All right, tonight, this is, if you were with us Soul Focus like a year ago, you will remember some of this tonight, but I really sense the leading of the Lord on this because just in learning how to live life, I think it's very, very important that we understand well how the gospel works in us every single day. So that's my goal, and this is what I call the—I'm using a book that we studied in particular, and I'm taking parts of it out so that we can sit and look at it and talk about it. And so the fellow who wrote it is a fellow by the name of Robert Thune. Robert has written a number of very practical and good stuff. His book on eldership is probably one of the best that's out today, very edible, very easy to read, very easy to understand, and yet gets right to the heart of what an elder should do. And so this particular book as well, there's a series of books, we went through two of them, and I think, or did we go through all three? Two, yeah. So the Gospel-Centered Life is the name of the book. I would encourage you to get it. It's a study. It's, I think, like an eight or nine, 10-week study, something like that. But it's very good, and this is partly bits and pieces of chapter one. called The Gospel Grid. The idea of it is you put the gospel in front of you. You say like, okay, what does this look like in my everyday world? So this will be selected scriptures. It won't be necessarily an exposition, per se. It's more of a topical, but I want us to look at this and let it sit well in your hearts. I'm very, concerned that the gospel be true in our lives, that the truths of God's word be permeating our lives. So this will be very practical, I think, for you. As I was growing up as a kid, when I learned of the gospel all through junior high and high school, it was always presented by way of evangelism. And what I mean by that is the gospel was associated with things like the wordless book. How many of you know what that is? How many of you that heard the wordless book also know that there is a gospel pen? Yeah, see, we had one of those gospel pens. It's the wordless book, but they're pen colors, so you could just push a button and that particular color would come out. No one else seen that? Man, we had that when I was a kid. I got one for my birthday one time, and I was like, ah, this is so cool. This is so cool. Stop laughing at me. I don't know. But that's how we looked at the gospel. Chick tracts, you guys never had those? Some of you, how many do not know what chick tracts are? Okay, most of you, man. Chick-fil-A, not Chick-fil-A. Chick tracts. This was your life? You never saw, this was your life? Those little booklets? They're very graphic, yes. Yeah, God's Simple Plan of Salvation track, how many of you know that? Yeah. Thursday Night Soul Winning, how many of you ever go on Thursday Night Soul Winning? Or Tuesday Night Soul Winning? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Bus Ministries? Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. Revival Services, where you'd actually say, we're gonna have a revival on this week. And you're going like, okay, all right, here we go. The Romans road? Yeah, most of you know what that is. Okay, understand something. I'm not giving this just to say all that was bad. No, God used it in my life. It's not something that was necessarily wrong, it just wasn't thoroughly teaching Everything. And I want you to understand. What are we doing? What are we doing here? All right. All right. So I'll let them deal with that. Okay. I looked up and saw. Like, where's soup? I'm like, where's soup? Are we serving soup here tonight? No. Okay. And I don't want you to think that everything that we teach is absolutely teaching you everything that you need to know. No, there's a sense to which we all deal with an infinite God, an infinite knowledge about God that we will never come to the end of. But what I wanna draw your attention to is that, When you bought into some of those things, it was assumed that when someone did that, they got saved. And typically, during a hymn of invitation, you would walk an aisle and a pastor would greet you at the front, and you would tell them that you wanted to be saved, and they would either sit with you and begin to talk, or they would motion to someone else who would come and talk with you, and these were people who were trained to really kind of take the Roman's road and help you with your salvation. And this would simply walk through steps of the gospel and it would go something like this. One, they would tell you, you must acknowledge that you're a sinner. All right, this is what you go, yes, I'm a sinner. Two, you know that Jesus loves you and died for your sins. You need to understand that. Three, that you ask Jesus into your heart and forgive you of your sins. Those are things that we were told, this is what you do. And if you did that, you were saved, and now you were saved. And there would be this kind of a joyous spiritual high five that would go on, maybe a hug or two, and then the person would fill out a card, and they may take your Bible and write a little date in the front of your Bible, letting you know that's the date that you were saved. And they would fill out this card, and to this day, I'm not sure what, that filling out that card necessarily did, although we were told that that was a mechanism whereby they would follow up. The problem