SPEAKER_00: All right, Mud Creek, how are we doing this morning?
SPEAKER_00: Good.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: I want to invite you to take your Bible and turn with me today, please, to the book of Galatians, chapter number five.
SPEAKER_00: Galatians chapter five, and we will begin our reading today in verse number one.
SPEAKER_00: Galatians chapter five and verse one.
SPEAKER_00: We have been taking some time over the past few weeks on Sunday mornings, beginning on Easter, talking about the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: I have this crazy idea that every time you come to church, that you should hear about the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And I believe that as a church, it's imperative that we get the gospel right.
SPEAKER_00: So much so that if we get the gospel wrong, we get everything wrong.
SPEAKER_00: And so we've been taking time over the past few weeks to drill down deep into our convictions about the message of the gospel from Scripture that we cling to here at Mud Creek.
SPEAKER_00: And today what I want to show you from the text we're about to read is that the gospel motivates us not by guilt, but by gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel does not motivate us by guilt, it motivates us by gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: Now the truth is that in life, guilt is a powerful motivator.
SPEAKER_00: We have this innate sense of believing that if we can get people to feel bad, we can make them do good.
SPEAKER_00: If we can make you feel bad, we can make you do good.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a classic example of this.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you heard this growing up or have said this to your kids, maybe even this week?
SPEAKER_00: You better eat that meatloaf.
SPEAKER_00: There are starving kids in Africa that would love to have that meatloaf.
SPEAKER_00: If you can make somebody feel bad, you can make them do good.
SPEAKER_00: How about this one?
SPEAKER_00: You ever had this conversation?
SPEAKER_00: You know, this might be your mama's last Christmas.
SPEAKER_00: So you better make sure that you stop by.
SPEAKER_00: So this week I was thinking about the different ways we use guilt to motivate people, and I thought, who can who can I talk to about guilt?
SPEAKER_00: And it dawned on me.
SPEAKER_00: I need to talk to the moms on staff at our church.
SPEAKER_00: And so I asked them.
SPEAKER_00: I said, How do y'all use guilt to motivate?
SPEAKER_00: And to a person.
SPEAKER_00: Our mothers that work here at Mud Creek told me that guilt is their primary language they use to speak to their kids.
SPEAKER_00: They say things to their kids like this.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not angry.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just disappointed.
SPEAKER_00: Where the dads on staff, they're just angry.
SPEAKER_00: Just angry.
SPEAKER_00: But the moms on staff will say things like this to their kids if you were really sorry, you would do better.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the moms on staff even admitted that she can make herself cry to make her kids feel guilty to get them to do the things that she thinks that they need to do.
SPEAKER_00: Makes herself cry.
SPEAKER_00: Guys, I knew it.
SPEAKER_00: I knew it was all fake.
SPEAKER_00: I knew none of that was real, and I knew they did it on purpose.
SPEAKER_00: But we believe that, right?
SPEAKER_00: That if we can make people feel bad, we can get them to do good.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm talking to people this morning that your whole Christian experience, you felt bad.
SPEAKER_00: And you've had preachers and you've had parents and you've had different voices along the way that have tried to motivate you to do very, very good things by making you feel very bad.
SPEAKER_00: They've loaded you down with rules, loaded you down with threats, loaded you down with condemnation to motivate you to be a good Christian.
SPEAKER_00: But is that sort of guilt, is that really the fuel that the Christian life runs on?
SPEAKER_00: Or does the Lord have an entirely different vision for the way that we live our Christian lives?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the Apostle Paul is going to show us today in Galatians chapter 5 is that the Christian's life is not motivated by guilt.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian's life is motivated by gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: That we do not live the lives God has called us to live by responding to threats from other people, by responding from manipulative, responding to manipulative preachers.
SPEAKER_00: We do not live the Christian life because we respond to our negative feelings.
SPEAKER_00: We respond to Jesus in gratitude, and that fuels everything that we are as believers.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel motivates us not by guilt, but by gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to show you this in Galatians 5.
SPEAKER_00: So if you have your Bible, let's read this, beginning in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: Galatians 5, 1.
SPEAKER_00: Paul writes to the church and says, Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty by which Christ has made us free.
SPEAKER_00: And do not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.
SPEAKER_00: And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he is a debtor to keep the whole law.
SPEAKER_00: You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law, you have fallen from grace.
SPEAKER_00: For we, through the Spirit, eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.
SPEAKER_00: For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything but faith working through love.
SPEAKER_00: The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of the Lord abideth forever.
