First Importance

Good morning, everyone.

Uh scripture reading for today is from 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 1 through 11.

1 Corinthians 15:1–11

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

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

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

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.

On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

It's a joy to gather together with you all.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And uh happy new year, I guess.

This is our first time gathering together in 2024.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm a fan of this year too.

You get to write 24 on your dates, which reminds me of Jeff Gordon.

So that's nice.

Um, yeah, so thanks for thanks again for uh joining us this morning.

Uh let's pray, and then I'll explain to you what this series is.

Holy Father, we thank you for your loving kindness towards us.

We thank you for bringing us into another year of your faithfulness.

We thank you for your work of preservation for your church and your continued care throughout her history, Lord, that when you ascended to the throne and gave us your spirit, that you made yourself present with us even before your return in the flesh, so that we might understand that the promise that you gave us, that you will be with us always, even until the end of the age, that we hold that now and we experience it right now, by gathering again on another Sunday, that you, by your work and the work of your spirit, have preserved your church.

You will build your church.

And there is just so much evidence that that promise is true.

It's almost the only way it can be explained, Lord.

We praise you for that, and we thank you for this new year.

In Jesus' name, amen.

So we're starting a series this morning called Redemption Story, and it's a series that's about the church.

Uh this church in particular, but also the church generally.

Now, you don't want to do a series on the church all the time because the church can get a little navel-gazely, and you don't want the church to just always be thinking about what the church is and kind of taking the church's spiritual pulse.

That's kind of like being in a relationship where all you're talking about is how the relationship is going.

That's called miserable.

I don't know if you you've ever been in one of those, or if you've been in, or if your marriage perhaps finds itself in one of those seasons where you're having to constantly take the relational temperature.

That's not where you want to be.

But uh the church, and that's because the church is meant to serve this sort of more invisible function.

If the church is really working, you're not thinking much about the church so much as you're thinking about Jesus and the glory of Jesus, and you're thinking about uh uh one another and your love for one another that we receive through the love of Jesus Christ.

We get to participate in.

And then all of a sudden the church is just kind of happening, and the church becomes the means of participation in that.

But uh, for this brief series through the month of January, before we move into Exodus, which I'm so excited for, um the we're I want us to kind of think of it like a pair of glasses.

So occasionally you your glasses, if they're really working, you know, you don't really notice them.

I don't wear glasses.

One time I thought I needed glasses, so I went to the eye doctor.

Turns out my expectations were just too high.

But the uh uh when you're wearing glasses, what you'll what you'll need is, I should be seeing better than this.

What what you'll need is uh occasionally to take them off and look at your glasses and see, oh, there's a smudge here, and uh I need to you know fix this over here, and I don't know what you all do with them, put them in your mouth so that we know you're thinking.

And then once you've corrected those things, you put your glasses back on, and you're able to just see through them again.

And so occasionally what you're looking through, you need to take off and look at what you're looking through so that you can look through it more perfectly.

So that's what we're doing with this series.

JC Hokendijk, um, who is of the Dutch Reformed stream, I didn't have to do any research to figure that out, said this in history, a keen ecclesiological interest, ecclesiology is just church.

Interest, it's like the study of the church.

Uh ecclesia is the word for gathering, the Greek word for gathering.

So in history, a c a keen ecclesiological interest has almost without exception been a sign of spiritual decadence.

And he doesn't mean he's not saying decadent like um like a molten chocolate cake from chilies.

He means it negatively.

Um, that there's uh there's a sort of a self-centered tendency that that can creep in when the church is constantly thinking about itself.

So uh, but this is this is an appropriate time for our church in particular to be considering what the church is, because this year we are joining the denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America.

And so this sort of ecclesial shift for our church means that this is a helpful time for us to understand what is the church?

What is the nature of this thing that we are doing here?

And and by understanding that, we'll be able to more completely and even self-consciously participate in it.

Because a lot of times we receive things from the church or we uh we participate in aspects of the church, and we wonder if we we if if this is what the church is.

Are we doing the thing that Christ says he is doing in the church?

Another uh theologian who's not uh who's not Dutch, his name is Edmund Clowney, wrote a book called The Church.

Um and uh it's a business management book.

