

And over the next couple of weeks, we're gonna look at just different cultures.

Uh, to create an environment where that happens, we want to look at what we want the church to be framed by and defined by.

Uh, and so for the next couple of weeks, we'll be looking at five different uh cultures that we want to see develop here.

Henry Ben Till is this Dutch theologian, and he says culture is religion externalized.

And so what you actually believe, what's actually true of you, what you actually believe and practice, um, that will be the shape of any environment that you're in.

Whatever you really believe will take shape and form in the space that you're in.

And so these are things that we actually want to be, not just, oh, that's that's nice, you can put it on a banner or something like that.

Not that, but like this is actually something that shapes us and forms us.

And so the first culture that we want to develop is a culture that is shaped and saturated with the gospel of Jesus.

Paul says this in this short teaching text, Romans 1.16.

He says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.

Let's say this together.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

During a British uh conference back in the 1950s where they were comparing religions.

Um, a bunch of theologians and scholars got together and they're just comparing the world religions.

Um, and the debate came up to trying to discover what was unique about the Christian faith.

And so they began talking about the Christian faith and how that's unique among other religions, and so they they started with the incarnation, Jesus coming.

They were like, well, no, other religions have different versions of gods appearing in human form, so that's not unique.

What about the resurrection?

Again, other religions had accounts of return from death kind of things.

And so the debate went on for some time until a man named Clive Staples Lewis wandered into the room.

And this is what he says.

Uh, Philip Yancey picks up and he says, Uh, what's all the rumpus about?

Which I think is hysterical, and I'm gonna start saying that.

What's all the rumpus about?

Lewis asked.

And his colleagues told him they were discussing what made Christianity unique among the other world religions.

And C.S.

Lewis quickly responded, Oh, that's easy.

It's grace.

After some discussion, the conferees had to agree.

The notion of God's love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity.

The Buddhist with their eightfold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and the Muslim code of law, each of these offers a way to earn approval, but only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

That's awesome.

Um, and so only Christianity, this thing that we claim and believe and we want to share is good news to people, only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional, not based on your behavior, not based on how well you believe, not based on the strength of your faith, but the object of your faith.

Only Christianity has real good news.

Everybody else can claim they have a gospel and have good news, which is what gospel means.

But we have actual good news, and that's why it's called good news.

God's love for you, his acceptance of you, is not based on your behavior, it's not based on anything that you can do for yourself because it is by grace.

And so we will be a church that believes, holds to, and seeks to be saturated with the gospel of Jesus.

We want that to define the way that we spend our time together.

We want it to be just the taste of the room.

I want it to be as almost as tangible as you can cut through it, like the gospel saturates everything that we do.

And so, what I want to do today is talk about why I want our church to be shaped by, and our the culture of our church to be shaped by the gospel.

The way that I want to do it is by sharing with you three stories that I think encapsulate a picture of the gospel and explain why we actually want to see, not just in theory, the gospel shape us, but we really want it to do it.

So three stories that show a picture of why we need the gospel to shape our community.

So the three stories are the story of a New York City mayor, that's one of them.

Second story will be the story of Larry Mullaney and the story of the prostitute and the church, and we'll take them in order.

But we want a church shaped by, saturated with the gospel, because of this story of the New York City Mirror.

This is uh Brendan Manning who writes this.

He says, Fiorella Ligordia, uh, where the airport comes from, was the mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression.

He was called the Little Flower by adoring New Yorkers because he was only five foot four and always wore a carnation in his lapel.

He was a colorful character who used to ride the New York City firetrucks, take entire orphanages to baseball games, and whenever the New York newspaper was on strike, he would go to the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.

It says one bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at the night court that served the poorest ward in the city.

LaGordia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself.

Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread.

She told LaGuardia that her daughter's husband had deserted her.

Her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.

But the shopkeeper from whom the bread was stolen refused to drop the charges.

The shopkeeper said, It's a bad neighborhood, Your Honor.

She's got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson.

LaGuardia sighed.

He turned to the woman and said, I've got to punish you.

The law makes no exceptions.