SPEAKER_00: If you carefully read the book of Galatians that we've been talking through over the past few weeks, you'll realize that the Apostle Paul writes this book with a deep sense of urgency.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think it's probably even fair to say that the Apostle Paul is probably a little bit angry as he writes this book.
SPEAKER_00: So if you've ever had the experience in your life where you have been rage texting your spouse, and then you hit sinned, that'll show them.
SPEAKER_00: And then you read what you just sent, and you think, oh no.
SPEAKER_00: Then maybe you can understand how the Apostle Paul feels.
SPEAKER_00: And yet in this case, the Apostle Paul is completely justified in his anger.
SPEAKER_00: He's inspired by the Spirit of God to write these words.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason that he's so urgent, the reason that he's so angry, is because a group of Christians that he loves dearly, that he led to the faith, are starting to drift from the message of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Now, for the Galatians, they are hearing two competing messages at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of static, and they can't get a clear broadcast as to what the truth of the gospel is.
SPEAKER_00: Because both messages talk about Jesus, both messages have Bible verses attached to them, and both messages seem to make people do good.
SPEAKER_00: Both messages promise to make people better.
SPEAKER_00: The difference is that while the Apostle Paul is preaching a message that says, the only way we can be saved from our sins is when we look away from ourselves by faith, trust in Jesus, and receive his righteousness as a gift, then we can finally have freedom and assurance that God is pleased with us.
SPEAKER_00: The other message comes along to the Galatians and says something like this.
SPEAKER_00: Well, you need Jesus, yes.
SPEAKER_00: But you need a little bit more.
SPEAKER_00: In this case, they would say you need to keep the Old Testament law.
SPEAKER_00: You need to obey the kosher restrictions of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: No more barbecue, that's over.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're a man in particular, you need to be circumcised.
SPEAKER_00: You need to go through all of these Jewish rituals and traditions in order to really please God.
SPEAKER_00: What they were doing when you get down below the surface is they were motivating people to do good through guilt.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul comes along and says, the Christian life is not primarily fueled by our feeling bad.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian life is fueled by our response to the grace of God that is revealed to us in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And so today what I want to do is I want to work with you through this passage of Scripture to show you how the Apostle Paul understands that and how the Apostle Paul thinks.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to do that by offering you four vocabulary words that are all right here in this text that you need to know, that you need to be familiar with, that you need to see how they impact our lives this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you're here today and you like to write in your Bible or highlight in your Bible, I want you to circle these words as we get to them.
SPEAKER_00: If you take notes, I want you to make a note of these.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be able to come back to these again and again until the day that you go to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Even if you have to steal an offering envelope and write it on the offering envelope.
SPEAKER_00: That's our gift to you today.
SPEAKER_00: These are so important and vital that you need to have them etched into your heart this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And the first one is in verse number one.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word liberty.
SPEAKER_00: The word liberty, in your Bible translation, it may be the word freedom.
SPEAKER_00: The Apostle Paul knows that the Galatians are not free.
SPEAKER_00: And he's worried that they are going to be entangled again with what he calls a yoke of bondage.
SPEAKER_00: And he gives them in this passage of Scripture several imperatives to say, do not, do not let yourself be shackled again by a guilty conscience.
SPEAKER_00: Do not let yourself be in bondage again.
SPEAKER_00: Live in the freedom that Christ wants you to have.
SPEAKER_00: Now in Galatians 5.1, there are some textual differences, and so some of your translations, they may be worded a little bit differently, but they all say the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: They all say, in essence, if you want to hear from the NJV, the New Jesse Version, it says this Jesus died to make you free.
SPEAKER_00: Live in that freedom.
SPEAKER_00: Live in the freedom Jesus wants you to have.
SPEAKER_00: And church, I want to tell you this this morning, and I'm going to try to move quickly because I really want to focus on the second word today.
SPEAKER_00: It's vitally important.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to hear me today.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus wants you to be free.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free from sin, of course.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free from the fear of death.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free from guilt.
SPEAKER_00: But he also wants you to be free from the feelings of self-condemnation that say, I haven't done enough.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free this morning from some of the religious baggage that some of you brought to church today that says, I have not tried hard enough.
SPEAKER_00: I have not been a good enough person.
SPEAKER_00: I have not done enough for God to really be pleased with me.
SPEAKER_00: The message of the gospel is a message that liberates us from that.
SPEAKER_00: It is a message of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And God wants you to live in that freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, for some of us as Christians, we're afraid of freedom, aren't we?
