SPEAKER_00: You and I don't love tension, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's a pretty natural thing to our human condition.
SPEAKER_00: We don't love tension, and when we experience tension, we always try to resolve it, right?
SPEAKER_00: Um, but here's something I'm learning more and more about the very nature of God.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, tension doesn't bother him.
SPEAKER_00: And the things that we perceive as tensions in him aren't.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, they're fully and beautifully suspended in this eternal harmony of his person and character.
SPEAKER_00: But to us, we see them as tension.
SPEAKER_00: We want resolve.
SPEAKER_00: But not every tension needs resolve.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I think you and I could do much better at is actually inhabiting tensions rather than trying to always resolve them.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I kind of mean by that.
SPEAKER_00: Last week in Acts 15, the first part of it, uh, the church settled its biggest fight yet.
SPEAKER_00: And it was about the very relationship between works and grace.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: The Jerusalem Council had ruled that salvation is by grace alone.
SPEAKER_00: It's not by keeping the law or the traditions of Moses.
SPEAKER_00: The Gentile people do not need to be circumcised in order to be included and belong to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And as a result of this ruling, the purity of the gospel, this good deposit treasure entrusted to us was preserved.
SPEAKER_00: That is a big win.
SPEAKER_00: Now you think after a fight like that, right, that the church could kind of rest, but no.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, here at the end of Acts 15, we actually see one more fight.
SPEAKER_00: And this one, Paul, he picks himself.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not about theology, it's not about the nature of the gospel, it's actually about a person, a relationship.
SPEAKER_00: See, Paul and Barnabas, they were sent from the church to take the gospel throughout the world, and they were partners for years.
SPEAKER_00: But here in this moment, in the end of Acts 15, it says that they disagree sharply over whether this man named John Mark ought to come with them on their next journey.
SPEAKER_00: And the disagreement was so sharp that they split up entirely.
SPEAKER_00: And then, almost immediately after this, Paul does something that looks like an absolute contradiction to everything he just fought for.
SPEAKER_00: He seems to be a hypocrite when he turns around and circumcises his new missionary recruit, young Timothy.
SPEAKER_00: Now, was Paul being a hypocrite?
SPEAKER_00: Was he contradicting himself?
SPEAKER_00: Was his theology inconsistent?
SPEAKER_00: Or is Paul faithfully inhabiting a tension that the gospel itself actually creates?
SPEAKER_00: One that teaches us not just when to fight, but how to pick the right fight.
SPEAKER_00: Let's walk through this together.
SPEAKER_00: Acts 15, 36 through 41, we see this partnership crumble and fall apart between Barnabas and Paul.
SPEAKER_00: They shared this really deep love for the believers who had just come to faith on their missionary journey.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul wants to go back to check on these churches that he and Barnabas planted together to see how they're holding up under the pressure of being new believers in a pagan world.
SPEAKER_00: But there's one issue standing in the way, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's Barnabas wants to bring John Mark along, his cousin.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's this relational uh equity that Barnabas has with John Mark.
SPEAKER_00: He wants to see them, him come along in this journey.
SPEAKER_00: And that might sound simple enough.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, go ahead and have your cousin tag along with us.
SPEAKER_00: Except it's that Mark had already failed them once.
SPEAKER_00: On their first journey, John Mark started strong in the beginning and then he quit partway through and Pemphylia and he abandoned the work right when the mission started to get tough.
SPEAKER_00: We read about this in Acts 13.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul remembers that.
SPEAKER_00: Paul remembers that, and he doesn't want to risk that same situation again on this journey to go back and encourage and strengthen the churches and their faith.
SPEAKER_00: And Luke, right, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, he doesn't soften what happens here.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 39 tells us this: that there arose a sharp disagreement between these brothers.
SPEAKER_00: This isn't some polite difference of opinion, like, oh, I see how you think, I think differently, maybe we should part ways.
SPEAKER_00: No, it's real anger, real exasperation between two men who had planted churches together, who had been beaten together, who had been imprisoned together, all for the sake of the same gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Now it's worth us pausing and reflecting on why in the world would Luke even include this in his narrative.
SPEAKER_00: A detail this uncomfortable, this revealing about its heroes to the church's founding leaders in open conflict with one another.