Ten dollars or ten days in jail.

But even as he pronounced the sentence, the mayor was reaching into his pocket.

He extracted a bill and tossed it on the desk, saying, Here's the$10 fine, which I now cancel.

And furthermore, I'm gonna fine everyone in the courtroom 50 cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.

Mr.

Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.

Forty-seven dollars and fifty cents was turned over to the bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren.

Uh 50 cents of that amount came from the red-faced grocery store owner.

Let's go.

Some 70 petty criminals and New York City policemen in attendance were privileged to pay the fine and gave the mayor a standing ovation.

I love that story.

I needed like I should have read these through faster because I get emotional thinking of them, but I love that story.

We want a culture saturated and formed by the gospel because the gospel is supposed to be the message that reminds us that that is what God is like, and that is how he has treated us.

Like he had like LaGuardia is just a picture, just a small picture of like this, what's his character like?

What does he think of me?

How will he treat me?

He will treat you like this.

And he has treated us like this.

Jesus, God was the judge that instead of actually condemning us like he could have done and been righteous to do, instead of condemning us, he chose to actually pay the debt that we owed and then chose to bless us beyond compare with something we didn't deserve in the first place.

We did wrong and deserved condemnation, and yet received blessing after blessing because he took on our penalty and took on our condemnation.

This is who he is.

And the gospel is supposed to be this thing that we are constantly in front of us, reminding us, who is he?

What's he like?

What does he think of me?

How can I approach him like I'm so sinful, what will he think of me?

And it's like the gospel reminds us this is what he's like.

And so we need a culture of the gospel being saturated among us because we struggle ultimately to believe that God loves us that way.

When we sin, as we walk through the world, as we feel distant from God throughout time, we just struggle to believe that he actually likes us and wants to be near us.

We don't see God consistently as the father of the prodigal son welcoming his son home, looking out for him, searching for him.

We don't see him as the father.

We see him as the older brother who's angry and mean and vindictive and like really upset that the son came home.

And it's like, why are you so happy?

He's kind of a jerk, like this guy, like he stole everything and lost all the money and all these different things.

Like, we think God is a little bit like that more than he is like the Father.

And Jesus is consistently saying, No, no, no.

He's the Father, gonna run to anyone who decides to turn to him.

Just give him a wink of the eye, just do something with your eyebrow, and he might run to you with amazing grace.

That's what he wants to do.

And so we need the gospel constantly presented to us, constantly in front of our minds, constantly hitting our hearts to remind us that he loves you so much that he was willing to pay your debt.

He loves you so much that he was willing to take the penalty of death that you deserved and that our sin deserves.

You weren't even asking for help, and he came to help you.

And so I think we can think of our sinfulness as something that drives him away.

And I've sinned and I've sinned and I've sinned.

Certainly he wants nothing to do with me, but the gospel testifies to the fact that it was our sinfulness that brought him, not the thing that drove him away.

It was it was he is Jesus who will save his people, who has come to save his people from our sins.

Paul says it this way that God shows his love for us.

This verse changed my life when I was 17.

God shows his love for us that while we were sinners, Christ died for us.

What will he do now that I've sinned?

Well, well, when you're a sinner and didn't even know he existed, he died for you.

Well, what about now?

I've sinned a lot.

I keep sinning in the same way.

What will he do for me?

What is his posture towards me?

Love, sacrifice.

Replacing what you're supposed to experience with what he gets to experience.

He wants you to experience blessing, not condemnation.

And so this is what he's like.

And the gospel reminds us of what Greg Boyd says.

I love this quote.

He says, Despite our sin, our creator thinks that we are worth experiencing a hellish death for.

In fact, it was for the joy of spending eternity with us that Jesus endured the cross.

In other words, the cross, Calvary reveals our unsurpassable worth and significance to God.

And at the core of our being, that is what we long for.

And so we need a church saturated with what the gospel is just constantly put in front of us so that we remember and have this view of God that is constant and pure and true, because I think most people don't have a right view of him.

I want us to think of God when it when we think about what he's like.