I'm kidding.

It's a book about the church.

And he says this he says, to be sure, if the church, rather than Christ, becomes the center of our devotion, spiritual decay has begun.

A doctrine of the church that does not center on Christ is self-defeating and false.

But Jesus said to the disciples who confessed him, I will build my church.

To ignore his purpose is to deny his lordship.

The good news of Christ's coming includes the good news of what he came to do, to join us to himself and to one another as his body, the new people of God.

So, with that in mind, with this understanding that we are looking at the church as a means of more completely participating in what Christ came to do, the thing that he said he would build, this body that is his body, this new people of God.

That is why we're looking at the church.

Uh so with that understanding, we're going to move through this this series called Redemption Story.

Now, the church in the United States is famously in decline.

Uh for example, last July in 2023, which is last year, in uh the Atlantic, uh, it was reported that 40 million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years.

That's something like 12% of the population.

12% of the population of the population in the United States has stopped attending church in the past 25 years.

This represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history.

The past 25 years has just been marked by this leaving the church, the church's decline.

Now that's not great.

But we'd be mistaken if we read this decline of the church at a population scale as a sign of the church's irrelevance.

It's in fact precisely the opposite.

This decline of the church is, in some sense, a desperate cry for the church's need to advance.

It is a sign of spiritual decay, which can be charted at a national level.

It is not as though with the retreat from the church, I guess this is part of what's strange about the retreat from the church that that our culture has experienced, is that there hasn't been a rise of a replacement.

Most of it has been informed by what's called the nuns.

You've probably heard that term before.

It refers to uh people who have who have no particular spiritual or religious affiliation.

So the church has been replaced with nothing, which means something like we went from at least an hour a week of some sort of consideration of something higher than us or of a moral absolute that we could participate in, and we've replaced that with nothing.

So if we were voting, there'd be at least uh 40 million people who said the church is slightly worse than nothing.

Not the best assessment of the church, but our church faces uh in some in some aspect uh some of the most intense cultural opposition that the church has ever faced in the United States.

And we can think of these points of cultural opposition as areas which the church might perhaps need to avoid in order to find a cultural foothold again or some sort of cultural relevance.

But I think that that's it's really precisely the opposite.

These cries of pain in our culture are the very places that that most expose the need of our world for the church.

The sexual revolution has failed.

It has proven completely unsuccessful for the fostering of children, for the preservation of marriage, for uh even sexual satisfaction, the thing that was most promised by it.

The promise of a world that could be founded in a mutual understanding of the value of individual self-expression, the promise of which is that I will be so freed from any cultural constraint that I will be able to freely express who I feel like I am on the inside.

And in that freedom of expression, I will finally be able to be known, has left us more lonely than ever.

And so these points of conflict we ought to, as the church, hear as cries for the church's advance, for the church to move into these particular areas.

That way we might be able to see the the church acting assault and light, this preservative force in the world.

I'll return to another Edmund Clowney quote.

The book on the church is really, it's a really good book.

Uh for this series.

Uh it was one of those things where it was like, I should just read this.

This guy's already done it.

Um, but he says this.

He says, when Christian witness or excuse me, Christian witness that is limited to private religious experience cannot challenge secularism.

I just wanna I just wanna sit with that.

A Christian witness that is limited to private religious experience cannot challenge secularism.

That means when the secular world is experiencing the failures that it is experiencing, the the failure of an idol of individual self-expression, the failure of the sexual revolution, and it is in and it's wondering, there is this sort of churning right now in secularism, wondering what do we do with these failures?

How do we account for them?

You can see it come in waves.

We don't know how to speak of racial reconciliation.

We don't know how to speak of what to we don't know how to speak of how two people are able to come together in a sexual union that could in some way be safe or in some way be beneficial to both of them.

So we try and develop like a sex ethic from nothing.

So the failure of that is this this churning that begs a question, and then it the if the only thing that that those folks are met with is people who have had a private religious experience, there is no opportunity for that secular framework to be challenged.

Because, congratulations, you had a private religious experience.

That doesn't really help me.

That doesn't help me sort out an ethical frame for my life.

It doesn't help me sort out if there is meaning or a possibility of meaning or a possibility of real community or of real engag uh of really being known in my life.

