Man, I know idolatry is a sin, but with Dave's haircut and mustache, he is the envy of every man in here.
We are all idolizing him right now, but what a story. Hey, let me say this right off the bat. Man, thank you for your patience enduring the chaos of getting in and out of here on a weekend like Easter. I'm actually not going to apologize for how crazy it is. This is very important. Guys, when a movement is happening, there's just chaos.
It just is. We're doing everything we can do, but man, I really appreciate you guys' patience with that, especially if you're newer with us. Hey, a couple of things before we dive in. Number one, if you are brand new, which we have that every single weekend, but I mean, Easter, a lot of times people are brand new. We want to say welcome.
We believe God has a plan and purpose for your life. We would love to meet you. We would love to find out how you found out about Mercy Hill.
That helps us to let us know that. That happens at our first-time guest tent. You go to our first-time guest tent. We have a gift for you there. If on your way out, you want to stop by, we would really appreciate that.
One of the things that's in that bag this weekend is this is really cool. One of the churches that we have had an opportunity to coach through our Breaking Barriers ministry, which is a totally different kind of thing. We coach churches all through North Carolina. One of them has a pretty high-end roastery for coffee. We were able to get some really incredible coffee beans from, well, they're not from Yadkinville.
They're roasted in Yadkinville. Anyway, we'd love to give you guys that. Come and check out our first-time guest tent. Hey, the other thing real quick, if you're here, this is not our, we've been doing Easter all week long. Our students launched last Sunday night, then our college students on Tuesday.
You got to see this. Guys, over 600 college students, over 30 baptisms on Tuesday night. We just praise God. He's doing something on the college campus that is unique. We meet a third of all of our missionaries.
We meet on the college campus. Many of them are unsaved when we meet them. We just want to continue to praise God for what He's doing on these campuses.
I wanted you guys to see that. We're going to be in the Book of Jude today. We're going to be in the first seven verses of the Book of Jude. We're going to be in a three-week sermon series. Listen, if you're new, you're about to be done with the first one.
There's only three. You can come back and get the whole set here. I hope you'll come back for the next two sermons. We're going to be hitting the Book of Jude over the next few weeks. Jude is an incredibly hard-hitting, fast-moving book of the Bible.
We're going to be diving into it as best as we can, explaining the concepts here. Let me unpack the series for one minute, then we'll talk about the sermon for today. The three-week series, here's the big idea of the series, passivity never produces perseverance. If you are going to grow and sustain what happens when you grow, if you're going to grow and sustain that in any area of your life, it's going to happen through intentionality, not passivity. Nobody has ever said, hey, I was totally passive with my finances this year and they got better.
Nobody says, hey, I haven't thought a thing in the world about strengthening my friendships and my relationships with people and I just fell backwards into better relationships. That's not how it happens. Same thing with our health.
You don't passively get healthier. There's a grind to it. There's a struggle to it. Here's the thing about our faith. When we become a Christian, there is no grind, no struggle. All it is is grace from God and we receive a gift.
That's it. But as we grow in our faith, God allows us to participate with Him in that. There's a grind to it. There's a struggle to it. There's a contending to it. There's a fight to it. Here's what you got to know about life. Many of you are probably going to understand this. If left alone, life is a down escalator, as one pastor said it. He said, what do you mean?
It means if you just stay stationary, you're going the wrong direction. You got to fight against it. You ever seen a house, you're driving through the country, you see a house that's all dilapidated, roof caved in, vines everywhere, all that. You think somebody at some point built that house, maybe had a mortgage on it, raised a family in it. What happened to this house? You want to know what happened? Nothing for the last 50 years. That's what happened.
Passivity, it's a down escalator. Our health is the same way. We got to fight against it. This week I had a buddy from college come in, one of my best friends. We had the chance to, we did one day together, hunt, fish, and play basketball.
That was our one day. Neither one of us wanted to tell the other one that we were injured. If you say you're injured, then people are going to say, how did you get injured? I got injured because I was playing basketball.
