We're going to start the message with a verse from Romans 1, verse 21. If you wanna turn there in your Bibles, and we're going to use that kind of as a springboard. This morning will be more of a topical sermon, departing from our, you know, trek through Luke and the Lord's Prayer. Romans 1, 21, hear now the word of God. Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile when their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. Thus far, the reading of God's word. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we do pray that you would open our eyes to see clearly our condition. Help us, Father, to be aware of what's going on in our own minds, our own hearts, our own actions, that we would recognize so deeply our need for what only you can provide. So we do pray, Father, that you, by your Spirit, would overcome our natural inclinations and help us to think godly thoughts, to think your thoughts after you. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. I am not given to alliterations. You guys know what an alliteration is, right? Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. That's an alliteration. I have another one down here, but I just don't want to have to wrestle my way through it. You get the idea. I think they do help us remember things. Don't get me wrong. And I think they're appropriate in a topical sermon, which is what we're doing this morning. But if you're going through a passage, if you're going through a book, I think I have found that there's a temptation to allow the alliteration to take control of the passage. More than once, I've seen the alliteration believing becoming, belonging, carved out of a passage that may have said something like that, but it certainly wasn't the primary message there, but it's like, I gotta make it work. I need to make the passage serve my alliteration. And I think we need to be careful of that. Having gotten that out of the way, There is an alliteration that I have seldom used, but I'll tell you this, I think about it all the time. And I think this alliteration really captures the appropriate sense of the Christian faith. So if you're not a Christian and you're here, I think this will be very tutorial for you. It'll be very much like if you were to say, what does it mean to be a Christian? What is Christianity? I think it's contained. in this alliteration. And if you are a Christian, I think we need to excel still more at understanding what these words actually mean. And the words are guilt, grace, and gratitude. Guilt, not a popular word these days, but guilt is a necessary prerequisite in the Christian faith to determine our condition before God. The Apostle Paul later in Romans 3.20 wrote this, for by the works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight. And then he explains one of the main three uses of the law, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin. So we read the law of God. Should we try to do it? 100%. But the more you try to do it, the more you realize you can't do it. It's in the effort of trying, of knowing it and trying it, that you at some point look up to God and say, who can do this? Well, be comforted in knowing this. Jesus didn't come for the people who can do it. He didn't come, he made it quite clear, he didn't come for the righteous. Now, of course, when he said that, it was really addressing people who were righteous in their own eyes, because no one is righteous. Jesus came for guilty sinners, and if that's you, you've come to the right place. It is a wonderful gift from God when he opens our eyes to our own sin, when he helps us to not delude ourselves any longer, when he helps us kind of get lost, when God goes, you're lost. And we thought we weren't lost, and now we realize we are lost. It's a gift from God when that happens. It's a sort of phase one in the Christian faith. It's as if the doctor has given us a diagnosis of a horrible disease. You didn't realize it, but you have a horrible disease. But there's a cure. Jesus made it quite clear, and he was speaking, I think, metaphorically when he said that those who are well have no need of a physician. That's in Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and all three synoptic gospels. So, and by well, he was talking about those who have no sin, as I mentioned a little while ago. And if you've come here this morning, and you don't think you have sin, you're still in the right place, because we're gonna somehow convince you that you are in sin. We need to know the disease in order for us to need the cure. Without guilt, without guilt, there's no need for grace. And what I want to push here, because I've said, OK, those of you who've come here for the first time, this is the basic tutorial of the Christian faith. But at the same time, those who have been in the faith for a long time, the greater you understand your guilt, the more you're going to appreciate the grace. If your growth as a Christian is not revealing to you all the more how guilty you are, you're not growing as a Christian. The Apostle Paul, and I've said this many times early in his ministry, referred to himself as a sinner. But toward the end of his ministry, he viewed himself as the chief of sinners. Now, I don't think he was a worse person at the end of his ministry than he was at the beginning of his ministry. I think God was sanctifying him. But his eyes had been opened