Do We Have a Role in Our Own Salvation? - 10/11/2026

Y'all remember high school chemistry class?

Uh my memory of high school chemistry class is that most of the time it was pretty boring.

Uh that, you know, you did these experiments, but they weren't really cool experiments.

It was like, here's a glass of water, put some salt in there, stir it up, it disappears.

Like, that's a solution, you know, cool.

Uh, but then every once in a while, you got to do something really fun.

Every once in a while, the teacher would get all serious and say, we're gonna do something that's dangerous today.

And there was that secret door in the back of the classroom that was always locked, and he'd take his keys out and he'd go in there and he'd kind of peek in, and it's just floor to ceiling.

I mean, just chemicals and things with like bones, you know, skull and crossbones logos on it and stuff.

He'd bring stuff out, and he, and that was the day, you know, you had to put on the big gloves and the white coat and the eye protection.

And he would give you this speech about how you got to be really, really careful because if you don't handle these things the right way, they're quite dangerous.

You could really hurt yourself or hurt somebody else.

And those were the fun days.

And that's today, okay?

So we're gonna handle something dangerous together this morning.

It's a dangerous Bible verse.

I don't know if you knew there were such a thing existed, uh, but they do.

Uh, this verse is dangerous.

If you don't handle it the right way, it actually could really harm your faith.

Uh, it could harm your relationship with God, in fact.

And yet, despite its being dangerous, it is a quite beautiful verse that really has power.

And we're gonna learn from the word of God together this morning.

So put on those big gloves and we're gonna get to work here.

We're in we're in Philippians uh chapter two this morning.

And Philippians is this letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, and he's been encouraging them, he's been talking to them about Jesus.

And a huge point of Paul's in this letter is that we all have a part to play in the story of Jesus.

That God is at work to redeem all things in creation to himself, that he's working through Jesus in Jesus' death and resurrection, but that God also is using our lives for that same purpose.

And the big idea of what Paul is gonna say this morning is this that we have a part to play in the story of our redemption.

That it in the way that God is redeeming you and your soul, you actually have a part to play in that.

And we're gonna jump straight into the deep end here with Philippians chapter two, verse 12.

Here is the dangerous verse.

Get ready.

It says this Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence, but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Work out your own salvation.

That's the dangerous part right there.

But let's just get our bearings here for a second.

Let's start at the top.

Therefore, what is Paul reverencing?

Uh, right before he says this, he has just explained the beautiful mystery of the incarnation, of God becoming a man in Jesus Christ.

And Paul has said, look, God, he humbled himself for you, he became a man, and Jesus in obedience humbled himself and went to the cross and died for you.

And now God has exalted him to the highest place.

And so this therefore is pointing back to in light of the mystery of the gospel itself, of this God who became a man and laid down his life for you, how then are you gonna respond to that truth?

And he says, Therefore, because of what God did for you, I want you, just as you've always obeyed, now to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Here's why that's dangerous, okay?

Because uh, when you read this for the first time, it seems to be reinforcing actually one of the most common misconceptions about how God works and what our relationship with God is like.

Here's the misconception.

Um, if you, you know, just grab some random person on the street, uh, someone who isn't necessarily a Christian, but believes that there is a God, believes that there is a spiritual reality, that there's there's a heaven and a hell, but they're they're not religious particularly.

And you ask that person, like, okay, how does it all work?

Like, how does one go to heaven?

Uh, the most common kind of answer you're gonna get about how God works is that if you live a good life and you do good things, that God will let you go to heaven when you die.

And if you do bad things, God will send you to hell.

And this idea is everywhere, it's actually quite common in the church as well for people who know Jesus.

I mean, a lot of us have this same misconception that, you know, how God thinks about us is just based on whether we do good things or bad things.

That when you do good things, God is happy with you.

When you do bad things, he's mad at you.

You know, if something bad happens in your life, it's probably because God is punishing you for something bad that you did.

All of this is not actually true.

This is not how God is.

Okay, here's the reality.

Uh, the reality is that God has offered you salvation as a free gift because of his mercy, not because of what you've done, but because of what Jesus has done for you on the cross.

This is the gospel message.

We preach it all the time.

Uh, it isn't your works.

And in fact, if you're following Jesus today, uh, God's not mad at you, even when you mess up, even when you do bad things.

He loves you as his own kid, all because of Jesus and what Jesus has accomplished for you.

Mercy, grace, his love.

That is your reality, and you can't change it.

Okay.