Not a big deal. Actually, I wasn't injured playing basketball. I was injured when the ball rolled out of bounds and I was walking to go get it and my knee popped. I'm serious.
He got injured from sneezing. It's like, if you don't fight for your health, it's a down escalator. Here's the point.
Our faith is the same way. If you say, man, I'm just going to be passive about it, you won't be in the same place next year as you are this year. You'll be down.
You'll be further back. We fight. We have to contend. That's what Jude is all about. Hard hitting, fast book, hey, contend for the faith.
Here's the message for today. False teaching leads to God's judgment. One of the reasons why we can't be passive, and this is very serious.
One of the reasons why we can't be passive is because there are false teachers who come in like wolves in sheep's clothing. They seek to destroy. They seek to cause disunity. They split churches. They teach doctrines that are false.
They pervert the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm gonna tell you something. Right here in this room, this many people in this room at our campuses as well today, I guarantee you, statistically speaking, there are wolves in this room sitting among us right now. Welcome to Easter, by the way. Okay, just wanted to tell you that. All right. But here's the thing.
This is why we can't be passive. We've got to devote ourselves to what is true so that we'll know if someone is trying to carry us away from what is true. Look at what the Bible says in Jude. I want to say chapter one, but there's only one chapter. So Jude one. Okay, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother to James, brother of James, to those who are called beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. May mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you. Beautiful introduction, very theological. I want to focus in on verse three. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you appealing to you to contend for the faith. Watch what he said. I'm gonna read it again.
I want you to catch it. Okay. Although I was eager to write to you about common salvation, let's say it like this. I wanted to write to you about that. But now I found it necessary to write to you about this, to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude starts here with a bit of courage that we all need. And that is, I wanted to have that conversation.
But now we need to have this conversation. And that's courageous, right? Because a lot of us, and I don't know if you've ever been in this situation, don't raise your hand, but have you ever tried to follow somebody? You ever had a boss or a coach or you ever had a pastor maybe or somebody in a leadership position or maybe it's been you?
Okay. Have you ever had to follow somebody like that, that didn't have the courage to have the conversations that needed to be had? It's very confusing and frustrating trying to follow someone like that, right? Maybe there's in our midst right now, are there conversations we need to have in our groups and our families, with employees, all right, with co-workers, whatever. Jude has the courage to say, I wanted to talk to you about that, but we got to talk about this. And here's what he's got to talk about.
Wolves have come in. There are people that are coming in that are perverting the gospel message. And so he says, I'm appealing to you to verse three, contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Contend, fight, struggle. This series we've named The Struggle because that's another word for contend.
It's a way that we can picture it and get it in our mind. Fight for, you could say it like this, contend means to actively fight for something. It's the opposite of life on the down escalator, okay? It's fighting uphill. It's like, man, I'm not going to stay in the same place.
I'm not going to be passive. Struggle, fight, contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints. Now you say, okay, I understand contend, contend, struggle, fight, man, go for it. But what does it really mean to contend for the faith? Well, I'm going to talk about the faith in just a moment. Let's talk about this word contend. I think contending for the faith basically means two things. It means knowing it and it means being willing to speak up for it. Okay.
That's what contending is. I got to know it. If I don't know it, I can't contend for it.
All right. But I got to know it one, and I've got to be willing to speak up for it number two. Well, how do I know it? You know it by devoting yourselves to the word. You know it by devoting yourselves to good preaching. You know it by getting saturated with people in your life that are going to point you to what is good and right in terms of doctrine. Now listen, this is very important.
All right. At Mercy Hill, we step right into a tradition that is 2000 years old. Our faith is based on Jesus Christ and his work told by told by the apostles written down in scripture canonized, right, you know, and that's what we've been following for 2000 years.
