Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Wed Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Tonight we’ll be talking about the danger of falling away, but before we do, you may have noticed we haven’t really spent much time this quarter discussing false doctrines.  And that’s for two reasons:  1) It’s much more efficient to learn the truth than to learn everything that’s false.  If you learn the truth, then when you spot something that doesn’t align with the truth, you know it’s false.  This is how bankers spot fake currency.  They may not know all the new fangled ways counterfeiters try to print fake money, but they DO know the real currency inside and out.  They know the weight, the feel, the color, the proper locations of the watermarks and serial numbers, so when they see anything that looks off, it’s a red flag.  Here’s another way to illustrate this point:

John 10:1-3 - The doorkeeper and the sheep don’t need to train themselves to learn every person’s voice on the planet in order to protect themselves from robbers who seek to harm them.  All they need to do is learn the shepherd’s voice, and any voice that’s not his is to be rejected.

2) It’s more edifying to learn the truth than to learn everything that’s false.  While it might satisfy our curiosity to learn about false doctrines, it doesn’t help us very much spiritually.  I mean, instead of the class on who Jesus really is and being amazed and encouraged by how He’s God in the flesh, we could have spent time talking about how Islam teaches He was just a prophet, but not really God’s son, and He didn’t really die for our sins, He was taken off the cross before His death.  Well, that’s interesting to learn, but it leaves us completely empty spiritually and now there’s no longer any sacrifice for our sins and we’re back to having to earn our way to Heaven by our good works.  No, it’s WAY better to spend our time immersing ourselves in what the Bible ACTUALLY teaches, and once you see the clear and true teachings of Scripture, then when Islam or Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Catholicism or fill in the blank with any other religion comes along and says, “Actually THIS is what Jesus really taught,” we’ll be able to say, “No, sorry that’s not Jesus’ voice.”

Having said that though, it can be valuable to learn about false teaching when we’re trying to understand where our religious friends and neighbors are coming from.  Tonight I want to talk about the danger of falling away from God, but many of our denominational friends and neighbors do not believe that’s even possible, and we might wonder, “How could that be?  How can they believe such a thing?” and of course they wonder the same thing about us.  But it’s helpful to know it’s because of the influence of a doctrinal system of belief called Calvinism advanced by a religious reformer named John Calvin in the 1500’s AD.  Now, there’s no denomination called the Calvinist church, but Calvinism is a theological system that permeates many different denominations.  A common term you might hear for it is reformed theology, and some denominations may even have the name reformed in their title.  Calvinists are not terrible people and they’re not crazy; they genuinely love the Lord and their number 1 goal is for God to be glorified above all else, so we have common ground with them on that.  But Calvinism can be summarized by the 5-part acronym TULIP, and all 5 parts stand or fall together, you can’t have one without the other, and if one is true, the rest are too.  We won’t spend long on this, because again it’s much more productive focusing on true doctrine, but I think this is helpful to know.

1) Total Hereditary Depravity.  We are born with the corruption of Adam’s sin in us, so all of our thinking, emotions, and even our choices are tainted by sin, which means it’s impossible for us to choose good.  Even when we choose to do good things, it’s with ulterior, evil motives, so the good is tainted too.  Since it’s in our fallen nature to choose evil, it is impossible for us to choose to follow God.  We were dead in our sins, and dead people can’t choose to come to the Lord.  (Verses they use:  Psalm 58:3; 51:5; Ephesians 2:3.  Response:  Psalm 22:9-10; 1 Cor. 14:20; Ecc. 7:20)

2) Unconditional Election.  Since we’re too evil and dead to choose God, He must choose and save us.  He elects us and gives us faith as a gift because we can’t have faith on our own, we’re evil and dead.  He gives us the faith and even gives us the DESIRE to be saved and come to Him.  (Verses they use:  Acts 13:48; Ephesians 1:11; John 6:44.  Response:  John 12:32; 2 Thessalonians 2:14)

A few classes ago, Gail asked why our religious friends and neighbors have such a hard time believing baptism is necessary for salvation.  It’s largely because of the influence of Calvinism, which says God’s choosing of us to give us faith and salvation is unconditional, and if there are ANY conditions placed on us, like the need to be baptized, to them that would mean man plays a role in salvation, which undermines the sovereignty of God and detracts from His glory in saving us.  However, if salvation is COMPLETELY based on His unconditional electing of us for salvation, then He gets all the glory.

3) Limited Atonement.  Since God has already planned ahead of time who will be elected for salvation, that means Jesus’ blood shed on the cross was only for the elect, not for the whole world.  (Verses they use:  John 10:14-15; 17:9; Ephesians 5:25.  Response:  1 John 2:2; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Acts 17:30)

4) Irresistible Grace.  Since God has unconditionally elected you to be saved from before time began, and since Jesus’ blood was shed for you to be saved, that means the elect WILL be saved no matter what.  If God wants you to be saved, there’s nothing you can do to resist Him.  His saving grace is irresistible.  (Verses they use:  Ezekiel 11:19; Ephesians 2:5.  Response:  Luke 7:30; Acts 13:46)

5) Perseverance of the Saints.  Since God elected you unconditionally, Jesus’ blood was shed to save you, and God’s grace is irresistible, that means you WILL be in Heaven no matter what.  Once you're saved, you're always saved and you can never lose your position in God’s kingdom.   Since your position in God’s kingdom had nothing to do with you in the first place and everything to do with God, then there’s nothing you can do to lose your position in God’s kingdom either.  (Verses they use:  1 Peter 1:5; Philippians 1:6.  Response:  Galatians 5:4; 2 Peter 2:20-21; Hebrews 6:4-6)

And this is why our Calvinistic friends reject the teaching that a Christian can actually fall away from the Lord and be lost.  And if you accept the previous 4 parts of the system, the TULI, then the P makes perfect sense.  But of course those 4 parts just aren’t Biblical, and as we’ll see in our study tonight, the P just does not square with what the Bible teaches on the subject.

Questions/Comments?

Losing Salvation vs. Falling Away

• At the risk of sounding like I’m splitting hairs, I’m not a big fan of saying we can “lose our salvation.”  It’s true we can lose our salvation, I just don’t like that wording because it makes it sound like it was an accident or like it was arbitrary, like when we lose our keys.  That’s an accident, and it was kind of random and arbitrary.  We had no plans to lose our keys, it just happened.
  • John 10:27-29 - Jesus would never allow us to be lost like a set of keys.  He’s protecting us, He’s keeping us saved, even when we don’t always live right.  I wanted to talk about this in our class on grace but I didn’t have time, but do you remember when I said one of our biggest problems as Christians is that we tend to treat the new covenant like a two-way covenant instead of a one-way covenant?  Instead of trusting in God’s promises for our salvation, we tend to trust way too much in our own performance.  Well, when we do that, it can lead us to feel like we’re constantly bouncing in and out of the kingdom.  Or, like we’re constantly losing and then re-gaining our salvation.
    • If we have a bad week and give in to temptation, now we feel like we’ve lost our salvation and we need to make sure to really step up our performance next week to get it back.  Then if we have a really good week, we can rest easy because we know we still have our salvation.
      • But do you see how that’s a reliance on our own power to keep ourselves saved, rather than relying on Jesus’ power to keep us saved?  Jesus says HE is the one giving us eternal life and HE will make sure no one snatches us out of His hand.
        • 1 Peter 1:4-5 - This should give us SO much confidence that we’re not just going to be living our lives as Christians, doing our best to live by faith, but then all the sudden we wake up one morning to find that Jesus let us get snatched away and now we’ve lost our salvation.  That’s not the way the Bible pictures it.

Instead, the Bible pictures it this way:

Hebrews 3:12 - The Bible never pictures Christians as losing their salvation for not doing enough good works, but rather as falling away from Christ in unbelief.  And actually, right before this verse, the writer of Hebrews quotes from Psalm 95 and uses the Israelites in the wilderness to help us understand what he means.

Hebrews 3:8-11 - Now, notice Hebrews is making a parallel between the rest found in the Old Testament Promised Land of Canaan and the New Testament Promised Land of Heaven.  Just as the Israelites were traveling through the wilderness, enduring trials and temptations along the way, so too are we journeying through the wilderness of this life, longing for the day when we finally find rest in the new heavens and new earth.

Now, when you think back to the Israelites on that wilderness journey, would you say that most of them were trying their absolute best to serve God by faith, but they just kept stumbling in sin.  Then when they sinned, they’d offer sacrifices and make things right, but then they’d stumble again, and God got angry at them because they stumbled one too many times?  No, that’s NOT why God was angry with them and why they missed out on the Promised Land of rest.

They missed out because of consistent refusal to believe in God’s promises.  They tested God constantly with the underlying attitude that we don’t think God is really with us or that He has our best interest at heart or that He’s ever going to make good on His promise to bring us into the Promised Land. They constantly complained and grumbled, they made a golden calf right after God told them not to make any graven image or worship any other god, they constantly rebelled against Moses’ leadership, and then of course the final straw was when they reached the very edge of the Promised Land and God was about to give it to them, and the majority of them said, “No, there are giants in the land, there’s no way God’s going to give this to us, we’ll all be killed.”  And that’s when God sentenced them to 40 years of wandering in the wilderness until that entire unfaithful generation died.