SPEAKER_00: We're afraid of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: Because we're afraid that if we're really free, we're afraid we're going to blow it.
SPEAKER_00: Like we're afraid if we get up here and we tell people, hey, Jesus makes you free, so go live in freedom.
SPEAKER_00: We're afraid that people are going to hear that and they're going to start having affairs and they're going to start shooting meth in their eyeballs and they're going to go on tour with the grateful dead.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're afraid of.
SPEAKER_00: And everybody in their 30s said, What's the grateful dead?
SPEAKER_00: Ask your grandparents.
SPEAKER_00: They'll tell you all about the 60s if they remember it.
SPEAKER_00: And we're afraid of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, God is not afraid of creating free people.
SPEAKER_00: Because he knows that the gospel transforms people.
SPEAKER_00: So that they do not abuse the freedom they have in Christ, but they enjoy and celebrate the freedom that they have in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So that the freedom God gives us in Jesus is not freedom to disobey God, it's freedom to please God.
SPEAKER_00: Where does that freedom come from?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the Apostle Paul still in Galatians 5 is in the middle of a long argument that really reaches all the way back to Galatians 3, that I think finds its climax in Galatians chapter 4, verses 6 and 7.
SPEAKER_00: Where he says that through the gospel we are no longer slaves, but we are sons and daughters.
SPEAKER_00: We have been adopted, he says in verse number 7, so that we are no longer slaves, but sons and have sons, and we are heirs of God through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And he keys in on the difference between a motivation, the motivations of a slave and the motivations of a son.
SPEAKER_00: Both of them can please the same person, the master or the father.
SPEAKER_00: Both of them can do good things.
SPEAKER_00: The difference is the motivation.
SPEAKER_00: A slave is motivated by threats.
SPEAKER_00: A slave is motivated by fear of punishment.
SPEAKER_00: A slave is motivated by knowing that if they don't do right, then things will go wrong.
SPEAKER_00: But a son who pleases the father is motivated by love.
SPEAKER_00: They're motivated by joy.
SPEAKER_00: So that a slave does what he does, knowing I could lose everything.
SPEAKER_00: But a son knows that he will never lose the love of his father, knows that his father is pleased, and wants to live that out in obedience to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: What Paul is saying is that in Christ, you and I have been adopted into the family of God.
SPEAKER_00: We have been given a radically new identity so that God is pleased with us in Jesus, not by our works, but by his works, and we live that out in our daily lives.
SPEAKER_00: But some of you today are afraid of that kind of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And you continually go back to establishing a rules-based approach to pleasing God.
SPEAKER_00: And in your mind, you're continually haunted by, well, what if I do this or what if I don't do that?
SPEAKER_00: And what if somebody knows?
SPEAKER_00: And what if I'm condemned?
SPEAKER_00: And what if I don't measure up?
SPEAKER_00: You're like my friend Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you about my friend Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: I was Jerry's pastor years and years ago.
SPEAKER_00: And Jerry's from Morganton.
SPEAKER_00: And actually, Jerry has some mutual friends here in the church this morning, but Jerry was on Crystal Meth.
SPEAKER_00: And I cannot overstate how terrible his drug problem was.
SPEAKER_00: And Jerry used to come to church and he'd always sit kind of on my right when I would preach in Morganton, and he would come to church just blitzed out of his mind.
SPEAKER_00: Did not know he was in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And I'd preach the gospel to Jerry and want to see Jerry's change.
SPEAKER_00: Pray for Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: His parents were brokenhearted about Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: A story that some of you know all too well.
SPEAKER_00: Jerry would go to jail and get arrested, get in trouble.
SPEAKER_00: I'd go see Jerry, share the gospel to Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: Jerry, you need to repent, you need to believe in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Until finally Jerry gets arrested, and he ends up in jail on Christmas Eve, and he gets in a fight on Christmas Eve, and he's locked in solitary confinement with nothing but a Bible.
SPEAKER_00: And there, in solitary confinement, God radically transformed Jerry's life.
SPEAKER_00: Saved him, made him a totally new creature in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing story.
SPEAKER_00: But Jerry did some time.
SPEAKER_00: Just the life he lived, Jerry did some time.
SPEAKER_00: And so now Jerry's out, Jerry's serving the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Jerry's doing great.
SPEAKER_00: He's a tremendous brother.
SPEAKER_00: I love Jerry dearly.
SPEAKER_00: And if he sees this, Jerry, I hope you know that.
SPEAKER_00: But every now and then on Facebook, Jerry will post these pictures of one of his favorite meals.
