Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

ILLUSTRATION

In early February of this year, a blog post appeared on the Museum of English Rural Life's website about an antique mousetrap displayed in their museum, which proved that it may be old, but it's not obsolete.

The 155-year-old contraption was recently found with an unfortunate mouse trapped inside!

The trap, first patented in 1861, has rusted, warped metal bars and a faded label that reads "Perpetual Mouse Trap," aptly adding that it "will last a lifetime."

Apparently it's capable of lasting even longer than that.

It is timelessly effective.

(http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/merl/2016/02/03/155-year-old-mouse-trap-claims-its-latest-victim)

Many people today think of the church, and the Christian way of life, as relics of the past.

Just because something has been around a long time doesn’t mean it’s obsolete!

You'll hear the argument that the Bible, which contains the great gospel message of how Jesus saves you, is not relevant today.

The Gospel is ancient, reaching back to God's determination to save the world through Christ before the foundations of the earth were ever formed, but that doesn’t mean it is irrelevant to us today.

The Gospel continues to deliver sinners from the penalty and the power of sin.

As Jesus promised, "be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age."”

(Matthew 28:20).

The gospel is timelessly effective.

V.42 tells us that the early church was devoted to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship

DEVOTED: προσκαρτερέω proskarteréō : to persist in something; busy oneself with, be busily engaged in, be devoted to (William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker, and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 881.)

They persisted in the Apostles' Teaching.

What was this exactly?

When Jesus was on earth before His resurrection, he was teaching the apostles and all people about the kingdom of God that was then at hand.

When Jesus was on earth for 40 days after His ressurection, “He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” (Acts 1:3, ESV) Even then, Jesus was teaching about the kingdom of God.

Jesus also affirmed the OT Scripture when He taught.

After Jesus' ascension to heaven, the Apostle's were teaching what Jesus had taught them.

Their teaching would have included Jesus' resurrection, the Old Testament Scriptures, and what Jesus taught when he was on earth.

One of the best examples of this is found immediately before our passage-- Peter's sermon in Acts 2:14-39.

This sermon was aggresive.

"This Jesus...

You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men."

And it was a summary of the OT--God's work through Jesus the Messiah and how that applied to them at the moment.

We would say that the church was devoted to the gospel.

Gospel is one of those words that is used frequently in the church and most people have an idea of what is meant, but it's hard to come by one solid definition--there are many ways to define it.

Trevin Wax has compiled a list of definitions of gospel from historical and modern pastors/theologians --> https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/trevinwax/2009/09/14/gospel-definitions-2/

The term gospel is found just under 100 times in the NT.

Gospel is the translation of the Greek noun euangelion, literally meaning “good news".

Very simply, the gospel is the Good News of Salvation through Jesus Christ, which ecompasses the teaching of the entire Bible, OT & NT.

Ed Stetzer gives this longer definition of the gospel: "The gospel is the good news that God, who is more holy than we can imagine, looked upon with compassion, people, who are more sinful than we would possibly admit, and sent Jesus into history to establish His Kingdom and reconcile people and the world to himself.

Jesus, whose love is more extravagant than we can measure, came to sacrificially die for us so that, by His death and resurrection, we might gain through His grace what the Bible defines as new and eternal life."

(Ed Stetzer, http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2009/november/gospel-definitions.html)

The apostle's teaching, the gospel, is recorded throughout the rest of the NT and the church was devoted to it.

They persisted in it.

And churches today must persist in proclaiming the gospel.

We started this series of messages titled "Committed Church" last week, looking at how we should function in order to glorify God.

Last week, we saw that we are to be committed to the fellowship, and this week we will see why we should be committed to the gospel.

If you don't know Jesus as Savior or if you've been walking with Him for 50 years, this message is just as important to both of you.

I hope you hear that we should be committed to the gospel for at least 2 reasons: 1) the gospel saves you; 2) the gospel sustains you.

It's easy to think of reasons why we shouldn't persist in the gospel: 1) it hurts our pride because it reveals our sin; 2) it's challenging to understand at times and requires study; 3) our culture looks down on it and considers it intellectually inferior; 4) it requires time, which is wrongly so easily given over to other priorities.

All of this would have been true of the early church too--maybe with added persecution!

This might be countercultural today, but it's what we need: I'm encouraging us this morning to be committed to the gospel.

Let me explain the first reason why:

THE GOSPEL SAVES YOU

Romans 10:13–17 (ESV) 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

14 How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent?

As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel.

For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” 17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

It is so important that we are all preaching the gospel message!

At some point in every Christian's life, they heard the gospel message proclaimed and they responded in faith.

It might be as a child, like me, when I heard that message and realizes for the first time that it was for me.

It might be as an old man who the Lord softens his heart to be able to respond.

It might be an exact moment you can remember or it could be something that sort of progressed with multiple hearings of the gospel in different ways, and you know that at some point you trusted Christ and it is evident in your life.

Whenever it happened, it happened because you heard that gospel message of Jesus.

We need to be committed to the gospel because the Gospel saves you.

Let me point out 2 things here:

The Gospel Saves By Revealing Righteousness

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.””

(Romans 1:16–17, ESV)

Paul tells us how the gospel saves us: it reveals the rightousness of Christ.

It is the power of God for salvation...for in it the righteousness of God is revealed.

A person's greatest need is righteousness because sinners aren't right with God.

We can muster up morals, but we can't create righteousness.

Only trusting in Jesus Christ can make you right with God because Jesus imputes His righteousness to us when we trust Him for salvation.

This is what is called triple imputation.

Impute= to ascribe or attribute something.

Adam's sin to us.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—” (Romans 5:12, ESV)

Our sin to Jesus.

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

By his wounds you have been healed.”

(1 Peter 2:24, ESV) “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29, ESV) “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

(Colossians 2:13–14, ESV)

Jesus' Righteousness to Us. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV)

That's the gospel message--it's understanding the bad news that you are a sinner in need of a savior, and then accepting the good news--Jesus Christ died in your place, took the punishment for your sin, and is the only hope you have to spend eternity with God.

ILLUSTRATION

If God asked you why He should let you in to heaven, what would you say?

The only acceptable answer is "you shouldn't.

But I believe in Jesus Christ and by grace, his blood has covered my sin and through faith, has allowed me into your perfect presense.

Without the righteousness of Christ, we can not dwell in the perfect presence of God.

Church: we must keep the gospel a priority.

The message of sinners needing a Savior is getting less and less popular.

I stole this from a FB post I saw from one of you this past week.

It's attributed to a guy named Ron Smith, who I don't know who he is, but it wouldn't matter--it's a good quote.

"There was a time when people went to Church, heard the truth, and wept over their sins.

Today people go to church, hear motivational speech, and ignore their sins."

Transition:

We must know our sinful condition, and we must accept the solution.