Legalism v. the Gospel

If you have a Bible with you, let me invite you to turn to Galatians chapter 2.

Galatians 2 · chapter mention

I am the other Stephen on staff, so it's good to be with you this morning.

Thank you to Stephen who's leading us through worship today.

And as you're turning there, let me help you begin to think about our passage a little bit.

A young father's child, this man had just begun really exploring Christianity.

Young father, his child was uh hospitalized, and he went into uh the chapel in the hospital and just railed at God.

He said, How could you do this?

I'm pursuing you, and here you let this happen to my son, and he's angry with God.

And in the middle of that room, throwing, actually throwing furniture in the chapel in the hospital and being angry with God, God met him and said, you know, inaudibly, but in his heart, but I gave my son for you.

And at that moment, the man was broken and realized God knew what it was like for him as a father to have his son go through this.

Son was healed, the man gave his life to Christ.

He's an elder in a church at this point.

Another story, there's a lady who was an academician, and she spent her whole academic life opposing the things to do with Christianity.

And then she decided, of all things, that she felt she needed to do an academic study on Christianity.

So she started to meet with a local pastor and talk with him about the gospel and Christianity and the Bible, and she found herself being pulled more and more to understand and believe the claims of Christianity and gave her life to Christ.

And so she rejected the old life, the old lifestyle, and she's fallen after Christ to this day.

Some of you know that story, but I'm not going to say who it was.

I had a student years ago, and he uh he could he was guilty of a crime that he couldn't undo.

And uh he grew up in a Christian home, and in a night of drug-fueled frenzy, he did something that he ought not to have done.

And afterwards is when he said, that's when I recognized the radical grace of God I'd heard about my entire life, but not until that point.

He's a missionary in another country.

There's a young lady who, when she was a little girl, she didn't uh believe that she was loved by her parents or by friends or by anybody.

She felt completely alone, and but she was involved with her youth group, and one night when she is sitting in her room, she said, it was as if God the Father was in the room with her and said, I love you and you are my daughter.

I care for you.

Complete game changer for her and the rest of her life.

I love those kinds of stories.

I love conversion stories.

I love stories about God meeting with individual people.

I love to hear your story at some point if you want to go and I'll treat you to coffee.

And uh, I'd love to hear your story.

But the passage we're looking at today is not so much about an individual story, it's the story of how the gospel of grace comes into a community and radically transforms it and the obstacles and things that get in the way of the community being what God has called the community to be and made the community to be in Christ.

So if you are uh able, let me invite you to stand as we read Galatians chapter 2, starting with verse 11.

Galatians 2 · chapter mention

But when Cephas, that's Peter, by the way, the Apostle Peter, but when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with them, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas, before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law.

Because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Grass withers and the flowers fade.

But the word of our God stands forever, every generation.

So let me pray and ask Him to bless us as we dig into it a little deeper this morning.

This is a favorite passage for many.

Maybe for some people in this room, but certainly in the history of the church, we are not justified by what we do but through faith in Jesus Christ.

And so we pray this morning as we talk about these verses around it and touch on that reality.

That you would be pleased to do a work in our hearts as individuals, a work in our church, and a work in our community through us as we hold forth the word of life.

Would you bless us?

Would you be with us, we pray, in Christ's name.

Amen.

Have a seat, please.

Speaking with a translator is pretty difficult.

I've had that opportunity on a few uh occasions, and you realize that you you have to really be in sync, and that's very hard to do.

Several years ago, I was in a on a mission trip with some of my college students.

We had about 20 that went down with us to uh Victoria, which is a city in Mexico.

And the reason we were there, the reason I was there is they wanted somebody to come in for a weeklang, week-long conference to this Mexican Presbyterian church on, of all things, the five points of Calvinism.

So uh one, that's a very difficult topic to begin with, but speaking through a translator is even more difficult.

And so the first day we got in and talked about it, the second day talked about it.

And then the third day was actually a national holiday.

And uh we, as a church, we all went down to this river called the River Guayalejado, and we had a picnic and I was supposed to teach.

Now, what was fascinating about this whole thing was uh the Mexicans were very gracious to us, they really showed a lot of love to us.