I want us to think the way uh Carl Barth in his book, Church Dogmatics, he wrote like thousands of pages, and then he basically defines God by calling him this, the one who loves.

Like thousands of pages in all these and these you know things that he's writing.

And he's like, How do I define God?

It's like at the end of the day, he is the one who loves.

I want that to be in our minds and in front of us all the time.

And the gospel reminds us that this is who he is.

We need it.

Adam and Eve forgot that God was good.

Israel forgot that God was good.

The church forgot that God was good, and we cannot forget that thing.

And so I want the gospel in front of us so that we remember what he's like and what he's done for us.

That's the first story.

Secondly, the story of Larry Mullaney.

Brendan Manning, again, if you ever want a good book on like just being reminded of the furious love of God, read his book, The Furious Love of God.

You will, I mean, you will just feel so loved by the Father.

And so Brendan Manning in this book, The Furious Longing of God, uh, tells a story of a kid who attended the college that he was at and um and that he taught at.

And he says that the kid was by any society, uh, society standards like ugly, and he was fat and short and just extremely unclean.

He smelled bad, terrible lisp, the whole thing.

He's like, by society standards in any capacity, he was a less than person.

Um and so he says this about Larry Mullaney.

He says, In all my days, I've never met anybody with such low self-esteem.

He told me that when he looked at the mirror each morning, he spit at it.

No girl wanted him, no fraternity would take him.

He walked into my office one day and said, My name is Larry, and with a bad lisp, he said, I'm an ethnoptic.

But when Larry went home for Christmas that year, everything changed.

His father was a straight-laced Irishman who, even on the hottest day in summer, was always wearing a suit.

He never really showed emotions and really talked of anything substantial.

But one morning, Larry was headed back to school, and his father took him to the bus stop and they got off the car, got out of the car.

There were six men standing across the street.

When they saw Larry, they began making loud, degrading remarks, like, oink, oink, look at that fat pig.

If that fat pig was my kid, I'd be so embarrassed.

I'd hide him in the basement.

Another said, I wouldn't.

If that slob was my kid, I'd just disown him.

Hey, pig, give us your best oink.

Larry told me that in that moment, for the first time in his life, his father reached out, embraced him, kissed him on the mouth, and said, Larry, if your mother and I lived to be 200 years old, that would be long enough to thank God for the gift he gave us in you.

I am so proud that you're my son.

He says, it would be hard to describe in words the transformation that took place in Larry.

He came back, cleaned himself up, and miracle of miracles, began dating a girl.

And to top it off, he became the president of one of the fraternities.

He became the first student in the history of the university to graduate with a 4.2 GPA.

Larry also became a Christian and was ordained as a priest in the ministry, serving in South America as a missionary.

Do you know why?

It wasn't because sitting in my office while I talked about Jesus, no.

It was because of a day long ago, during a Christmas vacation, standing at a bus stop, when his lace curtain Irish father looked deeply into his son's eyes and affirmed him with the furious love of Jesus.

That changed the whole direction of his son's life.

The furious love of God completely transforming people.

And we want a gospel-saturated culture because we have to remember that the gospel, the message of God's furious love towards us, the message of I'm willing to go die the death that you're supposed to die, take the penalty you're supposed to take, and then give you all of the gifts that I'm supposed to receive.

You're gonna have all that.

That message has the power to transform people's lives and change their hearts and change their minds and rework things that are broken within them.

That message can make people whole.

We want the gospel to do that among us.

Leon Morris says about the gospel in his commentary, he says, the gospel is not advice to people, suggesting that they just lift themselves.

It is power.

It lifts them.

Paul does not say that the gospel brings power, but that it is power and it is God's power.

And this is why Paul says this.

He goes, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

At a time when people were ashamed of the gospel, like your God died.

Like, why are you why are you preaching that?

It's like I'm not ashamed of the gospel because it is power.

I have watched it transform people from who they were to who they could be.

I've watched it transform people's hearts, and Paul experienced this.

He was like, I was a murderer shouting threats to Christians, and the gospel transformed me from a murderer of Christians to an advocate for Christians and an advocate for Jesus.