to the depth of his own guilt. I think that tends to happen when God invites you up to heaven, as he did with Paul. And you see that in the encounters, do you not? With Isaiah, when God says, come on up to heaven for a while. And what's his response? Woe is me. or I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among people of unclean lips because my eyes have seen the Lord of hosts. My eyes have been opened to my own iniquity. How wonderful was it for him when, you know, the seraphim took the tongs and grabbed a coal from the altar as a type, a foreshadow of Christ, and touched his lips and he said, your sin has been purged. You've been forgiven. And that's our second point. Grace. Grace, my friends, may be the apex of the message of the Christian faith. That's probably why half the churches in our denomination are named Grace. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, I think, says it really well, although I can't tell you How many people I've read who've tried to make this passage say something other than what it obviously says? For by grace you've been saved through faith and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not as a result of work so that no one may boast. Somehow people will take that You know that old saying, if you torture a verse long enough, you can get it to confess to anything. They will take that and they will try to make it sound as if, well, yeah, but it's still something I need to contribute. What he's saying here is there is nothing you bring to the table. And let me correct that. I'll tell you what you bring to the table, what I bring to the table. Guilt. That's my contribution. assailing the notion of salvation by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, may be the prime directive of the world. It may be the prime directive of the flesh, of the devil. We are weaved in such a way as to think, I'm gonna earn it. Because that's the way we are with each other. And there may be people in this church who owe me money, and I expect to get paid. That's not true, there's nobody owes me any money. But you get the point, because you cannot make God your debtor. You can't do anything and then look up at God and say, you owe me. Zero. He does, all he owes us is damnation. All he owes us is judgment. And sadly, it's not merely the world, but this idea that I can somehow contribute to my own salvation is continually banging the door of the church. And it's not just the church, we see it all through scripture. What do you think Adam and Eve were doing when they took the fig leaves? Right? We can cover our own sin. How did that work? No. With what were they covered? Animal skins. What had to happen in order for them to be covered with animal skins? Somebody had to kill an animal. Who covered them? God covered them. The works come from God, and God alone I think one of the beauties of weekly communion is its dedicated reminder to us that it is the broken body and shed blood of Christ alone that brings us redemption. I mean, I think it would require a particularly degenerative committed act of rebellion to seek to place our own blood in that cup. And when you think somehow you've contributed, you're saying, let me just put a drop of my blood in the cup. It's not your blood. You may shed blood. Your body may be broken, but not for the redemption of others and not for the redemption of yourself. It is Christ alone and his blood and his broken body that when we go to the Lord's table, that we fix our hearts upon. It is after we meditate upon and enjoy that grace that we can now respond, even as we were talking to Mason, right? And question number three, we're saved by grace alone in Christ. But then there's question four, right? How then should we live? Now, let me just state here. that after we've meditated upon, and enjoy, and never forget, and we are ever reminded of the grace of God in our lives, that we can now respond with good works. Going back to Isaiah chapter six, right? Remember where that led? First he's like, I can't even talk, I can't even sing, because I'm a sinner. Then his sin is purged. Then what does he say? Send me. I'm ready to do some work. And let me just remind all of us, because boy, this really likes to creep in, our good works are not an effort to win God's favor, but a response of gratitude for having been gifted God's favor through the work of another. Gratitude, praise, and good works, from a sense of gratitude completes our alliteration this morning. We don't obey God's commandments in hopes of being set free from the slavery of sin. The Bible talks about Jesus said it in so many words, those who commit sins are slaves of it, John 8, 34. The Apostle Paul builds on that in Romans 6, where he says, those who sin are slaves of sin. Those who are in the world, those who have not been rescued by Christ, they're not just sinners, they're slaves of sin. Sin is their master. Sin is in control of their lives. We are not seeking to be obedient to somehow get out of that slavery. We're not trying to earn God's love. We're responding to God's love. Think about the Ten Commandments. If I were to ask you, how do the Ten Commandments begin? Most people might say, you shall have no other gods before me. It's the first commandment. But it doesn't start with a commandment, does it? How does it begin? I am the Lord your God. who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. They've