However, uh, we were obnoxious because we were Americans, and I could tell that Dr.

Alvarez, where I was staying with about seven or eight guys, barely tolerated us and barely spoke to us.

He spoke a smattering of English.

And uh, so we're at the River Guileo, and you know, our kids are being loud and rowdy, and then it we we they fixed food for us and we sat out beside the river, and then it was my time to get up and preach and teach.

And so my my translator was a 19-year-old uh medical student who was thinking about ministry as well, named Arturo.

And uh it was one of those amazing times when we were in complete sync.

So while I was preaching, and I would do my hand like this while I was talking, and I would look over at the corner of my eye, and Arturo's doing the same thing.

So I would say it, and he would say the same thing.

And then came the QA, which is really interesting because people would ask questions in Spanish, Arturo would translate to me, I'd think of the answer, say it back to him, and then he would translate it back.

And something was happening.

Not only was there kind of a unity and unison between Arturo and me, there was a growing sense of connection with everybody who was there.

So at one point, an older gentleman in the uh church asked a question.

Arturo related the question to me.

I gave the answer, Arturo gave the answer back, and uh it didn't satisfy the man.

So he asked a question a different way.

Same process went all the way through.

And then Dr.

Alvarez of all people stood up and gave an answer to the question.

And Arturo, under his breath, is telling me what Dr.

Alvarez is saying.

It was phenomenal.

It was what I was trying to communicate.

We were completely in sync at that moment, even though uh he was saying something different.

But the thing that really blew my mind is afterwards, my students came forward and they surrounded me and they said, What just happened?

I said, the gospel happened.

The Holy Spirit showed up and did something amazing that was beyond anything that we could accomplish.

And I knew that something had changed because that night, Dr.

Alvarez took all the guys in his house out to dinner at McDonald's, because of course Americans love McDonald's.

And so he took us to McDonald's and in his broken English, the best he could, he told his story of faith and how he had come to faith in Jesus Christ.

And I was like, okay, this is pretty, this is phenomenal.

We're watching the gospel for this one short week break down all the walls so that by the end of the week, they were our students were saying they felt closer to this Mexican church than they did to people in the United States.

Close people they were close to because of the gospel.

Have you ever experienced that in your life?

Maybe some of you experienced that here, maybe you've experienced that other places.

I know that the apostle Peter experienced that several times in his life.

Peter was there at Pentecost.

Pentecost was that great outpouring of the Holy Spirit just a few weeks after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

He had seen all of these things.

But then at Pentecost, something happened.

Is they the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles and the small community that was with them.

And then he preached, and 3,000 people were converted in that one sermon and were added to the number of the apostles, the church that was growing.

And when the Bible talks about that in Acts 2, it says this hodgepodge of Jews became a rejoicing church, a growing church, a unified church.

There was harmony, there was deep generosity, there was hospitality as people welcomed strangers into their home.

And it says the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved because it was just overflowing from them.

There was a deep desire to grow and learn together, to share and do life together.

And people experienced purpose and meaning that reversed all of the great compulsion for accumulation of material goods, and they gave to any as they had need.

This was a real community where the walls have broken down in the gospel and they're living it out.

And Peter experienced that.

And then in Acts chapter 10, Peter was the means by which the first Gentiles came into the church.

Acts 10 · chapter mention

If you know the story of Cornelius, Cornelius was a Roman centurion who was a faithful man.

He wasn't Jewish, he hadn't been circumcised, but he did worship the Lord God, and he had a vision from an angel to come and send to Joppa for Peter.

And then Peter, meanwhile, is having this vision where there's a sheet lowered from heaven and it's got all kinds of unclean food from the Jewish perspective.

And the voice says, Peter, get up, take and eat.

And Peter says, Never, Lord, I have never eaten anything unclean.

It's never touched my lips.

And he said, and the voice comes back and says, Do not call anything that the Lord has made clean unclean.

It's clean.

So this happens three times.

So when the visitors come to his door and say, we've been sent from Cornelius, Peter says, Let's go.

And so he's there and he's the one who shares the gospel with Cornelius.

Cornelius believes the walls come down, Jews and Gentiles together in Cornelius' house, and they're eating together without any consequences in terms of like and qualms about food.

