Live Sermon | No Other Gospel | Pastor Chaston

A one-degree error doesn’t feel like rebellion, it feels like normal life until you hit the rocks. We’re in Galatians 1 with a blunt warning from Paul: turning from the gospel is not just switching ideas, it’s deserting the God who called us by the grace of Christ. When “grace alone” quietly becomes “grace plus works,” the message can still sound Christian, still use Bible words, still point to Jesus and yet become a counterfeit that cannot save. 

We unpack what was happening in the churches of Galatia, why adding religious requirements like circumcision and rule-keeping strikes at the heart of justification, and how distorted teaching spreads today through platforms, personalities, and the pressure to please people. Along the way, we talk about why the authority of the gospel sits in the message itself, not the charisma of the messenger, and why Paul uses such severe language when the truth is bent. The stakes are not theoretical; we’re talking about souls, families, and eternities. 

Then we get practical. We trace the slow drift from apathy to atrophy to apostasy, and we make the case that the gospel is not an “intro lesson” for new believers but the lifeblood of the whole Christian life. We also push back on treating the gospel like a product to sell in a consumer culture, and we call every believer to real discernment by knowing the genuine gospel so well that counterfeits stand out instantly. 

We end where hope always begins: “but God.” If you’re tired, drifting, or still stuck in the “dead in sin” part of the story, the good news is that salvation is a gift received by grace through faith, purchased by Christ crucified and confirmed by the resurrection. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs clarity, and leave a review that helps more people find the true gospel.

Transcript

Welcome And Scripture Reading

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Welcome to the Kenneth S Out First Podcast, where we're building transformed lives one message at a time. Each week you'll hear Christ-centered sermons from Dr. J. Perry Fowler, rooted in the truth of God's Word. This is where real faith meets real life, because a life built on truth is a life that lasts.

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Well, good morning. May be wondering, this guy does not look like Perry. Um this is what happens when you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a preacher for the weekend. And uh so, anyways, if we haven't met, my name's Chaston. I'm the worship pastor here. If you would, if you have your Bible this morning, if not, it's gonna be on the screens. Uh turn to Galatians chapter 1. Uh, it's on page 1449. Nobody? Come on. That's a classic. We're gonna be starting in verse 6. It says this, I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ, and you're turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preach to you, let him be accursed. If we have said, as we have said before, so now I say again, if any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Let the Lord bless his word. Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for your word that it's the foundation upon which we build everything. Soften our hearts, allow it to penetrate into the depths of our hearts, our souls this morning, what you would have to say to us. Amen.

The One Degree Drift

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In the age of sailing ships, a navigator's most prized possession was his charts. Before GPS, before satellites, the chart was everything. It told you where you were, where the rocks were, and how to get home. But historians of maritime disaster will tell you that the most dangerous charts were never the ones that were obviously wrong, because a blank page never sends anyone to sea. The charts that wrecked the ships were the ones that were almost right. A single degree of error in a compass bearing sustained over hundreds of miles of open ocean would place a ship not safely in a harbor, but silently and confidently onto a reef. The crew would have no warning, the navigator would have no doubt, and they would strike the rocks with full sails and a steady hand on the wheel, certain that they were headed home. Likewise, Paul is astonished in Galatians 1 because the Galatians were sailing on a corrupted chart. There were false teachers that were troubling them, and they had not handed them an obviously blank page. They're still talking about Jesus, they're still using covenant language, and they're still pointing to Abraham. It sounds like the gospel, it looks like the gospel, but friends, it is not the gospel. It's off by one fatal degree, and that degree is grace. The gospel of grace plus works does not get you close to salvation, it puts you on the rocks. And Paul, like a man watching the ship he loves sailing confidently toward a reef, he can't contain himself. Paul instead grabs the wheel. Here in Galatians, I want to put us in a bit of context.

