The Gospel Pt. 1

Pastor Jesse Carr clearly explains the Gospel throughout the Easter Season.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Let me again wish you a happy Easter today. I pray that today is a great day for you. I pray that it's a great day for your family. Moms, especially, I hope everybody cooperates for the pictures you've got to take later. I will add that to my prayer list. Kids, I hope you find the golden egg with all the money in it. I hope that it is a wonderful day for your family. But I do have to be honest with you this morning and tell you that I think it's a little bit weird the way we celebrate Easter. Hear me out on this. Easter is a Christian holiday where we celebrate that the Lord Jesus, the eternal Son of God, came into the world as the one perfect man, died on the cross for our sins, and three days after he died, he rose again from the dead.

unknown 0:48

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

And we celebrate that by hiding bold eggs in our yard and eating chocolate rabbits. There's something terribly unwholesome about eating a chocolate bunny. Whether you start with a tail or you start with the ears, it just seems wrong. It's weird the way that we give these gifts and celebrate this holiday. But in the spirit of Easter, I want to give you a gift today. Whether you're here every Sunday, whether you are a visitor, if you're even from out of town, I want to give you a special gift. Today, I want to give you the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I believe we should have it on the screen in three, two, three. There it is. This is the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. So feel free to take out your cell phone, snap a picture of that. That is our gift to you at Mud Creek this Easter Sunday. And I guarantee you that we are the only church in Henderson County that has given away Colonel Sanders' recipe of those secret 11 herbs and spices. And the reason that we know this really is the recipe for Kentucky fried chicken is because three or four years ago, one of Colonel Sanders' nephews is engaged in this really bitter family feud with the rest of the Sanders family, and in frustration towards them over whatever the issue is, he leaked this recipe to the public. Who would have thought that the guy who invented Kentucky fried chicken that his family would be trash too? But they are. And so here is the recipe for Kentucky fried chicken. And this recipe for Kentucky fried chicken is, to manipulate the phrase a little bit, the bread and butter of that entire restaurant empire. This is the model for consistency for Kentucky fried chicken, so that if you go to a Kentucky fried chicken in Bravard or in Bangladesh, they're going to use that recipe. And so it's going to taste exactly the same. Every dollar of the billions of dollars that KFC has made since it was founded by Colonel Sanders, all of those years ago, it all comes from this recipe that this great American produced because God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. As a church here at Mud Creek, we have something like KFC's secret recipe. Now it's not a secret, but we do have this guiding principle. We do have this gravitational center as a church. Mud Creek Baptist Church exists. We want to be, really strive to be, a family of believers who glorify a never-changing God by impacting an ever-changing world through sharing the life-changing message of the Jesus. Now, what that means is that for us, the message of Jesus is everything. It is everything. It changes our lives, it unites our church. We even take the message of the gospel the way Pastor Kyle was talking about it. We think about how we spend money as a church to invest in those that are sharing the gospel where it's never gone before. The message of Jesus is everything. The way that we say it here at the church is that the gospel is the center of everything. But what if we get the gospel wrong? What if we get the message of Jesus wrong? If you go back to the KFC recipe, 321. See, every week. There we go. The recipe for Kentucky fried chicken, number eight, calls for four teaspoons of paprika. But if you're going to imitate the Colonel Sanders recipe and you say, well, you know, I want to use cinnamon instead of paprika. I mean, they look exactly the same anyway. And you substitute cinnamon for paprika, whatever you end up with is not going to be Kentucky fried chicken. If you change any ingredient, you lose it completely. And so, because it's so easy for us in our world, even in churches, even on Easter to become confused about the message of Jesus. I want to spend the next four weeks on Sunday mornings here at Mud Creek making sure that we are getting the gospel right. And I want to do that by giving you four statements about the gospel over the next few weeks to clarify for us what the message of the gospel is and what it is not. And the first one is this the gospel is good news. It is not good advice. The gospel is good news, it is not good advice. Now, that is not an original statement to me. That comes from a pastor who's now with the Lord named Tim Keller. But you can just give me credit for it. The gospel is not good news, it is good advice. And I want to show you that today from the Bible in the book of Galatians. So if you have a Bible with you, take it and turn with me to the book of Galatians. You'll find that towards the last third of your Bible in the section that's called the New Testament. And we're going to begin reading in Galatians chapter number one. That's where you will find the big number one. And then we're going to begin in verse number one, which will be the little number one. So Galatians chapter number one and verse number one. Galatians chapter one and verse number one. If you don't have a Bible with you, I believe the words are on the screen for you to follow along. The Word of God says, Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brethren who are with me to the churches of Galatia. Grace to you, and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Paul says, I marvel that you are turning away so soon from him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different gospel, which is not another. But there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God abideth forever.