already been delivered. And having been delivered, then he goes, now let me tell you how to live. I have not made it unclear. It's no secret that my favorite hymn is Not What My Hands Have Done. I love that hymn because it is a continual reminder that it's not what I have done that somehow procures for me the love, the grace, the peace of God and the riches of heaven. It's what he has done. Should I love him? I should love him. But is my love for God the precipice on which I will stand in order to be secure in my own righteousness before the living God? Heaven forbid, right? It's what he has done. It's not what my hands have done. And you know when you want to do good things with your hands, but you never want to trust those good things that you've done with your hand to somehow find peace with God. It's a really insidious little trap. I was talking to a worship leader years ago. about what his goal is. It was kind of a more contemporary place. And I'm not against emotion and worship. I mean, like I said, when we sing that one hymn I just mentioned, it kind of affects me emotionally. And I'm not embarrassed at that. I just like it. Boy, the truth of this in terms of what it reveals to me is kind of awe-inspiring. I was talking to this worship leader and I asked him, I go, what is it you're actually trying to accomplish in your leading of worship? And he said, I'm trying to get us to connect with God. And, you know, obviously it's not some kind of horrible statement, you know, we shouldn't feel like, well, that's a bad thing to try to connect with God, but let me just challenge you with this thought. Our worship of God, our praising of his name, is not our attempt to connect with him. It is our praising of him for him having connected with us through Christ. It is not as if I can get kind of, and don't get me wrong, I think we should be intimate and thoughtful in our worship, but all that should revolve around you reached down and you rescued me. A buddy of mine shared a long time ago this thought that I know. It's profound in my own mind. And he said that if you had a friend, say that was a buddy of yours in the military, and he died to save you and a bunch of other guys. He's just somebody who was a hero. And the father of this man invited you all to his house. The last thing on your mind would be, how is this guy going to make me feel? What would be on your mind is I need to thank him for what his son did for me. And sometimes we don't go to church with that in mind, right? We don't go to church with this idea that I'm going to show up to thank God for what he has done for me. And don't get me wrong, I feel like we should get something out of it. And I feel the weight of that as the pastor. I want people to walk out edified and instructed and all this. But my challenge to all of you is that when you go to church and when you walk out of church, you have a keener sense of what God has done for you rather than how he might make you feel. These three things, guilt and grace and gratitude, this little alliteration I think is kind of interdependent. That one needs the other which needs the other. Our gratitude can be so inept. Part of this is because we have an inept understanding of our guilt. Part of this is because we have an inept understanding of God's grace. If we have a low understanding of our guilt, then we will inevitably have a low understanding of God's grace. Because we're not going to think we need him as much as we do. And if those two things are compromised, we will inevitably result in having a lower understanding of gratitude. I'm kind of thankful. I'm somewhat guilty. God's grace and my good works, we work together to save me. And so I'm thankful to God, but I'm kind of thankful to me too, because I worked out my salvation in fear and trembling, as if that were, as if that verse says, I worked for my salvation. That's not what it says. If we really understood the guilt and really understood the grace, our gratitude would be quite different. But there's a weird thing that happens, and I just would challenge all of you to kind of investigate this in your own soul, that people who have recovered, there's an old saying, nothing's worse than a reformed drunk. God has rescued you, he's brought you here, and now that you're here, you're like, now you can look down at everybody else because look at me, I've succeeded. Don't get me wrong here. I don't want to be misunderstood. But I have found that the easiest people for me to hang out with are unreformed drunks. And I know plenty of them, my buddies of mine down at the beach. And they have no pretense of righteousness. They have no pretense of seeking. They just know who they are. I pray for them. I literally will sit with them. They've heard the gospel. But because they have become so aware of their own depravity, they've got the guilt part down that they're just easy to hang around. I've never felt them look down their nose at me. If anything, you know, I mean, I was sitting with them not too long ago and, you know, after sitting for a while and talking, I got up to leave and one of the guy goes, and it's sad, but it's, you know, I don't know, to me it's also precious. He goes, you know, because they'll call me preacher down there. Hey, preacher, thanks for hanging out with the devil's rejects. And I mean, there was something about that that really