Why Galatia Turns To Works

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What was happening at the church of Galatia is that Paul is addressing this main theological, this bending towards a false gospel, that works such as circumcision, um, etc., are necessary for justification. Judaizers in Galatia were insisting that Gentiles or non-ethnic Christians or not ethnic Jews that were Christians needed to be circumcised, obey food laws, and observe calendar cycles in order to receive salvation. The Judaizers presented this as the true interpretation of the gospel, and the Christians in the Galatia had begun to believe it. The first thing that we see in this passage is a shocking departure. Shocking departure from the gospel. Paul says, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ, and you're turning to a different gospel. Now, I'm gonna give you some Greek words throughout this message this morning, so just hang in there with me. You don't have to know Greek like the back of your hand. I definitely don't. That's why they make software. Thalmazo, thaumazo. That's the Greek word for astonished. Paul is stunned, he is astonished, he is in disbelief, and he's disappointed that the Galatians had deserted the gospel. If you've ever done anything wrong in your childhood or in school or anything, and you've been sat down by a parent, a teacher, a coach, and you've done something especially that upset them, they would tell you this I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. Here Paul is saying, I'm not disappointed, I'm mad. He turns it on his head, he says, I am not disappointed, I'm mad. And in Galatians, that's gonna be a majority of what the book is about, is that he's mad at the Galatians. And in fact, in in chapter three, he even refers to the Galatians as you foolish Galatians, or in our modern day terms, you idiot Galatians. He does not mince words with them. So what was it, what was Paul really astonished, disappointed, Valmatso at? Paul was astonished that the Galatians weren't just deserting the gospel, but they were deserting the very grace of Christ himself. If we read here in the verse, it says, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting what? Him who called you in the grace of Christ. This wasn't just an ideological shift. This wasn't just a difference of opinion, or this wasn't just an academic idea. This was the complete rupture of the relationship with the very God who saved them. The Galatians are deserting the grace of Christ. Now, this word desert, notice it has one S, not two, so it's not about food. Another Greek word, metatistesi, I'm probably butchering that. But it's a it's a present-tense verb that means there is ongoing defection, there's ongoing desertion. And it carries some of the similar uh uh weight as as like military, is in the military. Like if you were to abandon your post or abandon your brothers, that's fairly unforgivable. And in the same in the same vein, Paul is saying that your allegiance lied with us, and now you have transferred it. You have abandoned the main post of the gospel, and you have transferred it. You have transferred it over here into this false idea, and for that you're falling away. Remember the context. The Judaizers in Galatia were trying to teach the Galatian believers that there were required works for salvation, which clearly goes against what the rest of the Bible has to say. Salvation is not achieved, it's received. It's a gift. It's something that we can't come to on our own. It's something that had to be done for us. Paul then spends the rest of Galatians reminding them that the gospel is rooted in grace and the all-sufficient merit of Jesus Christ. The God who had called them out of pagan idolatry to salvation and new life in Jesus did so on no other basis than his own desire. And to forget this is worse than betraying an army, a country, a friend. It's to betray the true and living God. They were abandoning their post. They were saying, Creator God, the one who has saved us, we want nothing to do with this grace, and we're turning to this false idea. They may not have realized that's what they were doing, but in their actions, they were actively abandoning God Himself. Again, this was not just a difference of opinion. This wasn't just uh uh let's agree to disagree type thing. This wasn't a matter of preference, this wasn't a matter of speaker, this was a matter of the gospel, this is the matter of the truth. The great thing, though, about this grace of Christ is that it is deeper, it's wider, and it is more powerful than any of our sin. They were abandoning this grace. We move on to verse 7. He says, You're turning to a different gospel, not that there's another one, not that there's another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. It's very clear to us that there is no second gospel. The gospel stands alone. The truth of God stands alone on its own merit and in its own power. However, what the false teachers were trying to offer wasn't a different type of Christianity. It wasn't a variant, it wasn't an offshoot, it was counterfeit. And the word distort,