unknown 7:54

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

The book of Galatians that we have just read from this morning is probably the oldest piece of Christian literature in existence. Probably the very, very first writing that we have from a Christian to other Christians talking about Christian things. Even non-believing, non-Christian New Testament scholars will agree that the book of Galatians was written by a man that we call the Apostle Paul, an early church leader, and it was written about 15, maybe 20 years after the life of Jesus. It's very, very early in the Christian movement. And as you read the opening words of the Apostle Paul's letter to Galatians, you realize that the Apostle Paul is writing in a state of heightened spiritual anxiety. He's worried, he's concerned. And his concern is that the churches that he loved and had started in the region of Galatia, modern-day Turkey, he's worried that these churches are confusing the message of the gospel. He uses that kind of language here in verses 7. He talks about the gospel being perverted, the gospel being confused. He will even say in Galatians chapter 3 and verse number 1 that people have come into the church and they have bewitched the Galatian Christians. They've put them under a spell. And he says that because people are confusing the message about Jesus, it's creating all kinds of disruptions and disasters in the church itself. And he will encourage them to recognize in Galatians chapter number 5 that if they are going to continue to bite one another and devour one another, they better be careful not to consume one another. The church is getting the gospel message wrong. They're wrong about Jesus. And it's creating division and disruption. And it's creating, if you allow me, mean religious people. Have you ever met any mean religious people? Me neither. But they were getting the message of Jesus wrong, and the lives they were supposed to be living for Jesus are wrong because of. And if you're here this morning and you've ever seen that up close at a church, or if you have ever had people that claim to love Jesus, that did not treat you as well as Jesus would have treated you, it's because somewhere along the way they were wrong about the message of the gospel. So how do these churches in Galatia, what was the problem? You have to understand this to understand the rest of the book that we'll look at over the next few weeks. You need to understand that the early Christian movement started really as a Jewish movement. Jesus was a Jewish man. We believe he was more than that, but he was not less than that. Jesus was a Jewish man. And his Jewish followers believed that he was the Jewish Messiah who fulfilled Jewish scriptures written by Jewish prophets. And so they begin preaching this to a primarily Jewish audience, and the early church has these very, very deep Jewish roots. But it does not take long for the message of Jesus to be believed and embraced by people who were not ethnically Jewish. And so for some of these Jewish Christians, looking at these new Gentile Christians, they celebrate it. They said, hey, this proves that Jesus is the Savior of the world, which he is, and that anybody who comes to him is welcome, which I still believe. But there were some people that said, you know, we're not so sure about all these non-Jewish Christians. Are we not losing something of our Jewish identity? Are we not losing something important to our Jewish culture? Is this not a threat to our way of life? So they went around preaching a message that went like this. Look, it's great that you believe in Jesus. In fact, you need to believe in Jesus, but you also need to add to Jesus Jewish traditions, Jewish customs, Jewish dress, Jewish diet, Jewish laws. In particular, the one thing that they were really, really huge on was they said to become a Christian, you need to believe in Jesus, plus you need to go through the Jewish rite of circumcision. Now, kids, if you're here today and you don't know what circumcision is, please ask your parents on the way home. Mom and dad, you're welcome. So the message of these teachers in Galatia and other places went like this. You need Jesus plus. And the Apostle Paul understands that when you add anything to the message of Jesus, you take everything away from it. That when you adjust the recipe, when you change the message, you lose it completely, and that whatever you have left over is no longer a gospel. It's no longer good news. That's why he says in Galatians chapter number one here, verses six and seven, he says, I'm surprised you're moving to a different gospel, which isn't a gospel at all. It's no longer good news, it's good advice. Paul says, No, the gospel is not good advice, it is good news. The message of Jesus is not about what you do, it's about what he did. The message of Jesus is not about what you earn, it's about what Jesus has earned. The message of the gospel is not good advice, it is good news. And so I want to make that case for you this morning by walking through this text and just lifting out a couple of truths about the gospel that I think are important for the