But if that's all true, then what on earth is this verse saying?

Okay, what does it mean to work out your own salvation?

If it's a free gift of God's, then what on earth is Paul telling us here?

And this matters because that misconception, if you believe that your relationship with God is just dependent on whether you've been good or bad, then you're never gonna have security in your faith, in your relationship with God.

You're always gonna be wondering if you've been good enough.

You're always gonna be wondering if God is actually uh mad at you, or or if you know he remembers something you did from long ago that you've long forgotten, but he's holding a grudge.

Like you're never gonna have the security of knowing that you belong to him unless you get it right that your salvation is a gift of God given to you freely because of Jesus.

And so let's try to get this right, okay?

So if we're gonna understand what Paul is saying here, we have to take a step back and ask just a bigger question.

This is kind of a theology 101 question, and we're gonna do a little seminary here this morning, okay?

So here's the question: What is salvation?

This thing that Paul says we need to work out for ourselves, our salvation, what is it?

This is one of those really common Christian things that we throw around, uh, is the idea of being saved.

If you ask a follower of Jesus to share their testimony, you know, one of the ways we talk about that is saying, like, when did you get saved?

Uh, you know, Jesus saves is one of the most common expressions to say of Jesus.

What are we talking about?

What is salvation?

And let's just start in the most basic sense.

What does just the word mean?

Not even in a theological context, but what is salvation just in general?

Salvation is deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.

Deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.

And what we mean by that varies wildly by the context.

We use this concept all the time in normal life, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways, you know.

Like so let's say your phone is dying and you, you know, you're really bummed because you're not going to be able to do Duolingo or whatever.

And uh you say to a friend, Does anyone have a charging cord?

And your friend says, Yes, I do, and they give it to you.

And you say, You're a lifesaver, you know.

You saved me, thank you.

Like very small, trivial things.

But we also use it in really big ways.

This is a real story.

Uh, this actually happened this week, okay?

There was a teenager in Canada and he was a rock climber.

He'd been doing all this indoor rock climbing, and he decided that he wanted to take it into nature.

And so he went to this place called Crown Mountain.

There was a gondola that went up to this hiking and climbing area, and he got to the top and he took out his phone and he asked Claude which climbing route he should take.

And Claude led him to the wrong place.

It was this super dangerous, like high expertise area where he promptly got stuck on a cliff face and could not go up or down and had to call for a helicopter rescue to come take him off the mountain.

Okay.

So, in this context, salvation is about having your life saved from the helpful chat bot that was trying to help you, you know.

So, salvation depends on the context.

When we're talking about theology, we're talking about what the Bible says about salvation, I'd ask the same question.

What are we being saved from?

So that's the question.

What does Jesus save us from?

And I'd love for you just to answer that question in your head this morning.

Okay.

Maybe you're a Christian, you've been following Jesus your whole life, and you've read the Bible a ton.

What is the Bible's answer to that question?

What does Jesus save us from?

And maybe you're not a Christian, maybe this is your first time in church this morning.

We're so glad that you're here.

Like, answer it this way.

What do you think Christians believe the answer is to that question?

I mean, imagine you were on this stage and you had to explain to the room, what does Jesus save us from?

What would your answer be?

And I I think that for many of us, we have a very simple narrative of the story of Jesus and what Jesus came to accomplish.

And I'm going to argue that there's actually an answer that's very common to this question that's not just simple, but it's simplistic.

It's too simple, but it's very common.

The simplistic answer is what does Jesus save us from?

Hell.

The simplistic narrative is you're a sinner, and because you're a sinner, you're going to hell.

But if you believe in Jesus, then you can be saved from hell.

And instead of going to hell when you die, you can go to heaven.

And that's the good news of the gospel.

And that simplistic narrative, it's not that it's untrue.

Jesus does save you from hell.

It's just that it's too simple to actually capture the reality of what the gospel really is.

It's been it's flattening the story so much that you actually kind of lose the plot.

But we encounter it everywhere.

You know, if you ever go down to a game in downtown Seattle, you'll see this message probably uh from a street preacher of some kind, Jesus saves from hell.

Uh, but that's not the only place we encounter this.

I mean, I feel like I got that simplistic message uh as a kid in church, you know, uh it's because it's hard to teach kids theology.

Theology is complex and there's nuance and there's words that we don't understand and whatever, but kids understand hell.

I mean, they they get fire.

Uh, and so this is the simplistic message is like, hey, fire is coming if you don't believe in Jesus.