Like that's what it's done for me to experience those things.

And so for us, the gospel is power that God uses.

It's the only power that God has ever put into a message.

Nothing is said in the Bible about any other thing that's called the power of God for salvation.

Nothing.

The only thing that gets that definition is this message.

What is the power of God for salvation?

It is only the gospel.

There's nothing else that can transform a person's life.

You can willpower them, you can shame them, you can do those types of things, and you can counsel them into good spaces too.

But true transformation, the only way that's been given, the only thing that God is empowered to do that is the gospel itself.

The gospel is power to actually transform people.

The gospel can save marriages by completely transforming the hearts of the couple, completely making them new, where they would never, ever have apologized before, always just fought to be right.

All of a sudden the gospel gets in there, changes that person's heart, and they become a brand new person.

The gospel can move into somebody's life who's angry and mean and vindictive and completely change them into different people who apologize quickly, who are gentle and kind and loving.

It can take abusers and turn them into people who aren't abusers anymore.

Like the gospel can absolutely rack someone's life and change them completely.

The gospel can change haters of Jesus into advocates for Jesus, can turn prodigals into saints, the gospel can turn hated enemies into best friends, the gospel can repair broken relationships, it has the power to break addictions, the gospel can change adulterers into saints.

That's what it did for St.

Augustine.

The gospel can change a grudge holder into someone who easily forgives, someone who says, I'll never forgive them, to someone who easily forgives them.

The gospel can just change our hearts and make us new people.

That was prophesied in the Old Testament.

One day I will come among them and I will give them new hearts, soft ones, tender ones, ones that respond to me and want to live for me, ones that are shaped by my image and shaped by me.

I'm gonna give people new hearts.

And there's only one thing that does that, and it's the gospel.

And so if we want to experience the powerful transformation of our hearts being made new and things that are broken within us being made whole, like the gospel is the only thing that does that.

The gospel can do in a moment what a lifetime of self-help books and willpower are powerless to do.

And so we want a culture defined by saturated with the gospel so that people experience this for themselves.

This happened to me when I was 17.

Drunk in my bedroom, just gonna live my life for myself forever.

And I just, and Jesus met me in my mind through that Romans 5.8 verse, and I could not get it out of my head.

It was banging on like the door of my head, and I kept saying it, but God loves those who are sinners.

He's the only one who loves sinners.

Wow, I was a sinner, Christ died for me.

Why was a sinner Christ died for me?

It was just playing in my head, and I couldn't get it out.

So for all night, drunk, dry heaving into the basket, my parents come home and find me, and I was miserable.

But in the in my mind, while I'm sleeping, it's just playing, that verse is playing in my head, and I couldn't stop.

And I didn't even know it was Romans 5.8.

I was like, I don't know what this is.

And I woke up the next morning and I was completely a different person.

Completely, I mean, something radically shifted.

And I was like, I don't want anything to do with all that old stuff.

All I want to do is figure out who he is.

I gotta know him.

Like it just changed everything in me.

And so it is the power of God to change people.

You see this in Matthew, you see this in Peter, you see this in Zacchaeus, the woman at the well, Saul who becomes Paul the apostle.

One of my favorite stories of the gospel transforming someone is the guy who built uh the Ryman Theater or the Auditorium in Nashville.

Uh back in 1885, there was this pastor named Sam Jones.

Um, he held these series of revival meetings, uh, so much so in Nashville, that this man, Captain Tom, as he was called, um, all of his saloons were empty.

And so he's angry.

He's like, all the people are going to the revivals.

Like, no one's getting drunk in my saloons anymore.

And so, Captain Tom, what he ends up doing is he gets a bunch of his friends together.

He's like, we're gonna go to one of these revival meetings and just tear it apart.

Like we're just gonna disrupt the entire thing.

And uh, and so that's what they do.

He gets a bunch of people together and he goes to the revival meeting, gonna cause a ruckus and like do all this stuff.

And uh they sit in the back and they're waiting for their moment, and then uh Sam Jones begins to preach, and this is what Sam Jones says he says, Some of you are here and you're living for yourselves, but it is no coincidence that any of you are here.

