One Year

Psalm 100.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.

Serve the Lord with gladness.

Come into his presence with singing.

Know that the Lord He is God.

It is He who made us, and we are His.

We are His people, in the sheep of His pasture.

Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise.

Give thanks to Him, bless His name, for the Lord is good.

His steadfast love endures forever and His faithfulness to all generations.

You may be seated.

One quick announcement.

RCD Kids volunteer training is next week from 11 to noon.

So if you are volunteering with RCD Kids, if you want to be volunteering with RCD kids, if you're a new volunteer or an old volunteer, uh you have training uh next week from uh 11 to noon.

Okay.

So we've covered that.

Uh now let's uh pray and then I'll talk about what we're doing today.

Lord, we praise you.

Lord, we just want you to hear in this space from us as your people, uh, that we enter your courts with thanksgiving, that we come to you in praise, Lord God, uh, that you've made it so we can enter into your gates.

Lord, I pray that you would allow us to worship you in a way that demonstrates your glory clearly and our gratitude and sense of your care for the particular ways that you've blessed us.

Lord, we praise you.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, this is our one year in this building in Berkeley celebration.

Round of applause.

Uh, the it it is so thrilling to be here.

And uh I want to just kind of focus in on uh really quickly, here's what's gonna happen.

I'm gonna give like a brief little sermonette, and then we're just gonna hang out and talk to each other.

And if you brought food, you eat your food, and there's a bunch of cupcakes that people made, and you can eat those.

We're gonna spread throughout the whole building and out onto the front lawn and uh just kind of party for the remainder of the time.

Sound good?

Okay, great.

Uh Jesus saves.

Jesus saves.

We can do better.

Jesus saves sinners.

That's what we're here to proclaim.

Jesus saves sinners.

Um, there's this book that kind of got me started in my ministry uh by a guy named John Owen, and it's called The Death of Death in the Death of Jesus Christ.

And that's about the way he writes.

Uh, and that book, one of the printings of it, has this introduction by a guy named J.I.

Packer, uh, a fellow James who went by Jim, and he passed away recently.

Uh, but the book, the intro to that book is as good as the book.

I mean, it's one of the greatest things.

And he gives this summary of the gospel.

And he says, the gospel is summarized in these three words: God saves sinners.

You ready for it?

Ready for him to break it down?

God saves sinners.

God, the triune, Jehovah, Father, Son, and Spirit, three persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power, and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling, the Father, the Son fulfilling the Father's will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing.

That's God, saves, does everything first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory, plans, achieves, and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies.

Sinners, men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God's will or better their spiritual lot.

We're here to proclaim that God saves sinners.

Now, salvation is one of those things that you think you want when we're talking about it in theory, but the reality is you don't want salvation.

You want things to go according to plan.

Getting saved means your back's up against the wall and you can't do anything about it.

That's when you we start to use words like rescued or saved.

Before that, it's just things going according to plan.

When you go for a great hike in our beautiful mountains and you need to be saved, that means something went terribly wrong.

Otherwise, it's just a nice hike.

But our God saves.

That's what our God does.

He saves.

So if you don't like your back up against the wall, you probably won't like Christianity.

Because our God loves to show his glory in saving.

Look at this.

We've been going through Genesis, and Abram is promised that he will have offspring.

Now, you get a promise like that, and what do you expect?

We're gonna conceive immediately.

But what happens?

God waits to give the offspring until it's impossible for them to conceive on their own.

Why?

Because our God saves.

And God says, Go and kill your son and offer him to me.

And God waits to provide the sacrifice of the ram to spare Isaac until the knife is over and about to come down on Isaac.

Why does he wait till then, instead of just delivering the news of it's not going to be Isaac, it's gonna be a ram on the way up?

Why does he wait till then?

Because our God saves.

Joseph is promised he will be a ruler over a people and even over his family.

And what does he experience next?

He is sold into slavery, he is uh he is lied to about adultery, he is sent to prison, and then he's forgotten in prison by two people who he helps.

Why?

Because our God saves.

Do you see how he likes to work?

The Israelites are sent into Egypt, and Pharaoh's hands are pried open by God one finger at a time, and then when they when he finally relents and Pharaoh finally lets them go, he changes his mind one last time and chases the Israelites until they're cornered and their backs are against the sea.

Why?

Why does God orchestrate things that way?

Why ten plagues?

Why not two or three?

And Pharaoh changes his mind and says, we weren't getting that much work out of these people anyway?

Why does he chase them again until their backs are up against the sea?

Why does he do that?

Because our God saves.

That's right.

God leads his people into the wilderness.

And when he brings them into the wilderness, they realize they've just been rescued, and what don't they have?

Food and water.

Why does God take them to a place like that right after he rescues them?

Well, God delivers manna from heaven and then miraculously he gives water from the rock.

Why does God do that?

Because our God saves.

That's right.

Jesus is born, David is anointed and told that he's going to be king over a united kingdom of Israel.

And what does David find himself doing next?

Fleeing for his life while he's being hunted by the current king.

Now, why would God orchestrate things that way?

Because our God saves.

Jesus is born like Moses into the midst of a genocide against Hebrew boys.

Now, why be born at that time?

Why not wait two years until the dust settles and he can just be born?

Why does God send him then?

Why do you think?

Because our God saves.

That's exactly right.

We it Jesus then sets his sights to Jerusalem.

Jesus is betrayed, he's arrested, he's beaten on a cross.