These were not people who had faith in God, stumbled in sin and gave into their weaknesses at times, then repented and determined to do better next time.  These were people who, at the core of their hearts, did not trust or love God.  And this is another parallel for us because…

Hebrews 6:13-14 - Typically when we swear an oath, we swear by someone greater than ourselves to confirm it, but since there’s no one greater than God, He swore by Himself to bless Abraham’s descendants by multiplying them and giving them the Promised Land.  Well, WE as Christians are Abraham’s descendants by faith, and therefore those promises were made to US!

Hebrews 6:19-20a - Just as the Israelites should have had absolutely confidence to believe God would keep His promise to bring them to the Promised Land of Canaan, so too should we have absolutely confidence God will keep His promise to bring us to the new heavens and new earth.  Remember this is a one way covenant based on God’s promises, not our performance, and the reason the Israelites lost out on the Promised Land wasn’t because they didn’t perform well enough, but because they didn’t believe God’s promise!  So too, we don’t bounce in and out of the kingdom and lose our salvation one week and gain it back the next based on how many good deeds we did or how few evil deeds we did.  No, our place in the kingdom is secure AS LONG AS we continue to live by faith in Him and believe in His promises.

Questions/Comments?

Question:  Why is turning away from the Lord so serious?  Even MORE serious, in fact, than the Israelites turning away from God in unbelief in the wilderness?

Now, I’ll put a couple Scriptures up that give us the answer, but just so it doesn’t feel like 3rd grade when you’re just reading back to me what it says, maybe you can just elaborate on it a little or put it in your own words.  You might even have an answer for this that’s not listed in these verses.

Hebrews 6:4-6; 10:28-29

1) As a Christian, we’ve been blessed with the heavenly gift, which could be a reference to Jesus and His sacrifice on our behalf, or perhaps to all the spiritual blessings He brought with Him like forgiveness, hope, purpose, a church family.  2) We’ve been given the Holy Spirit and have therefore been adopted by God as His child, we’ve been given life, character change, the presence of God, the power of God, the revelation of God by the Spirit through the apostles.  3) We’ve tasted the powers of the age to come!  Remember the timeline I showed you all?  How Jesus came to bring all the powers of the Heavenly age to come with Him into this present age?  That’s what the kingdom is, the place where the powers of Heaven invade this world to liberate us from Satan’s kingdom of darkness.  And this would have been even MORE obvious to first century Christians since the Holy Spirit gave many of them powers to perform miracles through spiritual gifts.  Plus they would have seen the signs and wonders of the apostles up close and personal!

Acts 2:43 - We may not see those signs anymore, but our spiritual resurrection in Christ is a power of the age to come, our direct access to God’s presence, our victory over sin, the newfound courage we have, our new purpose, the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  4) To experience all those things and then still fall away from Christ is to crucify Him all over again!

Even though there are parallels between us and the Israelites, we as Christians have advantages they didn’t have.  They were led by Moses, but we’re led by Christ!  They had animal sacrifices, but we have the one true sacrifice for sins.  They had priestly mediators, but we can go directly God.  They had the Spirit traveling alongside them, we have the Spirit traveling WITHIN us!

Illustration:  If I disrespect one of my teachers in school and openly defy their authority, that’s pretty serious, and I deserve whatever punishment I get for that.  But if I disrespect my parents and openly defy THEIR authority, that’s WAY worse because they gave me life, they raised me from birth, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on food for me over the years, they worked hard and made sacrifices to keep a roof over my head, they loved me and took care of me when I was sick.  So to defy THEM isn’t just an act of rebellion like defying my teacher, it’s a slap in the face and a sign of extreme ingratitude in a way defying my teacher doesn’t even come close to.

Luke 12:48a - God isn’t just our teacher; He’s our Father who gave us life and made the ULTIMATE sacrifice of His Son in order to do so.  If it’s the case that the one to whom much is given, much will be required, we’ve been given more than anyone else in history!  We’ve been given Jesus and the Holy Spirit!  Which is why to fall away and reject faith in Jesus is pictured as trampling Him under our feet, nailing Him to the cross all over again, spitting on Him, treating His blood as unclean, and insulting the Holy Spirit of grace.

Questions/Comments?

Note:  Calvinism is completely incompatible with the book of Hebrews.  The whole book of Hebrews is about Jewish Christians who decided they would stay Jewish, but abandon their faith in Christ, and the whole book is a warning to them that if you fall away from Christ, you will absolutely miss out on the blessings of the Heavenly age to come.

Calvinists respond by saying, “If it’s the case that a Christian falls away from Christ, then their conversion wasn’t genuine in the first place.”  But the Bible never says that.  How can someone be enlightened and become a partaker in the Holy Spirit without being converted?  No, the conversion is genuine, but unfortunately over time they fall away and abandon the faith in Christ.

Question:  What are some things that might lead a Christian to abandon faith in Christ?

1) Discouragement from trials.  We may be persecuted for our faith, or we may find that we’re having to make sacrifices to take up our cross to follow Jesus, and we get tired of sacrificing and may decide it’s not worth it.  It’s interesting that there aren’t any verses with the specific wording of warning us not to lose our salvation, but there are a lot of verses warning us not to lose heart.  Because losing heart can absolutely lead us to give up our faith in Jesus.  Trials can make us feel like maybe God doesn’t care about us or that He’s abandoned us and won’t keep His promises.  2) Temptation to go back to our old life.

Luke 9:62 - Another thing the Israelites did was constantly look back to Egypt longing to go back.  God was trying to move them forward, but they were living in a romanticized past.  They remembered all the food they had, but they didn’t remember the harsh slavery, and that happens to us.  We might remember all the partying we did before becoming Christians, all the “fun” we had, and we only remember the pleasure but don’t remember the pain, the emptiness, the loneliness, guilt, and shame.  And I love how Jesus describes joining the kingdom as grabbing a plow, because there’s work to do to co-rule with God by cultivating life in this new Heavenly garden on earth.  It points back to the kingdom prophecy in Isaiah 2 about turning our swords into plowshares, and it’s really hard to move forward with our work while looking back.  Next time you’re out mowing your lawn, try to turn your body and head around so you’re looking behind you, and then see how hard it is to keep walking forward.

3) Self-reliance/Pride.  Instead of connecting to the vine, we live as practical atheists.  We say we believe, but then we live like there is no God, we’re act like we’re totally self-sufficient and don’t really need God’s help or wisdom, because we can be good enough for Heaven based on our own performance.  4) We turn to idols.  Instead of trusting God to satisfy our souls, we turn to people, possessions, and pleasures to fill the void in our heart.  5) Seduced by the ways of this world.  The comfort, the pleasure, the riches and fame can pull our hearts away from Jesus and we can fall in love with all the flashy things of this world.

2 Timothy 4:9-10

6) Neglect.  Hebrews 2:1.  CS Lewis once said, “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”  This can happen in marriage where you just gradually stop spending time together, stop talking and sharing life together, and you drift apart to the point where eventually you don’t even recognize each other anymore.

Now I realize that’s a little depressing, but Sunday we’ll talk about the good news that God has set safeguards in place to help keep us from falling away.

Series: 1 Peter

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

Series: N/A

Service: Lord’s Supper Service

Type: Lord's Supper Talk

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Luke 1:76-79 [After John the Baptist was born and before the birth of Jesus, John’s father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit and shared a prophecy about this monumental moment in history happening through John and through the Messiah for whom John was the forerunner] - Here Zacharias refers to Jesus as the Sunrise from on high.  The New King James calls him the Dayspring, which is the same idea because sunrise is when the day springs forth!  And it’s hard for us to fully appreciate the sunrise; most of us are asleep when it happens, or if we’re up when it happens, we’re at work or school and can’t really watch it.  Plus, we spend the night in comfortable homes with artificial lighting, air conditioning, locks on our doors and security systems, so sunrises just aren’t as significant for us.

But in the ancient world, night time was incredibly dangerous.  It made you vulnerable to thieves, to nocturnal scavenging animals, to losing your sense of direction and getting lost, to tripping on something or falling into a ditch and getting injured, to exposure out in the cold, so when the sun came up in the morning, it wasn’t just beautiful to behold, it was a relief!

Back in 2010, there was a mine in Chile that collapsed, trapping 33 men 2,300 feet underground for a total of 69 days.  They were trapped so deep if you turned the empire state building upside down and put it underground, you’d still need another HALF of an empire state building to reach them.  They had some artificial lights, but the official biography of the men who survived was called, “Deep Down Dark,” and noted that many of the miners thought they’d be facing “a forever of darkness.”

And when they were finally rescued after more than 2 months with no fresh air or sunlight, their pupils had become dilated and if they were exposed directly to the sun, it would have caused permanent blindness, so they had to wear these super high tech glasses that blocked out 100% of the UV and infrared rays until their eyes gradually readjusted over time.