And I accepted Jesus a hundred times as a kid because I was afraid of hell.

Uh, and and so this we just kind of take in that simplistic message, but the reality is more complex and it's quite a bit more beautiful than just that simplistic narrative.

You spend some time in the scriptures, you realize the Bible talks about salvation in much different ways than just being saved from hell.

Uh, and it's important we get that because if you just carry that simplistic message with you, then you're gonna run into big problems when you read a verse like our verse this morning.

Here's our verse from earlier, our dangerous verse.

Like, if salvation is just about being saved from hell, and you read, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, then the only thing that you could take away from that verse is that your eternal destiny is still hanging in the balance.

I mean, he's talking to Christians here, and he's saying, Look, clearly you've got some work still to do, and you may not make it.

Like you should have some fear and trembling as you work hard to make sure that you really are saved from hell and that you're gonna go to heaven when you die.

Is that what this is saying?

No, it is not.

So, what then is salvation?

What are we being saved from?

And uh my argument is that when you ask that question, what does Jesus save us from?

The Bible's answer is quite a bit more nuanced than just that we're saved from hell.

The Bible's answer to that question is that Jesus comes to save us from sin and all of the consequences of sin, spiritual, relational, and physical.

Sin is the Bible's word for our rebellion against God, against our creator, that all of creation is in rebellion against him.

And all the way back to Adam and Eve, every human being has chosen to work against God rather than work with him, to pursue our own desires and our own definition of good and evil rather than submitting ourselves to God.

That's sin.

And sin entered the world and brought all kinds of consequences with it right away.

You know, it broke our relationship with God so that we don't have intimacy with God in the way that we were made for.

It broke our relationship with each other so that we don't trust each other and we're not trustworthy with each other often.

It broke just the way the world works.

It brought pain and toil into work, into our purpose.

It brought pain into childbearing and raising kids.

I mean, just on and on and on.

Sickness and death and shame and isolation and loneliness.

I mean, just every bad thing you've experienced in this world is a consequence of sin.

And what the Bible story is about is that Jesus came, and in Jesus, God is working to undo all of it.

He is undoing the power of sin from beginning to end.

And every consequence of sin is being healed because of Jesus.

And when you understand that big picture view of salvation, it starts to explain some of the weird ways that the Bible talks about salvation.

Because the Bible will talk about salvation in in totally different context.

It talks about salvation as being a past, present, and future reality.

Okay.

You have been saved by Jesus in the past.

You are being saved by Jesus right now, and you will be saved one day by Jesus.

All three of those are how the Bible talks about it.

So you know, if you're a follower of Jesus, somebody asks you, have you been saved by Jesus?

The answer is yes.

And not yet.

And I'm being saved by Jesus, and I will be saved by Jesus one day.

And that so three different salvation realities, and I want you to really understand them because this is central to our faith, and it's central to what Paul is getting at in this passage.

Okay.

So the three salvation realities, the first, that past tense, you have been saved by Jesus.

The theological word we use for that reality is justification.

Okay, what justification means is that God declares you to be righteous.

He wipes away the guilt of your sin, and you are saved from the guilt of sin.

And if you're a follower of Jesus, that is over.

It is done with.

God no longer looks at you as a sinner.

He no longer holds your sin against you.

You've been justified.

You have been declared righteous.

Justification is often, you know, what we think of first when we think about what salvation is.

When we say you've been saved by God's grace, we're talking about justification.

The Bible talks this way.

This is Ephesians 2, 8 and 9.

It says, For you are saved.

Past tense, you have been saved by grace through faith.

And this is not from yourselves, it is God's gift, not from works, so that no one can boast.

You can't earn your justification, you can't work for it.

It's not based on anything you've done, it's based on what Jesus has done.

And a lot of times we think of that as being forgiven by sin, that's what it's referring to.

And it's true.

I mean, it's one of the most beautiful truths that Jesus forgives you of all of your sin, but justification actually goes quite a bit beyond just forgiveness.

Um, every once in a while you'll read a story in the news about a court case where someone has committed some heinous crime and they've been found guilty.

And at the sentencing hearing, there's usually this time when the judge will allow a uh a statement to be made by either the victim or the victim's family or something like that.

And every once in a while you see a news story where some victim or some victim's family member will stand up and publicly in the courtroom, before the sentence is handed down, will offer forgiveness to the criminal who was found guilty.

And it can be this really powerful thing.

And often when people do that, they're doing it because they're followers of Jesus and they're obeying Jesus' command to forgive and to love our enemies as ourselves.