God has brought you here, which would have been a shocking thing.

It's like, no, I came here on myself.

No, God has brought you here because what you need to know is that you were created in the image of a God who loves you.

We've all sinned and fallen short of God's glory, and through great sacrifice of God, he sent Jesus to die to atone for your sins, and in redemption power, Jesus was raised to life again.

And in the account of this, the riverboat captain, Captain Tom, instead of heckling and doing all those things, like he begins to tremble in his chair among his people, the people that he brought.

And uh, when the invitation is given at the end, Sam Jones gives the invitation to receive Jesus.

He was the first one up there.

And he's like, I came to disrupt this meeting, but God has disrupted me.

Like that's the way that the account goes.

And he looks at Sam Jones, the pastor, and he's like, You'll never, you'll never have to preach in a tent in Nashville again.

I'm gonna build you a church.

And so what he does is he builds the Union Gospel Tabernacle that eventually becomes the Ryman Auditorium, and it's still standing there today.

But that's the story.

Like that's how the auditorium came to be.

Now it's like this signature of country music in the whole thing.

And when it became the Ryman Auditorium at Tom, Captain Tom Ryman's funeral, Sam Jones did the funeral, the pastor did the funeral, and uh at in that moment they did it at this space, and at that moment they're like, we're gonna rename this thing and we're gonna call it the Ryman instead of the Union Gospel Tabernacle.

Anyways, beautiful story.

They became really close friends.

But it's like, why?

It's like, man, he heard the power of God for salvation.

There's one message that transforms people's hearts.

There's one message that turns a disruptor into someone who's been disrupted.

There's only one thing that has enough power to do that.

And they could have yelled at him and blasted him and get out of here and that kind of stuff, but just preach the gospel to him.

And instead of doing what he came to do, he actually gives his life to Jesus and it changes his entire life.

There's one message that's been given that power.

And so we want a culture saturated with the gospel so that we experience that not just for salvation, but constant deliverance.

It is the power of God for salvation on and on and on and on and on, consistently, not just to convert you from death to life, yes, that, but to also deliver you from the things that constantly get in your way.

It is power to lift you beyond what you can lift yourself to.

And so we want a culture where God is able to transform people consistently by the gospel.

How are we doing?

We okay?

Y'all are really quiet.

Okay, cool.

You like the gospel?

Great.

Last story, last story.

The prostitute in the church.

In his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Philippiance tells a story from a friend of his who worked with a Down and Out in Chicago, and this is the prostitute.

A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter.

Through sobs and tears, she told me the sort of her sordid story, and at last I asked if she'd ever thought of going to a church for help.

He says, I'll never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face.

Church.

She cried.

Why would I ever go there?

I already feel terrible about myself.

They just make me feel worse.

And Yancy says, What struck me about my friend's story is that women, much like this prostitute, fled toward Jesus, not away from him.

The worse a person felt about themselves, the more likely they saw Jesus as a refuge.

Has the church lost that gift?

Evidently, the down and out who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth no longer feel welcome among his followers.

What has happened?

I want the gospel of Jesus to shape us and form us and form the culture of our church because the gospel alone will actually form us into a beautiful community where sinners feel like this is a refuge.

Not sinners just from the outside coming in and the people that never want to go to a church ever again.

But us here today, that we're battling with sin and we have addictions and we have issues, and if we feel like, man, I can't say any of that because everybody else is crushing it and they're perfect.

Like, no, they're just liars.

That's what they are.

And so this is supposed to be a space where we walk in, and everything that's outside and inside is just able to be right there, and it's vulnerable and in front of everybody, and it's like great, what a gift that the church can be to people.

That we can actually belong together and go, like, I've screwed up, I've made a mess of my life, and I can just be like, me too.

Let's do this together.

Like maybe we, maybe the two of us, if we put our heads together, we can really come up with something.

Like, it's supposed to be a space, like Jesus was a refuge for sinners.

The church is supposed to, to the world, declare the manifold wisdom of God.