SPEAKER_00: And one of Jerry's favorite meals is flaming hot Cheeto ramen.
SPEAKER_00: He takes ramen noodles, he crushes up his flaming hot Cheetos and mixes it all together, and he makes flaming hot Cheeto ramen.
SPEAKER_00: And that is a recipe that Jerry got a taste for when he was in the clink.
SPEAKER_00: He still, for whatever reason, and I've told him, I said, dude, you're free.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to eat that anymore.
SPEAKER_00: There's real food.
SPEAKER_00: But he has a taste for what he experienced when he was in bondage.
SPEAKER_00: Church, some of you are like Jerry.
SPEAKER_00: You've got a taste for bondage when Jesus wants you to be free.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free from constantly beating yourself up because he was beaten for you.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be free from living a life of torture guilt because he was tortured and condemned as guilty for you.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to live free from the fear of the wrath and the torment of God because he experienced the wrath and the torment of God on the cross for you so that you could walk free.
SPEAKER_00: Liberty.
SPEAKER_00: The next word that Paul uses, and I want to dive deep here.
SPEAKER_00: We may not get any further, and if not, I'll be back, Lord willing, by Wednesday, and we can maybe hit it again if we have to.
SPEAKER_00: But this is in verse number four, and it's the last word of the text, the word grace.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in verse number two, the apostle Paul says that to those that are trying to earn their righteousness by keeping the Old Testament law, eventually Jesus will become worthless to them.
SPEAKER_00: We are not going to fuel our Christian lives by grace and by guilt at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: We can't.
SPEAKER_00: We can't, because if we continually fill our tank with our performance, eventually we will drift away from Jesus altogether.
SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening in the Church of Galatia.
SPEAKER_00: He goes further in verse number three, and he says that if you are going to earn your righteousness by keeping the Old Testament law, then you will become a debtor to the whole law.
SPEAKER_00: It's a debtor mindset.
SPEAKER_00: All you're going to do is accumulate more and more debt.
SPEAKER_00: The harder you work, the worse it will get.
SPEAKER_00: Can anybody relate to that to your personal finances?
SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul's saying here.
SPEAKER_00: Then he says this in verse number four.
SPEAKER_00: You have become estranged from Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You've tried to fuel your Christian life by your performance instead of Christ's goodness to you, and you've become estranged from him.
SPEAKER_00: You're attempting to be justified by the law.
SPEAKER_00: You have fallen from grace.
SPEAKER_00: Now, that phrase fallen from grace does not mean that these people that were genuinely converted have lost their salvation.
SPEAKER_00: It's not what he's saying.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, what he's saying is that you have fallen away from the message of grace.
SPEAKER_00: You have lost your grip on grace, and God's grace has lost its grip on you.
SPEAKER_00: And this is connected to the word that Paul uses just a few words earlier when he talks about being justified by the law.
SPEAKER_00: The book of Galatians is a book about justification.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I am, at this point in the sermon, going to be perhaps overly technical.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want to make sure that you're locked in.
SPEAKER_00: I want to make sure that you're listening.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to make sure that you absorb what I'm about to tell you because I genuinely believe that there's nothing that I could ever preach to Baptists in Henderson County, North Carolina, that could ever be as important as what I'm about to tell you.
SPEAKER_00: So are you still here?
SPEAKER_00: Or if you're not here, raise your hand.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: We got a couple that aren't here, but maybe they'll come back.
SPEAKER_00: I know that the word justification is a big word.
SPEAKER_00: I know that it's five syllables.
SPEAKER_00: And I know that some of you hated English literature in high school and you cheated to get out because you didn't care about the wife of Bath and her journey to Canterbury.
SPEAKER_00: So I get it.
SPEAKER_00: This is maybe a bit of a learning curve, but this is vital.
SPEAKER_00: What is justification?
SPEAKER_00: This is what Paul's writing about in Galatians 5.
SPEAKER_00: When we use the word justification today, typically what we're talking about is somebody who justifies a bad decision or justifies a stupid behavior.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't have been driving drunk, but if you knew how hard my life was, you'd know I was drinking and whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00: We justify bad behavior and we call that justifying ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Because when we justify bad behavior, we're trying to prove that we were right to do wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: We are declaring our rightness, even if we did wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Declaring rightness.
SPEAKER_00: That's what justification means.
SPEAKER_00: It means to declare righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is laboring to show in the book of Galatians how God declares people righteous.
SPEAKER_00: How does God declare people righteous?