SPEAKER_00: That's not something that you invent to make your movement look good.
SPEAKER_00: If Luke's trying to write this great story that's so persuasive to draw other people into this movement that maybe they have even fabricated of themselves, you don't include such a detail within it.
SPEAKER_00: Luke tells us this because it happened.
SPEAKER_00: And because it mattered enough to record it honestly.
SPEAKER_00: And notice carefully, I think this is part of why this is included, what this disagreement is about.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a theological one or about the preservation of the purity of the gospel, right?
SPEAKER_00: Paul and Barnabas, they don't part ways over the gospel itself, they part ways over this practical judgment call.
SPEAKER_00: Is John Mark trustworthy to be included in this missionary journey?
SPEAKER_00: Can he finish what he starts?
SPEAKER_00: And so what do they do?
SPEAKER_00: They split.
SPEAKER_00: Barnabas takes Mark to Cyprus, which was their hometown.
SPEAKER_00: While Paul takes Silas and heads through Syria and Cilicia, and verse 41 says they were strengthening the churches as they were visiting them.
SPEAKER_00: And so here's the first thing I think this passage wants us to feel before we move any further.
SPEAKER_00: There are things worth fighting for.
SPEAKER_00: I think we live in a culture that's lost its fight in many ways.
SPEAKER_00: Or we're fighting for the absolute wrong things.
SPEAKER_00: But there are things worth a fight.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's not budging here, he's protecting the integrity of the mission from real risk, real abandonment, and he's willing to lose a partnership that he treasured in order to do it.
SPEAKER_00: But that's only half the story because just here later in 16.1 through 5, we watch the same Paul in the same narrative do something that looks at first glance like something completely contradictive to all that he just fought for.
SPEAKER_00: In 16.1 through 5, we see that a convert, young Timothy, gets circumcised.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul is journeying with Silas and he meets young Timothy in Lystra.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 1 describes Timothy in this way, and this is important for context.
SPEAKER_00: He is the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek.
SPEAKER_00: Goes on to say he was a young man, well spoken of by the believers in both Lystra and Iconium.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul wants him on the team for this journey that comes next.
SPEAKER_00: And then in verse 3, we read this statement that should kind of confuse us or shock us.
SPEAKER_00: Paul circumcises Timothy.
SPEAKER_00: If we try to set that next to everything that happened in the first part of chapter 15, right?
SPEAKER_00: The Jerusalem Council had just settled unanimously that Gentiles do not need to be circumcised to be saved, to be included within the church.
SPEAKER_00: Paul personally fought that battle in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: He would go on to write the entire letter of Galatians contending against this very point, using some of the most sharp language that is contained in any of his letters.
SPEAKER_00: When anger rose up in Paul about the preservation and purity of the gospel, about how it kept people away from Jesus, when we added things in front of it, you saw his anger come out.
SPEAKER_00: And Galatians is full of it.
SPEAKER_00: So why?
SPEAKER_00: Why almost immediately after this decision had been made, after this fight had been won, does he turn around and do the very thing he had just fought against?
SPEAKER_00: The answer becomes clear once we see how Paul handled a nearly identical situation with someone else, a man named Titus.
SPEAKER_00: So in this letter to the Galatians, in chapter 2, Paul describes refusing to circumcise Titus, even under this real cultural pressure to do so.
SPEAKER_00: These Judaizers had come into the church of Galatia, and they were saying that it's not Jesus alone which is able to save us, but it is adherence to the law.
SPEAKER_00: You must have Jesus and be circumcised also, or else you are outside of the kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: But see, Titus was fully Gentile.
SPEAKER_00: To circumcise Titus would have actually conceded publicly that Gentiles do need circumcision, works of their own flesh to belong to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly the principle that Paul was defending at the Jerusalem Council.
SPEAKER_00: And he wouldn't budge there either.
SPEAKER_00: But Timothy isn't Titus.
SPEAKER_00: Timothy has a Jewish mother.
SPEAKER_00: And that's important.
SPEAKER_00: Because what that means is that by the reckoning of the Jewish communities that Paul and Silas and Timothy were about to minister among, an uncircumcised son of a Jewish mother wasn't just simply overlooked or dismissed within their culture.