And so what Jesus was to the world, in his time, the church is supposed to be his body on earth, his hands, his feet, and doing that thing.

And the gospel, being reminded of that, it's saturating us, it shapes us and forms us into a people that actually are welcoming to sinners and the sinners among us and not just the sinners outside of us.

The more the gospel is preached, the more the gospel is sung, the more it's celebrated and kept in front of us, the more we will become the type of people that Jesus was for sinners, a refuge.

So some examples here.

As we are shaped by the gospel, we will become more loving.

The more we understand that Jesus loved us to his literal death, even though we are his enemies, even though we were sinners, even though we had nothing in common with him, the more we will be able to love our enemies, those who sin against us, and those who have nothing in common with us.

The more we understand that, that his love was not based on his agreement with our sin, but his disagreement with our sin, we will learn to love those who we disagree with as well, which is everyone for the most part.

Not just politically divided, but like realistically, in my own family, me and Rainey disagree a lot on most things that we do.

But I love her, and she, thank God, loves me.

Like there's a space in there among us that like we all love people we disagree with.

And the more that we actually are experiencing that like it was his disagreement with our sin that led him to love us so well, the more that we will learn to love people who are completely different from us.

We'll become more compassionate the more we realize that Jesus looked at the mess we were making in our lives and felt compassion and not condemnation, the more we will look at others who are making a mess of their life and feel deep compassion for them because that's how he felt for us.

We'll become more humble, the more we comprehend just how great Jesus is.

We look at the gospel and look at like he bankrupt heaven to come down and to do this thing.

He humbled himself, made himself nothing, died the death, not just any death, but a death on the cross.

The more that we look at that, the less we will worry about being superior, the more, the less we'll worry about our vain glory and what we look like, the less we'll see ourselves as better than other people, it will make us humble people.

The gospel will make us servant hotter-hearted.

The more we understand how great Jesus is, and he gave it all up to serve us and die for us, the more we'll be willing to serve anyone, regardless of our status.

Excuse me.

It'll make us thankful, not entitled, not arrogant.

The more we realize that we actually deserve nothing good because of our sin, nothing good, the more we will begin to see every good thing in our lives as something that did not come from our hands but from his.

Every single good thing that we have is a gift of grace.

And so we'll become more thankful people and not like, I deserved this.

I did good, you owed me.

No.

What you were owed, if God were to ever give you what you owed, condemnation is what we were owed.

That's it.

And so everything outside, he actually is like, I don't want to give you what you're owed because you don't want that either.

I want to give you what you don't deserve, which is far better.

We'll become more gracious.

The more we understand the multitude of our sin that Jesus has forgiven, the more amazing his grace will be to us, and the more gracious we will be towards those around us, and the more we'll give them forgiveness.

We'll become more generous as we see the generosity of God, what he's done for us in Jesus.

We'll become peaceful and not anxious.

The more we'll become peaceful people as we look at the gospel because there's this moment in history, the cross, the worst moment in history we realize God was still in control of the worst moment in history, which is God dying on a cross.

And so it will make us peaceful and actually assured of the fact that, like, even in the worst moments in our history, he's still in control.

If he's in control of the worst moment in history, he will be in control of the bad moments in our history as well.

And it'll make us peaceful and non-anxious in a very anxious world.

More faithful, more obedient.

The more we understand how much Jesus loves us, and we trust that, we'll trust that he's only trying to lead us into more life from his words and commands.

We'll become more obedient just because we're like, I'm not being obedient out of fear.

I'm not doing it out of duty, I'm doing it because I genuinely see your death in the cross and going, you have my best in mind all the time.

And so if you've ever asked me to do anything, it has to be because it filtered through the cross of like, you only care about what's best for me.

And so if you're ever asking me to do anything, it's not for my bad, but it's for my good.

This is what we want.

The culture of our church shaped, saturated with the gospel because the gospel reminds us of what God is like and what he's done for us.

It's the power of God, the power he uses to transform people's lives, and the gospel will form us into a more beautiful community, not just for the outside world, but also for us as we sit together and learn to do life together.