It's not like somebody 1000 years ago just popped up and came up with something. We reject the, you know, Gospel of Barnabas and some of these different works that were much later. Our faith is based on Jesus interpreting the Old Testament, that being recorded through the apostles who wrote it down and by the by way early in the first century, the works that we have in our New Testament, they're being written down, they're being circulated, and then it's canonized later into the New Testament that we study now. What I would say is that is the faith.
The faith is the known and received body of truth about Jesus and salvation told through the apostles in the New Testament that we have today. And we must contend for that. We contend for it. If we don't, we will lose it.
I've shared this with you guys before. Do you realize every generation of Christians is one generation away from extinction? If we don't contend for what is true. Now, I love this idea of content struggle, man, you know, I want us to be that type of church, man. We want to charge, we want to go forward.
I love the idea of this. One of the pictures that popped in my mind comes from the Christian subculture about 20 years ago, right? I'm a product of Christian subculture, 90s, early 2000s.
Okay. How many of you guys have ever seen the movie Facing the Giants? Have you seen that movie before?
A good bit of us probably have. There's a scene in the movie Facing the Giants that I've showed all my kids that to me is the embodiment of this kind of idea of struggling for something, contending for something. What happens is there's this football coach, I'll give you guys a series of pictures here. There's this football coach who is talking to the captain of his team.
And he wants the captain of his team to give him his best. And that's the key. He that the kids, they're going to do something called the death crawl that you'll see in a minute.
All right. And the and he says to the kid, he says, I want you to do your best. The kid says, I think I can get to the 50 yard line. He says, No, I don't want you thinking like that.
We're not thinking about where we can go. I just want you to leave it all on the field. Will you give me your best?
The guy says, I'll give you my best. Okay. So then this is the death crawl. All right. Now, I don't know if any of you guys have ever done this.
I have done this. And this is, well, it's basically torture. Okay, so that's what it is. And you go as you go as far as you can. And the kid remember had it in his mind.
I think I can get to the 50 yard line with nobody on my back. Well, they put the kid on his back. And he says, you just give me your best. Now the coach is in his grill.
All right. This is a great scene in the movie where he gets down right in the kid's ear. And the kids say, man, I'm hurting.
I'm hurting. And the coach says, then you negotiate with your body to find a way. But don't quit. Continue.
Take another step, five more steps, 10 more steps, one more step. And it's awesome scene in the movie. What ends up happening is by the end, the kid has gone 100 yards and he looks up, he's got a blindfold on so he don't know how far he's been going.
He takes that blindfold up and he says, look up, Brock, you're in the end zone. Now, here's why. Here's why I tell that. All right.
Many of us might have a fixed point in our mind, like, oh, if I get to the 30 or I get to the 50, I'm good. And I don't need to worry about the wolves that'll come in and take me away. Man, I'm mature enough. I'm in a group. I serve at the church.
I read the Bible once or twice a week or even every day. I'm good. There's this fixed point of maturity where we say, okay, I'm fine.
No, no, no. We got to get that out of our mind. What we got to get in our mind is contend today.
Struggle today. Fight for the faith today. And what that means is don't think about I'm going to give it this much.
Let's give it all we have. Let's contend for the faith, the faith verse three, that was once for all delivered to the saints. And I've already shared with you this faith that I'm talking about.
You know, Jesus interpreted the Old Testament through the apostles written down in letters that were circulated during the time and eventually canonized into the Bible that we have right now. That faith is what I'm talking about. It is once and for all delivered. Now this is important.
This is important. Okay. Because many of us will think about faith, think about man, the highest truth, capital T truth. And we have been taught for an entire generation that that capital T truth, all right, the faith that the greatest, the highest level of truth that we can attain comes from inside of us.
I mean, guys, it's every Disney movie you've ever seen. Okay. The truth is inside.
I'm the only one who knows it for me. I've got to get it out. And then everybody else is supposed to conform to whatever that truth is. And that is the opposite of what we see in the scripture because the scripture says the faith was delivered. It was received. It was something that was given the highest truth is something that we the community help each other conform to.
