Gospel Truth

Good morning Trinitas! It is so good to be with you all this morning. This morning we are going to look at a letter that Paul wrote to a young church plant, this is a letter that is meant to help them form their identity and purpose as a new community and ultimately to help them hold fast in the midst of a cultural pressures. And for you guys, as a young church and for me as someone who is going to be church planting, I think this is an extremely helpful grounding for us. And so read this with me…

Good morning Trinitas! It is so good to be with you all this morning. This morning we are going to look at a letter that Paul wrote to a young church plant, this is a letter that is meant to help them form their identity and purpose as a new community and ultimately to help them hold fast in the midst of a cultural pressures. And for you guys, as a young church and for me as someone who is going to be church planting, I think this is an extremely helpful grounding for us. And so read this with me…

READ TEXT:

PRAY

Illustration: My youngest memory as a kid is a family vacation to Yellowstone. I don’t remember all of it but I remember a few scenes from the trip vividly… I remember a thunderstorm where lightning struck only a few feet away… I remember leaning over the boardwalk next to the geysers trying to get a good look at the marmots. And most vividly I remember a horseback ride. I was only 4 years old but I grew up in a horse family, so from the time I was 2 I was riding horses… and I got to ride an old trail horse by myself named cookie. My siblings still make fun of me for riding my horse named cookie still today.

We all have various memories from our childhood, and the thing that I forget sometimes is how formative our family is. I love horses and camping to this day because I grew up with these things. They are some of my favorite memories, memories I am passing on to my own children.

You are who you are today in large part because of your family. Families are meant to guide us… to teach us how to live… You learn to love the things you love because your family did. And what we find in this passage is that the church works much like a family. It gives us our identity, it shows us who we are.

I think this is especially important for us because we are living in a time of the identity crisis. It feels like nobody knows who they are or what is true. We have been left on our own We have been given the keys to our freedom but we don’t know if we should turn left or right because nobody taught us how.. we have been told go which ever way you feel is right for you… it doesn’t matter if turning left will take me off a cliff… we don’t have our true north… So how do we navigate this landscape? How do we find our identity and purpose?

As Paul is speaking to a young church, the one thing that is forming the identity of the young church is the “Gospel Truth”. This is the same Gospel truth that is supposed to form our identity, both individually and corporately. The answer to our identity crisis, is the gospel truth… And there are three ways in this passage that we find the gospel truth gives us our identity and purpose.

The first is this… T

1. The Gospel Truth gives us hope for the future.

The gospel truth gives us an identity that has a sure footed hope in the future. We see this clearly in the first few verses.

“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel,” (, ESV)

Hearing the gospel… the word of truth produces hope… Christian hope is essential for us because our identity is formed by it. Our Hope sets u apart. It is essential part of the Christian Character along with faith and love. And what we find is that our Hope produces faith and love. They come BECAUSE of the hope……The church, the Christian community is a distinct community because it’s hope is in Christ.

What is this Christian hope in the gospel that we have?

That which is laid up for us in heaven – eternal life. W/Christ.

Our future hope here is a hope in heaven… it is an inheritance of eternal life(verse 12). This hope in heaven is what the gospel truth preaches. This hope leads to a future with Christ…

What’s amazing about this hope, is that it is already laid up. Past tense. Jesus is in heaven now. He has died and he has risen… this is why our hope is sure… Eternal life is before us now. Sometimes it is hard to understand how different our hope is and how formative it is for us… until we compare it to what our hope is not in.

Money – family – work – job status – our gender – stuff we have – hobbies.

This is an important distinction because if we hope in any of those things, they will crush you… because they are not capable of carrying your hopes…. They can’t carry your hope because they will fail you at some point… They are all good things… but not ultimate hope good (your life depends on them ultimate)…. For instance if your idtnity and hope is wrapped around your job and you lose your job… you will be crushed. If you hope in your money, when the market crashes you might contemplate jumping out of a window because your reason for living was taken away…

But when you put your true hope in Christ… losing money, family, hobbies, or whatever will bother you… but it will not crush you. Not even death can crush you…Because your future hope… your hope in heaven is never in doubt… Like Betsy Tanboom who from a concentration camp once said “there is no pit so deep that God is not still there”.

This is our community forming hope. The kind of hope that has spread around the world.

Now you might be thinking that sounds great to have such a sure hope giving us strength and forming us as a church, but how can we be so certain?

Because the gospel truth doesn’t just give us a future hope, but it adopts us into a new family now… giving us a new community - extending the benefits of a family to us.

This is the second aspect of our identity that the gospel truth gives us…

2. The Gospel Truth gives us a new family

Look with me at Verses 12-13

“giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,” (, ESV)

It is the gospel truth gives us a future hope because it qualifies us to be in the new family of God… Think about qualifications for a moment. We understand what it means to qualify for something. Whether it is being good enough to qualify for a tournament, or gaining the qualifications necessary to perform a job.