But what never happens ever is that you know someone stands up and offers public forgiveness, and then after that happens, the judge looks at the criminal and says, Well, I mean, I guess you've been forgiven, so you can go.

Never happens ever.

Because forgiveness actually doesn't do anything about your guilt.

This is the thing about the world.

Human beings actually have no way of dealing with guilt.

We we can't undo guilt.

Once you've done something, once you're guilty, you're just guilty forever.

There's no undoing it.

But what justification is, is it's not only that God forgave you, he actually removed your guilt.

He declares you to be righteous as if you never sinned in the first place.

The Bible says he removes your sin from you as far as the east is from the west.

That's justification.

That's what has already been accomplished for you at the cross.

But that's not the only salvation reality.

There's also the present tense.

We have been saved, we've been justified, but we are being saved.

And the theological word we use for that is sanctification.

Sanctification means to be made holy, and it is the reality that God is currently saving us from the corruption of sin.

See, sin isn't just something you do, it isn't just something that you can be guilty of.

Sin actually infects you, it corrupts you, it turns you into someone you were never meant to be.

It gives you desires for the wrong things.

It gives you the idea that you can run the show of your own life, that you can be in charge, that you should be in charge.

Sin, it takes your soul and it turns you into something even less than human.

And what sanctification is about is this reality that when you follow Jesus, God right then begins the work by his spirit in you of saving you from the corruption of sin, of removing sin from your heart and from your soul, of changing your desires and of helping you resist temptation and walk with him.

And that's an ongoing process.

It doesn't happen all at once.

I wish it did, you know.

I wish that you could just, as soon as you follow Jesus, it was just like, you know, snap your fingers, new person, never tempted again, you know, never have bitterness in your heart towards anyone again, never swear when you stub your toe, you know, it's just gone, you know?

But that's not how it works.

If you've been following Jesus any amount of time, you know that.

It's an ongoing process, and every Christian is in the midst of it somewhere.

That's the present reality.

And Paul will talk that way too.

This is 1 Corinthians 1.18.

It says, for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved.

That's how Paul describes the church today.

We are people who are being saved right now, an active process that's ongoing.

We have been saved, that's justification.

We are being saved, that's sanctification, but there's a future reality as well.

And one day we will be saved.

And the theological word for that is glorification, that we will be brought into glory one day with Jesus.

You'll be given a heavenly body that's incorruptible by sin.

You'll never face temptation again, you'll never experience the consequences of sin again, no more pain, no more suffering, no more death, just glory with Jesus.

That is the future reality of salvation.

And the Bible will talk that way as well.

This is Romans 13, verse 11.

Romans 13:11

Paul says, Wake up because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

It's not here yet, but it's coming, and it's closer now than it's ever been.

We have been saved, we're being saved, we will be saved one day.

Salvation is about all of this, okay?

And so, Theology 101 over.

Let's go back to our verse for a second and see what we can make of it.

Okay.

Paul says, Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence, but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

What is he talking about?

He's talking about that present reality that we are being saved, our sanctification.

He's talking about the work of the Spirit in us to make us more like Jesus.

He's saying, respond to what Jesus has done for you by working out that reality in your life by following Jesus.

And this is the part that you have to play in your own redemption.

Story saying it actually involves quite a bit of work to follow Jesus.

It takes effort, it takes decision making on your part that you really are going to walk with him and turn from your sin.

And that's what Paul means when he says, work it out in your life.

You know, the Christian life is not like you, you know, God just does it all for you.

You know, he you just accept Jesus and then, you know, you sit down and I don't know, meditate or something, and he just like fills you with power, and that's it's over.

He does it all, and then you just are a new person.

No, it takes reading your Bible and being in community and having people call you out for your sin and having to repent for it.

It takes worship and study and listening to the word preached.

I mean, it's just like ongoing effort.

It takes forgetting people in really hard ways, and it takes giving your time and serving and sacrificing and laying down your life for others.

I mean, it is this whole thing of it's all this effort.

And Paul says, Yeah, work it out.

But remember, it's never just your work.

Don't ever think that you on your own can sanctify yourself.

And this is why I love the very next verse of what Paul says, okay.

Verse 12 work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Verse 13, for it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purposes.

And you're like, Paul, what?

Which is it?

You know, like work it out yourself for it's God working in you for his purposes?

Like, pick one.

And you know, what is it?

Is it is it our work or is it God's work?

And Paul just says, Yes, yes, it is both of those things.