way we understand it this Easter. First, the gospel has one plot. The gospel story has one plot. Now, Paul is writing about the gospel. I am preaching the gospel to you today. I think I've already said it a hundred times. Pastor Kyle said it 35 when he took up the offering. We talk about the gospel all the time at Mud Creek. What is the gospel? We've got to know that. What is it? What are we talking about when we talk about the gospel? Now, when we use the word gospel, a lot of times in our world, we use it as an adjective, right? We talk about gospel preaching, or we say that we tell a story and we say, now that's the gospel truth. We talk about gospel music, which is usually just bad country music. But in the world of the Bible, the word gospel was not first an adjective, it was a noun. And these people would have understood that word, even divorced from its religious Christian context. The word gospel comes from the Greek word, a Greek compound word, Ewangalia. Pastors like to use Greek in their sermons because it makes us feel smart. I made my worst grades in seminary in Greek. And so I'd like to thank Dr. Frank Fieldman for that. Nevertheless, Euwangalia is a compound word with the prefix you, which means good, and the word angalia, which means message. The good message, the good announcement, the good news, the glad tidings, we say at Easter time. What is the message of the gospel? These people understood that a gospel of any sort was good news. And they would use this phrase to talk about any sort of good news you would experience in life. If you find out that you were expecting a baby, they would say, that is a gospel message, that is good news. They used the message of the gospel for politicians when they found out that they had won an election. That was a gospel. This is a good news. This is good news that should make you happy. There are even records in ancient Greek of people using the same word for gospel to talk about wizards casting ghosts out of people's houses. Like if you've got ghosts in your plumbing or whatever, and a wizard gets them out, that's good news. And they say, this is a happy announcement. This is good news. And when the Christian writers come along, they take that word for good news and they apply it to the message of Jesus. They apply it to the message that the Apostle Paul gives in Galatians 1, verses 1 through 4, the message of Jesus' death and the message of the resurrection. But here's the problem with any sort of good news. Here's the problem with any sort of gospel. There has to be a backstory that makes the good news actually good. Good news comes loaded with bad news. You've got ghosts in your toilet. That's bad news. But you need somebody to come help you, and they can give you good news. Your city is under siege by an attacking army. That's bad news. The good news is our army has been victorious. And the apostle Paul clues us in here on the bad news of the gospel message. So happy Easter. I've got some really bad news for you today. And the bad news that the Bible gives us is right there in verse number four, as the Apostle Paul, in sharing the good news of Jesus, says that he was delivered for our sins. And he was delivered to rescue us. He was given to deliver us from this present evil age. The apostle Paul identifies two problems that Jesus was given to address. First, the sin that is in all of us, and then the brokenness in the world around us. Now, it used to be really, really easy for preachers like me to convince people like you that they were sinners. We don't really believe that anymore, though, do we? We know we're not perfect, we know we make mistakes, we know that we could probably do a little bit better. When it comes to feeling like somehow we're unrighteous, that seems almost dated. It seems almost foreign, right? We we struggle to believe that we are sinners. And yet, friends, I want to tell you today that even if we do not believe that we are sinners in the way the Bible talks about that term. If we do not believe we have turned in on ourselves and away from God, if we do not believe that we deserve God's righteous judgment because of our rebellion against Him, there's still something inside of us that struggles to feel like we're good enough, isn't there? Something inside of us that feels like we don't measure up. That we're always on the outside looking in. There are these feelings of subjective guilt that all of us deal with. The Bible would say the reason you feel guilty is because you are guilty. All of us have sinned, the Bible says, and come short of the glory of God. But even if you cannot go that far, you have to at least agree with what the Apostle Paul says, that we do live in an evil world. That there's something terribly wrong with the world. That we see violence and we see oppression and we see abuse and we see war and we see all of these terrible things happening in our world, as powerful, evil, wicked people just destroy the lives of those around them. Where does that come from? What's wrong with the world? There was a British Catholic author by the name of G.K. Chesterton, very famous and very influential during