That's just your own private religious experience.

Okay.

Next sentence.

Christians in community must again show the world not merely family values, but the bond of the love of Christ.

It has to be shown by Christians in community.

This is the only place that the bond of the love of Christ can be shown.

Now that's a different reality than just a private religious experience.

I'll keep reading.

Increasingly, Clowney says, the ordered fellowship of the church becomes the sign of grace for the warring factions of a disordered world.

Only as the church binds together those whom selfishness and hate have cut apart will its message be heard and its ministry of hope to the friendless be received.

Only in our being bound together in love for one another are we able to demonstrate to the secular world this true hope that we have.

To the secular world, the warring factions that have developed as they compete amongst one another to sort of sort of ad hoc develop an ethical system, which they're which a lot of times the purpose, the purpose of developing an ad hoc ethical system can be thought of as twofold.

One is self-justification.

I can know that I'm living rightly.

And perhaps if I know that I am living rightly, I'll be able to resolve this internal anxiety that I feel almost constantly.

And second is you can, in a s, in a with with no relational commitment or with no relational baggage or entanglement, you can seek to draw others into your way of living.

Those are the purposes of an ethical system.

So it's self-justification and then it's condemnation, but it's an impersonal condemnation.

So it's a sort of condemnation that costs you nothing.

And so obviously, when you have multiple factions trying to come up with their own ethical system based on their current preferences, those would be incommiserable warring factions because the project of self-justification is married to the project of other condemnation.

Do you see that?

That sort of frame?

So that's not that's not gonna work.

The church, and but and by the way, that's not something that can be addressed by a personal religious experience.

Because our project of self-justification is always relationally entangled.

It always has to do with how others are doing, how it is we think others are doing.

So only the church as this bond of love against people who would otherwise be just participants in those warring factions, is able to show a love that transcends them.

And that means it must find its justification elsewhere.

And it must find its judgment elsewhere.

Otherwise, so long as those two things just come from us, from our own inventions, from from nothing, you know, our our our own little ex nielos, they will never be able to create something like unity.

And they'll especially, if they do create unity, it will always be a tyrannical unity.

Edwin Friedman uh wrote, uh he's the guy who wrote the book A Failure of Nerve, which has become pretty popular since 2020.

I don't know why.

Um because it was written in like the early 90s.

I kind of half mean that.

I can tell by the joke, by the laughter, that it's like, I don't know why it became popular after 2020.

Of course it did, because the world completely fell apart and it turned out we were a part of a tyrannical system we just didn't understand yet.

But other than that, he says it's not hard to get people to come together.

It's hard to get people to come together and stay themselves.

Now, the church is in a sense a picture of this because it is it is a body.

He was writing this about congregations.

It's a book about congregational, not a failure of nerve.

He wrote this other book called Generation to Generation, which is about congregational leadership.

And the the point there is that it's it's easy to get people to come together when you say to them, come do this, and then you will be the one who is justified, and you'll be able to you'll be able to condemn the others easily.

There's a hair.

Preacher got a wild hair this morning.

But you guys can say.

The church being founded on Christ as the one who justifies us, and being founded on him as the judge, the one who provides the real ethical framework that we all must come under, creates a community of people who are able to be bound in love for one another that speaks plainly against the useless warring of secularism.

So for us to understand the church, it's extremely meaningful for our world.

Now many of us have participated in the church as merely a means of our own personal spiritual development.

So the church is one of the things that you can come participate in as merely a way of advancing or growing your own personal spiritual development.

And the church in the United States has often positioned itself this way.

We've sort of marketed ourselves this way.

We are another option by which you can uh gain some of your own your own personal, you can grow further in your own personal spiritual story.

And in that sense, we can go perhaps even years of going to church, in a sense, participating in church, and at the same time, we're just we're still just serving this secular framework, this hyper-individualist framework, which says the story is really just about my own personal experience.

And the world is really just me gathering personal experiences for myself.

Now, I I understand that you want to come to church and you you want to get something out of it for you.

That's not absurd.

You know, it makes sense that when you come to church, you would want to hear, like, here's some here's some leadership tactic.

