Sermons - Veritas Church | Fayetteville, NC

As followers of Jesus, nothing we ever do will earn our right standing with God, that’s already been done. But, we have a job to do. We are called as Christ followers to go and tell the whole world of the grace and hope that can only be offered through Jesus. The better question is, why wouldn’t we want to?

Following Jesus means preferring him to everything else. If we love something Jesus provides for us more than we love him then we are idolaters! Idolatry means we’ve made an idol out of something - we prefer it to Jesus. If we are to address the idols of our heart we are going to have to come to grips with our own weaknesses and we will have to expose to others.

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Following Jesus means preferring him to everything else. If we love something Jesus provides for us more than we love him then we are idolaters! Idolatry means we’ve made an idol out of something - we prefer it to Jesus. If we are to address the idols of our heart we are going to have to come to grips with our own weaknesses and we will have to expose to others.

Today we look at repentance. In our culture, this usually sounds like a bad thing, but repentance is the norm for gospel-centered living. Becoming more aware of God’s holiness and our sinfulness leads us to repent and believe the gospel of Jesus. Biblical repentance frees us from our own devices and makes a way for the power of the gospel to bear fruit in our lives.

We are continuing to think about how the gospel interacts with our lives, but now we turn to consider the gospel’s relationship to the law. What is the law? Does God expect me to obey it? What is the purpose of the law? How does the law help me to believe the gospel? How does the gospel help me to obey the law? These are the questions we’ll dive into today.

The Gospel-Centered Life series is intended to help Christians understand how the gospel shapes every aspect of life and conduct. Colossians 1:6 says that the gospel is “continually bearing fruit and increasing” in and among us, even after we first believe it. How does that happen? Why is a continual rediscovery and application of the gospel so important? How will our personal growth and missional life be stunted if we don’t grasp the gospel deeply? These are the questions that we are seeking to answer with this series and the resulting study in Community Groups.

Each of us tends to “shrink the cross,” which is to say that something is lacking in our understanding, appreciation, or application of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sin. This manifests itself in two main ways: pretending and performing. Pretending minimizes sin by making ourselves out to be something we are not. Performing minimizes God’s holiness by reducing his standard to something we can meet, thereby meriting his favor. Both are rooted in an inadequate view of God’s holiness and our identity.

If the gospel is constantly “bearing fruit and growing” (Col. 1:6), then everything has to do with the gospel—God, humanity, salvation, worship, relationships, shopping, recreation, work, personality...everything! The objective of this first part of the series  is to establish a framework for talking about the gospel. This framework will get worked out in greater detail over the next two weeks, so this lesson is designed to help us understand the concepts and begin exploring how they relate to actual life.

In John 4 we see Jesus have an unlikely interaction with a woman at a well. Jesus pursues this woman with intentionality, with compassion and with the truth and it changes everything for this woman and an entire town. How does his pursuit of us motivate our pursuit of one another?