Perhaps this is part of the genius of Jesus being called a sunrise, because a sunrise happens gradually over time so your eyes can adjust to the light.  You can start to see the faint rays from the sun bouncing off the clouds long before you actually see the sun itself.  Later in Jesus’ ministry, He goes up on a mountain with Peter, James, and John, and Matthew’s gospel says in 17:2, “He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light.”  That’s how Jesus COULD have arrived on the earth; shining as bright and abrasively as the noon-day sun, but people could not have handled that, it would be too much; in fact, Peter James and John were terrified when they saw it!  No, instead Jesus is pictured as a gentle sunrise, He arrives as a baby, spends 30 years growing up from childhood to manhood, and through His ministry brings the gentle and beautiful light of dawn to a world that had been trapped in darkness for so long.

For the Jews, they had no king, no land, no kingdom; they were dominated by the Romans and hadn’t heard a word from God for the last 400 years.  For the Gentiles, like you and me, we were, as Paul will later say in Ephesians 4, “darkened in our understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance of our hearts.”  The entire world, Jew and Gentile, was trapped under the condemnation of death and held captive by Satan’s tyrannous kingdom of darkness.  Yet when Jesus, the Sunrise from on high, came, it signaled 4 things:

1. Hope

• Malachi 4:1-2 [This is one of the last things God said to His people before going dark with the silent treatment for 400 years.] - They had rejected His word through the prophets for so long, after Malachi God stopped sharing the light of His word with them and let His people sit in the dark for centuries.
  • But before He did, He promised one day the dawn would come, and the sun of righteousness would rise and bring hope, healing, and joy along with it.  And he paints a picture of calves that have been kept in a stall overnight in the cold, but when the sun comes up they’re free to frolic and play.
    • Luke 3:15 - When the people heard John preaching, and may have even heard his father’s prophecy about the arrival of the sunrise on high, it filled them with hope, expectation, and excitement!  For the first time in 400 years, they had a glimmer of hope that the Messiah had finally come!  Even for us in our modern world, sunrises give us the hope that no matter how terrible things were yesterday, today is a new day.

2.  Sight
- In the first century, people were much more prone to injury and to getting lost at night because they couldn’t see where they were going.  Even today, if we get up in the middle of the night and don’t turn any artificial light on, we might stub our toe or trip and fall, and we’re groping around with our hand out to prevent running into things.

- Luke 1:79 - Jesus illuminated the path to peace with God by giving us sight and showing us where to go.

- Luke 2:30-32 - Jesus came to bring us knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.  He revealed our sins, but also revealed a tender and merciful Father willing to forgive us.  He helped us see things they way they are, so we didn’t have to fumble around in the dark and be lost or injured any longer.

3.  Warmth

• Thinking back to the imagery of the skipping calves in Malachi 4, at night the calves were cold and huddled up together with their legs tucked under them to keep warm, but when the sun rises, it not only gives them light, but warmth and comfort and the safety to stand up and enjoy the day.
  • Luke 2:25 - The Sunrise from on High was a great consolation or comfort for God’s people.  Jesus brought relational warmth and comforted those out in the cold socially.

4.  Courage

• Again, in the first century world, darkness was dangerous, but the sunrise brought with it the courage and confidence to go conquer the day.
  • Psalm 18:28-29 - “For You light my lamp; the Lord my God illumines my darkness.  For by You I can run upon a troop; and by my God I can leap over a wall!”

And I want to finish with a story in John 9 that captures all of these aspects of a sunrise so well.

John 9:1 - This word saw isn’t just about observation, it demonstrates Jesus’ warmth and love that leads Him to help this man who had been trapped in the dark since birth and give Him sight.  We don’t know how old this man was, but since he had been blind his whole life, I imagine he would have given up all hope of ever seeing again — yet here comes the sunrise from on high with hope and healing in His wings.  And the Pharisees were NOT happy about this, and they launched an interrogation of this blind man and his parents to try to find some other explanation.  And when they confronted his parents, they said, “Hey don’t ask us, ask our son, he is of age and can speak for himself.”

John 9:22 - And though his parents cowered in fear of being removed from the synagogue, the Sunrise from on high who gave their son sight also gave him the courage to stand up to the Pharisees no matter the consequences!

John 9:27, 33-34 - He was so bold and courageous because Jesus gave him, not just physical sight, but the spiritual sight to realize Jesus was from God!  And even though the Pharisees kicked him out in the cold, Jesus went to find Him.

John 9:35-38 - The cold hearted Pharisees may have rejected this man, but the warmth of the Sunrise from on high sought him out, and gave him even greater hope, greater sight, greater warmth, and courage by assuring him he had found the Messiah.

But before all this happened, Jesus said something very ominous.

John 9:4-5 - Here, the Sunrise from on high, who was supposed to bring hope, sight, warmth, and courage, says night is coming and the sun is going down.  He knew the time was coming when the light of the world would be put out, and that’s exactly what happened.  When He was crucified, the sunrise from on high died and the world was plunged into darkness again; in fact, God miraculously blotted out the actual sun at noon for the last 3 hours of Jesus’ crucifixion to show us what happens when the Sunrise from on high is no longer with us.

It’s such an amazing thought, that the Sunrise from on high willingly plunged Himself into the darkness of our sin, hanging on the cross for the last 3 hours in the without being able to see much at all, and then He was buried in the grave for 3 days in the dark, and yet — in Mark’s account of the women who came and found Jesus’ tomb empty, he says, “Very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen.”  You see, the son [s-o-n] and the sun [s-u-n] rose together.  The Son [s-o-n] rising from the dead was like the ultimate sunrise that brought hope, sight, warmth, and courage.  And as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, let us remember 1) that the Sunrise from on high bore the utter darkness of our sin so that we could see the dawn of a new day and be at peace with God and 2) no matter what we’re going through, no matter how dark things get in this life, the sun will rise again, because the son [s-o-n] did rise again!

Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Daniel Fritz

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Adult Class

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Tonight is part 1 of 2 classes on Christ’s kingdom.  And I want to start with a couple verses and then a question:

Matthew 4:17, 23 - If you were to ask most Christians, “What is the gospel or good news?” they would probably say something, “Our sins can be forgiven!” Or “Jesus died so we could live,” and those are not totally wrong answers, but those are presented in the New Testament as a result or byproduct of the good news, not the good news itself.

Here Matthew says that the good news, or the gospel, that Jesus came to proclaim was the good news of the arrival of the kingdom!  Now, it’s not that Jesus never mentioned forgiveness, He did many times, but He talked WAY more about the good news of the coming kingdom than He did about anything else!  In fact, Matthew’s gospel especially highlights the theme of Jesus as King, and Jesus mentions the kingdom over 50 times in Matthew!

Matthew 1:1 - The very first thing Matthew highlights is the kingship of Jesus!  He calls Him the Messiah, which is the Jewish word for King.  The Greek name for King is Christ.  While Jesus Christ sounds like a first and last name, we’re actually calling Him Jesus the King, and the very first thing Matthew notes about Jesus’ identity and qualification to be King is that He is the Son of David, which means He’s the fulfillment of God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7 that one of His descendants would be seated on the throne forever!  Remember we covered that in an earlier class as one of the key Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament.  And His main message as the Son of David was that the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Heaven has finally arrived!

The question I want us to explore tonight is, what exactly does that mean?

Question:  How might you define or describe Christ’s kingdom?

There’s a really helpful verse in…

Matthew 6:10 - When Jesus asks for the arrival of God’s kingdom, He’s asking for the arrival of a place where God’s will is done on earth as it is in Heaven.  And the way Matthew structures his gospel helps us see what God’s will being done on earth looks like!

Matthew 4:23; 9:35 - This is a bookend, or we could use the fancy word inclusio, which is a signal in Biblical literature that these are summary verses for everything in between.

Which means if we want to know what the kingdom is all about, we should look to the chapters in between these bookends!

Matthew 5-7 = The upside-down, counter-cultural values and will of God for those in Christ’s kingdom.  This is what’s known as the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus explains how things are completely opposite in His kingdom from the way they are in the world!  Instead of hating your enemies, you love your enemies.  Instead of being prideful and confident in yourself, you are to be poor in spirit, instead of revenge, you pray for those who persecute you, etc.

Matthew 8-9 = God’s power to rescue and restore those in Christ’s kingdom.  There are 9 stories in these 2 chapters of Jesus healing the sick, casting our demons, forgiving sins, and restoring people’s bodies and souls!  He’s rescuing those who had been bound by Satan and liberating them!

Definition:  Christ’s kingdom is the place where the powers of Heaven invade this world to liberate us from the tyrannous kingdom of Satan, where we co-rule with God by doing His will on earth as it is in Heaven, and where the restoration of all things begins.

To understand this on a deeper level, I want to remind of something we covered in our resurrection class about how the Jews understood God’s timeline.

Acts 3:21 - Peter calls the Heavenly age to come the restoration of all things.  Sometimes this period is called the new heavens and new earth, or God’s restored kingdom.  Well, the Jews thought the restoration of all things would happen very soon after the Messiah came.   A) This present age is full of corruption and evil, but B) when the Messiah comes He’s going bring an end to the present age and God will pour out judgment on all the wicked and God will resurrect all the righteous from the dead and usher in C) The age to come, the glorious restored kingdom of God described by the prophets, or the new heavens and new earth.