Here's a means of dealing with your anxiety.

Here's a tip for strengthening your marriage, or here's help for coping with a particular loss or some uncertainty that you face in your life.

But if that is the end of the church, if the church is merely another tool by which you pursue your own personal spiritual advancement, that means you can be a part of the church for years and never really experience the church.

Never really be or become the church.

But the church is not just a gathering of people seeking their own personal spiritual development.

You know, you could add to that numerically forever.

And it and it would never like reach a threshold at which it became the church.

You know, here's 500 people gathering for their own personal spiritual development.

Here's 10,000 people gathering for their own personal spiritual development.

Never does it become a church when that happens.

That's just a utilization of the church towards our culture's own ends.

The church is its own creature.

It has its own being, its own ontology.

And so of the church, we could say things like, like Peter says in 1 Peter 2.9, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.

By the way, we don't have a, you know, vosotros, but that you is plural.

You know.

It wasn't really a joke, but I it I guess it kind of is.

But you are a chosen race.

You, y'all.

We have a y'all.

Not, you know, this side of the Mason Dixon, but but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

See, that is a very different thing than a group of people, no matter how well intentioned, gathering together to pursue their own personal spiritual development.

That is a different being.

And so what we're looking to discover in this series is what is that thing?

What does it mean to be a chosen race?

Can you imagine saying saying that?

I feel like I just read that for the first time.

I was like, that's a charged term.

Like on the street corner.

I dare you.

I am a part of the chosen race.

All right.

But what would it mean?

What would that type of self-consciousness mean?

You know, those are that that's not something you can just say about yourself.

There's no race of one.

You know, this is an this is an identification with something beyond you.

This is what it means to be a people.

It means you have a shared history, a shared goal, that there's this relational, even familial connection that you would participate in.

This is the type of language, a royal priesthood.

Like king priests.

A holy nation.

I love, I love a people for his own possession.

See how different that is, that language is than a bunch of people pursuing their own personal spiritual growth?

A people for his own possession.

That means that that the nature of the church is that we are his.

That the church's very being is a relational description, how it is that we as a people relate to God.

And what is the purpose of it?

That you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

If the church is just individuals pursuing their own spiritual growth in aggregate, then we cannot proclaim his excellencies.

And you might expect to see a culture and a church in rapid decline.

But if the church understands her identity as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, that in participating in this, I am a part of a body which is this whole other thing, then we proclaim his excellencies, the excellencies of him who brought us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Now, it is helpful when we're talking about a body of people, that we give ourselves something like a first principle.

It's helpful to have something that is central that we can aim at and can provide this sort of direction.

You know, because then we if we if we that is a that is an aspect of what it means to be a people rather than just a group of individuals in aggregate.

If we have a central tenet, a central hope, then we are making this shift from just groups who gather together to use the church like a tool from which we can gain tips and tricks that we can then use to achieve whatever our own ends happen to be.

If we have a central aim, then we're starting to become a people who are not just gathering tips and tricks for our own ends, but are going towards the same end.

This morning, I want to show you what is of first importance for the church to be the church.

What is of first importance for this creature, this being, the church, to happen is the gospel.

I'm not breaking any ground here, but the gospel is the only thing which can hold this central position.

If anything else moves into that central position, it is not the church anymore.

It becomes another sort of creature.

But the gospel is what is of first importance.

And hopefully, as we go on this morning, we'll be able to under get a more complete understanding of what it means, what the gospel is, and what it means to be a people formed around the gospel.

So I'm in order to show this, I'm gonna go to 1 Corinthians 15, which was read this morning.

And 1 Corinthians 15 is right at the end.

It's sort of the last doctrinal uh part of Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

And he ends this letter with this just glorious chapter, which has a bit of a shift from the previous chapters.

Most of 1 Corinthians is Paul just answering particular questions about how things should go in the church.

Who needs to experience church discipline?

Who should be brought back into the church?

Who should uh how should you uh engage with spiritual gifts?

How should the community gather?

How should the Lord's Supper be administered?

Those sorts of questions are engaged with throughout 1 Corinthians.

But then here at the end, he says, now look, I've got to give you something.

I've got to remind you here of what it is we're really talking about.