But here, in the gospel, it isn’t learning a trait or being good at something that qualifies us to be in the family of God. It isn’t us who is qualified for this work, but, as it says here in verse 12… “The father, who has qualified you…”

It isn’t a jewish heritage, it isn’t your skillset or being a good person… but the Father has done it… How?

By delivering us from the domain of darkness through Jesus… Christ has paid the fee… he has paid the price for what it means to be a member of the family of God. He has rescued you from a kingdom of darkness… from a kingdom of no hope. He has brought you into his kingdom… a kingdom of light… the kingdom of his Son… And this is something that he did for us… not something that we do for ourselves…

This is radical stuff. Because if you are anything like me, you have your good days and your bad days… I am a man of split devotions… I have days where I love the kingdom of God and other days where I think the old kingdom might be better… and yet the father looks at me… he looks at you and doesn’t say “Sinner!!!”… he says “Saint!”. He calls you his son and his daughter… I think sometimes we can get so caught up in the truth that we are totally depraved and we forget that we are totally redeemed.. We beat ourselves up about our sin thinking that we are the ones who qualify ourselves! But here we find that it is the Father who does this.

Jen and I have some friends who are going through the process of adopting two little boys into their family that have been foster kids for them for the past few years. In this process the parents have to renounce their rights before the adoption can go through. And the kids bring with them a lot of baggage from their previous home… and still our friends love these boys… the bring them into their family… they give them a new last name, a new identity… and they call them sons.

This is what God does through Christ. He Adopts us. We are transferred from one family to another… through Jesus, the rights of the kingdom of darkness over us have been renounced… he no longer reigns over our lives… And God the loving father… knowing our baggage, knowing how we might betray him… still brings us to himself… calling us his sons and daughters… his beloved… his saints… This is what the gospel truth does… it gives us a family… and teaches us how to live.

And you know something else I noticed about these young boys who have been adopted by our friends… is that they have started to act like their new family. They have picked up the family language, and the family hobbies. This is also true for us. This brings me to the last thing we find about how the gospel truth forms us…

3. The Gospel Truth Gives us Kingdom Work.

When we come into God’s family, we enter into the family business.

I think we see the work before us in three ways… the first of which is to grow in Knowledge and Wisdom.

Knowledge and Wisdom - “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,” (, ESV)

We are giving the task to know God. The first part of the kingdom work is knowing the king. Not just to know about him, to spit out facts… but to know him. How do we know anyone? We spend time with them. We worship God together, we spend time with him in prayer throughout the week. We are to give ourselves to the knowledge of God…

Bearing Fruit – The second part of our work is to bear fruit. As we grow in knowledge and wisdom, our lives bear fruit…

“so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;” (, ESV)

Being a part of this new family, changes us. Changes the way we live… gives us work. Our works don’t save us… qualitify us for the kingdom, but once we are in the new kingdom our new family stimulates us toward good works… towards bearing fruitful lives.. what kind of fruit? Apples… the fruits of the spirit… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control… Being in the kingdom gives us purpose in our daily tasks… That we would grow in the spirit whether you are a stay at home mom or an accountant. The work of the kingdom is to be the presence of God.. to be the salt of the earth wherever you find yourself. This gives us profound purpose in our daily jobs and tasks… knowing that all good work is kingdom work.

Endurance and Patience – The third way that we have a new work is through our endurance and Patience.

“being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy;” (, ESV)

Our work requires endurance and patience for the road ahead. Our work is not quick and easy. Planting churches takes endurance and patience. Loving our families and co-workers requires endurance and patience. The work of love, is not a drive-thru thing. Not only that, but we are promised that our work will be effective. Our work will grow.

“which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth,” (, ESV)

When the gospel goes out… when we carry it out… it grows. It is the light shinning on the hill. It will pierce the darkness. What an incredible promise for us to lean on.

And that it won’t be misery, but it will be joyful work. “Paitence with joy” – a surprising combination… especially if you know me at all… but If I took a poll of what people are looking for in their work they would probably all say at some point they want work that brings them joy. And there is no work that is as joyful as kingdom work. It brings us joy because it extends God’s rule and justice… it grows God’s family.

Kingdom work brings us into relationship with the king, it changes us and bears fruit in our lives, and kingdom work doesn’t fail.

CONCLUSIOn

And so what we find, is that in the Gospel Truth, we have our community forming identity. We have our purpose. We are not left to our own demise to figure it out. But we are called into a new family, we are given a new name, and invited to live as ambassadors of the kingdom of light.

May we be a people who hold fast to this truth… and who hope in the Lord, who has made us his family and calls us his beloved.