Apathy Atrophy Apostasy

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metastrefo, means to twist, invert, and to flip inside out. Now, I I love what he's what what Paul is talking about here, that there's no different gospel. There may be different religions, but there is no different gospel. So I went on a deep dive to look at what are some of the craziest religions that people believe. And I found I found three for this example. The first one, you might have heard of this one, you might have heard of this one. It's called Pastaferianism. Yes, that is none other than the church of the flying spaghetti monster. Yes, it's abs it's as absurd as it sounds. In 2005, as a satirical protest against intelligent design classes being taught in colleges, there was a Kansas physics grad who wrote a letter to the school board arguing that if intelligent design is taught in universities, so should the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was exactly what you think. It was a deity made of spaghetti and meatballs. It now has ordained ministers and legally recognized ceremonies in some countries. It's crazy. The second one is called Kapamism, the Church of Kapamism. It's a Swedish religion, leave it up to the Swedes, right? Recognizing by recognized by the Swedish government in 2012. Their sacred act is copying and sharing information. That's all it is. File sharing is holy communion to them, and Ctrl C plus Control V is a sacrament. It all started by another philosophy student who basically argued that the internet should be free. And the final one is dudism, the church of the latter-day dude. Yeah. It's all based off of the character the dude from the big Lebowski. And uh, I see some heads nodding. We probably shouldn't know what that is. We'll have some discipleship talks after this. I see you, Dennis. And uh yeah, that's right. That's the problem with me knowing your name, so I'm gonna call you out. Um it's based off of the dude from uh the Big Lebowski. The central ethic is just take it easy. Over 600,000 men and women are ordained as ministers under the church of the latter-day dude. And its sacred text is the movie itself. And it's fun to sit here and laugh at the absurdity of some of these, but the problem that occurs is not when we get a vastly different religion or a vastly different gospel that denies the deity. The problem arises whenever the gospel message is distorted and when it's held adjacent to the gospel and uses gospel language, yet it veers off far and it is still considered heresy. It's still considered not the truth. The problem arises when we distort the gospel. Now, if I were to place two clear glasses of water in front of you this morning, and they were they were filled with just with just plain water, but one of them was regular filtered water, and the other was salt water, from a distance they would look very similar. You would think they were exactly the same thing. Until you get up close and you begin to examine it, maybe you smell it, maybe you take a sip, and then you start to realize that something is inherently wrong with this salt water. The same thing happens when we distort the gospel. False gospels and different religions deny the deity of Christ, while the distorted gospel detracts from the all-sufficient merit of Christ. Now, we live in a very interesting and unique time in history where we have many people who want to talk on the gospel, who think they have some kind of merit because they have a stage to stand on or a podcast mic in front of them. And they they want to use gospel language to effectively try to widen the goalpost of salvation. But if we look at the words not of man, but of Jesus, we'll see he does the exact opposite. He reigns it in and he gets very narrow. He gets very narrow. In John chapter 14, verse 6, it says, Jesus said to him, very familiar verse to some of us, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one gets to the Father except through who? Me, except through Jesus. When we add on these extra requirements for salvation that go beyond the grace of Christ, sometimes we think we're strengthening the gospel message, but in fact, we're actually diluting it. We are detracting from the grace of Christ. We are detracting from the sacrifice of Christ, and we are detracting from the deity and the merit of Christ. Our goal is to deflect attention from ourselves and place it on the person, work, and grace of Christ. So you may be thinking to yourself, how does this distortion even happen? How do they get to this point? Because I'm sure they didn't wake up one day and try to, you know, try to commit heresy. Like I don't just wake up and be like, you know what? I think I'm gonna blaspheme God this morning. Um, I definitely did not do that this morning. But it starts with apathy. I'm gonna give you three terms. They all start with the letter A because I'm Baptist. So it begins with apathy. When we don't consistently revisit the gospel, we're susceptible to fall away from it. There's this underlying misconception that the gospel is only for those who have not given their life to Christ. It's only an evangelistic tool to bring those to Christ. But if you're alive and breathing right now, the gospel is for you. The gospel is for you. It always has been for you and always will be for you. The gospel isn't an insurance policy, it's not something we move on from after salvation. It's not something that we receive and we say, okay, I'm good. I'm just gonna move on with my life, do whatever I want, and whenever I'm on my deathbed, I'm gonna revisit the power of the gospel just to make sure that I get into heaven. The gospel is nowhere even near that. The gospel is not just another evangelistic tool on our belt, and it's not just a tag that we attach to the end of sermons, it has power. The gospel is the very lifeblood and foundation of every single thing we do. Without the gospel, you and I are not here right now. We are accounting for our sins and we're being held accountable for it. You know, we were at the SBC convention this past week, and uh Ryan Willis has uh some doctoral stuff that he's working on. He had to do like a seminar thingy down there, and uh they were evaluating all of the pastors at the pastor's conference. And uh so we were all just chatting about it, and um we were looking at the rubric that he was given, and down at the end it said, uh, did the did the pastor give a clear presentation of the gospel? And we kind of laughed. We were like, well, I hope we don't need this big gospel presentation and an altar call at a convention full of pastors and church leaders. And we kind of laughed about it, but I got to thinking and I was like, no, that's that's exactly who needs to hear it. That's exactly who needs to hear it. We need to revisit the gospel, be reminded of the power of the gospel, and reminded of our need for the gospel. That's flawed thinking. If you think that we can just move on and detach from the gospel. And when we do so, when we grow apathetic to the gospel, this is like this is like going on that charted course and just slowly veering off, slowly veering off. Once we're apathetic to the gospel long enough, we experience atrophy. You may notice this word from like muscular atrophy. Some people assume that this muscular muscle is lost dramatically, that it takes a really catastrophic inner uh injury or illness to waste away. The reality is far more unsettling. Physiologists tell us that muscular atrophy begins within 72 hours of inactivity. Just three days, not months, not years, not uh a significant amount of time, three days. Our bodies are very, very efficient. If it doesn't need a resource, And it doesn't need to maintain these resources. It's not going to expend energy trying to keep them up. That's what makes atrophy so dangerous. It begins early and it's noticed late. There's no alarm, there's no signal, there's nothing until one day you get down the road and you realize you may look in the mirror, you may reach for a bit of strength and realize that it's not there. When we are apathetic towards the gospel, we will atrophy towards it. And once we've reached an amount of apat atrophy, we will reach apostasy, which is just the most dangerous phase. This is when we've detoured far enough from the truth that it leads to heresy and a false understanding of the gospel. If apathy is the day you stop training, and you tell yourself you'll start again next week, which is when we're all going to the gym, right? Monday. Monday is when it starts. If apathy is the day you stop training, atrophy is the body responding to what you've actually chosen. An apostasy is then reaching for the strength necessary and finding that that muscle is gone. The Galatians didn't just wake up one morning and decide in their heads to abandon grace. It happened over time. And it was because they stopped training in it. They stopped defending it, they stopped treasuring it, they stopped revisiting it, they stopped allowing it to really grip their hearts. And that's my question to you this morning. When was the last time the gospel truly gripped you? When was the last time that the gospel truly indwelled into your soul and gripped you, and you were reminded that you are a sinner in need of grace? And that because of God's mercy and grace upon his children, he grants it to us as a free gift. When was the last time that message truly gripped you? If it's been a while, I pray today is that day. If it's been never, I pray today is that day. If it was yesterday, I pray today is that day. Then