tugged at my heart. But it's almost as if God takes us from here to there, and the natural Uncle Screwtape letter is, now that they're there, make them very pleased with themselves, to the point where they're insufferable to others. Boy, if we really understood our guilt, Our Christian faith would be quite different than the way it is. Our culture celebrates Thanksgiving. We see all these declarations of gratitude throughout the airwaves. But our gratitude is very, very fragile when it's not built upon the rock of guilt and grace. Sometimes people will say, I am really thankful. Kind of want to know to whom? They'll just say they're thankful and then it'll be like, they're just kind of thanking the air. Who are you thankful to? Because Jesus, let me just push this because I don't want us to be one of these types of people. Jesus taught about a very dangerous kind of gratitude. Now here was his audience. His audience is defined in the Bible as those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt. And those two things kind of go hand in hand. The more righteous you think you are, the easier it is to look at other people with contempt. A genuine grasp of their guilt and a genuine grasp of their need for grace was something that this audience rejected. So Jesus tells a story. And in that story we see this fragile, twisted, demented, and perverted sense of gratitude. We'll get into this in more details when we get into Luke 18, which will take a little while. Nonetheless, you'll be familiar with this in Luke 18, 11, and 12. Jesus is talking about these two guys who go up the hill to pray. And then there's the Pharisee. You guys know who the Pharisee is. The Pharisee is the religious person. The Pharisee is the cleric. He's the priest. He's the person who's quite pleased with his own righteousness to the point where he's holding others in contempt. The Pharisee standing by himself prayed thus. Notice how it starts. God, I thank you. So there's some gratitude. Thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector who was probably standing right next to him. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get. God, you have done such a good job with me. Well done. Look at me. Later in the lesson, Jesus is going to say that this man did not go down the hill justified. That justified is a big word in the Christian faith. It's the idea of being declared righteous. This man did not go down the hill righteous in the eyes of God. This man, according to Jesus, did not have favor with God. He was not acquitted of his sin, his fragile, partial, Gratitude did not set the blocks of his heart to recognize his desperate need for grace. Friends, partial gratitude, half gratitude toward God is the mortar which builds the stairwell to hell, according to Jesus, as we see in this account. And it's accompanied by contempt for others. So do your works of praise, your works of gratitude, do they vaporize when they are confronted with the discomforts of life? I mean, how grateful are you? Lord, I've been pretty grateful, but now some things have happened in my life and I'm not quite as grateful. I'm having a hard time worshiping you. I'm having a hard time serving you. Because I'm not getting what I think I should get. Boy, if God could just answer, what would he say? He goes, you should be thankful that you're not getting what you should get. Perhaps this is due to the truth that, like the Pharisee, we're partially thankful to God, partially thankful for the blessings by which we are surrounded, and even partially thankful for whatever good we might see in ourselves. And again, I don't want to sound overly oppressive. I've been in doing this job for a long time, and a lot of young Pastors will come to me, especially in this area, and they'll be like, OK, you've been kind of doing this for a long time. I got this problem. I got this issue and all this stuff. One of the things I try to let them know real early is don't go into the ministry with the sense that you're going to get something from your congregation, this idea that there's going to be some reciprocation, that everybody is going to give you a big grand applause They should, that'd be nice. They should be taught to respect the elders in the church. But if you go in looking for that, let me just tell you something, young man, that the people that you love the most and spend the most time with, that you seek to help the most, are going to be the people who, when they leave your church, are going to make you feel most miserable. I pray it's nobody in this room, but that's just what happens. People go in, there's this church, I expect this and this and this and this. I'm not going here to serve God, I'm not going here and it's with a sense of gratitude. I certainly have a very limited sense of guilt and you guys aren't producing and so these elders, I'm gonna go to the next church and talk about how bad they are. I'll tell you something, if anybody goes, those of you who are thinking about becoming members of our church, if you come into the elders meeting and the first thing you do is talk about how bad your last church is, that's not going to bode well in the discussion. It's a sense that we just have this entitlement and we've just walked away. Churches are going to have problems as long as there are people in them. But there's the sense where if you think that God has gifted you with