All this before pray after praying in a garden to God that there might be some other way to accomplish our salvation, that there might be some other way without dying, that this might be able to happen.

He asks God that he himself might be spared from going through with this, and yet he goes and is convicted wrongfully, he is beaten and he's hung on a cross, and he cries out to God, and Jesus is not saved.

Why?

Because our God saves sinners.

How do we have confidence that the salvation of God will work, that it is effective?

Because he himself bore the burden in himself, became sin, bore the requirement of our sin in his body and died on the cross.

He wasn't spared, so we know that we are spared.

And what happened three days later?

Resurrection.

And his spirit poured out upon us.

Why?

Because our God saves.

Do you see what he's like?

Do you see what God is like?

The way that he operates, how he loves to save us.

This might explain some of the circumstances that you find your own life in that you perhaps are in over your head.

Well, that's exactly where God likes to go.

Now, here's the question.

Why, why?

Why does God like to save?

What's so particular about salvation that God loves to work things out that way?

What does salvation get us?

Well, here's what we know.

Salvation, when you're saved by God and you say, God saved me, that's a way of saying, no one could have done this but God.

Nobody could have parted the sea but God.

Nobody could have atoned for my sin but God.

Nobody could have gotten me out of the mess that I was in, but God.

Nobody could have, my when my back was up against the wall and I saw no way forward, the only way that we could have gone forward is if God intervened.

And when He saves, truly saves like that, you know who gets the glory?

God gets the glory.

And you know what that makes us do?

Worship.

The proper response of the human heart to salvation is worship.

And what were we made to do as a people?

We were made to worship.

And that's why when you know that our God saves, when you know that ours is the God who, when your back is up against the wall, he's there with you and he will bring you through, then you get responses like this: Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing, know that the Lord, he is God.

It is he who made us, we are his, we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, give thanks to him, bless his name, for the Lord is good.

His steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Do you see how you fli that flows out of the heart of a person who says, I was in too deep, and he brought me through.

Our God saves.

Let me tell you the story of our church.

We were born out of the ending of another church, and it was it was involved a lot of bitterness.

And it was difficult and hard.

And a group of men rallied together to endure late-night constant phone calls of negotiating and figuring out how are we going to move forward in a way that honors our past and in a way that uh develops a future for this church that is really here.

And we had no 501c3, which you need.

We had no name.

We had a lead pastor with no experience, and every Sunday morning there was a church there.

It looked like this.

Why would God start a church in a way like that?

Say it with me.

Not a moment too soon, the church building sold, and we moved to afternoon services at 4 30 p.m.

Sorry, for those of you that were there.

And uh we have a congregation and we're trying to figure out and wrestle through what our identity is going to be and who we are.

And I'm sure many of you wrestling through are these guys trustworthy?

Is this okay?

Are we gonna go for this ride?

And uh during those uh uh 430 services, we saw it's we're gonna need to be looking forward to where we're headed next.

And so we would spend the last uh 10, 15 minutes of each service gathering in small groups and praying together for where we headed next.

And we ended in praying in small groups together.

That way we would ensure if anyone new came to check out our church, they would never come back again.

Now, why would we move through a season like that to determine our next steps?

Come on.

Our God stays.

We set our sights on a particular mortuary in the Berkeley area and this neighborhood, the one that you're sitting in now.

And in uh this particular mortuary, it we saw this would be a wonderful building and just the type of community and just the type of neighborhood that we felt called to and that we felt like we could really connect with and proclaim that God saves sinners.

And this building was under contract and set to be destroyed.

Now, why did we set our sights on that building?

Because God saves.

Because our God saves.

That's right.

You guys are starting to get it.

I know we're not charismatic, but we are today.

Was already under contract.

Why?

Because our God saves.

We took a flyer on the Berkeley neighborhood when this building looked like a total long shot, and we started to do pop-up church in the school right next door.

And I talked with multiple pastors who said, you're going to move your church from across town and you're going to start doing pop-up church.

This is the death knell.

This is not the way that you should work in a church.

But we felt a sense of calling to where we were headed.

So why would God put us in a position like that?

Because our God saves.

We get the building.

The contract falls through because the small group of building preservationists were working the whole time to preserve this building from being torn down.

And uh we're able to move in.

We move in a year ago, tomorrow, on March 8th, and we have our first service a year ago tomorrow, on March 8th, and we gather together and we pack the place and we sing and we celebrate.

And the next week we close down for months because of COVID.

Now, why would God bring us into the neighborhood like that?

Because our God saves.

Do you see the sense of calling that we have to this place?

Do you see that the way that we've come here, your story, church, the way that we've been brought here and preserved and cared for is exactly the way God calls his people.

I'm confident in our church's calling to this place and God's faithfulness to us in this place, like I'm confident the sun will come up in the morning.

Why?

Because this is the way God works.

He backs you up against a corner over and over again, and then he shows, I'm the one doing this.

I'm the one guiding you, I'm the one saving you, I'm the one bailing you out.

Our God saves.

Do you see it?

And what's the response to a God who saves?

Worship.

So let's sing one more song.

Let's worship him together for his faithfulness towards us.

Let's look forward to what he has in store for us as a church.

Let's remember that our greatest hope is to trust in him, to trust that God is the one who holds us together.

And let our church, this little church that could, continue on showing that it is God's faithfulness that shines through.

Let's show it to our neighborhood, the one we've been called to together.

Let's praise and worship today.

Let's eat together.

I pray that the bring your own brunch will be a feast to the Lord this morning.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for sticking with us.

We love you.

Our God saves.