Lest you get, lest you I end this letter and you get a little lost, and you think, okay, what it is that we're really talking about is uh when that person speaks in tongues, we need an interpreter over here.

And when you know you uh take your head covering off, you put your head covering back on, lest we get lost in those sorts of things.

Paul says, I've got to give you what's of first importance.

Okay, so let's look at this.

1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 2.

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

So at this final moment, Paul says, Now, brothers.

Part of the wonder of the gospel is just in how Paul calls us brothers.

You know, it he could always say, Now I the apostle.

But he says, brothers.

This is part of the shock of Christianity.

When Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, he's the emperor of Rome, he opened that council by saying, I'm glad to have gathered you, brothers.

Only Christianity can do something like that.

He says, Now I would remind you of the gospel I preached to you.

Remember this, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved.

Why is the gospel central?

By believing the gospel, you are saved.

By believing the gospel, you're saved.

There's nothing else like that.

There's nothing else in all of creation that to believe and put your trust in, you will be saved.

It is so utterly simple, you might miss it.

It is so plain, you might write it off.

You might think once you've heard that if I just believe the gospel, that I'll be saved, you might think there must be more.

And you might immediately begin adding to it.

Do you remember the story of Naaman, the Syrian king who has leprosy?

And he goes to Elisha, and Elisha sends his servant to talk to the king and says, You just need to wash in the Jordan.

And Naaman says, I got better rivers in Syria.

You call this a river?

That's the way I that's probably what.

I mean, yeah, I can just picture it.

I saw this beautiful river.

I said, that's a beautiful river.

And so he's about to walk away, and then one of his servants comes up and says, Look, if he had asked you to do something more complicated, you would have done it.

Just wash in the river.

And he washes and he is cleaned.

Algorithm keeps showing me this man named Brian Johnson.

Have you all heard of him?

Does algorithm show him to you?

It will now.

He's this billionaire.

I yeah, I don't think he's actually a billionaire, but he's got a lot of money.

And he's uh he made his money on Venmo, not the way you and I do.

He bought Venmo and then he sold it later.

And he um uh decided to use his money to try and become immortal, to to not die.

Which you're gonna use your money for something.

And so he's developed this extremely strict health regimen, which he calls the blueprint.

And he looks like a vampire.

He does.

You should you should look him up on your own time.

Google Brian Johnson, he looks like a vampire, which is a little on the nose when you're saying you're gonna live forever, you know?

And he follows this health regimen that is that is so it's like the most exacting thing you could you could possibly imagine.

He wakes up, he drinks this terrible drink, he takes like so many vitamins, you could more vitamins you could possibly imagine.

He measures all 78 of his organs and then tracks what how they're doing and then adjusts his diet with a team of five doctors that he pays to be on full-time staff to do this, and and then he lives in this precisely exacting way.

His story is, as he shared it, was um uh he was raised in a very strict Mormon household.

And he uh made a lot of money, uh, he divorced his wife, he had a real crisis of being, of understanding who it is that he was.

And then he sort of taught this vision for what he could use his money for, and perhaps immortality would be the thing that he used his money for.

I hear that story, and what I hear is you chose one complicated list of rituals to gain immortality, and you traded it for another, you know.

I think it's just more of a lateral move than he might realize.

But he's not returning my emails, and so I tell Brian Johnson, believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you will have eternal life.

You'd say, I know how to have eternal life.

It's in the blueprint.

You know, there's a there's a level of of sort of like objective holiness that I I'm convinced I can achieve, and there's immortality there.

And then we fools like us would show up and say, Do you want to live forever?

Do you want eternal life?

Believe upon Jesus.

That's it.

Jesus is absolutely sufficient.

Jesus is sufficient.

So, what is this gospel which saves?

What is this thing, this story, this announcement that we believe and by which we are saved?

Paul would write things like, For I'm 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 the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

It's the power of God for salvation.

What is this thing that we're talking about?

When we say this gospel is the power of God for salvation.

Paul relays it in a creed.

In verses three through four, he says, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

This is what Paul received and then delivers as of first importance.

You're going to hear it now.

The very thing that if you believe, you will be saved.

That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

This is first importance.

A creedal summary of the gospel.