was I don't ever remember being followed up about that. And I don't ever remember someone coming around me saying, hey, let's talk about what that meant, and let's work out sitting and talking over the next several weeks to see how this would affect your life. Now, I want you to understand something. Once again, I'm not saying that this is all wrong. But what I'm saying, there's much more to it than just that, to the gospel than just that. I had fun going through this this week when I personally accepted Christ as my Savior. I was at the age of four. And I remember specifically the Spirit of God working in my heart. Now, I don't know if I was at four going like, oh, this is the Spirit of God working in my heart. I don't think that. I just knew that I was a sinner. I'd seen enough sin around me to know there's right things and there's wrong things, and this is wrong. And if that's true, then what this man is saying must be true, that I am headed to hell. That's all I knew. And I went forward. This was a small, tiny Baptist church in Parma, Michigan. Anybody know where Parma is in Michigan? Good, I mean, that's all right, because it's like, it's barely there, all right? It's a little tiny village right outside of Jackson. Anybody know where Jackson is? Some of you do? Yeah, okay. And it was a snowy winter night. I remember walking out afterwards, and fresh snow had fallen everywhere, and I just felt like, I was a four-year-old. I just remember feeling clean, feeling clean with that. And I was led to the Lord by a fellow by the name of Noel Norton. Noel Norton. And Noel was in his seventies. And I remember him. And the reason I know that is because I texted my aunt this week. My aunt is still alive up there. And I said, do you remember the man? She goes like, oh yeah, sure. Noel Norton. and he was in his 70s, and he didn't live much past that, but I remember specifically, he sought to disciple me simply by typing up a letter. Each year on my spiritual birthday, he would send a little letter to my home. And I remember this because he was very old school. Now, I didn't know, once again, I didn't know this at age four, but what I loved about it was he typed up on an envelope, he would type, Master Eric Seip, And I'm going like, dude, I look back now, I'm going like, man, we've come a long way from there. We don't ever talk about that. But I remember going like, I'm a master? I'm like, and my mom would just say, no, that's just the polite way of saying your name and addressing it, like he would do it correctly. But we're certainly a long way from there. But really, other than Mr. Norton, I don't ever remember anyone taking time to say, okay, what about you? How does this apply, how does this work of Christ work in your life? So it simply meant that decades, it wasn't until decades later when by God's kindness and mercy I began to learn the gospel. And then I thought that I already knew it, but in reality, I only knew enough to kind of get in the door, as it were, and I did not have a decent understanding of the significance of God's work of redemption in my own life. And because of that, I had a very shallow view of the gospel, the good news. It wasn't really good news to me. I mean, it was a ticket out of hell, so to speak, but it wasn't this thing that would cause me great joy. Because in reality, what I did was I tried and I sought to work out my salvation by simply following the rules that were presented to me. These were things that you did or did not do that made you good. And so for the most of my teenage years, I was a good teenager. I was good, literally. I didn't get many demerits at all. In our school, we could get demerits. It was like y'all were laughing at me like, that was weird. But I'm like, no, we would get demerits. And if I got 50 demerits, I would be expelled. But I didn't get any. I didn't get hardly any. I was a good kid in class. A little mischievous, you know, a little bit joking, laughing at other people's expense. But if you would have known me in high school, you're going like, there's no way you're going to be my pastor. There's just no way. I have people now go like, you're a what? And I'm gonna be like, yeah, I've been a pastor now for a long time. But the reality is, I needed to understand what this gospel meant to me. So this is my burden, this is why I wanna talk to you. Because the gospel isn't merely the door into God's kingdom. It's the daily path that each of us must walk. And some of you remember the message that Steve Lawson preached here about the narrow door and the narrow way. And that's the way that we are to walk the same narrow way into his kingdom is the same narrow path that we are to walk in our Christian lives. So the gospel then must permeate our thinking and our very living, every aspect of our living. And this is why you hear me say from time to time, if you want to understand grace, if you want to understand God's grace, just take a breath. Because the bottom line here is we don't deserve even our next breath. And you say, how do you mean, why do you mean that? Because of the gospel. It's the gospel of Jesus Christ that allows us the privilege of breathing and knowing that that's from God. There's many people who breathe, but they don't know it's from God. They think somehow I've made myself breathe. Or somehow I am good enough, God must be lucky to have me so I can breathe. And