You cannot separate them.

Like, will you ever be sanctified apart from the power of God's Spirit working in you?

No.

Good luck trying to sanctify yourself.

It will not work.

But will you ever be sanctified?

Will you ever become like Jesus without your own effort?

Also, no.

Could God do it without you?

Sure.

He's God, he could do anything.

But will he do it without you?

He will not.

He didn't design it that way.

He designed his relationship with you that it actually is a real partnership, that he works in you at the same time you work in responding to his grace and following him.

There's some really cool uh developments in in medicine in the last uh decade.

I mean, it's amazing what people have discovered and invented and all that.

But one of the cool advances is this thing called immunotherapy.

It's a new kind of cancer treatment.

And for certain kinds of cancers, uh, what they can do is they can give you this immunotherapy, it's this medicine, uh, and they hook it up to an IV and it goes to your body.

And what happens is the medicine doesn't actually fight the cancer.

Uh, what the medicine does is it trains your immune system to fight the cancer.

And, you know, if you ever have to get this, and I pray that you don't, but if you're ever getting immunotherapy and you talk to your doctor about how it works, if you try to pin the doctor down and say, okay, but what's really happening, right?

Is it my body that's fighting the cancer or is it the medicine that's fighting the cancer?

Like, which is it?

There's no answer to that question.

It's both.

Your body couldn't fight the cancer without the medicine.

The medicine doesn't do anything without the effort of your body and your immune system doing the work that it was designed to do.

It is a true partnership.

And Paul's giving us an idea of our sanctification that is that way as well.

It is a hundred percent God's power working in you.

And it also requires your effort and your work as well.

And Paul says, This is what I want it to look like.

Okay, this is this is what I'm looking for in the church.

He goes on, he says, Do everything without grumbling and arguing, so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world by holding firm to the word of life.

There's so much here in these two and a half verses.

And it's interesting at first.

When you read this at first, you're like, wow, Paul like really has a negative view of the world, the crooked and perverted generation.

And that may be very well true.

I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff going on, but the language here is really intentional.

What Paul is doing is he's actually bringing into this story two different examples from the Old Testament.

There's a ton of Old Testament language here.

What Paul is doing is saying, look, I want you to remember what is what it's like when God's people work against his purposes.

And I want you to be inspired by what it's like when God works when God's people work with his purposes.

Okay.

So here are the two Old Testament stories.

Look at what he says here.

He says, Do everything without grumbling and arguing, and so that you can be children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation.

And all of those things are kind of hyperlink words that remind us of a particular Old Testament story of the Exodus, of the generation of God's people who are saved from Egypt.

And God, uh, you know, He parts the Red Sea after the ten plagues and he brings them out to the wilderness.

And, you know, he appears to them and he says, I'm going to be your God, and you're going to be my people.

And he gives them the Ten Commandments.

He says, And I'm going to bring you to the promised land, and I'm going to bless you, and it's all going to be great.

And then that generation, they go to the edge of the promised land and they get freaked out, and they won't trust God and they won't go in.

And they become the generation that wandered the wilderness for 40 years.

And what did they do in the wilderness for 40 years?

They grumbled and they argued.

And when Moses reflects on this generation, this is what he says about them in Deuteronomy 32, verse 5.

Deuteronomy 32:5

He says, His people have acted corruptly towards him.

This is their defect.

They are not his children, but a devious and crooked generation.

So Paul is thinking of when he writes in Philippians 2.

This is the picture of when God's people don't respond to God's saving work, when they don't work with him.

You become this grumbling, wicked, perverse generation that wanders the wilderness.

So Paul's saying, don't do that.

And then what he says instead, he says, Instead, what I want you to do is I want you to shine like stars in the world.

And that's also an Old Testament hyperlink, but not to the Exodus, to the book of Daniel.

The book of Daniel is about a generation of God's people who do work with God's purposes, who are faithful in a really hard circumstance.

They're in captivity in Babylon, but they stay faithful and God uses them.

This is a prophecy from Daniel 12 about how God's going to use his faithful people in the midst of a dark time.

It says those who have insight will shine like the bright expanse of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.

When you work with God, this is the picture of what he does.

For what purpose?

To lead many to righteousness.

Paul's saying, look, I want you to work out your own salvation.

I want you to be like the people of God who were faithful and walked with God and were used by God.

I don't want you to resist his work in you, like the generation of people from the Exodus.

And so how do we do this?

How do we respond to God's work?

Well, it's right here.