his life, and he was asked, along with many other British authors and British thinkers, British political leaders, to answer in a newspaper article that question: what is wrong with the world? What is wrong with the world? And he responded with the answer you see on the screen. What's wrong with the world? Here was his answer. Four words. Dear sirs, I am. See, even if we don't feel as if we've sinned against God, the truth of the matter is we look at the brokenness in our world, and y'all, we've all participated in it. Listen to me very carefully. I lie. I mean, not regularly. Maybe I should back up. I have lied on occasion. And you can look like you're better than me, but you're not better than me. You all lied. I've cheated. I've pulled the rug out from under people. Not literally, but pulled the rug out from under people under people to put myself ahead of them. I get jealous when other people succeed. And there's part of me that's really, really glad sometimes when other people, certain people, fail. I get angry. Sometimes I want to hurt. I am what's wrong with the world. And it's not just me, it's you. What's wrong with the world is wrong in me. And yet, what Paul says is that this is precisely why Jesus was delivered into the world. He was offered, he says, on the cross to die for our sins. This is how the apostle Paul understands the death of Jesus. He sees the crucifixion of Jesus as the central claim of the Christian message. That the good news of the gospel is that one Friday outside of Jerusalem, God placed his son on a cross to treat that son the way that he should have treated me. God took off my deception, all of my sin, all of my rebellion, and he put it into his son, and he burnt out his anger on Jesus so that I could go free. This is how Paul understands the gospel message as good news. It is good news because Jesus put himself in my place. But I'm gonna be honest with you, if the message that we have to preach to you today is a message that's only about a man dying, I don't have any good news. So Paul tells us right away in verse number one, he gives us all of his cards laid on the table, and he says that God raised him from the dead. That he may have died under God's wrath on Friday, but early Sunday morning he rose again with God's pleasure. His grave is empty, and the only thing that's still buried there is the sin that put Jesus on a cross and should have put me in hell. So the message of the gospel is the message that Christ. Has died and Christ has risen again. And if you'll bear with me for a moment, I want to emphasize that that message is radically different from what most people in Henderson County believe about life, the universe, and everything else. See, what we believe in what uh Flannery O'Connor called the Christ-haunted South, we kind of have these like little accents of Christianity in the things that we do without this explicit gospel that Paul gives here in Galatians chapter 1. I call this cracker barrel Christianity. Here's why I call it that. Not because I don't like cracker barrel, cracker barrel's fine. But if you had ever eaten my mama's cooking, you'd know that cracker barrel ain't home cooking. Cracker barrel is to my mama's cooking, what Taco Bell is to Mexican food. It's okay. It's fine. But it's just not the real thing, right? Here's what most of us believe. Most of us believe that people are born basically good. I've met enough people to no longer believe that. But we believe people are born basically good. We're decent folk, right? That's the way we say it. We're just decent folk. We're hardworking, we're good to people. We try to do the right thing most of the time. We're not perfect, but you know, we're decent folk. We do have problems. All of us have problems. There are problems that I deal with physically, problems I may deal with emotionally, problems that get really close to our lives, like addiction and abuse, those kind of things that we deal with. There are problems out here in the world. And thankfully, God is there to fix our problems. And we believe this is what God exists for. God exists for the sole purpose of making me happy and fixing my problems. And so that's why you pray. So God will fix your problems. That's why you go to church if you go to church, so that you know you can prove to God that you deserve for Him to fix your problems, so that you can be happy. And the big problem we have is that one day we're gonna die. But there's good news there. And the good news is that God is really great. And God knows we're not perfect, and God knows we fail, and God knows we do things we shouldn't do. But but at the end of the day, God just don't care. Right? We believe that God basically functions like my grandmother. Like my grandmother, she knows that I do things wrong sometimes. She just don't care. If I called my grandmother right now, my grandmother's 83 years old, she's on oxygen, and if I call my grandmother and said, grandmother, I need you to come up here and help me bury a body, she would say, honey, I'm bringing my shovel. And we think God's basically the same way. He just wants to spoil us rotten. So, yeah, one day we're