I wanna tell you, no, that's not the case. My friend, that is a grace of God that allows you to breathe. If you wanna begin to understand that, you gotta look at it through the eyes of the gospel. And that means two things. The gospel is what makes us right before God. And this is what's called our justification. And this is what it means when you hear me say that we are in Christ. Or we could say it this way, this is us in Christ. All right, in other words, we, by the gospel, are brought into Christ. And it's a beautiful thing. Paul tells us in Romans 1.16, it is the power of God unto salvation. It's bringing us into salvation. Our justification then is in a legal term, and it's God pronouncing that we are righteous. It's the righteousness of Christ put to our account. And that justification, I know Chaz even said that this morning, just as if I've never sinned. And I wanna say to you, that really is right. And he clarified it again by saying, just as if I've always been righteous. Why? Because it's not a broken righteousness that's been fixed, it's God's whole righteousness that's been put to my account. And it has no chinks. It has no weakness, it has no malady. It's full, it's whole, it's ours, and it's put to our account. That, my friend, is unbelievable, that God would take a wretched refuse like you and me and grab us and pull us into his family. That's what it means for us to be in Christ. But it doesn't stop there. So if you have the wordless book or the wordless pen, the colored pen, whatever, and you were brought to Christ with that, I'm going like glory be, but let's not stop there. Let's go further. And the further is that the gospel then frees us to delight in God for all of life. And this is called our sanctification. This is beautiful. This is Christ. in us. The first is us in Christ, the second is Christ in us. His presence and His power with us continues to do work out in and through us by His grace. That's why that message was so sweet today, because I'm going like, He doesn't even know what I'm speaking on tonight, and yet here's this hand-in-glove scenario once again that God does. And by the way, did you notice how well the hymns just fit well today? It was beautiful. I mean, our singing was just tremendous this morning. It was so good. It was such a blessing to my heart. But in Colossians 1, verses five and six, Paul is writing to this church in Colossae, and he goes, of this you have heard before in the word of truth, and then he goes, comma, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed the whole world, and it is bearing fruit and increasing. So it didn't come just to sit there and kind of just blob. No, it is bearing fruit and it's increasing in your life. This is sanctification. It's the same grace that saves, it's the same grace that sanctifies. And Peter reminds us that one of the biggest ways through which sanctification works itself out in us is this thing of sanctification. going through trials and suffering. Peter reminds us that the lack of ongoing transformation in our lives comes from forgetting what God has done for us in the gospel. And this is what we're talking about. This is why he says today, man, you take that grace and you are redeemed by that grace. And 1 Peter 1 verses 3 through 9 that we talked about two weeks ago, Peter tells us that it is through testing of our faith in Christ that God continues to shape and fashion our hearts after the likeness of Jesus. 1 Peter 1.7, the genuineness of your faith comes at testing. So this is where your view of God begins to expand and you begin to understand when you are tested and you are realizing that you need something other than yourself. You come to the end of yourself. It's the best place to be. If you come to the end of yourself where you are not the one, the great decision maker in life, you don't get to say how the world is and you don't get to say how God is, then you begin to understand Sanctification, you begin to understand justification, God's complete gift for us. He says in 1-7 that this testing does this, he goes, more precious than gold that perishes. Though it is tested by fire, it may be found to result in the praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. In other words, it lasts, it makes it to the end because it's genuine. Now, here's the point, though, where we live, and here's what I want you to understand. At the initial point of our conversion, the new heart given to us is like this newborn baby, and we're gonna see this this next Sunday, verses one through three, like a newborn baby. And we all have our moving parts. A little baby has its moving parts. Really cool, newborn baby, born to God. Stouts this week, Jesse and Emily Stout, a new little girl that was born, and she has all of her moving parts. I mean, she's whole. It's a wonderful little thing. But we have a very limited understanding, these babies have very little understanding of how they work. And you've heard me use this illustration before, but when your kids just go like this, and they go, oh, I have a finger, wow, look at that. And they do like this thing, and it's really precious. So in that process of growing in grace and the knowledge of Christ, two things happen simultaneously in our hearts that I want you to see tonight. Okay, I want you to understand this. First of all, we grow in our awareness of God's holiness. Part