SPEAKER_00: For most of us, our automatic assumption, the automatic track that the human heart runs on is God declares people righteous who are righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Which makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: And so in the Church of Galatia, it would look like this.
SPEAKER_00: Have you been righteous by being circumcised?
SPEAKER_00: Are you being righteous by observing Jewish feasts?
SPEAKER_00: Are you being righteous by avoiding pork and shrimp?
SPEAKER_00: Meat lovers' pizzas.
SPEAKER_00: Are you being righteous?
SPEAKER_00: If you are being righteous, God will see your righteousness and he will declare you righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Most of you probably believe that that's how it works.
SPEAKER_00: Except you don't have Jewish traditions, you have culturally Christian, deep-fried southern traditions.
SPEAKER_00: I am righteous because I come to church.
SPEAKER_00: I am righteous because the pictures of the missionary made me cry and I gave money to feed the orphans in Nicaragua.
SPEAKER_00: I am made righteous because I adopted a crippled dog.
SPEAKER_00: Which I really did.
SPEAKER_00: I am made righteous because I'm a good person.
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't cheat on my taxes.
SPEAKER_00: Anybody won't cheat on your taxes this week?
SPEAKER_00: Me neither.
SPEAKER_00: I am a good person.
SPEAKER_00: I am righteous.
SPEAKER_00: God sees that and he declares me righteous.
SPEAKER_00: We think that's the way it works.
SPEAKER_00: That's the claim of almost any religion in the world, regardless of how they frame it.
SPEAKER_00: If you submit to Islam and you are righteous, Allah will see that, declare you righteous.
SPEAKER_00: If you are righteous, God will declare you righteous.
SPEAKER_00: The Apostle Paul labors to say that the good news of the gospel is that God declares sinners righteous.
SPEAKER_00: When they are unrighteous, God says that they are righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because when they look away from themselves, good or bad or ugly, and they look away to Jesus, his righteousness becomes their righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So that the moment a person believes in Jesus as their Savior, at that moment, God who knows all of their secrets, God who knows all the skeletons in their closets, God who knows where all the bodies are buried, at that moment, God says they are as welcomed, as loved, as perfect, as righteous, as obedient as Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So, for Paul, the big question here is are we justified?
SPEAKER_00: Are we declared righteous?
SPEAKER_00: Are we saved by works?
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, of course.
SPEAKER_00: But the message of the gospel is Jesus did the work.
SPEAKER_00: He's the one who lived the righteous life I could not live.
SPEAKER_00: He's the one, Paul says, who takes the curses of the law, the curses of my disobedience into himself to say to all that will come to him, as sinful as we may be, come and receive it as a gift.
SPEAKER_00: Now, that's justification.
SPEAKER_00: That happens the moment a person believes in Jesus as their Savior.
SPEAKER_00: For good and forever, they are declared as righteous as Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It's not, justification does not mean God looks at me just as if I had never sinned.
SPEAKER_00: That's not enough.
SPEAKER_00: God looks at me as if I am as righteous as Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Now, justification happens the moment a person believes.
SPEAKER_00: But typically, there's going to be a life that occurs after I believe until I go to be with the Lord in heaven, right?
SPEAKER_00: God loves me so much and is so intent on saving me that he's actually going to work throughout my life to deliver me from the sin that he saved me from.
SPEAKER_00: And that lifelong process of God delivering me from sin is called sanctification.
SPEAKER_00: So we have justification the moment I believe, sanctification, the lifelong process, not of being declared righteous, but of being made righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Now, all of that to say this.
SPEAKER_00: The problem in Galatia, the problem with many of you, the problem with most Christians I have known in my life, the problem that's often in my heart is that we make our sanctification bear the weight of our justification.
SPEAKER_00: We make our behavior as Christians bear the weight of God's approval of us.
SPEAKER_00: So that if I'm reading three chapters in the Old Testament every morning and one in the New Testament, and if I'm going to church even on Wednesday nights, because we do that at Mud Creek, and if I'm a Proverbs 31 woman and I'm homesteading by goats and I'm making goat milk soap that I'm selling to give to missions, then God looks at that.
SPEAKER_00: And God's pleased.
SPEAKER_00: But I want you to understand this.
SPEAKER_00: Your sanctification can never bear the weight of your justification.
SPEAKER_00: But your justification can always bear the weight of your sanctification.
SPEAKER_00: Because God has declared you righteous, you're being transformed to become what you are declared to be by God.
SPEAKER_00: It's like this.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Dave mentioned just a few moments ago that in like three hours or whatever, we're getting on an airplane and we're going to Mexico City.