But instead, when Jesus came, it wasn’t the end of the present age and Jesus brought all the powers of the Heavenly age with Him right INTO the present age!  He brings that miraculous resurrection and restoration power that wasn't supposed to start until the END of the present age and He brings that Heavenly power with Him to the earth in all of His healings, His resurrection of people from the dead, and even in His own resurrection!  So now the age to come/God's restored kingdom of Heaven is actually overlapping with the present age.  Until D) Jesus comes again at the end of this present age and then the age to come begins in its fulness and there’s the final restoration of all things.  So after Jesus came the first time, it's certainly true we're not in the fullness of God’s heavenly kingdom yet, BUT Jesus started that heavenly kingdom now in this present age by the power of His resurrection.

Isaiah 35:3-6 - The Jews believed this is what would happen in God’s restored kingdom at the end of time, at the end of the present age, yet when Jesus came He did all of these things!  And when John asked Him if He was the expected King, this was His answer!

Matthew 11:3-5 - Jesus was showing everyone that the powers of the restored kingdom of Heaven have invaded this present age!  We don’t have to wait until the restoration of all things to experience Heavenly restoration, because we can join the kingdom of Heaven NOW by faith and when we do so, we’re blessed with the Holy Spirit who will produce fruit in us to adopt the values of our Father so that we start to do His will on earth as it is in Heaven, and He begins to restore our minds, hearts, and sometimes even our bodies by the miraculous powers of Heaven, and even if our bodies aren’t restored in this life, they will be in the resurrection!

Technically, it’s fair to say that Christ’s kingdom was inaugurated in the church, but sometimes when we hear the word “church,” we just think of coming together a couple times a week to do some acts of worship, and we don’t see the church on a more cosmic scale, that it’s a Heavenly community on earth that through faith in Christ is changed by the powers of Heaven to do God’s will and where hearts are being restored to the image of God.  It’s why the church, Christ’s kingdom, is eternal because it’s where Heaven and earth overlap, and when the form of this earth passes away, the church remains forever!  And in the perfected kingdom, it’s not just the new covenant church that remains forever, but all the faithful saints under the old covenant too!

The Big Picture of God’s Restored Kingdom

• Genesis 1:26 - In the beginning, it was always God’s plan that we be co-rulers with Him and co-rulers who rule LIKE Him over creation.  God is the owner and ruler over all things, but He entrusted us as royal managers or stewards to rule over His creation the way He would rule, which basically means to cultivate life, order and goodness in the world, but of course Satan tempted Adam and Eve to take the knowledge of good and evil for themselves rather than trusting in God to give it to them.  In other words, Satan tempted them to determine the right way to rule for themselves, instead of leaving on God to tell them how to rule, and it’s been an absolute disaster ever since.  In fact, right after sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, the defining feature of the way human beings ruled the world was through murder and self indulgence, which not only enslaved the humans ruling that way to Satan, but it enslaved humanity under the tyranny of those Satanic rulers!
  • In fact, the book of Exodus begins by showing us what that kind of tyrannical rulership looks like under Pharaoh.  He murders and enslaves God’s people, and yet God sends Moses to invade the kingdom of Egypt with the powers of Heaven and overthrow Pharaoh and his kingdom, breaking His power!
    • Exodus 15:18-19 - God’s kingdom invading earth in the form of those plagues destroyed the power of Egypt’s kingdom and liberated His people from the tyranny of Pharaoh.  And then what does God do?  He leads them out into the wilderness and makes a covenant with them and gives them a whole new set of values so that in Israel, His will will be done and instead of ruling Satan’s way by murder and self-indulgence, they actually become partners with God again, co-ruling on His behalf.
      • Exodus 19:6 - This is a kingdom filled with people who represent God to the world by doing His will and living holy lives reflecting God’s values.  And this was also the kingdom through whom the whole world would be blessed and restored through the Messiah, so Israel played a priestly role in service to the world!
        • But the problem is, as Israel’s history unfolded, they didn’t rule in God’s image either, their kings also ruled through self-indulgence and murder, and they were doing their own will, not God’s.  And remember from our class on the covenants, it’s because under the Old Covenant, most people’s hearts were not given to the Lord.  So God promised one day the powers of Heaven would invade and His kingdom would destroy all the evil kingdoms of men and of Satan, this time for all eternity and that God would make a new covenant with His people where their hearts would be restored through the Messianic King and they would do His will.
          • Isaiah 2:2 - Now, it’s important to understand mountains were used symbolically for kingdoms in the Bible because they represented power, stability, nearness to Heaven, and an overlapping of Heaven and earth.  So when God says He’ll raise up a mountain taller than all others, He’s talking about His kingdom.
            • Isaiah 2:3-4 - Notice in this kingdom, instead of people ruling however they want and taking the knowledge of good and evil, the right vs. wrong way to rule for themselves, they actually come to God so HE will teach them to rule, and instead of murder and self-indulgence, there will be great peace in this kingdom because instead of cultivating violence through swords and spears, they’re cultivating life through plowshares and pruning hooks, almost like managers of a garden.
            • And just a few chapters before Jeremiah 31 where He says He’ll make a new covenant with His people, God promises…
              • Jeremiah 23:5-6 - How is it that God’s people can dwell securely in peace and be saved?  It’s because they’re ruled over by a righteous King, a branch from the lineage of David, a son of David, who actually makes the people righteous like Him, so now just like our King, we do the Father’s will.  That’s only possible of course by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross who changes our legal standing from unrighteous to righteous in God’s court, and who then shows us exactly what it looks like rule in God’s image and empowers us through His Spirit to do the same.
                • So now, think about a verse with me from the New Testament.  When Jesus was casting out demons, He was accused by the Pharisees of doing so by the power of Beelzebul, which was another name for Satan, and this was His response…
                • Matthew 12:25-26 - When Jesus came, Satan’s kingdom was the dominant force in the world, and people were following Him as their king, which meant they were enslaved to demons, to sickness, and to Hell.  And Jesus says, “Why in the world would Satan have me casting out demons, fighting against His own kingdom?”  Then He gives the real truth!
                • Matthew 12:28-29 - Jesus is saying, “If I’m doing this by God’s Spirit, then you know the time has come for His power to invade this world, tie Satan up, and plunder his house by liberating those under His power, restoring them to God, and empowering them to do His will now!”

Definition:  Christ’s kingdom is the place where the powers of Heaven invade this world to liberate us from the tyrannous kingdom of Satan, where we co-rule with God by doing His will on earth as it is in Heaven, and where the restoration of all things begins.

Questions/Comments?

Christ’s Cosmic vs. Covenantal Reign

• Christ’s reign can be referred to in two ways.  One is on a cosmic scale because once He conquered death in the resurrection, He was given authority and rule over the entire cosmos, over all humanity and over every spiritual being.
  • Matthew 28:18 - This means Jesus is King over the whole Universe and has the right to tell every person what to do.
  • Ephesians 1:20-21 - But the truth is, not everyone recognizes Him as King or submits to His reign, which means they don’t enjoy the blessings of His kingdom at all.  No, the only thing that awaits them is judgment by the King they’ve rejected.
    • But for those who make a covenant with Christ, they’re submitting to His reign in their hearts and acknowledging His Kingship in their life.  This describes the church.
      • Matthew 16:16, 18 - Catholics take this to mean that Peter is the rock on which the church is built which means Peter was the first Pope, but Jesus was referring to Peter’s confession that He was the Christ, or King!  That’s what the entire church, or kingdom, is built on; people acknowledging and confessing His Kingship, and when we do that and live by faith in Him, that’s when we enjoy all the blessings of His kingdom, like liberation from Satan, restoration to God, and co-ruling with God according to His will.
        • Ephesians 2:6 - For those with the humility to acknowledge Him as King, God exalts us to be seated as co-rulers with Him, to be managers of God’s world the way He always intended from the beginning.  So in the definition of Christ’s kingdom I gave earlier, I described it as a place.  Well there’s a sense in which the place of His kingdom is the entire cosmos, but another sense in which the place of His kingdom is within our hearts, which is why it has no real national boundaries or borders because Christ’s reigns in people’s hearts around the world!  The church is a worldwide kingdom!

Christ’s Inaugurated vs. Perfected Kingdom

• Christ’s eternal kingdom has already been inaugurated in the church.  That’s why the New Testament describes Christians as already having joined the kingdom.
  • Colossians 1:13-14 - See?  Forgiveness of sins is part of the good news for sure, but THE good news is that we live in this amazing kingdom of light ruled over by the most loving and benevolent King in the world, and while that kingdom has already begun, it won’t reach it’s perfected form until Jesus returns.  In the perfected kingdom, the church now will become part of a the massive community of faithful saints from all time and there will be no more wickedness, no more pain or suffering or death, and we’ll continue to co-rule with God over the new heavens and new earth for all eternity.  You may have a different interpretation of what the new heavens and earth means, and that’s okay, but that’s the language the Bible uses.   Which is why the New Testament also speaks of the kingdom as something yet future!
    • 2 Timothy 4:18
    • And when Jesus comes back to usher in the perfected kingdom, that’s when the wicked will be judged and ALL people will recognize Him as King.
      • Philippians 2:10-11 - One day, all will recognize His cosmic kingship, but sadly by then it’ll be too late to enter into covenant with Him.  They’ll be making the same good confession Peter made and upon which the kingdom is built; but they won’t be blessed for it, they’ll be judged for not making it when they had the chance.