of coming to Christ is that there is this holiness of God, that there is this separateness, we call it, this holy other of God. And this is why I've said before, we don't get to say how God is. because he's God. Isaiah 55 verses eight and nine, and you can just see Isaiah wrestling through some of the things. That text in 1 Peter chapter two verse nine, I mean, or 10 and 11 and 12. I don't think that I'll ever get that out of my mind, because I see now the Old Testament prophets being told what to write, and they're writing it down, and they're going like, whoa, what is this? What does this mean? What does this look like? And they're pointing to Jesus. And so, Isaiah's writing and he's talking, this is God saying, my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. Well, of course, he's God. Of course he is, he's the creator, we're the created, and we have to constantly remind ourselves where we are. And so we grow in our awareness of God's holiness. But secondly, because of that, as a result of that, we grow in an understanding of our own sinfulness. And this is where, if you see a new believer, a person who's come to Christ, And like in the first several months, if they're taught right and they're taught correctly, you see them go through this and they wrestle a little bit with, what have I done? What is going on here? Because like, whoa, I'm starting to see my sin and it's much worse than I ever thought. And we're going like, yes, that's how it happens. Jeremiah 17, nine, the heart is deceitful. The heart lies. So if you're listening to your heart, It's one of the worst pieces of advice you could ever get. Just listen to your heart. No, my friend. You don't wanna listen to your heart. Your heart is deceitful. It lies to you. Listen to your feelings. No, my friend. Don't listen to your feelings. They lie to you. They're under the fall. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? You don't even understand it. And this is why you come to understand what you don't understand, and you back away going like, whoa, I don't understand this. I don't understand this about God. Then back away. Don't insist on your own way. Back away in humility, why? Because you're dealing with God. And you don't have any mound to stand on when you're dealing with God. You don't have any height, you don't have any advantage over God. So we grow in our understanding of our sinfulness. Now, the Bible is used by the Holy Spirit to come and cleanse us. That's what 1 John 1, 9, that cleansing agent within us. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us. It's a beautiful thing. I love it when Cindy cleans out our kitchen sink. Just has this, walk in, there's this little sparkle, and I go like, oh, she's wiped that down. That's awesome, that's beautiful. But that's the way he does in us. He cleanses us from all sin. Why? He has the authority to do that. Why? Because he died for that. And when we live in this community in fellowship with one another, we're part of the community of God's church, God's greatness and image becomes sharper into focus and it is not that God is becoming more holy or that I'm becoming more sinful, I'm just realizing what already is true. And I'm beginning to adjust my life according to what I am learning. I'm increasingly seeing God as God. And this becomes very, very important in how you live out your life. The answer in your soul has to be, is God God? Or is somehow, someway your God? And this is not only true for your salvation, but because of your salvation, it becomes true. So it should look something like this, all right? Time comes, and boom, there's a point where you are genuinely converted. This is why we use the word conversion, or you'll hear me say regenerated, or you'll hear me say born again. From time to time, I'll say saved, because typically, that can be a sort of a man-centered thing. And I want you to see that it's more than just a broken person getting fixed. It is a dead person given life. It is a fully hopeless person given hope, living hope, as we learned about. So Peter wanted us to understand this, and I think I agree with Peter, and I want us to understand it as well. It's new birth, and it grows something like this. You see this awareness of God. I'm gonna use the top part here. You grow in your awareness of God. At the same time, you grow in your awareness of your sin. So in justification, his righteousness covers us and covers every sin. Christ then becomes more and more precious to us and the more we see our sin, we run to the cross and we see his finished work on our behalf. So the cross, in fact, looms larger. And you see it where it's spreaded out. The cross becomes more and more important so that we can sing hymns like, so I'll cherish the old rugged cross. We should be able to sing that with a tear in our eye. And when we get to heaven, we're gonna throw our trophies down at the one who suffered on the cross. Because we don't deserve those things. But this is also true of sanctification through his work of grace in us, giving us eyes to see our sin and his grace. This is why you'll hear me talk about, Lord, give us eyes, open the eyes of our hearts, open the ears of our hearts. And this is why Scripture warns us, then, not to drift away from the gospel. The writer of Colossians, the apostle Paul, is very good about this, because I'm telling you, he spent nights crashed