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to fly from Greenville to Atlanta, which will take 10 minutes, and then we're going to fly to Mexico City.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And please pray for that trip.
SPEAKER_00: Please pray for our missions partners, Brother Ed Hoagland, Brother Salvador, and Jessica there.
SPEAKER_00: Please pray for that trip.
SPEAKER_00: And always please pray for the pilot.
SPEAKER_00: That airplane can carry my weight to Mexico City.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, hopefully, right.
SPEAKER_00: That's the idea.
SPEAKER_00: In theory.
SPEAKER_00: The pilot says it can, the engineers say it can.
SPEAKER_00: I hope the Lord agrees.
SPEAKER_00: That airplane can carry my weight.
SPEAKER_00: I can get in that airplane, I can sit down, and this high-powered machine, this giant tube full of jet fuel, it'll get me there.
SPEAKER_00: I hope.
SPEAKER_00: Can I carry that airplane to Mexico City?
SPEAKER_00: But what if I try really hard?
SPEAKER_00: And what if I'm really sincere?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what if I get under that landing gear and I strain and I lift and I push?
SPEAKER_00: What's going to happen?
SPEAKER_00: Nothing, and I'm going to hurt myself.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to preach at Mud Creek.
SPEAKER_00: No, there's going to be no movement except the vertebrae in my back that are going to pop and come by my belly button, right?
SPEAKER_00: But that is exactly the way some of you are living your whole Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: Instead of realizing that God has declared you're righteous in Christ, and now God is making you righteous in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You flipped everything on its head, and you are trying to prove that you are righteous, and you're trying to earn God's approval, and you're trying to bear the burdens that Jesus has already borne for you.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul wants you to realize, no, you're free.
SPEAKER_00: You're not motivated by guilt, you're motivated by gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: Let me belabor this point because it's so important.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you are familiar with, I guess it's the 1980s movie Pretty Woman?
SPEAKER_00: Y'all know that?
SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows of that movie, I guess.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not a big romantic comedy guy because I'm a guy, but stars Julia Roberts, Richard Gere.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not recommending you watch that movie or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: But the basic, the basic plot of that movie, if you've seen it, you know.
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't haven't seen it, you've had like 40 years, so I'm gonna give you, I'm just gonna tell you what it's about.
SPEAKER_00: It's your fault, not mine.
SPEAKER_00: You've had time.
SPEAKER_00: The basic plot of that movie is that Julia Roberts is a um, we got kids in the service.
SPEAKER_00: She's a professional lady.
SPEAKER_00: And um Richard Gere, wealthy, affluent, they meet one another, they fall in love, his love and money.
SPEAKER_00: Wins are over, and they all live happily ever after, eventually, right?
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make a case today, I may be wrong, but it's a chance I'm gonna take.
SPEAKER_00: That the plot to the movie, Pretty Woman, was actually written by Martin Luther in 1520.
SPEAKER_00: Because in his book, The Freedom of the Christian, in 1520, Martin Luther compared the Christian's experience of life and salvation and living with the Lord to a prostitute marrying a prince.
SPEAKER_00: Google it, it's true.
SPEAKER_00: And what he says is this that if a prince falls in love with a prostitute and they marry.
SPEAKER_00: The moment that they marry, the moment that the vows are said, and the moment that they become husband and wife, at that moment, everything that is the princes becomes the prostitutes.
SPEAKER_00: She's no longer a prostitute, she's a princess.
SPEAKER_00: She receives his name, she receives his wealth, she receives his extravagance, she's welcome in the family, she has been given a new name, she's been given a new identity, she's been loved.
SPEAKER_00: At that moment, as soon as it's declared that they're husband and wife, at that moment, the prostitute becomes something that she was not.
SPEAKER_00: But then he says this he says that lady, or that woman, now has to learn how to live as a princess.
SPEAKER_00: And she's gonna have to learn that some of the things that she said when she was on the corner, she can't say that when she's in the court of the prince, right?
SPEAKER_00: She's gonna have to treat people differently.
SPEAKER_00: She is going to have to learn to live out her new identity.
SPEAKER_00: And beloved, that's what Paul's saying to us in the book of Galatians.
SPEAKER_00: That we are the prostitute that was married by the prince.
SPEAKER_00: That we are sinful, that we are dirty, that we are guilty, and yet God has clothed us in the righteousness of Jesus so much so that now we live out that new identity.
SPEAKER_00: God is not up in heaven saying to us, as sinful as we are, you know, if y'all would try a little bit harder, I could really do something with you.