Anathema And Eternal Stakes

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we move on and we see the consequence of this drifting, of this falling away. We see two things here in verse eight. It says, If even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. In the first half of this verse, we see that the gospel's authority is not anchored on the messenger, but the message itself. The messenger doesn't carry the power. Whether it's myself, whether it's Pastor Perry, whether it's Pastor Ryan O'Kelly, whether it's Pastor Ryan Willis, Mark Amison, Judd, whether it's any of us up here that are giving the gospel message, if it is not true and clear, it's not the gospel. The message doesn't rely on the merit of the messenger. Paul takes this a step further. He says, even if an angel comes to you and says, hey, this is the gospel, and it contradicts what the Bible says, he says, Let him be what? Accursed. Now, I don't think we really have a good word for what Paul is getting at here when he says accursed. Here's another Greek word, anathema. It's used five times in Paul's New Testament. It's used five times. And what does he do? He uses it twice here. That's how serious he's taking this. He uses up two of them. God was like, hey, you get five anathemas. He said, fine, the Galatians are getting two. So what does this anathema mean? It's not just let ill will fall upon him. It's not just, uh, if he were to receive blessing, uh, let's just hold back blessing. No, anathema means to be completely and utterly cut off from God. That is the consequence of this false gospel and anyone preaching a false gospel. This is why it's very important for you to discern what is the gospel and what we are saying up here. Each time we get in front of you, there is pressure on us to adhere to the truth. And no matter who the messenger is, no matter who the messenger is, whether it's next week, whether it's a hundred years from now, unless the Lord comes back, this church is still gonna be standing. We're all gonna be long gone. We're all gonna be a distant memory, but this church is gonna be still standing. And my prayer is that this church preaches the gospel, preaches Christ crucified, and adheres to the truth of God's word. Can I get an amen? Thank you. I didn't didn't realize I had to ask for them this morning. I'm just messing with you. Guys, I'm having fun. Let him be accursed, is not afraid that it's not a phrase that should be taken lightly. Again, this word anathema means to be completely cut off from God. Here we see Paul's solemn damnation. To be cut off from God means to spend eternity away from him. And the alternative is not good, to put it lightly. What Paul is saying here is not just let him be cut off, let him be damned. It's that serious. I'm not hyperbolizing, I'm not being dramatic, I'm not trying to scare you into anything this morning. I am just telling you what the word says, and this is how serious we should take it. One night Caitlin and I were having a really deep conversation. I don't know how we got there. Um, but Olivia was pretty young, and we were talking about um our family, and we were talking about family discipleship, how we wanted to handle some things in our in our home life. And I was like, Yes, I agree with you that family discipleship is a very big thing. And she goes, No, you don't understand how serious it is. And for my wife to get serious like that, that I was like, Whoa, that it that is not normal for her. And she looks at Olivia who's who's playing on the floor, and tears come into her eyes, and she says, When I look at that child, I don't just see a child. I don't just see a person. I don't I don't just see someone who's gonna grow up and and hopefully go off to college and get married when she turns like 45, and because she's never talking to boys ever, and she's gonna get married, she's gonna have her own career, she's gonna have kids of her own. I don't see any of that. I see her eternity. I look at our child, I look at my child, and I see a life on the line. I see an eternity on the line. It's that serious. It is that serious. Each and every one of you in here this morning is an eternity that is on the line. When you go out to eat after this, each person that you're sitting around, your waiter, the hostess at the stand, the people who are sitting around you, they are eternities that are on the line. When you go to Walmart, when you go to Costco, the people that you're mad at in front of you because they are not walking fast enough and they just decided to stop in the middle of the aisle because that is the most perfect place for them to stop. They are an eternity on the line, and that is how seriously we should treat the gospel and treat the Great Commission. We should be that intense and that serious about the gospel. To return to our first part of this uh verse about the message and the messenger, Paul warns in 2 Timothy chapter 4. Um he's preparing young Timothy to go be a pastor in Ephesus, and he says this that he was he was telling him, hey, preach the word, adhere to the word, and preach the truth. He says, why? Because in verse 3, for a time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, I love that vocabulary, having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and they'll turn away from listening to