at sea, in prison, being beaten, and you can't tell me that he doesn't sit there and go like, oh, what is going on here? Is this worth it? Is what is going on part of the Christian life, or is this, there's just people mad at me? And how to explain that personally? And he says this, you continue in your faith. stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that has come to you, that you have heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven. Paul expands the breadth of how the gospel has been proclaimed. It's a beautiful thing. Do you understand that the gospel has been proclaimed everywhere on earth to some degree or another? It could be the very natural creation that every man walks out and sees and goes like, whoa, this is unbelievable. They may not link God until the Spirit of God brings the Word of God to bear in their hearts because it comes by hearing the Word of God, but there's a part of God that they can understand everywhere in the world. Scripture says in Romans 1, they're without excuse. And so he says this, of which, of which what? Of the gospel, I became a minister. It's beautiful, Colossians 1.23. But here's the deal. As we see God's holiness combined with our sinfulness, you see that, that's that grid up here, a battle begins to rage within. And this is where we live every day. Mom, you're at home. The kid cries, you know that's not just a normal cry, that's a cry of defiance. You know that, there's something that that battle kicks off in your soul, like okay, what do I do? Can I just set him aside, just be quiet, just be quiet. You can do that, but it doesn't deal with the heart. And if you're dealing with your own heart and you see the sinfulness, you go, wait, if I let him or her have their own way here, I'm gonna be teaching them that they can go through life and ignore God and it'd be okay. And I'm going like, no, you can't actually do that. You must first of all deal with your own sin, but then you look at that child and go like, no, I gotta help them understand that there is a God and they're not him. I gotta help them understand that. So this battle begins. Sanctification doesn't work out quite as neatly as we would like. I mean, the battleground becomes this inflamed inside with this great tug of war at our hearts as to what we will now do with our indwelling sin. How will we deal with our own sin? And so our tendency is to do one of two things with our indwelling sin, one, We begin to minimize God's holiness. We buy into this line that says God is less than his word tells us. God isn't the God that he says he is. I say how God is, and we begin to minimize God's holiness. Or, the flip side, we begin to elevate our righteousness. I'm really not that bad. I mean, I'm, I'm kind of better than God. I don't get angry like he did. He wipes out his enemies. And we elevate our righteousness. We buy into the lie that says I am someone better than God's word actually says I am. And what that does is it dooms us. It can condemn us to death. It may be a demonstration that we're truly not born again because we're not seen spiritually. We're not hearing spiritually. And so in doing this, what happens is the cross becomes smaller and smaller, and Christ's work on my behalf in my life is diminished. And this is how it works. Our hope is then not based on his goodness and his righteousness, or our salvation is not a third person theology, It's a first person theology, what I do, what I say, instead of a third person, what he does and what he said, and it's based on this vain expectation that God will compromise his standard, that God will give in because God doesn't really mean what he says, and God will grade us on a curve. I mean, we're all, no one's perfect. I mean, how many times have I heard that? How many times have that been uttered in my own soul? Well, no one's perfect, Gary, come on. I'm going like, yes there is. There is someone who's perfect, Jesus Christ. He's called Jesus Christ the righteous on person, on purpose. So the cross becomes smaller and smaller. Now, I wanna go over this briefly, but there are at least six ways in which we minimize our sin, all right? Let me just go through this quickly. First of all, this is no one in this room, so I'm not, I don't want anyone to take this personally, okay? But you know people, like your wife is this way probably. We become defensive. We struggle to receive feedback about our sin and our weaknesses. And when confronted, we tend to rationalize. We explain things away in a light that makes us appear not as bad. So we talk about our successes. and justify our decisions in that route, in that way. And this makes it difficult for people to approach us about what is true. Because they know that if they come and approach you, they're gonna get a pushback. and you're gonna push back. And what that's showing you is not humility, what that's showing you is the depths of the sin of your heart. So if you are pushing back when God brings people into your life that says, hey, hey, look at this, look at this, and you push back, all you're seeing is your sinfulness. Because that's a natural defense. We become defensive. Secondly, we fake our spirituality. We feel this pressure to seem spiritual, especially in a situation, a scenario like this. You've gone to maybe a Christian school, or you've gone to a church, and so you know that people are expecting a