You'll never be more countercultural in our culture of identity the way we are right now that when you understand the truth is outside of me and I conform to it. And also this is very important. It was once delivered once and for all.
Okay, it was it was it was delivered and it's not delivered again. This is very important. I don't stand up here week in and week out and say thus sayeth the Lord about things that are contrary to scripture. And I don't have a dream one day and say, Oh, you know what, the Bible says this, but actually we have a new truth today.
That's not what we do. But what we do is we do something called expositional preaching at Mercy Hill. All I'm trying to do is explain what is here in a way that sticks so that God can use it in your life because this was delivered to us once for all. And so we don't have a new truth. We go back to an old truth and we rework it over and over again. And the Spirit continues to move in. Alright, now, it's very important that we contend for the faith.
Why? Because of the wolves. Look what it says in verse four, for certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this to condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality. That's what I want to focus on in a minute and deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ. Certain people have crept in. They were prepared for destruction. They're ungodly.
They they pervert the grace of God and they deny Jesus Christ. We could talk about all those. I'm gonna talk about one of them. But first, let me say this.
It's very important to understand. Hey, you know, the wolves, the false teachers, they don't burst in. They creep in.
They don't kick the door down. They lurk among the shadows. And I think it's very important that we, the Christian church, are understanding today, hey, they probably are here.
They're probably in every church in Greensboro. And we need to understand that. There are threats from inside. I understand that we, rightfully so, Christians, and I know not everybody's a Christian, okay, especially on a weekend like Easter. There's probably hundreds if not literally thousands of people that that are not quite believers yet and you're trying to figure it out. But for the Christian church, okay, there are a lot of threats on the outside that we understand. I mean, you know, I think about how dogmatically things about evolution are taught in school and the breakdown of the American family and the stripping of religious freedom and a culture that's lost the concept of objective truth and much of the radical nature of the LGBTQ platform. And I mean, there's all these things that are on the outside, you know, and they are threats, I understand.
But here's the deal. What if the greatest threat isn't out there somewhere, the greatest threat could be lurking inside? What if the greatest threat is the false teachers who can come in and sow disunity and split a church, they can pervert the gospel and begin to pull people away. And that's what was happening in Jude's time. Now look what it says in verse four, they pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ. Let me tell you about the nature of the heresy.
I don't know exactly none of us do. All right, but basically something like this was going on in Jude's day, maybe you've heard something like this before. The people were being taught the false teachers were coming in and they were teaching in the church, they were saying, Hey, go live however you want, because of Jesus dying on the cross. In the end, God's gonna have to save you anyway. So just go live like hell, because you're bound for heaven.
Do whatever you want, man, sex, drugs, rock and roll, whatever it is, you do do what you want, because the grace of God will cover you one day. Now, here's the problem with that heresy and why it is so insidious. They are putting the grace of God versus the commands of God. And these two things are being split apart, two things that were never meant to be split apart. In fact, they radically go together. And here's why this is so dangerous. Okay, here's the modern example of this.
The modern example of this in the south is somebody sitting in this room right now, who's absolutely living in absolute rebellion against God, no care in the world. But you went to youth camp when you were 13 and went up front and said the magic beans prayer. And so you're like, man, I'm good.
I got fire insurance and I'm good. And here's the here's the part that you miss. This is we call it licentiousness.
Okay, here's the part that you miss. If the grace of God has not changed your at the bottom level of your heart, if the grace of God has not changed your desires, then what assurances do you have from the spirit that you are saved? Let me I'm just gonna say it boldly. If you love the idea of living in rebellion here with fire insurance later, man, are you really a Christian? Because the grace of God changes your deepest desires. That doesn't mean we don't sin. I know I do.
I know everybody in here does. They're saying we are all sinners in this room. But we like Paul say, I do the things I don't want to do.
And I can't do the things that I want to do. What does that even mean? Okay, here's what it means. At the very bottom of your heart. If you are a Christian, you are changed. And you actually the bottom of your heart, the deepest desire you have is that you want to live into God's vision for your life. If you're a Christian, man, you can't wait to get to heaven. One of the reasons because there is no more sin, and you will live every day every breath in his full vision for your life.