Itching Ears And Discernment

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the truth, and they'll wander off into myths. We're living through a very unique and a very important moment in history when it comes to the ability to consume content, especially from people that we don't know. Right now, I could get on Facebook, I could get on the internet, I could get on YouTube and watch just within probably a 50-mile radius, hundreds of pastors who are in the pulpit right now. And I could get on and listen to them. And so it's very important that we arrive to a point of maturity that we're able to discern what the gospel is and discern why they're using it and why they are um why they're saying it. We move on to verse 10, and this final verse is kind of funny to me because um it seems like a deviation of what Paul's been talking about. He's been talking about you, Galatians, you the Galatians, and now he turns the camera around and he says, Okay, I'm gonna put myself in your shoes, and I'm gonna talk about myself real quick. He says in verse 10, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. The gospel is not to appease man, it's to transform him. We don't preach a gospel. We don't preach a gospel that is simply marketed to you. The gospel isn't a product. The gospel is not a product. And Paul here, he's defending his position by doing what? Declaring his devotion to who? Christ. He says, Listen, I'm not trying to appease you. I'm not trying to tell you what you want to hear so you can leave and go feel good about yourself, receive a blessing. I want you to be confronted with your sins. I want you to be confronted with what the truth of the gospel is and allow the gospel in its own merit and power transform you. He says, I'm not trying to please man, because if I was, I wouldn't be a servant of Christ. And that's therefore implying that he is indeed a servant of Christ, devoted to Christ and Christ crucified. Paul's devotion to Christ influenced the way that he handled the gospel, and likewise it should inform us as well. The first thing that we should be wary of is not using the gospel as a product. While it's it's important to use strategy in deploying the gospel, we need to be careful about using the gospel. It's not a stepping stone, it is not a grandstand to support your political party or support your church or to be a catchphrase for your podcast. The gospel has power on its own. In our consumer heavy culture, it's easy to get wrapped up in this marketing. Every church is a standalone store with its very niche market. And while this strategy for reaching people and effective methods for discipleship are very necessary, I'm not saying that they have no merit whatsoever. We have very specific strategies for this. We should be careful with how we handle it because the gospel carries power on its own, and we should not shape the message to our liking. We should let the message shape us. The final application of a Christ-centered approach to the gospel is this theology is for everyone. Theology is for everyone. My prayer is that if you are a follower of Christ, that