certain level of spiritual quality to you, and so to appear like you love Jesus and his word, you begin to fake it. And we say this, we wanna maintain a good Christian testimony so we craft our lives in such a way that others will think well of us. And we may even be here tonight so that people will think well of us. I hope not. I hope you've saw through that and go like, no, I just need Jesus. I don't care what people think of me, I just need Jesus. Psalm 39, or excuse me, we'll get to that later. But as a result, not many people know the real us. So you can come into a situation like this and you hide, and that's the next thing. We hide from each other, number three. And we're like Adam and Eve when we begin to cover ourselves and hide. Now, truthfully, we can't ever hide from God. This is what Psalm 39 tells us. He goes, whether can I go from your spirit or shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you're there. It's like, if I go anywhere, behold, you're there. I can't get away from you. And the glory of that is that God is chasing you. He's not gonna let you go if you're his. Isn't that beautiful? I got a fellow that was in our church in Germany. By the way, is this being recorded? Yeah, okay. And I'm chasing him. I'm chasing him. He'll listen to this. I want him to know, I've told him this. He was in our church in Germany, and he's had a very difficult life, very difficult life. And I'm chasing him, because I'm going like, I'm gonna play a little bit of the Holy Spirit. I'm not the Holy Spirit, but I'm your friend, and I love you, and so I'm gonna chase you. And he's very grateful for it, by the way. He's very, very grateful for it. But this is the reality is, we can't hide But if we're into believing lies, we're into it, so we seek to conceal, at least to others, things about our lives that will make us look bad, especially the really bad stuff. I would say that if you're into hiding, then there are some things in your life that are probably really bad, but you don't want anybody to see it. And so hiding is more about shame and guilt. And we don't think people will accept us or love us if they know who we really are. Can I just tell you something tonight? If you're thinking that, you're believing a lie. Because there's no one in here that has sinned more than the Apostle Paul. There's no one in here that has sinned more than me. And you're believing a lie that helps you to try to cover your sin. Our hearts, all of us, and if you don't believe this about your heart, you're not looking at what is true. Our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked. It's okay to own that because that's the heart that Jesus died for. You qualify for grace. That's beautiful. That's unbelievable. by yourself, but with Christ in you, you do believe it. And that's what you do, you believe it. Fourthly, we create an image of us in the minds of others. We tend to think highly of ourselves more than we should. That's lifted right out of Romans. Romans 12, three, it says, for by the grace given to me, I say to every one of you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment. That idea of sober judgment is think what is right, what is true, what is accurate. You're not wishy-washy, it's not fuzzy, you're thinking what is true, what is right, what is accurate. But we want others to think of ourselves highly so we tend to exaggerate and make our goodness bigger than what it actually is for no reason whatsoever. There's no reason to do that, why? Because Jesus knows who you are. And then fifthly, we blame others. And I'll just tell you, stick around us long enough, you'll have reason to blame me. You'll have reason to blame the elders. You'll have reason to blame Chaz. I'm already blaming him. I'm like, it's already his fault. No, because this is how we do it in life. We have difficulty owning our own sin and there's always some reason why we don't make the right decision or we didn't respond well. I am a master at this. It's our pride that actually overrides any work of the Holy Spirit. And we set aside the input from others and are quick to point out the faults of others to give us an excuse for our own sin. And don't tell me you're not a master at it. These are the people that God has saved. So there's a little bit that ought to say like, yeah, praise God for grace. Yeah, hope so. And then number six, we downplay the means of grace to us. And here's where I want to just camp out just a little bit. I know it's getting late, but what is it that God uses to put his grace and glory into our lives? Do you know what that is? It's the normal means of grace. You've heard me say this before and I just want to reiterate this. What are these means whereby God extends grace into our lives? The people right around us, every one of us to each other are a means of God's grace into our lives. I meet with people every week and they have no idea what kind of grace is given to me through that meeting. I sit there and just rejoice. I was so pumped to have lunch today. because it was with a person where I have visually watched over the past several years, God take and pick that person up out of a horrible pit, place that person on a rock, and little by little, growing in grace and the knowledge of Christ, and now God has put them together with someone else to probably be married soon. There's no announcement here, okay? But I'm just