The walls came down and Peter stayed and ate with them.

Antioch, remember Antioch, we just read about Antioch.

In Acts chapter 11, you can read about the church in Antioch starting.

Acts 11 · chapter mention

Now the church started in Antioch because Stephen, we got two Stephen on staff, so eventually you and I are going to, one of us is going to be stoned.

It's going to happen.

So the martyr Stephen is killed, and a great persecution broke out against the church when that took place.

The Jewish believers and the Lord God from the Old Testament persecuting the Christian believers who recognized Jesus to be the Messiah.

And they fled.

And some fled up to Antioch, where they established a church.

And some of those people in the church shared the gospel with Gentiles.

And so these Gentiles came into this Jewish church.

The walls came down, and there was peace and there was unity and there was unison.

And they were sending out missionaries.

And the church in Antioch became Paul's hub for doing ministry.

So this church in Antioch is this very diverse church in the gospel because of the gospel.

And Peter shows up there, and what we read is that Peter enjoyed the full fellowship and connection of camaraderie with these Gentile Christians, eating with them without qualms, about the Old Testament food and dietary laws.

There weren't any walls between them because to Peter, Peter saw them as being equal in Christ because Jesus makes us right with God by his work, not by our work.

So if God accepted these Gentiles apart from anything they were doing, then I am called to accept them as well.

It's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

God took this diverse group of people and made them into a unified church acting in unison.

But and you saw this in the passage, but because of self-righteousness and legalism, a diverse church became a divided church.

The walls went back up.

So virus of hypocritical legalism.

It's a virus.

This is what we read in Galatians chapter 2, verses 11 to 12.

Galatians 2:11–12

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

Now men came from James, and for some reason their arrival had a it deeply affected Peter.

And the passage doesn't tell us exactly why.

But if you look at some of the commentaries, the commentators will say it's possible that a cease and desist letter came from the Jewish church in Jerusalem.

For whatever reason, there's a cease and desist, Peter, you can't eat with these Gentiles any longer.

Or there are some people who think that when the Jews showed up, they didn't have a cease and desist letter.

They had a cease and desist attitude that just really came out in everything that they were doing.

Was it a cease and desist letter from Jerusalem or just a cease and desist attitude from these men with pinched faces and haughty eyes and upturned lips?

I don't know, upturned noses.

We don't know.

But we see the result.

Peter was intimidated.

And Peter reversed course on this policy he had of saying, Jesus is enough, and I can go meet with them, because Jesus is not just enough for me, he's enough for these Gentiles as well.

And he uh reversed course on that and associating with uncircumcised Christians and drew back, and it says separated themselves.

So we see the fruit of legalism here.

The gospel united diverse people in the Antioch Church, and the legalistic mindset divided the same people.

Now, I've known people and I've talked to people who say that's what I don't like about religion.

It's so judgmental and it's so divisive.

But listen, a person doesn't have to be religious to be self-righteous.

This is a quote from J.D.

Greer.

Greer writes people who aren't religious at all do this, that is, act self-righteously, just as much as religious people.

Atheists feel like they are fair-minded and good citizens.

Hollywood stars pride themselves as social activists.

And we see this all the time.

People involved in cancel culture.

That's judgment and removing and separating yourself from other people.

It's a pride and sin problem.

Sin can be religious, sin can be irreligious, sin can be unrighteous, and sin can be self-righteous.

In fact, those are the two poles for sin.

The two poles of sin are unrighteousness, which we're very familiar with.

We'd call that sin.

But then there's the other pole, which is self-righteousness.

And the Bible would also call that sin.

And what's interesting about it is these are all in the same pole, and I was thinking this is in God's providence an interesting picture this past week.

Some of you are familiar with the uh fly, what was it, uh, airplane?

Obsidian?

Fly fly Dubai.

The plane this week where the co-pilot uh stabbed the pilot and tried to crash.

Now, as you're listening to what's being said, one of the things they're saying is that that co-pilot was involved in an extreme religious group.

There's one pole.

But then on the other end of the pole is the unrighteous.

Self-righteous, unrighteous on the same pole, doing the same thing.

Because it's all destructive.

Self-righteousness is destructive, unrighteousness is destructive in the church.