So let's walk through its four premises.

First premise: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

This is fundamental.

This is the seed form of the church.

If this is planted, and if this is received in your heart as true, you will be saved, and you will be brought into the body of the church, and you will become a participant in the body of Christ, which is the church.

Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

Christ, the promised one, the Messiah, the Son of God, died.

Why?

What are the exigencies that would demand the death of the Christ?

Your sins, the heirs of us, errors, our rebellion against that very God.

All of the warring factions that we participate in that are outside of him, all the ethical frameworks that we develop designed to ignore him, our sins.

Your sins.

Christ died for our sins.

This was in accordance with the scriptures.

From the very beginning, when it was promised that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent and his heel would be crushed as well.

From the promise of the coming one, the one who would be like Moses, the one who would sit on the throne of David, the suffering servant, as described to us in the latter chapters of Isaiah?

The new covenant, which is promised to us when there is no, which was promised to the exiles, when there was no throne, there was no nation, they were no people.

What type of people is made from that central understanding?

A type of people who self-consciously understand I am a sinner, and my justification comes from someone else.

How can that group of people, what would that group relate like internally?

No longer are they self-justifying, and in their self-justification seeking a judgment which can make them objectively God over others.

This is a group of people who says, I'm justified by Jesus.

I'm the sinner in the story, I'm the saved one in the story, like you.

He, when I didn't deserve it, looked at me in love, and at great cost to himself, he saved me.

We are the people founded on that.

This would be a type of people who loved one another.

As they self-consciously understand that they are saved.

He was buried.

The second person of the Trinity, the eternal logos, the one through whom all things were created, who upholds the world by the word of his power, the one in whom all things hold together, was dead in a tomb.

He really died.

Third, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

He really came back so that we have a hope of eternal life, a hope of final resurrection, a hope of true restoration, that we might be truly made new.

And that is a hope that cannot be defeated.

It can't be defeated because it is a hope that takes place in the face of death, which is the most final judgment.

When Brian Johnson gives you a tour of his fridge, which he'll do later today, he says, Now if you or now if you come over to my house and you you come to my fridge and you're looking for something naughty, you won't be able to find anything naughty.

Now I thought when I heard that, first of all, you're a weird dude.

And and you don't sound like a good hang at all.

Second of all, I thought when you make physical health the absolute idol of your life, then you must use sin language to describe any deviation from that.

You know, and you see how it completely encompasses, encompasses the world.

His final judgment of his ethical framework and his ability to conform to it or not will be death.

And when he dies, he will know it didn't work.

In the face of death, he will be hopeless.

Resurrection.

In the face of death, we are a people who have an absolute hope.

It is a hope in Christ, that his resurrection will be our resurrection, that in his death by faith it is counted as our death, and that his righteous life is counted as our righteous life, and so his final resurrection will be our resurrection.

Lastly, he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Christ did not do this in a corner.

This message, this fact of history, which is accomplished by Jesus, Jesus then revealed to those whom he tasked with sharing it, so that we might encounter it as the central fact of history.

And by encountering it, we might be ones who heard from them and we might become like them and believe that it happened.

And so, what type of a world is it that we live in?

We live in a world where God became a man.

He died on behalf of sinners.

He was buried in a tomb.

Three days later he rose from the dead.

His death accomplished the atonement for our sins.

It reconciled us to himself.

At his resurrection, he was granted all authority in heaven and on earth.

And he rose like a king, and he gives good gifts to his people, and those gifts are the establishment of his church, his body.

And he says, I will build my church.

The gates of hell won't stand against it.

The one who rose from the dead, who atoned for our sins, will build his church.

This is of first importance.

If we hold this, if we are the people who receive this as a fact of the world, we are grafted into Christ.

His Spirit transforms us so that we call Christ brother and Lord.

So that we call the Father our Father.

So that we are a new people in the world, a royal priesthood.

And that the excellencies of his name might be proclaimed.

When the church holds this as central, it becomes the church.

If you came here this morning, you were saying, this will be an you know, church is pretty good for my mental health.

And this will be a means to that end.

Have I got a surprise for you?

The surprise is seek him.

Receive the fullness of the atonement that he has accomplished.