Christ’s Kingdom Wins!

• Remember in Matthew 16, Jesus said the gates of Hades, or death, will not prevail against it.  Gates are defensive structures, which means the church, or Christ’s kingdom, is on the offense to destroy Satan’s kingdom of darkness and replace it with the kingdom of light!
• Daniel 2:44; 7:27 - Even though it may look to the world like Christians are losing because we’re mocked and derided as fools, or because we’re persecuted and have even been killed throughout history, the truth is Christ’s kingdom WILL come out on top and dominate every kingdom of man under Satan.
  • And that’s because the kingdoms of men conquer by the sword and by force, which means there’s always another kingdom bigger and stronger to come conquer you by the sword.
    • But Jesus’ said this…
      • John 18:36 - Because Christ’s kingdom is spread not by worldly ways like the sword, but by service, not by a lust for power, but by love for one’s neighbor, not by conquest, but by conversion of the heart, it can never be defeated.  Even if the kingdoms of men kill us with the sword, they cannot kill our love for God and neighbor, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection, we won’t stay in the grave anyway which means Satan has no ultimate power over us!

Question:  How can a deeper understanding of Christ’s kingdom help our evangelism?

- 1) Rather than just telling people to repent so they don’t go to Hell, we’re inviting them into something amazing!  A kingdom of freedom and restoration and love!  2) We’ll talk more about the nature of His kingdom on Sunday, but it can help us feel more victorious and less like our message is weak and impotent.

Bonus:  Also, I found another great passage that helps us understand the good news, or gospel, of the kingdom.

Luke 4:18 - The Spirit of God came from Heaven to empower Jesus’ ministry on earth, and when it says He was anointed, that’s kingship language, and He came as King to liberate those held captive to Satan’s kingdom.

Luke 4:34, 41 - The demons knew He was God’s King who had come to destroy them!

Luke 4:43 - Jesus left to go share the good news of the kingdom in other cities too.

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Sun Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

In our last few classes, we’ve talked about the incredible, life-changing grace of God, and how He has blessed us tremendously by giving us His Holy Spirit through baptism and I think the apostle Paul shows us the perfect response:

Galatians 2:20 - Having the Holy Spirit in us is just like having Christ and the Father in us because He represents their presence and character.  And now that Paul has been baptized and put the old self to death, the new identity within him is Christ!  Now everything he does, he does it to please Jesus by faith because of His grace and loving sacrifice on the cross.

Illustration:  It would be like if you were an alcoholic and got drunk in your house and didn’t realize you left food on the stove and it set your house on fire. Then firefighters came in and rescued you and entire family, but one of those firemen lost his life in the process.  You would feel a mixture of horror and gratitude, on the one hand realizing your alcoholism cost that fireman his life, and on the other hand gratitude that he saved you and your family.  And if you really understood the gravity of what happened, you’d say, “The old me died with that fireman.  I’ll get whatever help I need and I don’t care what it takes, from now on I’m going to live in such a way as to honor the man who saved my life.”  It’s as if that fireman is now living through you because everything you do is going to be for him.

And the truth is, when someone dies to give you your life back, your life no longer feels like it’s yours.  You wouldn’t feel the freedom to just go right back to drinking again; no you’d feel like your life belongs to that fireman now and you owe it to him to change.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 - Paul wasn’t an alcoholic before Jesus saved him; he was a murderer of Christians, and now because of Jesus’ love who died to give Paul life,  he understood his life belongs to Jesus now!  He was bought with the price of Jesus’ blood, and so were we, which means instead of doing whatever we want with our lives, life is no longer about us, it’s all about pleasing our Master!

And it’s so important to understand this is not a forced or coerced response, it’s the completely natural response for anyone who truly appreciates who Christ is and the magnitude of what He’s done for us.  We don’t belong to ourselves or to Satan anymore and that’s a good thing because when we lived for ourselves and for Satan we wrecked our lives and hearts and set our spiritual house on fire.  But now that we’ve been rescued, we belong to Jesus and He lives in us and through us by His Spirit, which means now we have Christ’s goals, Christ’s character, we see the world through Christ’s lens, and our new ambition is to live for His glory and pleasure, not our own.

And this morning I want to talk about following Jesus by taking up our cross, but this conversation won’t make any sense until we really grasp the fact that we belong to Him now, and gladly so.

Questions/Comments?

Notice Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ.”  We’ll come back to that language later, but first let’s lay the foundation for it with this passage:

Mark 8:34-37

• If you were the disciples, this would have been one of the most shocking things you’ve ever heard.  In their day, crucifixion was the primary means of execution for crimes against Rome, and as you travelled, just like our streets are lined with billboards, many of their streets would have been lined with crucifixion victims, especially after a rebellion or revolt, of which there were many against Rome.  So as you’re walking, it would be horrifying because you’d see corpses on crosses who had been dead for days or weeks, with birds pecking at their lifeless bodies, there would be some still alive groaning and speaking deliriously.  Rome did this so it would be front and center on everyone’s minds what happens when you betray the Empire.
  • And as Jesus’ disciples, you would be SO thankful because you believed Jesus was coming to destroy Rome and put an end to these crucifixions once and for all!
  • Yet Jesus is saying, “If you want to be My disciple, you must be willing to be crucified.”  How’s that for a sales pitch?  He didn’t say, “If you wish to come after Me, I’ll make you richer than your wildest imagination and everything will go great for you in life.”  No, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”  To first century ears, taking up your cross meant 4 things:
    • 1) Suffering - crucifixion was tortuously painful.  It’s where we get our word excruciating from.
    • 2) Shame - they lived in an honor/shame culture and honor was all about the good you do for your family and community.  Well, crucifixion was a sign to everyone that you did wrong by your family and community, so there was a horrible stigma of shame attached to it.  Plus, you were hung naked and lifted up publicly for all to see and it was an incredibly dishonorable way to die and the shared public sentiment was that you deserved it because you’re a shameful and dishonorable person.
    • 3) Sacrifice - When criminals were crucified, their lives were sacrificed for the good of Rome.  In the mind of the Romans, their death improved everyone’s lives and preserved peace in the empire, which in a roundabout way was kind of like a sacrifice to the gods because they believed peace and order in the empire was the will of the gods.
    • 4) Surrender - When the Romans crucified you, they made you carry your own cross.  Think of how humiliating that would have been to have to carry your own instrument of execution.  It would be like today if you were sentenced to execution by lethal injection, but the government made you fill up the syringes.   It’s incredibly disturbing, but it’s a sign of surrender.  You’re conceding defeat because you recognize there’s nothing I can do at this point, my death is inevitable.
      • And here’s the amazing thing:  these are all the things Jesus went through to save us.  So when Jesus tells us to take up our cross, He says to take it up and follow HIM, because He took up His cross for us first.  And unlike a fireman who dies saving a family and all of society lauds them as a hero for it, Jesus was viewed as a piece of garbage who deserved what He got.
        • And then Jesus says to His disciples, if you’re going to follow Me, you need to be willing to suffer physical and emotional pain for your faith, you need to be willing to endure shame and social humiliation, you need to be willing to sacrifice your life for God and surrender to His will, even if it means the whole world treats you like garbage too.
        • Yet as terrible as that sounds, Jesus says, “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
        • Question:  What does He mean by that?
          • 1) Well, when He took up His cross and lost His life, He actually found life because of it and was resurrected to the right hand of the Father for all eternity.  So like Jesus, we’re trading the temporal for the eternal!  If someone asked you, “Would you rather have a blissful 80 years followed by an eternity of suffering, or 80 years of suffering followed by an eternity of bliss?” the answer would be obvious!  We wouldn’t LIKE suffering for 80 years, but it would absolutely be worth it for a blissful eternity.
            • Romans 8:18 - A man named Jim Elliot died for his faith in the mid 1900’s.  He and 4 other missionaries were trying to reach the Waorani tribe in Ecuador with the good news of Jesus, and tragically they were speared to death by the tribesmen.  In one of his journal entries this quote was found: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  His point is none of us can keep our earthly lives anyway.  We’re all just here temporarily, so why not give these lives we cannot keep to Jesus, and in exchange He’ll give us eternal life and blessings we can never lose?
            • 2) There’s a sense in which, by living lives of sacrifice in service to others, we find our lives right now.  We don’t have to wait until we die to find life, because remember in baptism it’s as if we’ve already died with Christ and have eternal life in Him now!
              • John 10:10 - God hardwired us to get the most satisfaction in life and to feel the most sense of purpose and honor and accomplishment in taking up our cross to live for Him and our neighbors.  One of the problems of sin we didn’t mention in our problem of sin class, simply for time’s sake, was that it mars and corrupts God’s image in us.  We were made to be like God in our character, and sin makes us unlike God, which means the more we live for ourselves, the more we deviate from our purpose in life and we’re confused and disoriented and dissatisfied, which explains so much of the problems of modern society.  Even though Satan tries to convince us that comfort and pleasure are WAY better than taking up our cross, it only leaves us empty.  But by Jesus taking up His cross, He was showing us how to live in line with our purpose, which is to be like God Himself, and thus to be truly satisfied at a deep, soul level in life.  CS Lewis once said, “The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.”