The Gospel Is Not A Product

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you are plugged in somewhere that you can grow deeper in your faith and deeper in knowledge about who God is and what He's done for us. That's why we have life groups, that's why we have teachings on Wednesday nights. That's why we handle these uh theological topics and uh these theological ideas. It's very important for us to know the doctrine and understand why we believe it and know it truthfully. Theology is not just for us who have the degrees, who sit in the offices. Theology is not just for the leaders or your life group leaders, theology is for you. Just as much as the gospel is for you, so is doctrine. And we must adhere to doctrine. And when we devote ourselves to the study of doctrine, of theology, and of the true gospel, we will learn to discern what is and what isn't true. On this matter of discernment, John MacArthur famously uses this illustration. It regards the active uh and the art of noticing counterfeit money. In his book Reckless Faith, MacArthur writes this federal agents don't learn to spot counterfeit money by studying the counterfeits, they study the genuine bills until they master the look of the real thing. Then when they see bogus money, they recognize it, and they recognize it easily. The idea is that when it comes to using discernment with the gospel, we should be so familiar with the real thing that we can recognize the counterfeits. So I've always heard this, and I typed in, is this real? Is this real? Like, is there counterfeit departments and banks? Do they do this? Or is this just a really cool illustration? So I wasn't the only one who had this idea. Tim Challies, who is a Canadian writer and pastor, he has also heard this illustration and from both MacArthur and many other pastors, and he wanted to test the validity himself. So he scheduled an interview with the counterfeit detection branch of the Bank of Canada, not the Bank of America. He got a basic rundown of the process used to sniff out counterfeits, and he discovered that it was indeed true what John MacArthur and so many others had asserted. But one thing stuck out to him. Despite the highly resourced counterfeit detection division of the Bank of Canada, it's as formal as it sounds, the Bank of Canada has a clause in all of its stuff. That we expect all Canadians to exercise discernment with their currency. So despite this big building, this big office with experts and people who have devoted their lives to this thing, there is still responsibility on the everyday person. You all have a responsibility. However, we all have a responsibility to discern what is and what isn't the gospel, and whether or not the people you see on the platform are preaching it clearly and preaching it truthfully. You have a responsibility. So don't get distracted studying the way people can mess it up. Instead, devote yourselves to studying the truth that can't be wrong. So you've been listening to me pontificating for the past too long on the true gospel. So

Theology Is For Everyone

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what is the gospel? What is the gospel? The true gospel is this is that there's a God. And he has existed since before time. He is exists outside of time. He has created the idea of time, and he created everything we see. He created you and he created me. And you know what he said when he looked at man? He said, This is not just good, this is very good. And he delights in man, and man delights in him. But man, wanting to be more like God and wanting to be God, sinned against him and disobeyed God. Therefore, man fell away from God, disrupting and rupturing the relationship. And so God, over the course of hundreds of years, thousands of years, he established relationship with his people. He called them chosen, he set up a government for them, he protected them through the wilderness, he grew them, he loved them. And as later on in Galatians chapter 4, it says this in the fullness of time, Christ came. At the right time, in the right place, at the right moment in history, Christ came. And Christ came to not only just be here among us, but to live a sinless life and die as our substitution on the cross, be raised up again three days later, declaring victory over death, and therefore declaring us righteous before him when we place our faith in him. And whenever I'm drawn to what is the gospel, I'm drawn to this. In Ephesians chapter 2, it says this and you were dead in the trespasses and sin in once in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air. The spirit is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. The end. No, not the end, the beginning, because the very next words are this, but God. In spite of us, God, however, God, but God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, has made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved. You've been raised up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing, but it's the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast, for we are his workmanship. That's what the creator of the world says about you and I, that we are his workmanship, we are his masterpiece. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, and we should walk in them. That's the gospel. Anything contrary to that has no place, has no place. Anything apart from Christ and Christ crucified and grace and grace alone has no place. It would manipulate us, it would change us from the inside out, that it would change you, that it would change this church, that it would change this country, that it would change this world because it has that power. And this morning, if you if you're still wrestling with that we were dead part, if you're saying I'm a child of wrath, if you're saying I'm following

What The True Gospel Is

SPEAKER_01 46:16

these princes of the power of the air, these principalities, these other thrones and dominions, I want to point you to but God. I want to point you to the part where it says that you've been saved by grace through faith. And today is that day that you say, I'm gonna follow Jesus.

But God And Grace Through Faith

SPEAKER_00 46:52

We'll see you next time. Keep building your life on truth.