SPEAKER_00: No, he was regarded as an apostate.
SPEAKER_00: He was regarded as a living violation of the covenant.
SPEAKER_00: And so here's what would happen.
SPEAKER_00: He would be seen as a stumbling block before he ever even opened his mouth to talk about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If Timothy went into those synagogues uncircumcised, the conversation would have never even reached Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It would have got stuck, it would have stumbled over Timothy's corrupt identity first.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul removes the obstacle.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: And so here's something that we've got to think through in our own Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: You and I have a propensity to put stumbling blocks of our own making in front of the stumbling block of the gospel of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: The only thing that should be in the way of a person coming to Jesus is the stumbling block of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: So often, out of comfort or cultural norms or preferences or non-essential doctrines, we put stumbling block after stumbling block in front of people who are far from Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: What a horrible thing that is for us to do.
SPEAKER_00: So we see here the same man, Paul, same unmoved conviction about what the gospel actually requires, and yet two completely different actions, with no contradiction in either one.
SPEAKER_00: None.
SPEAKER_00: Once we see clearly what was actually at stake in each situation, we may understand better.
SPEAKER_00: With Mark, the risk was to the mission's integrity.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul fought.
SPEAKER_00: With Timothy, the obstacle was a cultural stumbling block that had nothing to do with the gospel's truth.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul sacrificed.
SPEAKER_00: Paul adapted.
SPEAKER_00: And Luke lets us see the fruit of both of these decisions together.
SPEAKER_00: Paul, Silas, and Timothy moved through the cities, delivering the Jerusalem's councils decision.
SPEAKER_00: And verse five tells us plainly the churches were strengthened in the faith and they increase in numbers daily.
SPEAKER_00: See, this is the fruit of sound doctrine and sacrificial service.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: That's the fruit of that.
SPEAKER_00: You see, this happened, the strengthening of the churches, the increase in numbers, it wasn't despite the conflict with Barnabas, it wasn't despite the circumcision of Timothy.
SPEAKER_00: No, the mission moved forward, strengthened through both.
SPEAKER_00: And so what we need to grasp this morning is that we fight, we fight to preserve the gospel, and we sacrifice to serve the culture.
SPEAKER_00: We fight to preserve the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: We sacrifice to serve the culture.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: And it's really a lesson in how to pick a fight in this Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not whether to have conflict.
SPEAKER_00: We ought to have conflict in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is conflict.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that Christ died for our sin, was crushed under the Father's wrath to redeem us and to reconcile us to himself.
SPEAKER_00: That is cosmic conflict.
SPEAKER_00: What we need to be asking is whether we're fighting for the right thing, whether we're sacrificing for the right thing, and strive to have that without confusing the two.
SPEAKER_00: The first fight is easy to miss because it happened earlier in chapter 15, but it's the whole reason Timothy's circumcision even feels like a contradiction in the first place.
SPEAKER_00: How could Paul fight against the call to circumcise those who were in the church and then turn around and circumcise a young man in the church?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: These group of men came down to Antioch insisting that unless a person was circumcised of the flesh, according to the law of Moses, they could not be saved.
SPEAKER_00: That's all of the beginning of Acts 15.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul would not have anything to do with it.
SPEAKER_00: He fought that battle all the way to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: And the apostles and elders ruled unanimously in his favor.
SPEAKER_00: Salvation is by grace alone, through Christ alone, and circumcision or any work of the flesh is not a requirement for inclusion into his kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: And what good news that is.
SPEAKER_00: That was a fight worth fighting.
SPEAKER_00: Because the gospel itself was on the line.
SPEAKER_00: So when Paul circumcises Timothy, one chapter later, well, the contradiction seems obvious.
SPEAKER_00: The hypocrisy seems glaring.
SPEAKER_00: Didn't he just fight this battle and win?
SPEAKER_00: You see, he didn't undo the outcome of the fight.
SPEAKER_00: Timothy's circumcision was never a fight to begin with.
SPEAKER_00: It was a sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: A piece of Paul's own theological consistency on display.
SPEAKER_00: So that Timothy could reach the very people that Paul was trying to reach.
SPEAKER_00: Many of us we we pick fights all the time, but they tend to be fights over our own preference and comforts, and we call it standing for truth.