SPEAKER_00: If you would just read the Bible through every six months instead of every year, and if you'd really learn how to pray, and if you'd give, you know, 11% instead of 10%, then I would really be pleased, and then I would take you, and then I would love you, and I'd give you these things that you need for me.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: God says, I take people where they are in their sin and then transform them by their grace.
SPEAKER_00: That's grace.
SPEAKER_00: Let me move very, very quickly.
SPEAKER_00: The next word that I want to give you is verse number five.
SPEAKER_00: It's the word hope.
SPEAKER_00: Paul talks about the internal witness of the Spirit of God that gives us the hope of righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Now, hope here is not the kind of hope that we typically think.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that we get some rain.
SPEAKER_00: Because this pollen is driving us nuts.
SPEAKER_00: I hope we get some rain, but I don't know if it's going to rain or not, right?
SPEAKER_00: I hope that the airplane lands in El City de Mexico.
SPEAKER_00: I hope.
SPEAKER_00: But you never know, right?
SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about that kind of hope.
SPEAKER_00: He's talking about certainty and assurance.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says that God's people, through the witness of the Spirit, have a certainty of righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: How?
SPEAKER_00: How is it that they're not twisting like a worm on a fish hook?
SPEAKER_00: How is it that they're not ping-ponging back and forth between defeat and doubt and worry and anxiety?
SPEAKER_00: How is it that God's people know that they will be declared righteous when they stand before God?
SPEAKER_00: How do I know that?
SPEAKER_00: Here's how.
SPEAKER_00: Because the justification that I have in Christ, the righteous declaration that He has given me, is very much a future tense declaration of what my judge will say about me on the last day.
SPEAKER_00: I know that I will stand before God and you will too.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 14, 12 says to us that every one of us will give account of ourselves to God.
SPEAKER_00: You will meet the God who made you, you will meet the God who gave you life, and some of y'all are gonna have to explain yourself.
SPEAKER_00: What will God say about you on that day?
SPEAKER_00: That's the question.
SPEAKER_00: And how can I know what God will say about me on that day?
SPEAKER_00: The reason I know what God will say about me on that day is that he's already said it.
SPEAKER_00: When he says that in Christ I am forgiven, I am righteous, and I am loved.
SPEAKER_00: And so this echoes so many great places from Scripture, Romans chapter 8, verse number 1, that says, There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I will never face the sin that Jesus was crucified for.
SPEAKER_00: God has already judged it, it has been removed, and I will never answer for it.
SPEAKER_00: So much so that Paul will say later in that chapter, Romans 8 34, he'll ask the question, well, who is it that condemns?
SPEAKER_00: Who is the one who judges?
SPEAKER_00: He says it's Christ who died.
SPEAKER_00: The one who judges is the one who was judged.
SPEAKER_00: And the one who was judged is not going to judge those he was judged for.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody say amen.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody say hallelujah.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody say glory to God.
SPEAKER_00: So that, as the Apostle John would say in 1 John chapter number 4, God's people now have boldness in the day of judgment.
SPEAKER_00: Think of this.
SPEAKER_00: We look ahead to the righteous judgment of God and we have boldness.
SPEAKER_00: Hear me.
SPEAKER_00: If any of this depends upon you and your faithfulness and your faith and your perseverance and your goodness and your effort, there is no boldness.
SPEAKER_00: None.
SPEAKER_00: Because you've blown it.
SPEAKER_00: Some of y'all didn't want to come to church today.
SPEAKER_00: You didn't want to be here.
SPEAKER_00: You blown it.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you hadn't read the Bible this week.
SPEAKER_00: You've blown it.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have said things that are hurtful and mean and cruel.
SPEAKER_00: And some of you just really wish you could get away with some of that stuff.
SPEAKER_00: How can you possibly have boldness facing the judgment?
SPEAKER_00: The only way is when you understand the gospel the way Paul describes it here in the book of Galatians.
SPEAKER_00: That Christ has been judged for us.
SPEAKER_00: And we can look ahead beyond death to judgment, knowing that we are welcomed and loved and accepted by God.
SPEAKER_00: Now I think this is vitally important for us to consider for just a moment this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are here today, and I want to say this lovingly, and I want to say this pastorally.
SPEAKER_00: But you just got a few more miles than the rest of us.
SPEAKER_00: Some of y'all are pushing.
SPEAKER_00: Kyle, help me, buddy.
SPEAKER_00: How can I get out of this?