So, a couple of ways that we'll aim at this.

We're gonna constantly preach the gospel and not behavior modification.

I'm never gonna tell you you need to act better.

Maybe you do need to act better.

That's between you and the Lord.

But I'm going to tell you the gospel.

He loves you in the midst of your sin.

When you sin later today, he is looking on you and smiling and calling you his son and his daughter.

It's not a reason to then go and sin, but it is true that where sin abounds, grace abounds.

And so it's true for you.

So we're gonna preach the gospel and not behavior modification.

We will preach the good news of Jesus from every text in the Bible because the entire Bible testifies to him.

It's all about him.

It was all leaning that way.

We're gonna do a series after the Mark series called The Gospel in the Old Testament because there is all this pointing to Jesus.

The Old Testament points to Jesus, the uh New Testament is about Jesus, and the uh the current church is pointing back to him and always looking back at what we're doing.

It's all about this one person that changed history.

And so for us, we will do that.

We'll celebrate the gospel through communion, we'll sing the gospel through our through the songs that we sing.

We're gonna do parties as a church and be reminded of the good news of like, what does this party remind us of?

It's like, oh man, because of what Jesus, because the Lamb has overcome, uh, we get to celebrate with him in the new heavens and a new earth.

Like, this is just a foretaste of the thing that we get to experience in real time someday.

And so for us, this is, we're gonna aim at this with everything that we got because it's the only thing, it's the power of God for salvation.

So we will be a church shaped by a culture of the gospel, saturated with the good news of Jesus because it's the power of God to save.

All right.

Lord Jesus.

I pray that you make that true among us.

That we would just seek to elevate this one message that Paul said, I will preach nothing else but Christ and Him crucified.

There's nothing else that moves into a person's heart and doesn't do damage but does reparation and just starts repairing things that are broken and healing what's been taken and restoring what's been stolen.

There's one message, you have done a beautiful thing.

And so the rest of my life, we just get to testify and witness to the beauty that we've seen and experienced.

And so, God, I pray that this church that you would make us more so a community that is defined by and saturated with the good news of Jesus so that more people are set free from striving and having to try and work at it and trying to make you love them and just get to rest in the fact that you can just I did the work, you just rest.

God, I pray that you would do that among us.

Would your name be famous once again in this city?

Not as a space where it's like, oh yeah, the church, those judgmental people.

Oh, would they be like, man, God is in that place and he loves me.

I've tasted, I've seen that the Lord is good.

I pray that that would be what goes forward, not only in our midst, but also from our church.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

We get to rehearse the gospel in front of us, and we do that every week with reminding ourselves, like this is his body broken for us, this is his blood shed for us.

Why did he do it?

And it wasn't because you were crushing it in your life, and he didn't do it because you were, you know, choosing him at any time.

He did that before all of that, before the creation of the world, he decided to give his life for you so that you can experience the goodness of God in your time without having to earn it.

And so this is a space that we just get to be thankful and joyful, and you get to confess your sins freely without fear of uh of like punishment or that he's gonna slap you from heaven or something like that.

It's not that.

You just get to sit with him in this space and be like, I am a sinner, but you came for sinners.

I'm I'm the person you came for.

And it's actually the broken stuff and the wrong stuff that led you to come to me in the first place.

It wasn't because I was righteous, it's because I was sick and I needed healing.

And so we just get to sit there and be reminded, like, why does he love me?

And it's like, because he loves me.

And he's come to heal, he's come to forgive, he's come to make us new and make us whole.

And so um, take some time in your seats, you can confess your sin.

What a gift that we get to do that.

So that he cleanses us of all unrighteousness.

And what a gift! Like, what does he do when you confess your sin?

Like, ah, it's a lot of cleansing taking place, not a lot of condemnation.

And so we have this space that we just get to do that.

And so we should do that weekly, and we get to rehearse the gospel.

So take some time in your seats and then come receive the elements.

We will commune together through a liturgy, and then we'll sing a little bit.

But if you help set up communion, please come and hold the elements and then come as you feel led.