Comments/Questions?

The Three Crucifixions of a Christian

• Galatians 2:20 - Here’s the first crucifixion.  1) We are crucified with Christ.
• Galatians 6:14 - Here are the second and third crucifixions.  2) The world has been crucified to us and 3) we have been crucified to the world.
  • Question:  What do you think are the distinctions between these three crucifixions?
    • 1) We’re crucified with Christ
      • A) This is connected to baptism where we join ourselves to Christ’s death.  Which means instead of ME literally dying for my sins like I deserve, Christ died for me, and then I join myself to His death so that His death counts as mine.  Which means my debt of death to God has been paid and now I’m free to live!  B) It also means my old self died and life is no longer about me anymore, it’s all about living for Jesus!
        • 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 - When Christ died for our sins, it’s as if we all died with Him because He was taking the death we owed upon Himself.  And because of it, now we no longer live for ourselves.  It’s not about me anymore because I died!  Now, it’s about living for Jesus who died and rose again on our behalf!  And notice again, we do it NOT out of obligation or coercion, but out of love.  Love now drives us to live in honor of the one who loved us enough to die for us so we could be saved!  It’s love that controls my behavior and thoughts now, not my old fleshly impulses.
          • But I do think it’s worth noting that dying to our old self is described as crucifixion because even though we love Jesus and want so desperately to live in a way that honors Him, it’s incredibly painful to leave our old wants and desires and habits behind.  It can be a multiple times a week process to re-nail our old self to the cross.
    • 2) The world is crucified to us.
      • A) Paul is saying he has put the world up on the cross and treated the world like garbage that has nothing to offer Him.  He has treated the world with the same contempt and rejection Jesus endured.  Now, he’s not talking about crucifying people in the world, but the worldly way of thinking, the worldly value system that favors might over right, pleasure and comfort over service, survival of the fittest, do whatever feels good in the moment, if someone hurts you, you hurt them back, any and all worldly philosophy that sets itself against the way of Christ.  Paul put all that up on the cross and said, “The way of the world is dead to me now.”  And the crucifixion language is violent!  Paul isn’t just saying, “Well I appreciate the world’s perspective, but it’s just not for me,” no he’s utterly rejecting the evil ways of the world’s thinking and living, he’s spitting on it, driving nails through it, and suffocating it the way the world did to Jesus because the world has nothing to offer him.
        • • Philippians 3:8
      • 3) We’re crucified to the world
        • If we crucify the world, the world is going to crucify us.  Just as they rejected and crucified Christ by their evil way of thinking and living, so too will they reject us and they’ll view us as dead to them because in their minds we have nothing to offer the world.
          • John 15:19 - This is why Jesus said to be willing to take up our cross, because unfortunately our association with Him means this world will make us suffer, this world will try to shame and humiliate us, we’ll have to sacrifice “the good life” in this world, and the world may even decide to kill us like they killed Jesus.  And we should be absolutely willing to go to our deaths for Him because He went to His death for us, and as horrific as that sounds, Jesus showed us in the resurrection that it’s actually the path to victory.  We’ll talk more about the nature of Christ’s kingdom in our next two classes, but it’s completely counterintuitive because in Christ’s kingdom the path to victory is through earthly defeat, the path to strength is earthly weakness, and the way up is down.

Rhetorical question:  When you understand the radical call of Jesus to deny self, take up our cross, and live this completely backwards and counterintuitive kind of life, does anyone think we could possibly live a life like this by our own strength and will power?  There’s no way.  The only way we can take up our cross is by the power of the Holy Spirit and our daily connection with Jesus.  Paul didn’t say, “Now that Christ gave Himself for me, I’m still alive, I’m just trying harder.”  No, he said, “I’m dead and Christ is the one living in me.”  And Christ had constant connection to His Father during His ministry, and we’re going to need that too.

John 15:4-5.  Question:  What are some practical ways to improve our communication with God, both to speak to Him in prayer and to hear Him through Bible reading?

- 1) Think of it as transferring dependence.  Then it becomes a need, not just a routine.  2) Be real and honest with God, don’t just pray formulaically things you think He wants to hear.  3) Part of taking up our cross means sacrificing our time to be present with God and crucifying our restlessness that keeps us from sitting still.

Question:  What are some practical ways to defeat temptation to sin through self-denial?

- 1) Set down our pride and seek help.  2) Remember the self-denial is only in a temporal sense.  There’s no ultimate self-denial because actually we’re doing the best thing possible for ourselves by trusting God.  Saying “no” to some temporary pleasure is saying “yes” to eternal pleasure.  3) Remember sin just sets our house on fire, and Jesus denied Himself and took up His cross to save us from it, so we’re taking up our cross and denying ourselves this sin to live in His honor.  4) Remember we’re crucifying the world because it has nothing to offer us.

Philippians 2:5-8.  Question:  What are some practical ways to empty ourselves and become a servant for others?

- 1) Have the humility to realize you’re not above certain tasks.  Sometimes we might look down on an act of service as too lowly and demoralizing, but remember Jesus washed feet, the job of a slave, and died on a cross to serve us in the most demoralizing way possible.  2) Build in to your weekly schedule time to serve others.  Sometimes we fill up our schedule with all the things we want to do and there’s no time left over for others.  3) Ask, “Is this worse than dying for our faith?”  If we’re willing to literally die for Jesus, then any act of service will feel like nothing in comparison.

If we want to take up our cross, we need to say with Paul…

Galatians 2:20

Series: N/A

Service: Lord’s Supper Service

Type: Lord's Supper Talk

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

First to the Tomb, First to the Truth

Of all the people Jesus could have appeared to first after his resurrection, he chose Mary Magdalene.

Not the twelve. Not his mother. Not the religious leaders who had watched his trial, or the crowds who had lined the streets on Palm Sunday. The first person the risen Lord spoke to was a woman who appears in the Bible exactly once before the cross — in three verses in Luke 8 — and almost nowhere else.

That choice is worth sitting with, because it says something profound about the kind of Savior we remember at this table.

Who Mary Was

Luke 8 tells us three things about Mary Magdalene. She had been possessed by seven demons — a detail that deserves weight. We don't know exactly what her life looked like during that time, but we know it was not good. Jesus cast those demons out of her, and from that moment she was changed completely.

She became one of a group of women who traveled with Jesus and his disciples through the cities of Galilee. And she used her own money to help fund the mission — making sure Jesus and those with him had food and resources to continue the work God had sent him to do.

That's all Scripture tells us about her before the cross. There is nothing in the Bible about her being a prostitute. There is nothing about a romantic relationship with Jesus. Those ideas come from tradition and speculation, not the text. What the text does give us is a woman who had been freed from something terrible, and who responded to that freedom with total devotion.

She watched Jesus die. She stayed after others left to find out exactly where he was buried. She came back three days later with spices to anoint his body — determined to give him the proper burial he deserved.

Singly Focused, and Missing the Point

When Mary arrived at the tomb that morning and found the stone rolled away, she ran to tell the disciples. Peter and John sprinted back to the tomb, saw the empty grave clothes, and left — confused, not yet understanding. Mary stayed.

She stooped down and looked into the tomb, and saw two angels sitting where Jesus had been laid. They asked her: "Woman, why are you weeping?"

Her answer is striking. The angel had already told her — directly, clearly — that Jesus had risen. But she answered: "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."

She wasn't being stubborn. She was being human. She had come to anoint a body. That task had been consuming her for three days. And when the mind is fixed on one thing with that kind of grief-driven intensity, new information — even angelic announcements — can fail to break through. She heard what the angel said. She just couldn't process it yet.

Then she turned and saw someone she assumed was the gardener. He asked the same question: "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?"

These are, as far as we know, the first words the risen Jesus spoke after his resurrection. And they were questions — not corrections, not rebukes. Just: Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?

Mary held her ground. Still working from her original mission: "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."

Tears still flowing. Spices still in hand. Still trying to get to the body of her Lord.

One Word

Then Jesus said one word.

"Mary."

Everything changed.

That's all it took. Not an explanation of the resurrection. Not a theological argument. Not a rebuke for her confusion. Just her name, spoken by the voice she knew, and the weight of three days of grief lifted instantly.

She turned and called him Rabboni — a word even more personal than Rabbi. My teacher. She grabbed hold of him, and the Gospel accounts suggest the other women who had come to the tomb did the same — clutching his feet, not letting go.

Jesus didn't tell her not to touch him. He let people touch his body after the resurrection — that was part of the proof that he was real, that this was not a vision or a ghost. What he gently redirected was the clinging, the holding on as if to keep him from leaving again. "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father." There was still more to come. She would have to learn to live with him present in a different way.

And then he gave her a message to carry: "Go to my brethren and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.'"

My Father and your Father. My God and your God. He was inviting her — inviting all of them — into the same relationship with God that he himself held.

Why Mary

It's worth asking why Jesus appeared to her first. If you were writing the script, you might have him appear to his mother, or to Peter, or to one of the inner circle. Instead, he chose the woman from Luke 8. Three verses before the cross. Freed from seven demons. Faithful to the end.

Perhaps because she needed it most. Perhaps because he wanted her to know that she was not on the margins of his concern — she was at the center of it. The first name he spoke after conquering death was hers.