We do it by holding firm to the word of life.

The word of life is this gospel message of who Jesus is and what God has done in this world through Jesus.

And his death and resurrection, God's kingdom has come to earth, he's renewing all things.

And Paul says, look, if you want to be used by God, you got to hold firm to the word of life, to Jesus Himself.

The Gospel of John says that Jesus is the word made flesh.

Hold tight.

There's this really cool thing here in this passage, which is this word holding.

It has a dual meaning.

It's kind of a double entendre in the Greek.

The word is a peho, and it has two separate meanings that both actually apply in this passage.

And you can think about it this way by kind of uh thinking back to our story of the teenager who had to get rescued off of the mountain.

Um, the first meaning of a payho, of the holding, it means to hold firm or to hold fast, to hold tightly to something.

And you can kind of imagine if you're on that cliffside, you know, and the helicopter comes and they lower the rope to you.

Can you think about how tightly you would be holding on to that rope?

I mean, quite literally, for dear life, right?

And this is the first meaning of the word, to just grasp on to something tightly.

Paul says, hold firm to the word of life.

It's a it's a pretty good picture of the Christian life, actually.

You know, this world is crazy.

Life is crazy.

And there are gonna be all kinds of things that are thrown at you.

You're you're gonna go through trials and tribulation, you're gonna have relationships crumble and fall apart.

You're gonna do things yourself that you just can't believe that you actually did and you feel all kinds of shame about.

I mean, you're gonna have doubts and fears, like this world is really gonna mess with you.

And this picture that Paul is giving us is look when the storms come, whatever you're experiencing in life, hold tight to Jesus.

Hold tight to the message of the gospel because it's the thing that's gonna save you.

And to hold tight to the gospel, you also have to let go of the other things that you're holding on to.

It's actually one of the hardest parts of rescuing somebody in a situation like that.

One of the hardest things to do is to convince the person that they're rescuing to let go of the mountain.

I mean, you can picture it, they've been up there for hours, just I mean, gripping the mountainside for dear life.

It's actually pretty hard to convince them to take their hands off of that and grab on to something else.

And Paul's inviting us to do that.

Like there's all kinds of things in this world that we we grab onto tight because we think they're gonna save us.

Paul says, no, it's only Jesus, it's only the word of life.

Grab tight.

That's that's meaning number one.

But the second version of that word a payhoe, of what that word to hold means, is not to hold tight, but it's to hold something out as an offer.

And to picture that version of what the word means, you can picture not being the person rescued off the mountain, but the person in the helicopter who's lowering the rope of safety to save someone else.

Word also means that.

And that's a pretty good picture of the Christian life as well.

That our purpose here is not just to be people who hold on for dear life and just try to make it to the end.

But our job is also to hold out the offer of the gospel, to hold the word of life in front of a world who desperately needs it and say, This salvation is for you too.

That's why God has us here.

That is our purpose.

That is our part in the story to play.

So I wonder what reminder you need this morning.

And maybe life has gotten crazy.

And maybe what you need to hear this morning is just to hold tight to Jesus, that he's with you, that you can trust him.

There's nowhere else you can go to find salvation.

Hold tight.

And maybe what you need to hear this morning is your purpose to hold out the word of life.

And maybe there's a name that even comes to mind right now of a friend, of a neighbor, of a coworker, of someone that God loves who doesn't know Jesus yet, and God has placed you here to be the one to bring that message of the gospel to them.

Maybe there's someone that needs to be sitting next to you in church next weekend.

And what's standing in the way of that is that you haven't yet invited, you haven't reached out.

Who are you praying for right now?

Who are you investing in?

Who are you inviting to respond to the gospel?

That's why we're here to hold tight to Jesus, to hold out the message of the gospel, and to take part in this beautiful story of what God is doing in this world.

Let's ask him to keep using us in that way.

Would you bow your heads?

Jesus, thank you for this truth, that you have saved us, that you are saving us, and that you will save us.

And Lord, we we want to respond to that.

We want to work out that truth in our own lives and to follow you and to hold tight, to lean into what you're doing, and to reject sin and turn from temptation by the power of your spirit.

And so help us to do that, Lord.

And would you build a community here where together we're holding tight to the truth of the gospel, but where we're also holding out that truth for the world around us, that we're inviting people to respond to you and to what you've done.

And so, Lord, just shape this community, turn us into the people that you want us to be, that the name of Jesus might be lifted high and many people might come to faith.

We ask all this in Jesus' name.