Proclaim the Gospel

It was all me . . .

I think you guys should consider yourselves pretty lucky, because I’ve been here at Edgewater for almost 10 weeks and in my recollection I haven’t used weightlifting as an illustration at all yet. This is an accomplishment for me, because it is one of my favorite hobbies - especially lifting heavy.

But as I was looking at our reading today and the next step in our sermon series on the Mission of Edgewater, I had to tell a weightlifting story. Now this story isn’t about any one person, it’s more of a collection of things from a bunch of people I know or have observed in the gym - so it’s a composite story of sorts.

Before I get into the story I want to translate a little bit of gym rat for you - because I’m probably about to slip into it a little bit. When I say “get swole,” “get yolked,” or “get jacked” what I mean is to get bigger muscles and get stronger. When I say “gains” what I mean is gains in strength, or gains in how much weight your lifting. And when I say “throw iron” or “pump iron” I just mean going to lift weights.

With that out of the way, I want to tell you the story of this guy. We’re going to call him Dude - because he’s a weightlifter. So Dude starts off as a skinny little man and decides he wants to start lifting, he wants to get jacked. So he goes into the gym with a trainer and the trainer teaches him everything. He teaches Dude about safety and lifting form and which exercises to do when. And Dude learns, he starts to get in the gym most days out of the week, but he always includes at least one cheat day. But Dude isn’t seeing the gains he wants, he’s not seeing the improvement. So he goes harder, he goes every day. Even though he’s in the gym every single day, Dude isn’t seeing the gains he wants, he’s not seeing the improvement. So he starts to feel discouraged, he starts to let things go and feel hopeless - no matter what he does he isn’t getting the results he wants. And his friend, his trainer notices this and goes to him. He tells him, “this has to be a whole life thing, you can’t just work out to get jacked, you have to eat right and live a healthy lifestyle too.” And that trainer, who was an incredible friend, dropped everything else to help Dude. He was in the gym every day, he helped him with every meal, he did almost everything for this guy - and Dude finally got the results he was looking for.

And then Dude went around telling people that he had done it all by himself. He had just worked really hard and eaten right and gotten so big, so strong through sheer force of will. Kinda messed up right? Even more than that, he started to buy into his own hype. So he stopped taking advantage of the trainer, he stopped going to him for help and support. And when he started to slip again, when he started to miss days and eat junk - he thought “I did it by myself the first time, I have to rely on myself again.” And that doesn’t work our for him at all.

I’m just not enough . . .

I have one other story for you before we start drawing some connections. Our first story was about Dude, so we’ll make this story about Lady.

Lady grew up and she never felt like she was enough. Her parents never told her that they were proud of her, so she poured herself into school and sports. She worked so hard to have straight A’s and to play on the varsity team - and she made it, but then she got to college and she just couldn’t any more. She tried and worked and studied but she couldn’t keep her 4.0 and wasn’t good enough for the varsity team at the school. And that feeling of not being enough started to creep back in. So she filled the void with busyness - she was always doing something, involved in everything, always running from one meeting to another. And for a while she felt like enough because she was the busiest person she knew. Until she stopped and thought about it, and that feeling started to creep back in. So she turned to social media, to Instagram and Tik Tok, feeling like if she could get enough of a following on those platforms, she might finally feel like she was enough. And she got lucky, she started trending and got a ton of followers. And still that feeling of not being enough started to creep back in. And through the other stages of her life, she just kept facing this pattern. She would pour herself into her job, her relationships, her family, her kids - and each time she got there, looked around, and found that she still wasn’t enough. All these things that looked like they could fill that void, that looked like a way she could become enough, a way she could feel like enough, they just left Lady empty and searching for something more.

God’s Story

These two stories illustrate the world outside of the Gospel.

Like Lady, we try everything to feel like enough, to feel like we’re good enough. Grades, accomplishments, positions, technology, family status, kids’ accomplishments, social media popularity - you name it, someone probably uses it to try and feel like they’re good enough. And it’s all just different versions of what theologians call “works righteousness.” It’s trying to be good enough on our own, it’s trying to justify ourselves.

And in an even more insidious way, like Dude, there’s a temptation to make even our faith a good work. Like he told the world “I did it all myself,” rather than crediting his trainers, people will say “I accepted Christ into my life” or “I committed myself to Christ.” No you didn’t! The Holy Spirit creates, builds, and sustains faith in you - it isn’t your work. And the danger of relying on our decision to follow Christ is the doubt that can creep in there, “did I decide firmly enough?” “Did I really give my heart to Jesus?”

And that’s why the second part of our mission statement is so incredibly important, so crucial, so inseparable from who we are and what we do. We “proclaim the love and forgiveness won by Christ's death and resurrection.”

We know a God who created the world, and when mankind messed it up, he promised to save them, to heal the relationship, to restore them. He guided His people throughout history always pointing them to the promise of His Son. He taught them more and more about His character and about His relationship with them. And then He fulfilled his promise, Christ came and lived His life perfectly, taking a punishment He didn’t deserve for us, and He rose again to show the world He had defeated sin and death and the devil. And then He sent out His followers to proclaim that love and forgiveness. Like the song that Joel and the band led us in earlier, somebody loves those babies, somebody loves what we can’t see, and if somebody told them maybe, those babies would be free. I had a friend who was outside the faith, and I asked her to read the Gospel of Mark - I just wanted to see what her reaction was.

And it was incredible. She said, you don’t have to do anything for this. And she couldn’t believe it. Because we live in a world that says you have to earn everything, you have to do something to be enough. We live in a world where at least you have to make a commitment, a decision. And Christ says “stop it! I am enough, my death and resurrection makes you good enough for me, good enough for my church, good enough for my new creation!”

So we proclaim something radically counter cultural, we proclaim something the world doesn’t understand, we proclaim the love and forgiveness won by Christ’s death and resurrection. Amen.