the ability to know the problem, then start trying to solve the problem. There was a family in our church that are still here. I think it was about 30 years ago, give or take, and they came to the church and they were like, we really like your church, but it's not very friendly. The people here aren't very friendly. Nobody likes to hear that, right? And I go, so what are you going to do? And they're like, well, would it bother you if we began a ministry where we greeted people when they came to the church and make sure they're interacted with? I'm like, knock yourself out. So they were like, we like the church, but there's a problem. They didn't leave. They came and they fixed the problem. Now everybody loves our church. We ought to also, if I can push this a step further, is we ought to be thankful, and not in a pharisaical way, not in a thank you Lord that I'm not like other people, but we ought to be thankful for whatever good we see in ourselves. There's a story told about, excuse me, Matthew Henry, a 17th century theologian, who I still use to this day in terms of commentaries, and he was robbed And when he got home, he uttered a prayer to this effect, Lord, I thank you that even though I was robbed, I was not hurt. And thank you, Lord, that even though I was robbed, I just really didn't have much to steal. And I thank you, Lord, that even though I was robbed, I was able to make it safely to my home. But most of all, Lord, I thank you that I was the one robbed and not the one doing the robbing. Do we have any idea what we are capable of apart from the grace of God? We tend to have this, I would never do that mentality. And it may be at some level true when it comes to certain levels of evil. But let me tell you about biblical anthropology, what the Bible says about the nature of man. And that includes everybody in this room. And that is that apart from the grace of God, as we saw in this experiment in the beginning of Genesis, where you have Noah preaching, and the whole world rejects the preaching of Noah. And that leads to every human being on the face of the Earth thinking continually that which is only evil in their heart. That's where we end up. If God says, I'm going to turn you over to your own heart, I'm going to turn you over to your own reprobate mind, where we go is from total depravity to just abject depravity. I don't think we understand how evil we can be. We may consider thanking God for the things outside of ourselves, but we ought also to thank God for any good that is within us. Again, not in the pharisaical sense. Again, Moses wrote of the entire human race, other than Noah's family, that every intent of the thoughts of his heart, that's everybody, was only evil continually. Friends, that is not a general description of sin nature. That's not just a description of total depravity. It's been said that this was an iniquity which had reached its highest point, a prodigious wickedness, an extraordinary wickedness, an abnormal and monstrous wickedness. Have you ever seen anybody do something? You're thinking to yourself, how on earth are they capable of doing such a wicked thing? But what we learn in the experiment with Noah is that would be all of us. We would only think evil continually. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think any of us have won the battle over sin and evil. But I dare say there's probably not a person in this room who only thinks evil continuously. We all have moments, right, where we're like going, this morning, when you got up and said, I think I'll go to church, I think that was a good thought. Right, when you go, I need help, Lord, that's a good thought. Even the Apostle Paul, when he's writing the most self-deprecating passage, maybe in all of scripture, Romans chapter seven, where he's saying, I continually do that which I do not want to do, and on and on, he goes, inside of me, the one who wants to do good. And you know what, wanting to do good is a good thought. So what he's describing is where we would all end up apart from the grace of God. And when I say that, I'm not just talking about the grace of God of individual people who come to faith, but the influence that they have in the world by which they are surrounded as well. The answer to this is a phrase we've all heard, but I don't know if we really mean it, and that is, there but for the grace of God, go on. It's so easy to be frustrated with other people. We watch the news and we see gang members or dishonest politicians or terrorists. You know, you see this poor girl who was just shot, you know, by some guy yelling Allah Akbar and all this stuff. And you just, I mean, I have to say, I have a sense of indignation. And I think rightfully so. So don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. I think people who commit evil deeds should face the full effect of God's justice on earth. I mean, we see that all the way back in Genesis, where we see the capital punishment for the first time. For whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God he made man. So I'm not saying what I'm about to say right now in such a way that we should alleviate culpability. People should be responsible for their behaviors. What I'm trying to convey to you and me is there but for the grace of God go I. I don't think we understand where our nature would take us. What I want to put before us is a proper understanding