SPEAKER_00: Or we go soft on the actual gospel, right?
SPEAKER_00: Telling ourselves we're just loving people well, we're just trying to be kind when really we've just stopped being willing to fight for anything at all.
SPEAKER_00: Paul fought hard, but only for the gospel itself.
SPEAKER_00: And he sacrificed constantly, but only ever his own comfort.
SPEAKER_00: He never sacrificed the gospel's truth.
SPEAKER_00: I love how the writer of Amazing Grace, the hymn that we love, John Newton, talks about Paul's disposition.
SPEAKER_00: He says Paul was a reed, endable, breakable, in non-essentials, but he was an iron pillar in essentials.
SPEAKER_00: This man who said, I desire to become all things to all people so that some might be saved.
SPEAKER_00: What was he willing to do?
SPEAKER_00: Sacrifice everything but the purity of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: So the gospel might win those he loved.
SPEAKER_00: That's this whole passage here.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he's willing to do this to Timothy.
SPEAKER_00: And it deeply informs our Christian life, learning to fight for the right things, learning to sacrifice for the right things, and never getting confused in the two.
SPEAKER_00: If Paul managed this so clearly, we should ask honestly, how are we doing?
SPEAKER_00: How are we doing with this?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: If we're honest, we tend to pick one fight or sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: And we call that faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: But it's really just us leaning into our own comfort.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us we're always fighting, fighting ferociously, certain that our preferences carry the same weight as conviction.
SPEAKER_00: We turn non-essential doctrines into essential ones.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: We love to think that the essential doctrines of the faith is this huge bucket that's filled with all of these points.
SPEAKER_00: And reality is that that bucket is so significantly smaller than we want it to be.
SPEAKER_00: There is a bucket, there is truth and doctrines in.
SPEAKER_00: In it.
SPEAKER_00: It's not as big as we think it is.
SPEAKER_00: The essentials of the Christian faith are so simply put in things like the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds, less than a whole page of this is what we must believe about God and His Son, of whom He sent, and the Spirit who now fills us, and the church that's established by that finished work.
SPEAKER_00: Many of us too, and in the way that we put forward these preferences and these personal convictions, here's what we tend to do in our relationship with others: we put sanctification before salvation a lot of the time.
SPEAKER_00: If you could just kind of get this stuff right first, then you could come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If you could conform to our subculture first, then maybe you'll be accepted.
SPEAKER_00: Why do we do that?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we have this propensity to put sanctification, a work of the spirit alone, before salvation?
SPEAKER_00: Saying that somehow, if in your own flesh and self-determination you could get it right, maybe you could come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, we're busy fighting battles that never win the war of a human heart.
SPEAKER_00: Others of us, we've stopped fighting for anything at all.
SPEAKER_00: We're lovers, not fighters.
SPEAKER_00: We offer acceptance without any cost.
SPEAKER_00: We offer this generic forgiveness and belonging without any consequence.
SPEAKER_00: But that acceptance, that forgiveness cost heaven everything.
SPEAKER_00: It's not cheap.
SPEAKER_00: We mistake the absence of conflict in our relationship for the presence of love, and that's a lie.
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Because we've traded something.
SPEAKER_00: We've traded this hard, gritty, patient work of discipleship for the easier feeling that we all long for to be liked.
SPEAKER_00: How many of us have changed or exchanged these truths of what it means to really love someone, to tell them the truth, to share the gospel?
SPEAKER_00: Well, we've exchanged that for this pursuit of maybe if I can just get them to like me, they'll like Jesus too.
SPEAKER_00: But the gospel and its mission never lets us settle for fighting alone or sacrificing alone.
SPEAKER_00: So how do we work this out between the two?
SPEAKER_00: Many of us, we sacrifice to serve the culture, but we fail to preserve the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: We sacrifice to serve the culture, but fail to preserve the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: This is the side of hyper-inclusion.
SPEAKER_00: This is the side of just being nice and kind and random acts of kindness, right?
SPEAKER_00: Thing.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if anybody's ever been saved by paying for their fast food meal behind them.
SPEAKER_00: But what happens is we offer this acceptance, this forgiveness without cost or consequence.