saying, I'm sitting there getting goosebumps upon goosebumps because I've watched God change this person And I'm going like, I just don't ever wanna get used to that. Because I know what God's done in my own life. And this is what I have so much enjoyed about just getting to know Chaz and Chelsea a little bit more. I don't mean to embarrass them in this, but. So literally, we thought this through. And God brought us here in 2010. God took them away from Columbus in 2012. took them out to California to work a real change in their lives. They had no idea what they were going into. You need to ask them about that and let them tell you about those days. It's glorious to see how God met their need and they had nowhere to turn but to God. They had no friends, they had no people that they knew. They began to gain friends. But then God gave them the education that he needed. But one of the things that God didn't do, and I'm so grateful, He didn't give him the kind of church experience that was gonna go along with the seminary that much. He got a little bit of it. And then God decides to bring him here. And I'm going like, man, this is so good because we as a body have a chance to help him get some experience. Really, really. And I just love it, I love it. And they're so eager for it and so hungry for it. But I'm just saying, my friend, that's a work of God. You can't orchestrate stuff like that. That's a work of God. And we as God's people should be seeing this and going like, praise God, from whom all blessings flow. But in these ways of downplaying all this, the cross fades in the background. and our gospel gift of salvation in Christ is no longer prized, it's no longer valued, and so it looks something like this. We grow, and over time, we get kind of like, oh, I don't wanna think about God's holiness, and oh, I don't wanna think about my sinfulness, and what happens is, is the cross looks like it's shrinking. It's like it's less important in our lives. And Robert Thune says it this way, he goes, quote, something is lacking in our understanding and appreciation or application of Jesus' sacrifice for our sin, and it manifests itself in two ways. And this is what I want us to see. When we shove aside the cross, when we shove aside the gospel, not for salvation, we like our ticket to heaven. But in our sanctification, we shove it aside because it's up to us now. We're gonna make things happen. So what happens is two things. One, we either pretend, we get into pretending, that's where growing in our awareness of our sinfulness is not fun. And it means admitting to ourselves and others that we are actually not as good as we think we are. In fact, Richard Loveless in his book, and I use this book in part of my study for my dissertation, he says this, if we're not resting, or he says this, sorry, that our righteousness or our pretending becomes a complex web or compulsive attitudes and beliefs and behavior. that we try to pretend and play so immediately when someone bumps up against us, we go boom, we throw this pretending wall up there. We pretend our spirituality, because we're not resting in Christ's perfect work. And this growing sense of sinfulness can crush us. And we buckle under its load and we live a life compensating by pretending that we're better than we actually are. We're really okay. I mean, there's nothing to see here. So stay out of my life, I'm okay. And it comes in many different ways. It comes in dishonesty. I'm really not that bad. It comes in comparison with others. Well, I'm not like they are. And we develop an us versus them mentality. Man, that will kill a church environment. False righteousness. I mean, there's all these good things that I do. a judgmental, self-righteous attitude towards others, because if we keep people lower than us, we seem higher, we seem better, and hopefully will dampen my inner guilty feelings. Somehow we need to assuage that shame and that guilt underneath, so what we do, we pretend. Or, the opposite happens, and we perform. Growing in our awareness of God's holiness is very challenging. It is a line to gain, in football lingo, that we never reach, and we know it, but we're very hesitant to agree with it. Because if we agree with it, then it means we need something. And in our pride, we don't really need anything. So we stare at God's perfection in the eye, as it were, and we're bowing our wills accordingly, and it seems we just fall short, and we really are falling short. So if we're not rooted in God's acceptance of us in Christ, we compensate by trying to earn God's approval through our performance. And this is where religion comes into play. Religion just says, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. But religion won't save us. Doing this won't save us. So we create a false source of righteousness. And to do this, here are some examples. Let me give you some examples of places that we go for our righteousness. Places where we go for our satisfaction. Places where we go to squelch that inner numbness of our hearts We have job righteousness. It's not Job righteousness, that's job righteousness. I'm a hard worker, so God will reward me. If I work really hard, God will give me. Family righteousness. Because I do things the right way, I am a gift to my wife, I'm a gift to my husband and my children. I send my kids to a Christian school, or I send my kids, and we don't send