I'm talking fruit of the Spirit popping out everywhere. No sin, no struggle. We long for that. We love that. Do we sin?
Yes, we sin. But the bottom of our heart is not long for that day. Let me let me say this.
If you're the person 13 years old, magic means prayer at a youth camp live in rebellion, but are pretty sure you're going to have it. Let me ask you this. Do you think you'll even like heaven? Because if you choose hell on earth, you'd probably choose hell after earth. Heaven is going to be a full conforming. Heaven is going to be a full bowing of the knee and surrendering to God.
Do you actually want that? Or do you just want to not go to hell? You know, here's what I'm saying. This is such a insidious heresy because it tricks people into thinking that they're saved when they're not saved. And here's what happens. Man, if you end up there, there's going to be many people in the kingdom that come before the throne and they say, Lord, Lord, and he's going to say, I didn't know you. I mean, yeah, magic means prayer, whatever.
I didn't know you. And so here, so here's the thing. What, what Jude is doing is waking us up to that reality. And then, and this is, this is heavy y'all verse five, six, and seven is heavy.
Okay. Then he gives us a warning of judgment for those who pervert the grace of God and for those who follow the perversion of the grace of God. And it's very serious. Look, now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus who saved a people out of the land of Egypt afterward destroyed those who did not believe. Now we've been studying that in Exodus, so we, we understand some of this. We're going to talk about it.
This is a little crazy. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. And verse seven, some of you guys have heard the term Sodom and Gomorrah, even though you've never read the Bible. Well, here, here, here's a reference to it. Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursuit on natural desire serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
Now this is what Jude is doing. If you pervert the grace of God or follow the perversion of the grace of God, you are in danger of judgment. And he gives three examples. First example, the wilderness. We just studied this in Exodus, right? Hey, the people of God, they came out of Egypt, but they never made it to the promised land. Actually that first generation, they died in the wilderness.
They were judged for their rebellion. Second story. Okay. There's a story in the Old Testament and it's a little complex.
All right. Many of us have a different interpretation of the events of this story now. But in the first century, there was no debate on the interpretation of the story. And so Jude is playing on that story. And that story is that the sons of God came down and had families with the daughters of men. And at the time, the interpretation 2000 years ago was unanimous. And the interpretation was the angels rebelled against God and came and had family and had had wives and stuff with humans. And I know there's a lot to that.
But the point of it is this. If they rebelled against God in that way, what happened? Judgment. Gloomy darkness in chains awaiting the judgment day. And then thirdly, okay, Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah? Sodom and Gomorrah is a cautionary tale. It's been told for thousands of years about what? The dangers of sexual sin, homosexuality, abuse culture. I mean, just crazy.
Okay. And what happened? God literally rained hell from heaven. They say in the first century, there was still smoldering ash.
Okay, now here's the whole point. Jude is waking us up to the judgment of God that comes from perverting his grace. He's giving us these stories as a warning. Don't go down this road. Don't go down the road of following somebody who tells you live like hell, and then get fire insurance later. Don't go down that road because God won't have gotten ahold of your heart. And one day, man, you're not going to be where you thought you were going to be.
Instead, with sobriety, see it for what it is. Don't pervert the grace of God. This is a great warning for us today.
And I love what he does. When you bring up these three examples, man, the warning really sticks because you can see it. I told you guys this a while ago, but my son turned 13 this summer. And I said, man, we got to do something to mark the manhood moment. We're not a kid anymore. We're moving into teenage years. And so I said, well, I want to do something just awesome.
He's going to remember and something that takes some guts. And so I said, all right, here's what we're going to do. I sat him down and said, man, we're going down to Florida and we're going to go hunt an alligator and you're going to kill it. And he was like, let's do it. So that's what we did. And so we go down to Florida. It was super fun.