SPEAKER_00: Someone shares how they identify in their person.
SPEAKER_00: And what do we do?
SPEAKER_00: We affirm it.
SPEAKER_00: We embrace it without ever telling them about the Jesus who alone can tell them who they really are?
SPEAKER_00: The Jesus who spoke life into their being and knew them intimately as they were being formed by the hand of the Father in the womb of which they were developing can speak to them and tell them who they really are.
SPEAKER_00: They don't have to just depend on some figment of their own imagination.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you have a friend that describes their relationship that you know is wrong for them, that won't bring life that they hope, but only death.
SPEAKER_00: And we celebrate it rather than tell them about the Christ who died to free them from that.
SPEAKER_00: To free them from exactly the thing that somehow we're trying to defend for the sake of relationship.
SPEAKER_00: And notice what's actually missing here.
SPEAKER_00: It's not about calling them to moral correction.
SPEAKER_00: The danger is we never get to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We've confused withholding judgment with withholding the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: When what people most need, the way that we can most love another person is for us to tell them about Christ, the one who forgives completely, the one who accepts them as they are, the one who transforms them from the inside out by his spirit, the one who can give them hope.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this reality isn't new within the church.
SPEAKER_00: Paul faced very similar things in Rome.
SPEAKER_00: A people who had heard, salvation is by grace alone, not by any works of our flesh.
SPEAKER_00: They concluded then that grace meant sin can no longer matter then.
SPEAKER_00: If we do live lives of grace, ought we not be able then to just sin if grace covers us?
SPEAKER_00: We call this anti-nomianism.
SPEAKER_00: Paul wrote about it in anger.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 6.
SPEAKER_00: This rhetorical question in verses 1 through 2, shall we go on sinning then that grace may abound?
SPEAKER_00: Paul asked, by no means.
SPEAKER_00: By no means.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is what freed us from sin.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is what delivered us from sin.
SPEAKER_00: The apostle who refused to add anything to the gospel also refused to let it be a false covering for anything that it was meant to free us from.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this pursuit, this desire to love people well, it often doesn't come from a bad place.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's a scriptural calling on all of us to love our neighbor.
SPEAKER_00: We should love well.
SPEAKER_00: We genuinely want people to feel welcome and apart and loved, but somewhere along the way, welcome becomes silence.
SPEAKER_00: Silence becomes a version of love that never actually offers anyone Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And what do we do as the church?
SPEAKER_00: We call it grace.
SPEAKER_00: But the sad thing is this at the end of the day, it's cowardice wearing grace's clothes, and it has no power for anyone.
SPEAKER_00: That's one way we get this wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the other.
SPEAKER_00: We fight to preserve our culture, our own personal culture, and we sacrifice the power of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Many of us we turn non-essential doctrines into essential ones, or personal preference into these commanding convictions for all to embrace.
SPEAKER_00: Be gracious with me in some of these examples.
SPEAKER_00: But we make a political party, the assumed posture of any serious, real Christian.
SPEAKER_00: We make the presence of alcohol evidence of worldliness instead of wisdom, an issue of wisdom that the Bible leaves to personal conscience.
SPEAKER_00: We make certain schooling methods become the only faithful choice for a Christian family.
SPEAKER_00: Hymns become the only reverent way to worship, as if God's people only really started worshiping him around the 1700s.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make sense.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: This isn't new.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's the same instinct and pursuit that the Judaizers had in 15.1, insisting somehow that a work of the flesh, a matter of freedom in its own context, the circumcision be added as a requirement for salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
SPEAKER_00: Even in Paul's time, because of the gospel, an issue like circumcision became a matter of freedom to the individual's conscience.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Paul called that when we tried to bind someone to such a thing in Galatians 5.
SPEAKER_00: He called that a yoke of slavery.
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't because the practice was evil.
SPEAKER_00: Hear that.
SPEAKER_00: It's not because circumcision was evil.
SPEAKER_00: He would have never done that to Timothy if it was so.
SPEAKER_00: It was because making us it an essential distorted the gospel into something we contribute to in our own flesh rather than something we simply receive by grace.
SPEAKER_00: None of the things listed above are unimportant.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, they're all really good.
