The Gospel of C.H.R.I.S.T. (2)
Notes
Transcript
Context
Context
Good morning Church!
For those of you who may not know, my name is Thomas Hale. This over here is my beautiful wife Keshia, as well as our three kids (Layne, Leighton, and Landry).
I cannot begin to tell you how excited our family is to be here with you all today! I consider it an honor and a privilege to be here with you and I am excited to see what God is going to do in the services today!
I also want to take just a second and brag on the individuals that you all have appointed to your pulpit committee and as your deacons. Every single interaction that I have had with all of those people truly exceeded my expectations. I can confidently say that you have a very good group of people who love God and want whats best for this church representing you, and that has done my heart good. I simply want to thank each of you who have met with my wife and I and for sharing your hearts and desires for serving God with us. It has truly been amazing!
Alright! I know we have lots of yummy food in the back that many of you are just itching to get to, so let’s jump right in.
We are going to be in 1 Corinthians 15, if you want to be finding that in your Bibles, and as you do so, I want to share a little bit about myself and lay a foundation for the message today.
I was saved at the age of 12 years old. When I got saved, I really leaned in to God and church. I loved it. I was not always faithful, which I will go into a little more detail on tonight, but by the grace of God I never completely lost sight of God.
On August 23 of 2009, I announced before our Church that God had called me to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I had just turned 20 years old.
My pastor at the time set up a major event, or at least it was to me, and told everyone in three counties to come. The first time I preached a message before a crowd of people, there was well over 100 people there. I had no idea what I was doing, or even how to adequately prepare a message, and it lasted a whole 12 minutes. I felt fairly confident that I had made a mockery of myself, but within a month, I started to book places to go preach. After one more month, I was booked 3-4 months out on my calendar and it stayed that way for almost 3 years. There was one church who did not have a preacher at the time, and they even let me come and teach a Bible study every Wed night to the Church. Anywhere I could get in to preach, I was there.
One Sunday, I was invited to preach the Sunday morning and evening services for a small country church that was there local.
After the service that Sunday night, I was shaking hands with everyone and I could tell that there was a little old lady who was just hanging around and waiting to speak with me. I finally got away from the hand-shaking and made my way to her. She politely asked me if she understood correctly concerning something I had preached in my message, and I told her yes.
She then opened her Bible and began to show me verse after verse of how what I had preached did not line up with the Scriptures. She done so politely and discreetly.
You have no idea how deeply that cut into my heart. It showed me that I had been riding the coat-tails of other people’s beliefs and that I needed to study the Bible for myself and come to my own conclusions about what the Bible had to say about every single topic.
I stopped at the DG on my way home that night and began to jot down every spiritual thought, spiritual concept, and spiritual idea that I could think of. Every belief that I had been taught got put down on paper. I told myself that night that I would no longer stand on someone else’s beliefs, and that if I preached it, it needed to be because I had studied it for myself.
I started making my way through the list and I came to one Word that I had wrote down. I almost drew a line through it and skipped over it. I considered it to be a very base thing and felt confident that I already knew where “I” stood on the topic.
The word was, “The Gospel”.
As I put my pen on the paper to draw the line, I was instantly convicted that if I did that, I was not being true to my promise. I decided to start looking up verses and studying the concept of the Gospel, not realizing what I would find. I am so glad that I did, because it has changed me so much. The Gospel is everything and everything is the Gospel. None of those other topics even exist, or are even worth studying, if the Gospel does not exist.
That dive into that topic has shaped my beliefs, and even my life, more than anything else ever has. That is why I am so bent on the Gospel and making sure I preach it, and teach it, everywhere I go.
One theologian once said, “The Gospel is so shallow that a child can bathe in it, but also so deep that a theologian can drown in it.” I have never read a more truthful statement concerning the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
With that being said, I want to preach to you today a message titled, “The Gospel of C.H.R.I.S.T.”.
Content
Content
The Report of the Gospel
The Report of the Gospel
1 Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand,
2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,
We have here a the Biblical breakdown of what the Gospel is: The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the Gospel in a nutshell.
To start with, the term Gospel simply means “The Good News”. That’s it. That Gospel of Jesus Christ, is the Good News of Jesus Christ. What is the good news? He came, died, was buried, and rose again. That is the good news. Ok. That’s great.....but why? Why did he have to come? Why did have to die? Why all of this for me?
Those are some great questions, but to fully understand the answers, we are going to have to go deeper.
The Revelation of the Gospel
The Revelation of the Gospel
Creation
Creation
Man was created in the Image of God
27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Man was Created Perfect
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Adam represented all of Mankind
12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—
21 For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead.
22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
Hesitation
Hesitation
Man Disobeys God
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;
17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.
Sin Causes Separation From God
8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
1 Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear.
2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation
God’s Standard is Perfection
10 For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her,
26 that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word,
27 that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.
There is always a price of Reconciliation. This is known as the atonement.
18 knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers,
19 but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.
6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace
Imputation
Imputation
The word “Impute” means to lay to the account of someone else.
5 But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness,
6 just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works:
7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, And whose sins are covered;
8 Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.”
Shopping cart buggy (2*2*3) is 12 square ft of real estate.
You all thought land was expensive...
1 acre has 43560 square ft in it. Divide that by 12 and you can fit 3,630 shopping carts in an acre.
If you paid the same amount for land that you do for groceries, you would $726,000 for 1 acre of land.
Our sin is imputed to Christ while His Righteousness is imputed to us.
21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
24 who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.
Salvation
Salvation
Salvation comes by faith in Jesus.
9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,
9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
The Result of the Gospel
The Result of the Gospel
One must take a stand on the Gospel.
Transformation
Transformation
We are sanctified through an ever growing relationship with God.
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
17 Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.
Commitment
Commitment
If you are here today and you are lost, I beg you to receive the Gospel of Christ. Let today be the day your name is burned into the Lamb’s Book of Life. Let today be the day your sins are forever forgiven. Let today be the day that your heart is made new and secure. Let today be the day you gain a peace that goes beyond this world. Let today be the day that you give yourself to God for all eternity.
If you are here today and you have already received it, I beg you to take a stand on it. Plant your feet and stand firm. Make it a point to go deeper into your relationship with Jesus Christ. Let today be the day you stop living a surface level Christian lifestyle. Let today be the day you stop putting everything else in the world before Jesus. Let today be the day you make your spiritual mark within the depths of your heart. Let today be the day that changes your future.