It is yours.

Just by trusting him.

And it is completely yours.

Eternal life is promised by this story.

Paul goes on, and I just want to include this as the last sentence, because there's there's almost.

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

No other world religion has a sentence like this.

Because here's the strangeness of Christianity.

The principle, which I've described as the gospel, that is at the center of our faith, which makes us a people, is not a principle.

It's not a premise.

It's a fact of history.

Paul writes to his contemporaries, and he says, Jesus reveals himself to more than five hundred others.

Some have fallen asleep, meaning they're dead, but many of whom are still alive.

Paul's saying, this happened.

Now, what that means is that we are not just here to grasp some grand unifying theory.

We are here to know the person of Jesus Christ.

That these things that happened absolutely happened, as real as you are right now.

The reality that you feel right now, the people that you look around and see right now, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are as real as that.

So the grand wonder of a promise of eternal life meets you here.

So what is the church?

What is the wonder of the church, this body that is created?

Look around for real.

Go ahead.

That's how real it is.

You are looking around at those who are saved by Jesus, who will have eternal life in him, who are justified by the Lord Jesus Christ's death.

This is something that we have right here.

It's the glory of our Lord.

He is working out his church right here.

So when we hold this premise, this gospel as of first importance, don't you see that the meaning of this present life, of the glory of his people, all of a sudden it shines in this ordinary place?

So hold fast to Jesus.

Hold fast to him together.

This is of first importance.

The gospel is true.

It really happened.

As real as this.

And the fruits of it are really happening.

I can prove it.

You can look around and see it.

This morning, you can see it.

Okay.

Are there any questions?

In an era of deep institutional mistrust, how do we bridge our hope from private religious experience to life-changing and saving hope for the world?

See twenty twenty.

And so there's this disintegration of trust because look, even the thing that you're telling me you think is good, you're not acting like that.

That's being made more plain than ever before than than I can remember.

Like we we call things gates, like you know, deflate gate because of Watergate.

And then you hear, and it's like Watergate, this big controversy.

And then it's like, yeah, he was spying on his on the other campaign.

And it's like, that doesn't seem that bad.

And then you lied about it to our faces.

Yeah, I lied.

Politicians lie to our lied to my face.

Like, honestly, it's kind of nice to be lied to to my face instead of lying to me behind my back.

And so now we're in situations where it's like, you know, we stand for the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

How do you feel about genocide?

It's depends.

It's like, okay.

I feel like somewhere our wires got crossed.

The church, you all know you don't live up to the values that you prescribe.

It is the nature of our being.

It is, in a sense, it's foundational to our institution.

We are sinners, saved by grace.

Come into the church.

You will ex- all the sins of the world, we got them in here.

Have you been hurt by others out there at your toxic workplace?

Let me invite you into another environment where you will get to experience all kinds of toxic relationships.

Well, how could an institution like that be bound together, hold in the midst of these warring factions?

It is if they are bound by the justifying sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The one who justifies us isn't us.

I'm not the Christ.

We're gathered around him.

See how that's a different frame of institutional trust?

Insofar as we are founded on ourselves and we are seeking to coax some sort of trust out of the world by trying to prove to them that we can be more moral.

Then we will just cultivate the same level of institutional distrust.

It might take a little longer, but add a couple of generations, and that's what will happen.

If we are founded on the justifying work of Jesus Christ that we are all in desperate need of, then we will be a type of people who are repentant, who receive his grace in holding us together.

And we will gather together and we will wonder at our still being bound together because we know ourselves.

The great judge, the absolute who saves.

So it's some something like that, that the something like that.

In 1 Corinthians 11, starting in verse 23, Paul says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

As real as the bread is, as real as the wine is, this is how real the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is.

As simply as taking and eating, this is how simply we receive the benefits of his sacrifice.

It is freely given to us.

Come, sinner, freely receive.

He will bring you into his people.

And I pray that the truths of it would be central in our hearts and in our hope for us as a church.

Lord, that we would, in gaining growth and understanding of your gospel, of the word of God and truth, that it would take root and multiply, that you would make us a people who proclaim the excellencies of you who draw who drew us out of darkness and into your marvelous light.

Amen.