SPEAKER_00: They're great conversations to have about how we engage with politics and how we educate our children and how we engage with the culture around us, all how we worship.
SPEAKER_00: All of those things are wonderful things, good things.
SPEAKER_00: But what happens is we so often make them essential things and we bind the conscience of image-bearers of God that the gospel brought freedom to.
SPEAKER_00: You see, we've moved these things from wisdom into gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And once we do that, we put sanctification before salvation.
SPEAKER_00: We bind the conscience of others, we fight battles that will never win the war of the heart of man because they aren't about the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And so we end up smuggling through the back door of the church this Jesus plus gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus plus, plus one more thing that you have to get right.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus plus, one more way you need to fix yourself.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus plus, one last thing that you've got to do before you really belong to him.
SPEAKER_00: Paul would recognize that instinct instantly and reject it with righteous anger.
SPEAKER_00: You see, both of us, the lover who never fights, the fighter who only does so, all for the wrong things, we both need the same rescue.
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Jesus became like us to reach us, and he became our sin to save us.
SPEAKER_00: When we look at the statement of Paul, I have become all things to all people so that some might be saved.
SPEAKER_00: We have to look at Jesus as the most grand, majestic, and cosmic demonstration, an example of that.
SPEAKER_00: You see, both halves of this statement.
SPEAKER_00: He became like us to reach us, he became our sin to save us, they matter.
SPEAKER_00: Neither one is optional in our understanding of the gospel and the pursuit of God after his people, of whom he's made a covenant with.
SPEAKER_00: The letter of Philippians tells us that Christ Jesus Himself, though he existed in the form of God, did not consider such an equality with him something to cling to.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man.
SPEAKER_00: This is the same missional sacrifice that you and I are called to by the Spirit in Christ, but Jesus has taken it to its furthest, most cosmic possible extreme.
SPEAKER_00: When we're called to become all things to all people so that some might be saved, Jesus is the reason that we can.
SPEAKER_00: Not once was he disobedient or rebellious, but our guilt of our sin was truly credited to him there, fully on the cross, as if he had committed every sin and act of rebellion that we ever have.
SPEAKER_00: And the Father's wrath that our sin deserved fell on him instead of us.
SPEAKER_00: Paul tells us that on the cross, Christ Himself disarmed the rulers and authorities, putting them to open shame, triumphing over them in his flesh.
SPEAKER_00: You see the very sin and death that holds us captive, that we can't fight our way free of, no matter what, or be kind enough to be excused of, no matter how hard we might try.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus already defeated it.
SPEAKER_00: Not partially, but completely.
SPEAKER_00: This is what neither of us manages to fully hold together on our own.
SPEAKER_00: We fight for the wrong things or we sacrifice the wrong things, but Jesus did both, fighting and sacrificing perfectly.
SPEAKER_00: And he won.
SPEAKER_00: That's the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel's not about your fighting.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel's not about your sacrificing.
SPEAKER_00: It's about his.
SPEAKER_00: And because it's his, church, we're finally free.
SPEAKER_00: We're free to be all things to all people so that we might win some.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit makes us fighters for truth and servants to the world.
SPEAKER_00: You see, that's not something that we can manufacture in our own flesh, in our own um insistence.
SPEAKER_00: It's what the same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead does in us, because Jesus already fought the fight and made the sacrifice that actually mattered.
SPEAKER_00: So we don't need some formula for knowing when to fight and when to sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is worth dying for.
SPEAKER_00: And almost everything else is worth sacrificing for.
SPEAKER_00: When we know what the gospel actually requires, right?
SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, when we actually know what it doesn't require of us, we're free.
SPEAKER_00: We're free to hold the line where Christ Himself drew it clearly, and we're free to lay down everything else: our comfort, our preferences, our need to be right, our personal convictions.
SPEAKER_00: We get to lay them all down for the sake of the people that we're trying to reach.
SPEAKER_00: This is how to pick a fight.
SPEAKER_00: Preserve the gospel, sacrifice for the culture.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it looks like to be a part of a church.
SPEAKER_00: As we see at the end of Acts 16 and 5, still being strengthened in the faith and increasing in numbers daily.
SPEAKER_00: So let us fight to preserve the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Let us sacrifice to serve the world.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.