that apart from God's grace in our lives, we would be in the same condition as those people we find most reprehensible. Let us be challenged. not to glory in our own character, but to thank God for any good, again, not like the Pharisee, but to genuinely thank God that I'm not a person who would willingly kill an innocent person. That is not a result of my nature. That is a result of a renewed nature. God's restraining hand, as our first passage taught us, a lack of thanksgiving, a lack of thankfulness. A lack of thankfulness is like a primal foundational sin, right? Because although they knew God, They did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened." What we have here, the context here, is the Apostle Paul just explaining the nature of man. This isn't a specific group. This is anybody. That passage teaches us some really interesting things. One is that all men and women know God. They don't have a saving knowledge, but they have a sure knowledge. God has revealed himself to all. In reference to this, Charles Hodge, I think, explains it well when he says that it does not merely mean that they have the opportunity of knowing him, that in the constitution of their own nature and in the works of creation, they actually possessed an intelligible revelation of the divine existence and perfections. The knowledge that God is does not come at the end of our investigations. It's the beginning. Now, the appropriate response to God's revelation of himself would have been worship. like Isaiah, right? You just kind of get cleansed and you enter into worship. I think what's not so obvious in terms of the response of this general revelation is they're not thankful. Thankful for what? I mean, the things for which we should be thankful are really beyond number. But certainly, included in the list is the very revelation that Paul was just writing about. We should be thankful to God for all that we have, for all that we are, that is for our very existence. What we might not think to add to our thank you note to God is his willingness to reveal himself to us. He didn't have to do that. God has chosen, you know, my atheist friends are always looking for evidence, evidence, evidence, right? And it's such a fallacious request to somehow prove something that is eternal, self-existent, and immaterial in the same way that you would prove that soap floats if you put it in water. And that's the kind of silly things that they're asking. And I'll ask them, I'll go, well, what would you need to see? Maybe you were at the debate here with the atheists. And I said, what would you need to see in order for you to believe that God is? And he said, well, I don't know, maybe if the moon split in two. And I said, well, how would you know God did that? Maybe our moon was pregnant. He goes, yeah, I guess I would have to exhaust all the other possibilities before I would acknowledge that it was God who did the very thing you asked me that needed to be done in order to prove that God exists. But you know what's beyond that? You know what's beyond some type of evidential proof? God has instilled it in your very heart and your very mind that He is. It is undeniable. It's not you figuring it out. It's God going, you, the moment you realize you are, you realize I am. And the moment you realize I am, you realize you are. We tend to take that for granted. Calvin remarks, nor is it without reason that he adds that they were not thankful for there is no one who is not indebted to him for numberless benefits. Yea, even on this account alone, because he has been pleased to reveal himself to us, he has abundantly made us indebted to him. Our guilt in God's grace should ever lead us to gratitude or thankfulness. It is a thankfulness which should produce worship and obedience. That God made himself known to us, as Calvin offers, has abundantly made us indebted to him. And let me tell you, friends, it's a debt you can never pay. We have been ransomed by Christ. I remember a buddy of mine was dying of cancer, just one of the most wonderful people that I had known, you know, and he was a pastor, and I reached out to him. You know, those are hard, right? What am I going to say? You know, he's dying. He knows he's going to die. But you reach out, and you're like, hey, how you doing? What can I do? And I remember he wrote a little simple note to me, and the note said, the debt has been paid. that the debt has been paid in terms of our redemption. That doesn't mean we have no response. Now the Apostle Paul, in light of his own guilt and God's grace, you know what he viewed himself as? A debtor to all. It's woven into our hearts to live as if we are owed. Boy, that's an inescapable part of our nature. But the truly godly, thankful person will live as if he owes. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we do pray that you would continually open our eyes to the depth of our own sin, the depth of our own guilt. Not that we might be overtaken by it or just engage in kind of meaningless self-loathing. but that it would remind us of the height of the grace that is found in the cross of Christ. And Father, with those things squarely in our hearts, we do pray that you would be with us and aid us to live lives of true gratitude and thankfulness and obedience, not in order to win your favor, but because that favor has been purchased by his blood. In his name we pray, amen.