SPEAKER_00: You're seasoned.
SPEAKER_00: That's good.
SPEAKER_00: You're vintage.
SPEAKER_00: Automobiles.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't say you're antiques.
SPEAKER_00: I would never.
SPEAKER_00: God forbid.
SPEAKER_00: But some of you are in your 70s.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, listen, listen, you're in your 70s.
SPEAKER_00: You're in your 80s.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are pushing 90 and beyond.
SPEAKER_00: And God may have blessed you with a long life, and God may have blessed you with good health, and I pray that He has.
SPEAKER_00: And I pray He continues to do that.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: But we know, life being what it is, some of you do not have as long as others do.
SPEAKER_00: And some of you know it.
SPEAKER_00: Hear me, you know it.
SPEAKER_00: And you're looking ahead, thinking, I've been in church my whole life, tried to be a decent person, raised my family, kids, grandkids, now great-grandkids, and even great-great-grandkids.
SPEAKER_00: There's more than you can even keep up with.
SPEAKER_00: You don't even know who you're kids are.
SPEAKER_00: But you look ahead knowing that in a year, two, three, five, ten most, your life will be over.
SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna meet your God.
SPEAKER_00: And you live with anxiety and fear and worry about what happens next.
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you today how you can finally be free of that.
SPEAKER_00: And how you can know that when your life is over, you are ready to meet the God who made you.
SPEAKER_00: And the only way that that can happen is when you stop trusting in your effort.
SPEAKER_00: Stop trusting in your works.
SPEAKER_00: Stop looking at how good you are or how bad you are and look to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And there's another vocabulary word I would like to look at, but I feel like we probably need to stop right here at this moment.
SPEAKER_00: The other words love, that's in verse number six, circle it, it is important in the Bible, okay?
SPEAKER_00: But here's what I want to say to you, friends.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are here this morning, and I am deeply worried about you because you're worried about yourself.
SPEAKER_00: You're worried about yourselves, and you know who you are in this moment.
SPEAKER_00: That you're afraid of what comes when life is over.
SPEAKER_00: And some of you thought, yeah, well, maybe some of these senior citizens need to worry about that.
SPEAKER_00: Hear me today, not to be more, but you don't have to be old to die.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be old to die.
SPEAKER_00: And even if you are young today and you're going to live a very, very long time, and I hope that you all do.
SPEAKER_00: If I never had to preach another funeral at Mud Creek, that would be great for me.
SPEAKER_00: But please hear me.
SPEAKER_00: You do not want to live 70 or 80 years continually tortured by guilt, continually trying to prop yourself up by your own performance, trying to manufacture a Christian life that runs on feeling bad.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm saying to you today, you don't have to.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I'm going to encourage you to do as we prepare for our invitation in just a moment.
SPEAKER_00: And this is advice from an old Puritan preacher, I believe Scottish Puritan, that may not be correct.
SPEAKER_00: But an old Puritan preacher from centuries ago by the name of David Dixon.
SPEAKER_00: David Dixon said that there came a moment in his life when he took all the bad that he had ever done and he piled it up in a heap.
SPEAKER_00: All the sins he could remember, all the guilt that he carried, all the shame that he had, and he piled it up in a heap.
SPEAKER_00: Then he said, He took all the good that he had ever done, all the prayers he had prayed, all the times that he had done something to help somebody else, all the things that he was proud of, and all the things that meant a lot to him.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I took all of my good works and I put it in the same heap.
SPEAKER_00: And then he said, I fled the heap and ran to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm inviting some of you to do today is I'm inviting you to pile it all up in a heap and flee the heap and run to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Your good and your bad, all of it.
SPEAKER_00: Pile it up and come to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And you say, Brother Jesse, you're saying these things, and I remember when I was a little kid, I thought I believed in Jesus and I was baptized, and I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying, pile it up in a heap and run to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm saying to you today.
SPEAKER_00: Is say that you're not going to leave here trusting in your own merit.
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to leave here today tortured by your own guilt, but you're going to pile it all up and you're going to run to Christ, and you're going to find in Christ a sufficient Savior who has taken God's wrath against your sin, who offers you his perfect obedience, and you're going to realize that from this day until the last day, Jesus speaks for you before the throne of God, your judge.
SPEAKER_00: And you're not going to live tortured by guilt, you're not going to live tortured by doubt.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to leave it behind, and you're going to run to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And so today I'm asking you to flee to Jesus, to run to Him, and to receive a totally new way of living the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: It's not motivated by guilt, but is a response to His extravagant grace.