gonna die, but hey, guess what? When everybody's in the church and they're crying at that Vince Gilles song, go rest, huh? And then they go to eat potato salad and deviled eggs in the fellowship hall. Man, we're gonna be in heaven catching smallmouth baths. It's all good. You know what's terrifying about that? You know what's terrifying about what some of you believe this morning? There's no gospel in any of it. There's no need for Jesus at all. And Paul will make this point in the book of Galatians, and he will say, listen, if you can save yourself by your good works, by your effort, if the message of the gospel is a message of good advice about how you need to try harder and you need to do better and you need to work a little bit more, if that's the message of the gospel, why was Jesus crucified? What did he die for? Why did he come? And Paul understands what we often do not think through in our sort of cracker barrel Christianity. What we don't really think through, friends, is that if we can have some version of Christianity without Jesus, whatever it is is not Christian. The Christian message says that Christ died for sins. He was buried, and he rose again the third day, according to the scripture, saying that if we would call upon him, he would give us eternal life. The gospel has one plot. It is about what Jesus has done, not what you do. It is about how much God loves you, not about how much you love him. It is a message of divine accomplishment, not human achievement. And if you change that, then your message is now about good advice and not good news. Paul's gonna show us. That's not a gospel. So the gospel has one plot. I spent the most, the bulk of my time there, so I'll move quickly through the next two thoughts. Second, the gospel has one plot. Paul's gonna say the story of the gospel has one author. One author. Paul is deeply concerned about where the gospel the Galatians are believing is coming from. He's worried about who's preaching it. He's making it adamant that his gospel has come directly from God. He says in verse number one that he's an apostle of God, not from men. He's making it clear that his message comes from God. Why? Because Paul knows that the message of the gospel is a message that no human being would ever invent. And here's why. Here's why. Because human beings, we want to be something. We want to make something of ourselves. We want to put our back into it so that we can take some credit for it. We want to try. We want to be diligent. We want to be moral. We want to be religious. We want to prove we are somebody who's done something. The message of the gospel doesn't let you take credit for anything. And so what Paul understands, and I pray some of you would hear this this morning, Paul understands that the message of Christianity, rightly understood, is radically different from every other religious truth claim in the history of the world. Because every other religious truth claim will tell you to be good, it will tell you to be better, it will tell you to try hard. It will tell you to pray more, it will tell you not to eat certain things or that you can't eat certain things, it will tell you what to do. But the gospel comes to us and tells us what has been done. And Paul says, God alone is the author of that, the God he says, who delivers, who gives Jesus over. Did you know that behind the message of Easter, behind the message of the crucifixion and the resurrection, stands the heart of a God who loves to give. A God who delivers, who gives his best. Did you realize that for people that are hyper-religious, and for people that reject religion entirely, that the one thing that they have in common is that neither one believes God is really generous. Did you know that? Religious people believe God gives stuff. He gives blessings, however they're defined, he gives health, he gives certain things, but he really doesn't want to. And the only way, this is what some of you believe this morning, the only way you can get God to give the stuff that he doesn't want to give you is by being good. Like you can impress him and manipulate him, and they'll say, fine, you prayed enough for it, you did enough for it, you raised your kids right, and so they're gonna turn out to be successful. That's the way we think this worked. But for those that are not religious, they look at a stingy God and they say, Why would I want him in my life? This is where some of you are today. Some of you are here this morning and you said, I really don't want to be here. The clothes are uncomfortable, it's a little hot. I don't know these people, they're weird, they're raising their hands a minute ago. Are they waving to Jesus? What's happening? You're just not at home in this. You had to watch a YouTube video 15 times to figure out how to tie your bow tie. I get it. You said, God, you believe God is in the way of the life that you want. He's standing in the way of the things you're after, of the joys that you seek, that you think you need, the pleasures that you're after. You believe God is stingy and God is hindering you from having it. And so people like that, what do they do? Instead