Jesus knows what each person needs. He knew what Mary needed in that garden on that morning: not an argument, not a lecture. Just to hear her name in his voice.

When the trays come to you today, that is what this table is. It is Jesus, speaking your name. Reminding you that he is risen, that he is with the Father, and that the relationship he has with God — he has extended to you.

He knows what you need. He knew what Mary needed. And he met her exactly there.

He will meet you here too.

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Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Galatians 2:21 - One of the most common problems Paul faced when talking to his fellow Jews about Jesus was that they didn’t think they needed Jesus to die for them!  They said, “What are you talking about Paul?  We can be right with God on our own by keeping the Law He gave us through Moses!  We don’t need a Savior to come die on a cross to make us right with God!”  And truthfully, Jews to this day who don’t follow Jesus say the same thing!  Muslims say they didn’t need Jesus to die for them either, and they claim God removed Jesus from the cross before He died.  Atheists of course don’t believe they needed Him to die for their sins either.  And Paul’s point in Galatians 2:21 is this: “If we could be saved without Him, then His death was completely needless!”

Illustration:  It would be like if a fireman saw a family’s house on fire and he ran through the front door to save them and he dies in the process, but he didn’t realize the family had already escaped out the back door!  So when the news anchor interviews the family they say through tears, “Wow, that fireman was so courageous and we hate so much that he lost his life because this just wasn’t necessary.  If only he had known we already saved ourselves and didn’t need him to save us, he could have lived.”

Now, I suppose there’s a world in which something like that could happen, it’s an honest mistake.  But the analogy needs to be sharpened because most of the time when people say they don’t need Jesus to save them, they’re not saying our house was on fire but we escaped ourselves; they’re saying, “Our house wasn’t on fire at all and there was nothing we needed to be saved FROM.”  So now it would be like a fireman who gets no call at all that there’s a fire in the house, he sees no smoke, zero evidence of a fire, and yet he bursts through the front door and says to the family, “I’m here to save you all!”  And they say, “From what?  There’s not even a fire here.”  And he says, “Oh yes there is I just know it, so let’s get you to safety, and as he’s trying to corral the family out the door, he trips and hits his head on the coffee table and dies.”  Now when the news anchors interview the family they say, “Wow, that fireman was certifiably insane!  He died for absolutely nothing because there was no fire or any evidence that we needed saving at all.”

That’s a FAR less likely scenario than the first one; the chances of a fireman breaking into your house because he invented a fire in his mind that didn’t exist are pretty much zero, and THIS is Paul’s point in Galatians 2:21.  Many people were basically telling him, “Our house isn’t on fire, we aren’t in trouble and we don’t need saving,” and Paul is saying, “Then why in the world would Jesus leave Heaven and come to earth to live a life of suffering, rejection, and ultimately be killed in the most horrific way imaginable?  If we didn’t NEED Him to do that for us, then His death on a cross was pointless!”

Now, maybe someone says, “But Brian, just because we didn’t need Him to die for our sins doesn’t mean His death was pointless.  I mean, He still could have inspired others by His courage to take a stand and be willing to die for one’s convictions.”  Yea but the problem is one of His convictions was that His death was meant to forgive us of our sins.  So if you think that claim was delusional because He didn’t have to die for our sins and there was no fire to save us from, then his death is not courageous, it’s just crazy.  Just like that crazy fireman was not an inspirational figure, Jesus wouldn’t be eithe.  No, we’re left with only one of two options:  A) Jesus died for our sins or B) His death was completely pointless.  There’s no middle ground position, and my hope this morning is to convince you to believe what Jesus claimed about the reason for His death and what all of His early followers claimed about it too.

Matthew 26:28

1 Peter 2:24

1 Corinthians 15:3 - If we are to believe that Jesus’ death wasn’t pointless or needless, but that He really DID die for our sins, the question is why did we need Him to do that?  Why do we need a Savior?  Let me give you 3 reasons:

1. Our Sin Leads to Physical and Spiritual Death

• When God created human beings, He put us in a garden where we could live forever with Him in peace.  He gave Adam and Eve so many blessings to enjoy with beautiful trees and delicious fruit, four rivers (actual rivers, not the BBQ place, though that would have been awesome), the garden was surrounded by rich resources like gold and onyx stone, they could eat from the tree of life and live forever, and Adam and Eve had the joy of each other’s companionship and all the pleasures of their sexual union in marriage and everything was on a perfect trajectory to give them and their children the best life in the presence of God.  And yet God placed one restriction on them.
  • Genesis 2:16-17 - As is so often the case with human beings, even if we have 1000 other options, we hate being forbidden from anything.  It’s like when you’re a kid, you may not have ever thought about a specific room upstairs because you’re too busy enjoying the rest of the house, but the second your parents say, “That room is forbidden,” it’s like now it’s all you can think about!  And that’s in part because Satan tempts us to fixate on the forbidden.  Satan WANTS us to die so if he can get us to violate God’s laws and put us under the curse of death, he’ll dangle that forbidden fruit in front of our faces to try to get us to give in!  And that’s what he did with Eve!  He told her, “God’s lying to you, you can’t trust Him.  If you eat this fruit, you won’t die!”  And instead of trusting God, she trusted Satan, and she and Adam both ate the fruit, and as a result were sentenced to two kinds of death.
    • 1) Physical death.
      • Genesis 3:19, 24 - God created humans from the dust by breathing His breath or spirit into us, yet here we see there’s going to be a reversal of that process and one day our spirit is going to leave our bodies.  Before sin, there was no physical death.  Adam and Eve were meant to live forever with God eating from the tree of life.  But once they sinned, they were cut off from the tree of life and the process of physical death began as their bodies gradually decayed over time until the final day of their life when they would die, their souls would leave their bodies, and they would return to the dust.  And even though Adam and Eve started it, we’ve all perpetuated the curse of death in our own lives by sinning against God like they did, and we’ll talk more about that in a second.
    • 2) Spiritual death.
      • Genesis 3:8 - Instead of living with God in peace, sin makes us ashamed and afraid to face God.  It fractures our relationship so now we’re no longer right with Him and we’re sentenced to something far worse than physical death; we’re sentenced to spend eternity apart from Him in Hell.
        • Sin is any violation of God’s will, whether in thought or in action.  And it’s not just a legal infraction because we’ve broken God’s law, it’s a personal infraction because we’ve broken His heart!  And you might say, “Well why can’t He just let us off the hook?  If He’s supposed to be a loving God, why does He have to sentence us to physical and spiritual death?”  It’s because God cannot violate His nature.  Scripture says God cannot tell a lie because He is truth by nature.  Likewise, He cannot let sin go unpunished and let us off the hook because it would violate His nature as a God of justice.
          • Proverbs 17:15 - If there’s a judge in court who’s condemning innocent people, that’s an abomination to God, but also if a judge is letting guilty people off the hook and justifying criminals by declaring them innocent, that TOO is an abomination.  And it’s an abomination to us too!  If someone committed a crime against you and during the trial the judge said to the one who wronged you, “You know what?  I know you committed a crime, but I’m feeling really loving and generous today so you’re free to go,” you would cry out, “Injustice!”  If God were to just forgive us and let us off the hook, He would be committing injustice and it would violate His nature.  Which means there’s a major tension between His nature as a God of love and His nature as a God of justice.  Even though He loves us, His justice requires our physical and spiritual death.
            • And this is why we needed Jesus to die for our sins, and why it’s the greatest news in the world!  You see, because God loved us SO much and didn’t want us to die physically or spiritually, He allowed His Son Jesus to die in our place.  This way, God’s justice could be maintained because the penalty for sin was paid, yet God’s love for us was maintained too because didn’t have to pay the penalty; Jesus paid it for us.  And notice what Paul said this allowed God to do…
              • • Romans 3:26b - Remember He said a judge who justifies the wicked is an abomination?  Well because of Jesus, God can justify us, the wicked, while still being just.  He can declare the guilty to be innocent, because Jesus took the sentence of death we owed for our guilt.  So now God can be both just and the justifier of evil sinners like us if we’ll put our faith in the death of His Son on our behalf.
                • Now, if you’re in doubt about whether you’ve sinned and are under the condemnation of death in the first place…

2.  Deep Down, We’ve Always Known We’re Sinners

• I think it’s fair to say most people don’t think of themselves as sinners.  We might think, “Hey I’m not a bad person, I pay my taxes, I open doors for people, I treat people with kindness, I’m a hard worker, I’ve never been arrested,” and by most standards and compared to other people, we might seem pretty decent.
  • But according to the Bible, the true standard for goodness is God!  He is morally perfect, sin is completely against His nature, and when we compare ourselves to HIM, our sin becomes immediately apparent!
    • For instance, the  prophet Isaiah was a very righteous man.  And if we were to compare his level of goodness with the nation of Israel, he was head and shoulders above everyone and was a pretty great guy!  But one day he saw a vision of God!
    • Isaiah 6:1-3 - The majesty of God here is overwhelming!  God’s presence fills the cosmos above the temple, and the only part of God that’s in the temple is just the lower hem of His robe.  And He’s surrounded by fiery angels who are covering their faces and feet in humility because even these majestic angelic beings know they don’t belong in God’s presence.  He’s too great for them!  And listen to Isaiah’s response!
      • Isaiah 6:4-5 - As righteous as Isaiah was compared to other people, compared to God he was immediately aware he was unfit to be in God’s presence.  The perfect sinlessness and holiness of God exposed the sinfulness and unholiness of even a man like Isaiah!