So when we look at this passage, the sin psychology isn't that far off.

The same pole, just two different ends.

And this legalistic community came in and destroyed the work that God was doing by separating these people.

It was destructive to Christian unity and fellowship and joy and mission and freedom.

So, what do we mean by legalism?

This is from church leaders.

I used this last week, so many may be familiar with you to you this week.

Legalism in its simplest form is trying to earn God's forgiveness and acceptance through my obedience rather than through the finished work of Christ.

So a legalist is a person who believes and teaches that God requires a person to perform religious works to be saved, to earn salvation.

Now here's the reality as we come to this passage.

Peter didn't believe this.

He didn't believe that statement that was just up there.

He did not believe that our works save us.

He would say it's Jesus who saves us.

Period.

He knew better.

He would never say we earn our salvation.

But in this passage, he was engaging in a form of what, and I learned a new term this week, of what some people refer to as cultural legalism.

Not theological legalism, but cultural legalism.

Peter feared the circumcision group, so he acted in a way that was contrary to the gospel that he believed and preached.

And the passage says he acted like a hypocrite because he was acting like something, somebody who didn't have the convictions he had about the gospel and treating his Gentile brothers as if they were not worthy of God's grace and being called Christians.

So how does this how does legalism happen?

This is from Richard Loveless.

People who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons.

Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness, and defensive criticism of others.

They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.

So we come back to the two poles, right?

One is unrighteousness, the other is self-righteousness.

They're both on the same pole, like the North Pole and the South Pole.

Two opposite ends of the same thing.

Self-righteousness leads people to act unrighteously.

So how does legalism affect a community of people?

Tim Keller.

A legalistic spirit leads to being ungenerous, harsh, overly sensitive to criticism, deeply insecure, and jealous of others because our sense of personal identity and worth has become entwined with performance and its recognition rather than being rooted and grounded in Christ and his unmerited grace.

Legalism is never just directed inward, it's directed outward.

It's a big part of it, and it is contagious.

So, how did that kind of cultural legalism affect this community in Galatia?

Well, it was division in the church.

But it's not just segregation like between two different racial groups.

The false brothers, what they're communicating to these Jews, to these uh Gentile Christians, is that they have lost citizenship in heaven, which the gospel gave them.

They can have no assurance of salvation in Christ alone because you have to be circumcised.

They are not adopted as God's children, that's taken away.

And sanctification in the Holy Spirit has been removed because you no longer have access because you're not circumcised.

So they cut them off, not just from table fellowship, but what they're communicating is you're now cut off from the things of God.

And this is what Sinclair Ferguson writes.

He says, the danger of legalism is that it builds up again what Christ has torn down.

In short, the gospel mindset lives out of the reality of what Jesus has done for us, and the legalistic mindset lives out of the mentality of what I have done or am doing for God.

So what's at stake?

What's at stake?

What's at stake is the reality that any of us can fall into this.

Now, if you're like me, I would be sitting there thinking, what did I do that Stephen is preaching this passage?

What are we doing?

We did, do we have we done, are we legalistic?

And the answer is no, this was in the passage.

So I was just wrestling with it and preaching and thinking, I was preaching this to myself all week.

But then the reality is, is yes, we are all guilty of this to some degree.

Um is susceptible, everyone is vulnerable.

Peter was vulnerable.

Peter was an eyewitness of Jesus' three-year ministry, and he saw how Jesus dealt with the loss, the hurting, uh, the people who were caught in various sins, the woman caught in adultery, that he saw it all, and he saw Jesus.

He saw that.

He was an apostle.

He was a church leader, he was a privileged person with unique experiences like walking on water.

He was an inspiration to many, a courageous preacher on Pentecost and before the Jewish leadership.

He was a bridge to the Gentiles, and yet he was vulnerable, just like you and I are.

And so how does Paul deal with their legalism?

Through revisiting gospel truth.

And Peter reminds Peter, uh Paul reminds Peter of the gospel.

Galatians 2, 14 to 15.

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.

Yet we know, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Now, when he says justified here, that's a legal term.

That means uh that you've been declared righteous.

Now, we're gonna talk about this again.

I mean, it just comes up in the book of Galatians a lot, so we're gonna talk about this a good bit.