I've never hunted an alligator before. It was, it was kind of a crazy, kind of a wild adventure. All right. But the guy that was guiding our trip, this young guy, awesome guy, he's, he does this a lot.
Um, I, you know, we're, we're getting all the stuff ready. And I noticed that he ain't got the half a hand on one side. Okay.
He's got two fingers and his hand's gone. And uh, and he's an alligator guy, hunting guy. Okay. So I was like, well, this seems a little dangerous.
I didn't know if I should ask him about it or not. I decided not to. So we go through the hunt.
He did great. Um, man, it was a fight of our life getting the alligator on the bank and my son kills alligator and we just got the head back this week. Okay. So this is so cool. We're good.
We got it now in our basement. And um, and about that time, about that time, uh, the, the, the guide says, yeah, man, you gotta be really careful. He said, I took a really bad bite last year, a year ago, year and a half ago, whatever. And I was like, okay, well now he's brought it up.
All right. So I can, it's like sort of wanted to know what happened, you know? And so I was like, I was like, Hey man, I saw your hand and I didn't want to say anything about it, but dude, that's horrible.
Like what happened? And he, he got this kind of weird look on his face. He looked at me and he's like, he's like, are you talking about this with this half a hand? I said, yeah. He said, Oh no, bro, that was fireworks. I said, Oh, okay. All right.
Um, so you know, he actually been bit on the other arm crazy as that is, um, perfect Florida man story. So I, I, uh, I remember I, it was so funny. It, the second he said that, cause I don't know about y'all and I, and I'm man, I'm just, you know, I, I, when I grew up, we did a lot of the wrong things with fireworks.
Okay. I'll just put it like that. And um, maybe a lot of you guys did too. I have preached incessantly to my boys. You better be careful with this stuff. And the second the guy said it about the fireworks, I looked at my son AP and I said, see, I told you, man, you can't play around with this stuff.
And if I'm lying, okay, I could see it in his eyes. When you tell the kid not to play with fireworks and he's standing next to a guy with half a hand, it just hits different. Okay. It does.
It sticks in a different way. That is a, listen, that is what Jude is doing. What he's saying is, Hey, don't pervert the grace of God or follow those who do.
Let me give you three examples that are visceral right in front of your face so that this sticks in a little bit of a different way. Because here's the deal. We pervert the grace of God. You know what there is for us would die in the wilderness chains, doom and gloom, and eventually hell rains down from heaven and it's Sodom and Gomorrah time. That's what we deserve for our sin. It's what we deserve for perverting the grace of God. And if we don't get that right, then we're going to stand before God with those sins.
And that will be the judgment that rains down on us. Let's apply this to groups of people and I'm going to be done. Okay.
The first group is this. Well, let's, let's say this. Deny false teaching and contend for the true faith.
That's the application for this weekend. All right. Deny false teaching, contend for the true faith, two groups of people and I'll be finished. The first group is man, the Christians in the room.
All right. If you are a believer, then you are one who has received the faith. Now it's time to contend for the faith.
I want to ask you this question. How are you contending for the faith? Remember what I said? Contending means I know it and I speak up for it. I know it and I speak up for it.
Now some, maybe it's, maybe it's, maybe it's one or the other, which is it for you? Maybe some of you really know the faith. Man, you know the doctrines. You've heard good preaching for a long time.
You read the Bible every day. Are you willing to speak up about it? Maybe there's somebody in your community group that's a baby Christian or not even a Christian yet.
And they're talking about how work saves saves them. I know I'm not saying in group, you know, you don't become a contentious person because you're a contending person. Are you willing to pull them aside after group and say, Hey, listen, I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about grace and what it means and how works plays in and doesn't, that's not how God saves us. Are we willing to speak up about some of those things? The other thing is, are we devoted to it?
Are we devoting ourselves? Hey, are you listening to good preaching? Are you in the word? Man, are the, are the people you're listening to on podcasts, are they, are they Orthodox in terms of their theology?