of doubling down on being better, they just run from God completely. And they go get a couple nose rings, buy a Subaru, move to Asheville. That's what they do in Western North Carolina. Because they say, I don't want God in my life. Yet the message of the gospel says to us that God will not let us write him out of the story. That God, the author of the story, has written himself into the human story to save those that will believe in him. God has said, You're so wrong, I'm not stingy, and I'm gonna prove to you how good I am and how generous I am and how free I am and how extravagant I am by putting the very, very best that I have, which is my Lord Jesus, my son, the Lord Jesus. I'm gonna put him on a cross, I'm gonna hand him over to death, I'm gonna hand him over to sin. I'm gonna hand him over to grave, to hand him over to life, to hand him over to you. The gospel does not let us believe that God is stingy. It lets us see that God has stepped into our sinfulness to bring forgiveness to us. He overcomes our disobedience with his obedience, he overcomes our unrighteousness with his righteousness, he overcomes our unfaithfulness with his unfailing loyalty. A number of weeks ago, Pastor Kyle and I had a conversation about some of these things with a gentleman who was a non-believer and a really, really confusing religious background, but he basically says, look, he said, here's the deal with religion, here's the deal with the world. He said, I think it's like all of us down here are just blind people trapped in a pit. And we're just trying to figure out a way out. That's what he said, right? Just blind people trapped in a pit, and we're trying to figure out a way out. And I agreed with him. He's true. That's a great way to explain the condition of humanity. We are blind, the Bible says, and we are hopelessly trapped. That's true. And he said that every now and then, a great thinker like Jesus, he said, well, come along and say, hey, here's how to get out of the pit. And I thought, man, you're that close. You're so close. We are trapped in a pit. We are blind. But what we don't need is somebody to tell us how to get out. We need somebody to come get in it with us. And so agnostics come along and say, Yeah, I really don't know if there is a pit. Or maybe I don't know if there's anything outside of the pit. Atheists come along and say, Well, I don't believe in a pit. Marxists come along and they say, you know, if the workers in the pit, could you not together? So that the laborers control the means of production, we might be able to build a way out of this pit. Sigmund Freud comes along and says, you know, this pit's mostly your mom's fault. Buddhists come along and they say, Look, if you can just transcend the pit, you can escape the pit and just dissolve into nothingness. Hindus come along and say, You never get out of the pit, but you can come back to the pit as a cow. Baptists come along and they say, We're gonna put up a no-drinking, a no-dancing sign in the pit. The Bible says that Jesus comes and gets in the pit with us. He gets the dirt of our sin on him. He reaches down where we are and he says, I'm not just gonna tell you the way out, I am the way out. And so Paul is adamant that friends, the last thing we need is advice. We don't need somebody to tell us what to do. We need someone to rescue us. We need a savior. And Paul says that because the gospel has that one plot, that it has that one author, he says it can only have one hero. Verse number four, he says, it is Jesus who delivers us from our sin. It is Jesus who delivers us from the present evil age. If I am made right with God, or if I am somehow fixing my life to build the life that I want, then I can take credit for that. But if I am so hopelessly consumed with my sin that the only hope that I have is divine rescue, that I am not the hero of the gospel. Jesus is the hero of the gospel. Beloved, here's the truth. All of us are looking for a hero. We're looking for somebody to fix us. We're looking for somebody to solve our problems. We're looking for somebody to make everything that is broken whole and to make everything wrong right. Some of you this morning believe that your hero is named Jack Daniels or Jim Bean. And I don't say that, I don't say that facetiously as a joke. You really are looking to something in a bottle just to help you escape. Some of you, though, many of you believe that your hero's named Charles Schwab. And you believe that a good financial portfolio and a healthy 401k, 403B, whatever, that that is going to fix any problem that you could ever have. Others of you believe your hero is Prince Charming, and you know he's gonna come riding into your life on a white horse any minute. He might even be here today. Some of y'all had your head on a swivel the whole service, hadn't you? They're worse places in the world to meet people in the church. I mean, honestly. That you believe deep down this romantic love is gonna save me. Sexual fulfillment is gonna save me, radical independence so that nobody has any claim on my life, and I can do everything that I please my way. That's gonna save me, so that I can become my own hero. Can I tell you today, friends, there's only one hero? And the Bible would tell you that you can have that hero and you can know that hero. And that your hero was born into this world and laid in a manger outside of Bethlehem in Israel. Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, born without the sin that corrupts us and chains us, so that your hero could live the life that you simply cannot live. And the Bible tells us that for 30 years he lived in relative obscurity, unnoticed and unknown. But at the age of 30, he went into the Jordan River, and his cousin and a preacher by the name of John the Baptist baptized him. And we came up out of that water. The Bible says that God said about your hero, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. And the Bible says that from that point, the Spirit of God led your hero out into the wilderness, and for 40 days he did not eat a bite of food. And he went toe-to-toe with Satan, the great tempter, who's deceived all of us, who disrupts all of our lives. And yet Jesus uniquely resisted the temptations of the devil and said, I'm not here to live your way, I'm not even here to live my way, I'm here to live God's way. And after that temptation, the Bible says that your hero went about doing good. The Bible shows you scenes of your hero placing his hand on the head of a leper, saying, I will make you clean. The Bible shows you a hero who's not put off by human sinfulness, but will sit with women who are caught in the very act of adultery and say, I'm not here to condemn you, but I love you. And yet the Bible also shows you a hero who's bold enough to say to educated, intelligent, important religious people, you need to be born again, or you will not see the kingdom of heaven. And the Bible shows you your hero sitting with his disciples at his last meal with him, then, with his followers, the last time they would celebrate together, breaking a piece of bread, saying, This is my body that's going to be broken for you. The Bible would show you your hero holding up a cup of wine, saying, This is my blood that'll be shed for you. And the word of God says that your hero went out to a garden named Gethsemane to pray. And while he was praying that evening, the Bible says that your hero was betrayed by one of his dearest friends who came and kissed him on the cheek. And then his enemies came and placed him in handcuffs. And powerful, important, wealthy people led your hero away to endure a night of false accusations and false trials. And the Bible says that they blindfolded him and beat him and said, If you really are a prophet, why don't you tell us who hit you? The Bible says they placed on your hero's head not a crown of glory, but a crown of thorns. And the Bible says that they whipped your hero until great rivets of blood would have flown out of his side. And the Bible says that early on Friday morning, that they took your hero to a skull-shaped rock named Golgotha. And there they laid him on a cross and they drove nails through his hands. And your hero was lifted up to die. The Bible says that for six hours our hero hung on that cross. And he cried out, saying, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. That's why he's the hero and you're not. The Bible says that he cried out from that cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Knowing that God had turned his back on him so that he could turn his face towards you. That's why he's the hero and you're not. And the Bible says that with his last words, he cried out this and said, It is finished. And your hero dropped his head in death. And they took his body off of the cross and they laid the cold body of your hero in a borrowed tomb outside of Jerusalem. And he laid there all night on Friday. And he laid there all morning on Saturday, and he laid there all day and all night on Saturday. But the Bible says that early on Sunday morning, our hero triumphed as he walked out of the grave with all authority in his hand, holding the keys of death and of hell. And on the other side of the grave, my hero says to you, I am the resurrection and the life. I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. And on the other side of that grave, our hero has come to us, many one by one, often as young people, often as old people, and he said to us, I want to be the hero of your life. You can lay the bottle down, you can lay the sin down, you can lay the brokenness down, and I will be the hero that you're looking for. And I know that there's some people at Mud Creek Baptist Church this morning that would put a hand towards heaven and say, That Savior who walked out of that grave that first Easter, he's my hero. He's the one who delivered me, he's the one who rescued me. He was the only hope that I had, but he's the only savior that I need. And now I want to say to you, I want to say to you this morning, some of you that are still searching for a hero, thinking your money can fix you and sex can fix you, and thinking that maybe drugs can fix you, God forbid, or thinking that even being a better person can fix you. I want to tell you we can introduce you to this hero today.