And we're gonna talk about this in a couple of weeks.

But the word justification is not an assessment in theological terms.

It's not God looking at you and assessing your life and saying you're justified.

Justification in Scripture is a declaration over you based on the assessment of Jesus' life and Jesus' worth.

It's a declaration of saying Jesus, his righteousness and which he's deserving is now declared over you so that you are righteous because of what he has accomplished for you.

So it's not my work, it's not my effort, it's not my resume, it's his.

And he unlocks the doors for us to be able to come through.

So if you think about justification, it has two parts to it.

One is Jesus paid the penalty for our sin.

So he gives us a key that unlocks the door to the dungeon.

We can come out and be free of the penalty because Jesus has paid for us to be able to leave that.

So when you become a Christian, all of your sins of your whole life, not just the past up until the point you believe, but your whole life is now paid for by Jesus and you're the doors open, you're never going back into the dungeon.

But the second is he gives us a key home into the family of God is we are now able to enter into the family, to the household of God.

And if you're needing a quick way to remember this, some of you are new to this, some of you have heard this before.

To be justified means that it's just as if I'd never sinned and lived a perfect life.

So that's credited to me.

So that when God sees Stephen speaks, he, yes, he does see all the brokenness, but he loves and accepts me as if I had never sinned and lived a completely perfect life because the righteousness of Christ is declared over me, and I'm put under that umbrella.

An old writer by the name of Sir Marcus Lone wrote this the voice that spells forgiveness will say, You may go, you've been let off the penalty which your sin deserves.

But the verdict, which means acceptance, that is justification, will say, You may come, you are welcome to all my love in my presence.

So in the gospel, anyone can come in, and everyone who comes in comes in the exact same way, receives the same acceptance, the same status, the same Jesus, the same spirit.

And this is true for Jew and Gentile.

Jesus is our access, all of us.

It's acceptance for in Christ for anyone who believes.

Now, what's fascinating about this passage for me is Paul is talking to Peter publicly.

And the reason he's talking to Peter publicly is because what Peter and the others are doing has affected the entire congregation of people who are eating.

So there are people who have felt disenfranchised that Paul knows they need to hear this conversation I'm having with Peter so they can realize what the way they were treated was wrong in the gospel.

They need to hear this.

There were other people who were like Peter, who were intimidated by the hauntiness of the Jews that were coming in from James, whatever was going on with that, their cease and desist eyes glaring at everybody.

They needed to realize you don't have to kowtow to them, although they present this attitude that they're in the right and they're keeping all the rules.

You don't have to do what they say.

You go to the gospel, and this is what the gospel says.

And then Peter needed to hear this.

One, he needed to hear it because the Bible is very clear he was in, he was condemned.

He was clearly in the wrong, as the NIV says, but Peter needed to hear this too.

And it's fascinating because Peter here is not preaching, Paul's not preaching to those outside of the room.

He's preaching to people who are inside of the room, who were all, as far as we know, professing Christians, including Peter.

I mean, can you imagine as Peter's sitting there and he's being redressed by Paul?

If I were Peter, and I was putting myself in his shoes, I'd be thinking, oh, I knew this.

Man, how could I make such a big mistake like this?

How could I be such a coward?

How could I do this to these uh Gentile brothers and sisters?

Am I even a Christian?

Do I even believe the gospel at all?

And the answer is, yes, Peter, you are a Christian.

Yes, Peter, you do believe.

But yes, Peter, you need Jesus just as much today as you ever have or ever will.

He's your righteousness.

He's your righteousness when you were standing before the Jewish leaders and preaching about the resurrected Jesus, and he's your righteousness when you have failed miserably and hurt your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Faithful people can be led for a time in a bad direction.

And Peter was intimidated.

But Christ was just as much his Savior that day as he was any other day.

So why does this matter?

Why does this matter?

I was trying to think through this this week.

And you know, what are the applications uh for this?

And one of the one of the applications, I think, is certainly this.

Uh as a modern American church, we often take our cues from social media.

And part of that is not just the content of the message, but the tone of the message.

And sometimes we as Christians, even though we would we would say that we believe, we don't believe theological legalism, we do engage in a sort of a cultural legalism in our tone and the way that we talk to people.