My, my question for you is how and what better ways do you need to contend for faith? Can I tell you this? Over the last two weeks I've had the opportunity to interview online.
It's been crazy. They all said, yes, we thought maybe one of them would say yes. Um, three of the biggest influencers right now in terms of Christian apologetics, um, Ruslan KD, Sean McDowell, um, who many of you guys know his dad, Josh McDowell, and um, and Wesley Huff, who was just on Joe Rogan like a month ago. And I got a chance to interview these, interview all three of these guys.
They're Christian apologists that go all over the country contending for the faith. I asked him the same question. Okay. I said, Hey, what does the church need to do to be ready to contend for the faith?
They all said the same thing. You got to know what's true. You got to devote yourself to what's true. After all, the only way to spot a counterfeit is if you know what the real thing looks like. And so we got to devote ourselves and saturate ourselves.
What step do you need to take in that? But you know, there's others of us here today. Listen, you're not a believer, man. And the reality is like you're, you're, you're searching, you're here, you're interested. You're not a believer.
You've never stepped over that line. And I want to call for you today to understand you can't contend for a faith that you've never received. The faith is something that was delivered.
Have you received it? I pray that you will. I pray that it'll change every desire that you have.
I pray that it'll rock you in the way that I was talking about earlier, changing what you want out of life. I pray that you'll move from a person who wants to live like hell, but still get heaven to a person who wants to live for heaven. Now, live into God's vision for your life. And the only way to get there is to understand the true gospel message.
Y'all, we celebrate today. I know this is, I know this is not a typical Easter sermon. Okay. Um, but we're not a typical church either.
Okay. So I understand that. But you know why we celebrate today? Here's why we celebrate it.
This can be your reality today too. We celebrate because in our sin, we deserve the wilderness. We deserve the chains. We deserve the hell fire raining down from heaven of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Jesus Christ took all of that as he took our judgment for us on the cross.
Because of our sin, we're separated from God. We deserve nothing but hell for all eternity. But Jesus stepped into our shoes and he took death in our place. Listen, Jesus took what we deserved so that he could give us what he deserves. And what he deserves is life before God forever for a life lived without sin. But he laid down on a cross and we call it theology, the great exchange.
Man, I get what he deserved and he took what I deserve. But here's the, here's the beautiful thing. We celebrate the resurrection today. It's not just that Jesus canceled my sin by going to the cross.
It's that three days later, he burst forth in the newness of life. I'm not at a zero with God anymore. Instead, I am seen clothed in the righteousness of his perfect son. And that will be true of me if I have admitted my sin, believed in what Christ has done and confessed him as the Lord of my life. That will be true of me for as long as Jesus lives. And this is the good news of Easter. Jesus will never die.
He's already defeated death once. He doesn't have to do that again. Praise God. He doesn't have to do it again. And if I admit and believe and confess, I am joined with Christ and he will live forever and we will live with him forever.
Would you accept that gospel truth today? I pray that you will. Heads bowed and eyes closed if we can. I'm going to give us a quick invitation here. For some of us that may want to pray to receive Christ today, I want to give you an opportunity here.
So man, just try to limit distractions and just get in a good mental head space here. Hey, is God calling you? Has he been after you for a long time?
It's not chance that you're here today. And God is moving in this place. He's moving in the triad.
He's wanting you to get swept up in that. Would you accept him today? If you want to step over that line and become a Christian, I'm going to call for you to do this. Just pray this prayer with me. That is a simple gospel proclamation. You would say, Father, in your words, in your heart, Father, I know that I'm a sinner. God, I know that I deserve what we read in the book of Jude.
I deserve hell. But God, I believe that Jesus died in my place on the cross, canceling my sin before you. And in his resurrection, he lets me walk in the newness of life. I believe that I want to be united with him, join with him. God save me. And I confess him as the Lord of my life from here on. Father, I pray now that you would give these ones that have trusted you the courage to take the next step of faith in Christ. And we pray.