Illustration:  We typically can’t see all the junk we breath in all day.  The air is invisible so we don’t even think about it, but have you ever opened a window when the sun was shining through and all the sudden you could see millions of little dust particles floating in the air?  It’s kind of horrifying, and that’s what it was like for Isaiah.  Compared to the rest of the nation, Isaiah’s sins were invisible, but once he stood in the brightness of God’s glory, it exposed the uncleanness of Isaiah’s soul, and he realized he had no business being in the Lord’s presence.

Illustration:  I used to play golf in middle school and high school and got pretty good.  I practiced for 3 hours a day during the week and 6 hours a day on the weekends, I made team captain, and felt like I was a pretty decent player.  Well, one time I got the opportunity to play a round of golf with a former member of the PGA tour.  He wasn’t famous, I think he only made it on TV once, but I kid you not, I spent the entire round with my jaw on the floor in awe and wonder.  As good as I thought I was, I wasn’t even in the same universe of skill.  Because it was just for fun, this guy would use the completely wrong club just to make it harder for himself, and one time he walked around the other side of the ball and swung left handed, but he used a right handed club to do it, so the club face was upside down and he’d still knock the thing 3 feet from the hole.  I didn’t just lose, I lost to him in humiliating fashion and thought, “I don’t even deserve to sit next to you in this golf cart.”

That’s the way it is for us in every area of life; there is always someone better than we are at things, and we might think we’re great compared to others, but compared to the standard of perfection, there’s always some standard we’re falling short of.  Even if you take the best athlete in the world, even they will tell you, “I still haven’t arrived, there may not be any other person better than me, but there’s a better version of me out there and a higher score or higher level consistency I haven’t reached yet.”  And deep down, we know the same thing is true morally!  We might be feeling good about ourselves because we’re a good citizen, but that’s not the standard by which we measure things!  We know there are moral standards we simply do not live up to, and that’s because GOD created us with an innate sense that we’re supposed to live like Him and be reflections of His character in the world because HE is the true standard of goodness!  And compared to God, none of us have lived up to that expectation.

Romans 3:23

Ecclesiastes 7:20 - And this seems to be a universal human experience.  Plato wrestled with one of the primary conundrums of human existence:  we know the good, but we don’t do the good.  The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “We have all sinned, some more, some less.”  The Roman poet Ovid said, “I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.”  Blaise Pascal wrote that “man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who would prefer to act the angel acts the beast.”  When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, Lady Macbeth arranged a murder and from that moment on she would sleepwalk and rub her hands together at night and say, “Out, cursed spot!  Out, I say!”  Her sin was like a stain she couldn’t get out no matter how hard she tried.  In the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll noticed that in private, he’d commit evil acts that made him feel ashamed, so he invented a potion to separate the evil part of himself from the good, that way he could live during the day as the good man without worrying that the evil man would ruin his career, but then at night he could live as the evil man without feeling shame or guilt for his actions.  The good man was named Dr. Jekyll, the evil man Mr. Hyde (which basically means the hidden and hideous part of himself).  The problem was, he didn’t anticipate just how evil his evil side really was, and his evil side started killing people.  So Dr. Jekyll promised not to drink the potion anymore to keep Mr. Hyde suppressed, but his evil side was too powerful to keep hidden, and he started morphing into Mr. Hyde even without taking the potion, and it got to the point where Mr. Hyde took him over completely.  Obviously that story is fictional, but it’s a great illustration of what we all know to be true; that there’s an evil side to all of us that must be contained or it’ll ruin our lives.

And you might say, “Well Brian I’m not like Mr. Hyde because I don’t kill anyone.”  Okay, but isn’t it true there’s a hidden, hideous part of yourself that you wouldn’t want anyone to see or know about in public?  If there was a machine that could project every thought you had and every deed you did onto a screen for everyone around you to see, would you want them to see those thoughts or deeds or would that cause you terrible shame and embarrassment?  A preacher named Tim Keller gave another great illustration:  he said imagine if you hung a recording device around your neck for a year and it recorded everything you ever said about how you think other people should live, like if you said, “I think people should keep their word, treat each other with kindness, keep themselves under control,” etc.  Question:  If you were to play back the recording at the end of the year, would you have perfectly lived up to those expectations yourself?  The point is if we’re honest, most of us know we don’t even live up to our own standards, so if we fall short of the moral standards we set for ourselves and others, how much more likely is it that we’ve fallen short of God’s moral standards?  And deep down, we all know it.

Romans 2:15 - Paul’s saying even people who have never been taught about God have an innate sense that God is real and that there’s some moral law they’re not living up to because their conscience is accusing them of violating it.  CS Lewis argued that if we didn’t know deep down that there was some moral law from God, or the Law of Nature as he calls it, then we wouldn’t make so many excuses for our sins. “We have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people, and we make all kinds of excuses.  That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired.  That slightly shady business about the money came when you were very hard up.  What you promised to do for old so-and-so and have never done, well you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be.  I am just the same.  I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm.  These excuses are proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, that we believe in the Law of Nature.  If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently?”

In short, humans who are honest with themselves have always known their house is on fire, which is why…

3.  Humans Have Always Sought a Savior

• In Paul’s day, the Jews knew they were sinners, but they sought salvation in the Law of Moses.  But Paul tried to explain to them the only way to be saved through law-keeping is to keep it perfectly, and none of us have done that, so the Law only condemns us to physical and spiritual death!
  • Sometimes we seek to be our own saviors through law keeping, sometimes we do so by making excuses for our sins to get ourselves off the hook like CS Lewis mentioned.  He continues…
    • “The truth is, we believe in decency so much, we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so much that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.  For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations.  It is only our bad temper that we accredit to being tired or worried or hungry; we accredit our good temper to ourselves.”
      • Saving face is an attempt to save ourselves from the embarrassment and shame of our sin, and to make it sound like we don’t really need saving at all!  That’s exactly what happened when Adam and Eve sinned!
        • Genesis 3:12-13
• Deep down we all know we’re naked and ashamed to stand in the presence of God, so we’ll do whatever we can to save ourselves, convince ourselves we don’t need saving, or seek saviors in things like money and success and even though we’ve made a mess of our relationship with God, like Jim Carry in Dumb and Dumber we think we’ve TOTALLY redeemed ourselves because hey at least I’ve got an amazing career and tons of money, or I’ve got a scholarship to play sports, or I’m really handsome or beautiful, or I married the perfect person, or I have TONS of subscribers on my channel or I voted for the right person who’s going to save our nation, or I’ve looked inward and found my authentic self, or I’ve found a religion that tells me God is all love and sin is no big deal, and the list goes on.
  • Humans have always gravitated towards people, possessions, positions, power, prestige, politicians, paganism, passing the buck, and personal traits and accomplishments, but none of it does a thing to solve the problem of spiritual or physical death because of our sin!  Our house is on fire and all of our efforts to find Saviors of our own are like trying to put out the fire with gasoline!  It only makes things worse, and the more we try to save ourselves the more apparent it becomes how desperately we need a Savior!
    • That’s why Jesus left Heaven and came to die on a cross for our sins because He knew there was absolutely no other way to be saved!  In fact, when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His death, He begged His Father not to make Him go through with it.  He didn’t want to be scourged and crucified, and of course His Father didn’t want to SEE Him be scourged and crucified either.  But the Father did not grant Jesus’ request.  He still asked Jesus to go through with it, and Jesus submitted to His Father’s will because they both knew there was no other way.  If there were any other way, Jesus would have never come to die for us!  It’s why Jesus said…
      • John 14:6 - It’s why Peter said this…
      • Acts 4:12 - Jesus did NOT die needlessly.  Our house was absolutely on fire and we were sentenced to death for our sin, yet Jesus ran into the house and gave His life to rescue us so we could live.  We couldn’t get ourselves out the back door and save ourselves from the fire, and Jesus wasn’t a crazy fireman who invented the fire in His mind.  He ran into the fire because we needed Him to.
        • • Romans 5:8-9
            • Jesus is not like other religious leaders who came merely to share good teachings and new laws. Remember, laws can’t save us because laws are just moral standards we fail to live up to!  No, He came to change our legal standing with God by dying in our place so that even though we’ve broken God’s laws and put ourselves under the sentence of death, Jesus took that death sentence upon Himself so we’re no longer condemned.
              • Romans 8:1 - If you’re not in Christ, you’re still condemned for breaking God’s law.  You may still be wrapping your head around all this and may not FEEL guilty, but you’re legally guilty in God’s court.  And there’s nothing you can do to change your own legal status and make yourself right with God.  You need a Savior; You need Jesus and the good news is He left Heaven to come save you and He’s inviting you to stop trying to save yourself, to stop denying that you needed Him to die for you, and to come to Him right now.

Series: N/A

Service: Song Service

Type: Song Service

Speaker: Micah Hinely

Series: N/A

Service: Song Service

Type: Invitation

Speaker: Micah Hinely