I have I have found myself doing this.

So if you think I'm up here like pointing, I am, I'm pointing, I'm pointing at somebody who does this.

Is I'll I'll watch a video, and then that's my anger, that's my mood, that's my tone against anybody who disag anybody on that side of things.

I do that.

And you do that.

It's it's if you're online at all, you're encountering that and being drawn into it and to the anger and the ire that we see there.

And I'm also really disturbed by the amount of social media sites that are out there where it's Christians talking about what's the problem with the you know, big swathes of people.

I'm like, I don't think that's necessarily healthy in that.

I mean, in this moment in Galatians, the culprits were right there in the room, right?

And he didn't, there wasn't telling other people what was going on.

It's I'm addressing these people right now face to face.

So when he's we can easily get drawn into that, and so we have a decision, which is to engage or not to engage in that.

And the scripture actually does tell us how to engage.

This is uh from 2 Timothy 2.

The Lord's servant must not quarrel, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.

Those who oppose him, he must gently instruct in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth.

So gentle instruction, taking people under wing.

Um I don't know if you respond a lot online.

I don't know if people listen to you online, but I know that the people right in front of you would if you love them the way that this passage is talking about.

This is what Madeline Lingell said.

She wrote, We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how they are, how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

Even if we must point out sin, it's always to point them to Jesus.

There was a young man, I read a story uh a while back.

His name is Alex, and Alex grew up in a Christian church, I think this is in England where he was growing up.

He grew up in a Christian church, but as he looked around, he just saw what he said was a lot of hypocrisy.

And some of that's you know, his youth talking, other things, and his desire for personal freedom.

But he was so angry with the Christian world, he began to go online and he found a voice that was really articulating his anger.

It was a man by the name of Christopher Hitchens.

And he said, Hitchens was full of rage, and so was I.

And so he poured himself into atheism and poured himself into all of these chat rooms, and he would argue and fight with any Christian he came across, and he was typing in chat rooms and everything.

He poured himself completely into it until he got to this point where he really started listening to what Hitchens and other atheists were saying, and he said it was Hitchens' views and Hitchens' demeanor towards people that really began to rub in the wrong way.

And so he was seeing the poles of sin, right?

The pole of unrighteousness and the pole of self-righteousness.

He was a college student and he met some Christians on campus who befriended him, and he said that the arrogance, hypocrisy, and anger of the atheists he admired was in stark contrast to these Christians he met on the college campus.

And he went on to say this.

They were nice to me, even though they had no reason to be.

I certainly wasn't nice to them.

One of my favorite tactics was to insult Christians until they blasted back at me with unkind attacks.

Then I would smile and say, I guess Jesus is really pleased with you right now.

But the Christian guys I met in college didn't fall for that.

It didn't work on them.

They seemed calm, a dramatic contrast to what I'd seen growing up.

These Christians also showed amazing respect for people with whom they disagreed.

A dramatic contrast to what Christopher Hitchens displayed almost all the time.

And he says that through their love, patience, and thoughtful explanation, I came to believe in Christ.

They didn't discredit, they didn't attack, they just explained in love.

And I think these men knew something.

In Jesus, the walls come down.

In Jesus, in the gospel, anyone can come in.

And everyone comes in, comes in the same way.

It's through Jesus.

And that means that everybody I'm talking to is not somebody who could not be brought in, but everybody we talk to, even if they say some really horrible, ugly things about Christianity and what we believe, they're people that through the power of the gospel reaching into their lives and us loving them well in Christ, embodying the gospel to them, may come to believe, just as Alex did, just as the academic did, just as other people have throughout the time.

It's just as if I'd never sinned and lived a perfect life.

I'm not better.

It's a verdict, it's a declaration over, but not an assessment of me.

And when it comes to other people, that same verdict over them, that same declaration over them, I can completely change everything.

If here, if you're here this morning and you've not believed, then that just as if I'd never sinned and lived a perfect life, key is being offered to you.

All your sins forgiven, complete welcome into the kingdom of God.

And if you're here and you believe and struggle like Peter to always embody the gospel, there's just as much grace today as there ever has been.

Let me pray for us.