them anywhere, we homeschool them, and it becomes our form of family righteousness that says I'm good, and we're looking at our performance, and this is where the perfectionistic mentality comes in, and it can destroy us, because I work so hard, I want it right, and then we have one child that just won't do right. That's what God all has to do is just have one child that just doesn't do right. In the morning we're like, oh, we can't do this. That's a good thing, by the way, to come to terms with that. Schedule righteousness. I'm really self-disciplined. I don't waste any time. And you shouldn't either. Here, have my scheduler. You need to copy this. Some of us do need some discipline in our schedules, all right? I'm not gonna lie. Some of us do need that. But then the opposite of that is flexibility righteousness. Man, I'm flexible. I'm not like those stressed people that have everything down to a T. I resist that discipline stuff. I'm flexible with my time. I mean, we go out shopping any time we want to. It's just like, it's not a big worry. Or mercy righteousness. And I really care about the poor and disadvantaged. I wish you had my sense of mercy. Legalistic righteousness. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't chew, and I don't what? Run with those who do. You see, you know that, you know that. Too many Christians just aren't concerned about holiness these days. I see this all the time on Twitter. I just want to go, they're not wrong. I think that's true. But if it's self-performance, then I want to flag that. If you're concerned about holiness is based in what we learned this morning in the gospel of Jesus Christ, then you're where you ought to be. If you're concerned that you have to do more and try harder, that's not where you ought to be. Because you can't do more and you can't try harder because the line to gain is perfection. There's only one person in all of time that did it perfectly. That's our Savior, Jesus Christ. Praise His name. Believe in Him, trust in Him. Political righteousness. I vote for fill in the blank. Or I don't vote for fill in the blank. So I'm right. I vote not for the person, but for the platform. My platform is right, my thinking is right. Yours, of course, isn't. Okay, now, I'm not saying there's not some truth to understanding that, but what happens is there's those things that comes and divides unnecessarily God's people because of our own claim to we're the right one. And we don't bother even spending time thinking about the person that we're talking to that they, God may be working in their life. And how are they learning and coming to terms? No, we don't even do that because why? We're shutting that down, we're not talking about that. Tolerance righteousness, this is very big in our world today. I'm open-minded and charitable toward those who don't agree with me. I'm not open to talk with people who disagree with me. And you're just going like, okay, all right. Let's be careful about that. Those are these ditches on either side. So, how would you fill in the blank here? In order for me to be a better Christian, I need to what? In order for me to be a better Christian, I need to what? Do more? Try harder? or actually live out the Christ that's within us by grace, through the Word of God, and do so with great humility, realizing you don't deserve any of it. The only way we become a Christian is Christ's love put to our account, and we, by grace, through the Spirit, live Him out through the Word of God. through his person through us, and it will result in a life that looks more and more like Jesus. And this, my friend, is a journey. It's a lifetime journey. It takes time. It takes living in humble submission to the word of God. It takes the body of believers working together to care for one another in order to cause this Christ-likeness that's in us to become part of what then names us. There should be a sense to which people, when they hear your name, go like, oh, that person just, there's something different about him, there's something about Christ that reminds me of who Jesus is about him or her. Our subtle tendencies toward pretending and performing only prove our failure to actually believe that Christ's work is sufficient for my relationship with the Father. And those tendencies are subtle. These then become the root of all of our more visible sins. The pretending and performing, not trusting into Jesus is the root. trusting in Christ then becomes the flow of life in us and through us. So as we learn to apply the gospel to our unbelief, to preach the gospel to ourselves as it were, as Jerry Bridges tells us, we will find ourselves freed from the false security of our false righteousness that is really a self-righteousness and it's not a righteousness at all. So my point tonight is this, that our gift of righteousness given to us by grace is through Christ. and it's Christ in us and it's us in Christ that begins to show outwardly to others in such a way that it brings those people to greater knowledge of Jesus that will begin to open the door for us to speak the gospel into their lives because our life is also speaking the gospel because we preach not only verbally but we preach visibly. And this is what God, how God has designed the church to function in this world and to do so with great joy. So rest in his perfect righteousness and let your heart rejoice in him.